Rwanda, suddenly remembered

On road to Congo, a land's horror is recalled

(Robert Baker photo)

Rwandan children rush to school.

Coco McCabe, a resident of Ipswich, is a writer for Oxfam America, an international relief agency. Together with a small team from the organization’s communications and advocacy departments, she is visiting the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo to collect stories about Oxfam’s work in the region and to get a better understanding of the current situation for the Congolese people and their ongoing efforts for peace.

By Coco McCabe
Thursday, March 6

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo -- It’s early March and I’m roaring above Rwanda in the comfort of a half-filled Airbus A330 with three colleagues from Oxfam America. Below, the land lies black and still. But in the distance, lights begin to wink through the night sky, and soon we’re circling over Kigali, the capital.

We’ve come to this tiny African country because it is the easiest way to get to the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where constant fighting and systematic human rights abuses committed at the hands of a host of armed groups have spread terror. Across the country, Oxfam is helping hundreds of thousands of people who have tried to escape the strife, and we’re on our way to document some of that work.

But as we touch down and get our bearings, something else fills our minds: the genocide in Rwanda. We are keenly aware that 800,000 people were killed here, many of them hacked to death, in the course of 100 days 14 years ago. We imagine them running for their lives on the same road we travel toward the Congo, snaking up the steep slopes and plunging down again in this country of countless hills. One of us admits to quickly searching for scars on the faces of the people she passes in the streets. And I remember the photograph I stumbled on before leaving the states -- skulls heaped in an enormous pile, each just like the next, featureless and as brittle as porcelain. Who had they belonged to?

There is danger in forgetting them, in allowing time to erase the particulars of names and faces, of friendships and interconnections. I find myself thinking about who they might have been. Could one of them have been like the customs official at the Kigali airport who asks kindly if the trip was long? He can see it in my eyes, he says. Maybe another was like the woman at breakfast, who pours me a cup of coffee before I even know that’s what I crave. Or perhaps the man at the front desk of the hotel, who laughs with understanding when he realizes I have missed most of the directions he has just delivered in French, and then repeats them again -- in flawless English.

Chugging through the streets of the capital, we ask ourselves what the genocide has meant for Rwanda and its neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo. That country has been caught in a long spiral of conflict, with one of the first wrenching jolts following on the heels of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who fled the horror in their own country to seek refuge in Congolese camps. Two years later, Rwanda invaded the country in pursuit of militias tied to the former Hutu government that inspired the mass killings.

At 7:30 in the morning, the sidewalks of Kigali stream with people heading to work, to school, to market. Cars, trucks, and mini-busses jammed with riders crowd the roads. They’re well-paved, some of the best I’ve been on in Africa. When the traffic thins out you can go fast. And we do.

“People are living in the here and now,” says one of my colleagues as Kigali, with new buildings sprouting across its hills, disappears behind us. “I guess they have to.”

But across the border, the here and now feels profoundly different. In Goma, the capital of Congo's North Kivu province, the road is so rough that those of us riding in the back of the truck work hard not to let our heads smash into the metal roof as we lurch toward the Oxfam office. The road, I realize, is just one symptom -- and by far the most benign -- of the poverty and strife that is strangling the country.

In late January, the International Rescue Committee, the New York-based relief organization, estimated that since 1998 conflict -- and the hardship it showers on people -- has left 5.4 million Congolese dead. Many of them have succumbed to illnesses that we Westerners, with our ready access to clean water and abundant food, can hardly fathom. In Democratic Republic of Congo, diarrhea and malnutrition are among the biggest killers -- and they’re still at work. The IRC says 45,000 people a month continue to die.

It’s not the same kind of destruction that cast such a dark shadow across Rwanda, but it hasn’t stopped. And in the Congo, that’s the horror people live with every day.

For more information about Oxfam America and its work, please visit its website at www.oxfamamerica.org. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.