A Heart Big Enough for Mine

So here’s a post to kick things off about human nature. It’s a long one, and it’s more of a personal anecdote than an argument, but it’s an experience that has left an indelible mark on my beliefs. And as a disclaimer, there will be relatively few posts like this, but this has been on my mind for some time.

In the winter of 2009/2010, I was lucky enough to visit Rwanda on a human rights delegation that lasted about 3 weeks. The story of that trip alone is enough to write a memoir, so I will relay what I consider one of the most important parts.

An important part of our delegation was visiting sites in Rwanda that were particularly significant to the 1994 genocide. Each visit was deeply emotional and impactful, but none so much as the church at Nyamata. Tutsis attempting to escape the massacre hid in the church seeking refuge, the Interahamwe militias had no mercy and killed 24,000 people in 2 days between April 10th and 12th, 1994.

Here is a picture of the inside of the church (that someone else took).

Today, the church is left largely in tact, with bullet holes, bloodstains, and the clothes of the dead acting as reminders of the atrocities. When our delegation visited, there were only two people there: an elderly Rwandan woman and our tour guide - a young man who had survived the massacre (he was only a boy at the time). He shared his story of being squeezed in that church with the other Tutsis hearing the primal screams of the genocidaires outside. He then described exactly what he saw when they entered – murders, rapes, mutilations – in lurid detail. It was horrifying. The tour guide would point to various corners of the church and tell us what happened in that specific spot, who was killed and how. All the while, a bullet-ridden statue of Mary looked over the church as though she were a silent witness to evil.

He led us to the back of the church grounds and showed us where hundreds of these people had been buried. This tomb was a very narrow stairway that led down to a long narrow hallway where coffins were stacked at least seven high. As some of our delegation moved through, myself included, I began to experience seriously intense emotional reactions to the place. As I tried to make my way past the others in this narrow hallway, one of them accidentally bumped into me so my chest was pressed against one of the coffins. It was too much.

I left the tomb as quickly as possible and as soon as I was outside I wept openly. It was impossible to imagine the suffering that went on at that place and to experience even a small fraction of it was overwhelming.

As I walked away from the tomb crying, that same elderly Rwandan woman saw me and immediately rushed over. She held me tightly, as if she knew that I had just been pressed against a coffin. She blew gently on my neck, patted my back and whispered calming words. While I couldn’t understand what she was saying, I knew exactly what she was doing. She was acting as my mother would in that moment, offering me comfort. It suffices to say that I completely lost it and was simply bawling in this stranger’s arms. But these tears were cathartic more than anything. They were a release.

It was only when the delegation had left the church altogether that we were told that the elderly woman was a survivor herself, that she lost almost her entire family in that church, that she had suffered a stabbing attack from the same people that had killed her family. We learned that she had been through unimaginable trauma.

It is then that I understood the magnitude of what she did for me. She saw someone, clearly a foreigner, crying over her trauma, and decided to comfort him. She had been through a literal hell and still had the compassion to treat me as one of her own.

If there is a single experience that has informed my opinion on human nature it would be this one. In that place, I saw the scars human evil. I saw and heard things that I wish I could forget. In the same place, I saw someone who survived all of that and still had a heart big enough to care for mine.

I believe that humans, for whatever reason, are fundamentally good in nature. Humans rarely seek to harm one another, and even in the most appalling and horrendous circumstances, have the capacity to demonstrate a deep compassion.