V6 - REFLECTIONS, By Janelle Fann

April Days By Janelle Fann

"40,000."

I feel my eyes go wide.

"In this parish?"

I want to grill Father Valens about that figure, feeling that he could not possibly be correct. Only a thin understanding of the culture and of the man holds me back.

"Yes," accompanied by a rather vigorous nod, a bobble head priest.

I sit back in my chair, weak with incom-prehension. Depending on who you ask almost a million people died here in just under one hundred days. In addition to the general slaughter thousands were murdered in churches. There are stories of priests who drew up lists of people to be killed. Churches with Swiss cheese roofs from grenades and bullets. For a while after the genocide religion was ignored. But now Christianity (Catholicism in particular) is truly back in full force. I do not know how to respond to such faith.

Shakespeare wrote (and I take liberties with the man‘s words here) that it is foolish to weep for dead men. If they were evil and went to Hell, it was no more then they deserved. If they went to heaven then they surely were in a better place then the weeper. Being no Shakespeare, this situation looked like divine abandonment to me.

I turn to look out the window mulling over my heathen status. My already weak faith was obliterated by my mother‘s long death and I have only made feeble efforts to reconstruct it. For an entire country to have faced what this one did and still be able to turn to religion afterwards at any point is almost inconceivable to me.

We finish breakfast and I walk around the parish. Rwanda is struggling to find an eco-nomic foothold, in the meantime people strug-gling up Mount Poverty. The arduous journey is documented is the hands, eyes, garments, and habitats of her people. It is then, glaringly obvious, how nice the parish (and by extension the priests‘ living space) is: clean, well kept, equipped with solar power. I marvel anew at my surroundings.

Three priests serve the parish where I live: Valens, Paul, and Edward. Valens is very much a jovial sort, Willie Loman—Rwanda style. He keeps giving me warm yogurt and walking away as I struggle to eek out what is supposed to be "lactose intolerant" in Kinyarwanda. Paul is . . .interesting. Please be aware that I‘m already not in love with living with three priests (even if it‘s only for a short time) when Paul and I have this exchange.

Paul: Are you married?

Me: Oh No. I‘m single, just like you.

Paul: I am not single. I am married to the church and when (?!) you become Catholic I will be married to you too.

Me: Uhhh. . . (Because really, what do you say to that?)
Valens is the oldest and well, fatherly. I don‘t eat much in general and even less in the face of continuous pots of boiled potatoes, boiled rice, boiled foliage, and. . . well boiled every-thing. On a night when I‘d managed to unearth my appetite, I tried to explain hunger to Father Valens by pointing to and rubbing my stomach. It was at this point Valens got up and rounded the table in order to rub my belly. Discomforting. Later at the same meal, he decided it would be fun to tickle my twenty-eight year self.

Willie, My New Husband, and the Stealth Stomach Rubber, are basically good
guys.

Paul and Valens do not join Father Edward for lunch, leaving Edward and myself to enjoy the afternoon‘s selections of boiled delicacies.

I pick at my boiled something as Father Edward peppers me with questions in halting English:

"Have you talked to your family?"

"Yes, they are very well. How‘re yours?"

"I don‘t have."

"You are an orphan?"

Edward belly laughs. "Me? Yes, an orphan."

"No. . ." I pause. "No cousins, brothers, sisters?"

"Ah no. No one. You have?"

"No, my mother and father had me only. Your mother and father had you only, too?"

His face is glassy in its smoothness. "My mother, brother, sisters, and father. Everybody in 1994 was in the church that bulldozer de-stroyed."

* * *
As Sister Marie Grace and I stood look-ing into the pit, something fluttered down into it. At first I think one of the ragged children who followed us threw something in. I start toward them threateningly but I notice the wind is picking up and scattering small green leaves about. I move back to Marie Grace‘s side not touching, not talking. She rubs her forehead with three fingers and abruptly begins a jerky circuit around the pit.

There is no "Never Again" sign or commemorative banner here as in other places in Rwanda. How you find it is by asking, if you‘re a stranger. Then you are directed to a straggling dirt path and about one hundred and fifty feet from the road there it is. But Marie Grace does not need to ask.

On the right side there‘s a field of almost ripe corn. On the left, a tight stand of eucalyptus trees where five or six goats are placidly graz-ing. Looking down you see the opening, just a small thing maybe two feet across. Beyond the opening, the size and depth of the pit is reminiscent of a swimming pool and you realize that it‘s shaped like an upside down funnel. The little sun that reaches the bottom reveals mud and decaying plant matter. But your mind works to find skulls and femurs, shredded clothes and naked teeth.

Marie Grace catches my hand and tugs me away this April 7th. I go as placidly as any goat because I am leaving the children there. Though a few follow us, two or three of them, puzzled and reverential, remain at the lip and are still. I turn and follow Marie Grace because the children are there at the hole in this place, filling it, quelling the echo of loss with the reso-nance of life. I can not think of a more appropri-ate way to negate death.