We're All Interconnected: Lessons from Rwanda and India
Ellis Cose is a winner of the 2009 North Star News Prize.
Work on "Against the Odds," my public radio documentary series, has taken me to Rwanda twice and India once in the last year and a half. In Rwanda, I was trying to understand how a country copes with an implosion of such unimaginable magnitude.
It was on April 6, 1994, shortly after 9 p.m., that the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana went down in flames. Habyarimana , President Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi and six others were victim of a rocket fired by perpetrators whose identify and purpose remain unclear to this day. The assassination ignited an orgy of violence. Somewhere between 800,000 and a million Rwandans perished--well over a tenth of the population--as the world looked on in horror; and did nothing.
What I found is that, on the surface, the country is coping very well. There are few visible signs of the slaughter. Even the Hôtel des Mille Collines (which became famous as "Hotel Rwanda") is now just another big, luxury hotel. During one visit, as I sipped a cocktail by the pool, an African visitor serenely did laps.
Yet, clearly the past is not yet buried. "After the plane" is a common phrase one hears in Rwanda, where memories are divided into two periods: the world before the plane went down and the world after. For in a country as tiny as Rwanda, virtually everyone was personally touched by the genocide. Virtually every family lost members--or saw brothers turn into killers. As Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana told me: "Almost everybody knows someone who died, and knows somebody who killed somebody... We are dealing with the [still] fresh hurt of our people."
Bishop Rucyahana, who has opened a boarding school for orphans of the genocide and who also ministers to perpetrators in Rwanda's prisons, believes Rwandans have no choice but to reconcile: It's not an issue of waiting until the pain is over. It's now."
Rucyahana's point, of course, is that the past does not have to be forgotten or buried for one to move on; that sometimes life demands that you simply learn to live with the pain, and perhaps even embrace those who have caused it.
Rwanda has not yet fully recovered and it is not exactly reconciled; but it does seem to have learned the collective lesson that embracing the future does not necessarily require comprehending or coming to terms with the past.
Among the things I was examining in India was the issue of caste. In the bustling metropolises of Mumbai and Delhi, it's easy to forget about caste. In such cosmopolitan centers, people have a certain freedom to become what they will. But in the small villages of India, caste is an omnipresent reality. Those small villages are where Martin Macwan has labored most of his life.
Martin is the second oldest of nine surviving children born and raised in poverty. The defining event of his childhood occurred when he was nine, working on a farm with his grandmother. His throat was parched and he asked for water. But instead of giving him a glass, the farmer told him to catch the water in his hands. Martin was learning an essential lesson for a child of his caste: how to interact with people without touching them: how to be untouchable. That incident, along with others, led Martin to dedicate his life to fighting discrimination against Dalits, who make up roughly 20 percent of India's population. Dalits, in the eyes of many Hindus, are condemned to suffer for sins committed in a previous life.
Martin work focused largely on showing Dalits how to become more self-sufficient by setting up cooperatives. But in 1985, at the age of 26, he ran into trouble in a village called Golana. The government had given 33 acres to a Dalit cooperative as part of a land reform. But higher caste landholders refused to surrender the land. That resistance turned violent and in January, 1986, four Dalits were shot dead.
That incident led Martin to create his own organization, which he called Navsarjan--or "New Creation" in Gujarati. Martin's new creation was dedicated to fighting every single case of caste violence through the legal system. Eventually his lawyers were fighting nearly 1,500 cases annually. Today Navsarjan is a major force for change, working in some 3,000 villages across the state of Gujarat.
Recently Martin has shifted gears and focused his own efforts on education. He has written several children's books and also built three schools. I visited one in the village of Katariya. The boarding school has 140 students, ranging in age from ten to fourteen years. The students get up at 5:30 and spend the hours before class helping to maintain the grounds and the rest of the facility. They are trained in math, reading and all the traditional subjects; but they also learn about ecology and making chapati, or bread.
I asked a group of students how the new school compared to those they had attended in their villages. They were no longer physically abused in school, said one. They were taught to use computers and speak English, said another. When I asked how many would like to return to their villages schools, not a hand went up.
Some sixty years after the Dalits gained equal status under the law, many of their fellow citizens still see them as the lowest of the low. But in Martin's boarding school, for the first time in their lives, Dalit kids are being treated as precious human beings with limitless potential. They are learning that it is okay to have big dreams, that they should aspire beyond the limits imposed by bigotry. That is the gift Martin has given them; and he hopes it will not only transform their own lives but eventually their entire society.
Since the documentaries have aired, I have heard from hundreds of listeners who have found much to embrace and ponder in the stories. But what has impressed me most was how people focused on the universality of the lessons. Issues of forgiveness and forgetting are, of course, not peculiar to Rwanda. And problems engendered by discrimination are hardly peculiar to India. For me, the stories, and the reaction, serve as reminders of how interconnected we all are, wherever we may travel.
