Hope Amid Horrors

AUGUST 4, 1993. The civil war that began in 1990 when the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda, reaches a ceasefire when President Juvénal Habyarimana signs a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsis in Arusha, Tanzania. Four days later, Hutu extremists, feeling Habyarimana sold them out, launch the hate radio station RTLM, which refers to Tutsis as inyenzi (cockroaches) who need to be eliminated. The seeds for the genocide are sown.

Maybe the ultimate lesson of Rwanda is that the gap between human kindness and beastly brutality is not all that great, a slippery slope greased by lies, down which good people can slip with frightening ease. As the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire warned: "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." Such was the case here.

Forgiveness, it seems, has been possible in large part because it is simply too painful to not move on. Still, while the dead are buried, the memories are not. The world turned its back on the slaughter in Rwanda by refusing to stop the genocide, but Rwanda perservered. While the country struggles with poverty, disease and a staggering orphan crisis, it doesn't forget the past.

Two phrases spice nearly every conversation in Rwanda: mbere y'itsembabwoko (before the genocide) and nyuma y'itsembabwoko (after the genocide). Everything either happened before or after. The Memorial Centre in Kigali serves as a frank reminder of the event that defines this nation. Sitting on a hillside overlooking the tin roofs and mud huts of one of Kigali's many slums, the terraced gardens outside the modern building appear as mere ornaments until the tour guide explains that they rest on the mass graves of 258,000 people. While the enormity of that number is sinking in, she points to an uncultivated plot of land and says it is for the bodies still being found.

Safari Abubarahmani is a 33-year-old Tutsi who works as a driver. He was 20 during the genocide and survived on his wits. "If I went to my house I would be in and out, in and out, this way and that," he said, his hands darting through the air like a bait fish fleeing its pursuer, explaining how he avoided the roadblocks of the Interahamwe death squads by taking alleyways and back streets. "At night I would sleep in the forest," he said. "Sometimes I would stay there for days." That was especially true after both his parents and two siblings were killed. They are buried in the mass grave at the Memorial Centre.

"I asked myself why I was born in Australia to two fantastic parents and not in some Third World nation," Hull says as she sits slumped on a bench outside the museum, drained by what she has just seen. "But we can't answer that. All we can do is try to be the best person we can be and have faith in the future." The tears she shed were not her last of the trip. While there are constant reminders of death in every corner of Rwanda, there is still something alive that no amount of brutality could ever kill. There is a spirit, a passion and a joy that seems to leap from the brilliant green hills into the hearts of the people. Time and again, women -- and it was mostly Rwandan women with whom the group interacted -- who seemed to have no reason for hope were full of it. Time and again, the golf pros were clearly taken out of their comfort zone not just by the crushing poverty they witnessed but by the soaring passion, the complete embrace of life, they felt from the Rwandan people, many of whom were dying of AIDS, all of whom lost loved ones in the genocide.

At a World Vision training center where former prostitutes, single mothers, many of whom are HIV positive, and orphans raising other orphans learn job skills, the players are enveloped by laughing, singing, dancing women who shout the hope that resides in their souls and seem to scream that all that is needed is a chance. They sing tuzagubaka -- we will build. They sing the phrase over and over, the joy building to fever pitch. "Tuzagubaka ... tuzagubaka ..." Tears flow easily from the players. So does laughter. Eventually they all join in the dance.

OCTOBER 3-4, 1993. Eighteen U.S. soldiers are killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force. A horrified nation watches TV images of the dead dragged through the streets. After Mogadishu and the peacekeeping effort in the former Yugoslavia the world has little interest in military intervention, especially in a small, landlocked nation with no oil or other valuable resources. The stage is set for indifference.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Paul Kagame's arrival at Kigali GC is that he is driving. It's not often you see the president of a nation behind the wheel. That's not to say his arrival is not preceded by soldiers toting automatic weapons. It is. Kagame, 50, is a reed-thin 6-foot-5, clad in a tan "Jungle Jack Hanna" shirt. An avid tennis player, Kagame's interest in golf is fueled by his wife Jeannette, who plays. His interest in the clinic at Kigali GC -- a modest 15-year-old layout that is the only 18-hole course in Rwanda -- is the exposure the visit can bring for the problems his country faces. This is no ceremonial walkthrough. He and the First Lady spent more than two hours with the players and the children being taught.

Kagame, who was 2 when his parents fled Rwanda in 1960 for Uganda to escape the first wave of killing of Tutsis by Hutus shortly before Belgium granted independence, makes bridging the divide in his country left by the genocide a top priority. Once the military genius behind the RPF army, Kagame has formed a government in which the president and prime minister must be from different parties, no party is allowed to have more than half the seats in the Council of Ministers and, by law, at least 24 of the 80 seats in the Chamber of Deputies have to be held by women. In fact, at 48 percent, Rwanda has more women holding political office than any other nation in the world.