Rwandan village’s efforts give hope for unity
BUGESERA, Rwanda — Anastasie Nyirabashyitsi and Jeanette Mukabyagaju think of each other as dear friends.
The women’s friendship was cemented one day in 2007, when Mukabyagaju, going somewhere, left a child behind for Nyirabashyitsi to look after.
This expression of trust stunned Nyirabashyitsi because Mukabyagaju, a Tutsi survivor who lost most of her family in the Rwandan genocide, was leaving a child in the hands of a Hutu woman for the first time since they had known each other.
“If she can ask me to keep her child, it’s because she trusts me,” Nyirabashyitsi said recently, describing her feelings at the time. “A woman, when it comes to her children, when someone trusts you with (her) children, it’s because she really does.”
It wasn’t always like that. Nyirabashyitsi and Mukabyagaju are both witnesses to terrible crimes. But, in the government-approved reconciliation village where they have lived for 19 years, they have reached peaceful coexistence from opposite experiences.
Nyirabashyitsi, 54, recalled the helpless Tutsis she saw at roadblocks not far from the present reconciliation village, people she knew faced imminent death when the Hutu soldiers and militiamen started systematically killing their Tutsi neighbors on the night of April 6, 1994.
The killings were ignited when a plane carrying thenPresident Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down over Kigali. The Tutsi were blamed for downing the plane and killing the president. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed by extremist Hutus in massacres that lasted over 100 days in 1994.
As for Mukabyagaju, she was a 16-year-old temporarily staying in the southern province of Muhanga while her parents lived in Kigali. When she couldn’t shelter at the nearest Catholic parish, she hid in a latrine for two months, without anything to eat and drinking from trenches, until she was rescued by Tutsi rebels who stopped the genocide.
“I hated Hutu so much to the point that I could not agree to meet them,” she said, adding that it took a long time “to be able even think that I can interact with a Hutu.”
The women are neighbors in a community of genocide perpetrators and survivors 24 miles outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali. At least 382 people live in Mbyo Reconciliation Village, which some Rwandans cite as an example of how people can peacefully coexist 30 years after the genocide.
More than half the residents of this reconciliation village are women, and their projects — which include a basket-weaving cooperative as well as a money saving program — have united so many of them that it can seem offensive to inquire into who is Hutu and who is Tutsi.
An official with Prison Fellowship Rwanda, a Kigali-based civic group that’s in charge of the village, said the women foster a climate of tolerance because of the hands-on activities in which they engage regularly.
“There’s a model we have here which we call practical reconciliation,” said Christian Bizimana, a program coordinator with Prison Fellowship Rwanda. “Whenever they are weaving baskets, they can engage more, talk more, go into the details. We believe that by doing that … forgiveness is deepened, unity is deepened.”