The Rainy Season

The rainy season. We have so much to do in the rainy season. The kickoff to Memorial Week is our reminder: a funereal procession following a man with a distorted microphone, driven in the back of a blue pickup truck with a broken windshield, who stutters so rapidly in Kinyarwanda over the sound of a generator that I am sure that I am not the only person who cannot understand him and that, perhaps, he doesn't mind this. His speech is punctuated by statements of Never Forget, Never Forget, our reminder that, this week and this week alone, we will be given no choice.

However, the Resurrection of Christ will have to take precedence. We are in Church. We are in Church all evening until well after the rain and well past the time that most people are normally in their homes after dark. We are in Church in the morning too, being constantly reminded by our priest to liken Christ to our loved ones. To look to rebirth and renewal, rather than to the horrors of our past. This is a time of year we need the prayer and Easter is more enjoyable than Memorial anyways.

We have a whole week of state-mandated mourning to perform, most of which, thankfully, is cut short by the rain. If not, it is cut short some other way. This is no time to talk about the past. This is the time to talk about gratitude. A district official makes this clear as she stares, bewildered, at an elderly man, drunk off too much urwarwa who comes to the microphone and begins to tell us the details of his past. Not today, she says, gingerly snatching the microphone from his quivering fingers. Not this moment. This moment we will discuss why we are thankful. That will be all for now and all that we will hear for all of the days.

Each meeting is so much like the next. On one day, guest speakers touch briefly on the crimes against the bodies of women, another on the crimes against the minds of our children. Crimes of ideology are the worst kind of crimes we really care to discuss. On most days, we end early, on account of the rain. Rain that we are grateful for after long hours spent on wooden benches, trying to drown out the sound of the speakers without any success until the sound of the rain, the same rain that unfortunately failed to end the crimes against this country we are now forced to discuss in the rain every year.

18 years of discussion. 18 years of well-contained mourning, if you can call it that, meant to make sure we never forget, but also that we never have to remember. Nothing is more frightening than having to remember. For 18 years, the 3,000 bodies in the Red Zone have lain, unburied, where they died and 18 years the mourners have been there, asking for their burial. And, after 18 years, we are still forgetting them. The world is forgetting. Like it forgets and forgets and always forgets even though the word in front of forgets, we are told, was always supposed to be never.

A day after remembering, my community is resurrected from the dead. We are in Church again and it is time for Baptism. Crying babies are subjected to cold water, dripping down their faces in a rush to cleanse them of the sins of their ancestors before it is too late and beaming parents smile into camera lenses in an attempt to make this a moment never forgotten. The ceremony is tight, contained, which each ritual step memorized collectively by the whole. At the last final clanking of the bells we proclaim Dushimiye Imana (Thanks to be God) and it's raining again with nothing to do, but let loose and dance in it.