 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
With their men gone, they seek strength from each other
Sunday, September 24, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer with pictures by Martha Rial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
Sometimes surviving horrific events seems not a blessing but a nearly unbearable burden. Every Thursday afternoon, a group of women fills the waiting area of Polyclinic of Hope in Kigali. All were widowed and assaulted during the genocide. Some have lost children.
Yet somehow, none has lost hope.
They rely on each other to keep living, even as their memories anchor them in sorrow.
The clinic began when two nurses and several other women approached Mary Balikungeri, then a coordinator with Church World Service in Rwanda, with the idea of providing counseling to victims of rape and violence during the genocide six years ago. Balikungeri is now the director of the Polyclinic of Hope, which is part of the locally run Rwanda Women-Network.
More than 500 women are registered at the clinic, which provides free medical services, financial aid and legal advice. Officially, 180 of them were raped and 20 are HIV-positive. The numbers of women who have been raped and carry the AIDS virus are probably higher, but many are afraid to acknowledge what happened to them or be tested because of the stigma they would suffer. Each woman cares for an average of five orphans.
"Women are struggling," Balikungeri said. "In our culture, always the husband takes over everything. When they die, you find women really struggling to learn many things."
To help the women earn their own money, the network has established such projects as a coffee processing plant, beekeeping and poultry farming. New houses have been built to provide shelter for the women and their children. But it is growing difficult to find funding to sustain these ventures and develop others.
Even more than the practical help, though, most women here value the weekly sessions in the clinic that allow them to share their struggles and successes.
"When we came here first, we never talked," explained one of the participants. "We were full of hatred and always felt like we wanted revenge. Our nurses and the people here helped us to really know that life has to go on and that we need to work together to achieve our goals."
Because of their common plight, the women at the clinic have bonded with each other, regardless of which ethnic group they came from.
It's the outside community that seems to ignore or fear them.
Some Rwandans may be guilt-ridden over why the women became widows. "They don't want to see us because...we know what they have done."
And many men are disturbed by the women's newfound solidarity.
"The men are saying they are threatened because the women are becoming so advanced, so dynamic," said another woman. "They think we're busy copying the lives of [Western] women out there. We decided to wake up and begin to live because we know we have to confront life on our own."
Before the war, widows could look to extended family members for assistance. But the genocide decimated families, leaving thousands of women and children with little or no means of support. Many were forced out of their homes by male relatives or squatters, and others abandoned their homes when they fled from the machete-wielding genocidaires.
Others are alone because their husbands have been imprisoned for genocide-related crimes. These women have the added tasks of finding, preparing and delivering food to their husbands, because the prisons can't provide enough to eat.
The genocide made widows out of 500,000 women. During those gruesome months, at least 250,000 women were raped and many of them also were mutilated and tortured.
Rwanda's international criminal tribunal made history two years ago when it became the first international court to convict someone of genocide, punish sexual violence during a civil war, and find that raping a target group of women was an act of genocide.
In November, the government enacted legislation that would allow Rwandan women for the first time to inherit property from a husband or father, although it is not yet clear whether they will be permitted to buy property themselves. This means they could do small-scale farming, which is how the majority of Rwandans survive.
Some of the widows may appeal to the courts to get their homes back, but that requires the scarce resources of time and money. Others are already begging in the streets or doing odd jobs for a pittance.
"Before, you never saw a woman carrying heavy loads on her head," said another clinic participant. That was a job reserved for men. "Now, because we are caring for ourselves, we have to do things we never did before."
That includes learning about the world beyond Rwanda's borders and demanding that it pay attention to their concerns.
Anthanasia Kankazi, 41, one of the 30 women in a Hope clinic discussion one day, was a secondary school teacher before the genocide and now works in a hospital. She is articulate and impassioned when she demands to know why the international community failed to step in more forcefully during the killing, and when she pushes for a commitment to help Rwanda heal.
Last year, Kankazi and women from other countries testified at a United Nations-hosted conference in New York on violence against women. She told them that her greatest suffering was hearing her 12-year-old daughter pleading at one point with the Hutu militia for forgiveness and vowing her family would no longer be Tutsis.
Although six years have passed, Kankazi's regal demeanor gives way when she talks about what happened to her in the fighting. Her voice grows quiet, her body shrinks and her eyes dull with grief and unearned shame.
Words stream from her, racing to get to the end of the story. There's no time for bitterness or self-pity.
Hutu militia killed her husband and then put their four children into a room. They took Kankazi to her bedroom and told her that she would not die as he did. They asked, "Did you know rape also kills?" The mattress on the bed had been stolen. She was gang raped on the wooden frame for several days.
One night she was taken outside the house to a nearby hole where the militia had thrown the bodies of her neighbors. The men asked her if she had any last words.
"I had to thank them," Kankazi said. "After raping me for so many days, at last they were going to kill me and I was going to rest."
Then she chided the men who had assaulted her, telling them they were too young to realize that their own lives would be eaten up with guilt over the atrocities they had committed.
"So kill me quickly. I am tired," Kankazi told them. "But even now, I forgive you."
Out of pique, they decided to let her live -- after they raped her again in the bushes.
Even then, Kankazi's indomitable spirit forced another concession from the men. She told them she was unable to walk home.
"They carried me, very bitter, and they threw me in front of the house," Kankazi said. She hit her head on the ground, but eventually was able to crawl inside.
She had survived, but after a few days, another gang of militia found her house and began to rape her. This went on for weeks. During that time, she miscarried her husband's baby.
"I got to a time where I really didn't know what they were doing," Kankazi said. "My whole body smelled like semen."
The assaults stopped in July 1994, when the genocidal government was overthrown. But the anguish continued. For a long time, she cried instead of talking. She wanted to die and believed that it could happen any day. She felt that she did not like her children as much as before. And she strongly suspected that she would soon be dead because of AIDS.
But tests in 1997 showed that she wasn't infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Others were not so lucky. Beatrice, 32, lives in a tiny house in a Kigali slum. Her husband was killed in the genocide, too. She was raped repeatedly and became pregnant with a daughter, now 6, who was in the hospital at the time of this interview. Beatrice had two other children and was caring for her sister's two children, as well.
Or she would have cared for them, if her health had allowed it.
Beatrice was infected with HIV, and so was her hospitalized daughter. Her sister had died of AIDS eight months previously, after also acquiring the virus through rape.
In the previous six months, Beatrice had lost more than 20 pounds. Fatigue overwhelmed her; she could stay awake only two hours a day.
She was so short of breath, she felt like she was suffocating. Her cough became so severe at one point that she went into the hospital for a few weeks, but eventually she was sent home. There were already too many patients, and no cures or effective treatments were available.
Beatrice was taking medications for tuberculosis. The triple drug therapy that had helped thousands of HIV patients in developed countries was not available to her. Three other HIV-positive women she met through the Hope Polyclinic had died since January.
Her neighbors didn't know about her diagnosis. She hadn't told them for fear of their reaction. And some of them participated in the genocide, she said, so she wouldn't let them rejoice in her plight.
Beatrice had told her children that she was not long for the world -- but not why. They would be sent to another relative, orphaned by war and pestilence, like so many others.
"I'm not afraid of dying," she said, through a translator. "You go to sleep."
Such rest looked very inviting to the frail, weary woman.
"We are just struggling to really mobilize the people to accept that this [AIDS epidemic] is a crisis, a world crisis, and people should come forward, accept living with it, accept being at the forefront to go against it," clinic director Balikungeri said. "It's taboo, but we have to keep talking."
The director of AIDS programs in Rwanda said in January that 60 percent of hospitalized patients had an AIDS-related illness. More than 150,000 adults and 200,000 children died because of the disease last year. It already has orphaned 60,000 children.
Sub-Saharan Africa has born the brunt of AIDS. Seventy percent of the world's people who are infected with HIV live in this region. Experts estimate that up to 12 million children already have been orphaned because of the deadly disease.
As Beatrice continued to weaken, it seemed there would soon be five more.
Back to Journey Home main page
Beatrice was raped during the genocide. Her sister was raped, too. As a result, they became infected with the AIDS virus. Her sister died several months ago, so Beatrice tries to look after sister's children as well as her own. Click to Photo Journal 
Beatrice's medical chart contains a picture of her and her children in healthier times. Now, the 32-year-old battles constant fatigue as AIDS ravages her system. She is not scared to die, she says. It will be a relief. Click to Photo Journal