Meeting Charles

On our second day in Rwanda, we traveled to Nyamata, a small town outside Kigali, to visit the Nyamata Church, a brick building surrounded by a white iron gate. The sound of singing from Sunday Mass being celebrated in a nearby building could he heard through an open door. As I looked through quarter-sized bullet holes in a patio cover overhead — a reminder of the massacres that took place there — I found it hard to fathom that such faith was still present.

A young man dressed in dark jeans and a black button-up shirt, whom I had not noticed on the porch when we arrived, quietly introduced himself in accented English as Charles Mugabe. Awkwardly apologizing for his poor grammar, Charles switched to Rwanda’s native language, Kinyarwanda, and, with help from a translator, started telling his account of survival in 1994.

Charles was 8 when the genocide began. He, along with his father, mother and two brothers, fled to Nyamata alongside thousands of their Tutsi neighbors. Together, they crammed into the Nyamata Church and the surrounding yard, unable to sit. Charles said that many died from starvation and dehydration even before the arrival of the Hutu rebels, the Interahamwe, which, in Kinyarwanda, translates to "those who attack together." The Interahamwe was responsible for much of the killing during the genocide.

As Charles led us inside the church, we passed under a purple-and-white banner that, translated, reads, "If you knew me, you wouldn’t have been able to kill me."

Piles of torn, dirty and bloodied clothes that once belonged to those murdered in and around Nyamata were stacked a few feet high on every wooden pew. On the altar lay a rusted machete. Overlooking the mounds of clothes, a Virgin Mary statue was positioned on the back wall. Bullet holes in the roof made the interior of the church appear bathed in sunlight.

In his soft voice, Charles recalled April 1994, when his family was massacred inside those brick walls. He remembered the armed Interahamwe rebels mobbing the church, as they sang and shouted, “We’re coming to kill the cockroaches, the snakes.”

Charles pointed at places around the church, recounting the crimes he'd seen. To the right of the entrance, the rebels had murdered the little children, grabbing them by their legs and bashing their skulls against the wall. In front of the altar, they carved the fetus out of a pregnant woman, yelling, "We have to kill the Tutsi inside of her." To the left of the altar, a woman was impaled, a spear shoved between her legs. It exited through her neck.

This was our first meeting in Rwanda with a genocide survivor. I felt numb and unsure how to respond, but perhaps the most disturbing story was still to come: how Charles survived.

He turned his attention back to the open closet door behind him and explained how he and his mother had hidden there with others. His mother had been killed after the Interahamwe forced open the door and started pulling people out, in some cases using machetes to cut off the arms of people and slicing off the heads of others, which were tossed into the crowded sanctuary.

Charles had escaped into the main area of the church where he was able to find his twin brother, the only member of his family still alive. Slashed across the neck with a machete, his brother told him to smear the blood across his own limbs in an attempt to fool the rebels into believing he had been injured as well. Charles told us he did as his brother told him and, accepting his own death, lay down and eventually fell asleep. Later, after the soldiers left, he escaped from the church and sought refuge in swamps a few miles outside of the village.

Charles did not tell any more of his story. Instead, he stepped aside while we walked around the church, which is now a memorial site. Outside again, he led us down to a cramped underground space and stood next to shelves full of the skulls of those who had been killed during the genocide. On other shelves, simply made coffins covered in cloth contained more bones of the dead. As we made our way down the steep stairs, the air increasingly stale, Charles pointed to one he said held the remains of his family.

When it was time to leave, we shook Charles Mugabe's hand. Overwhelmed and reflective, we thanked him and shuffled back onto the bus. I took a seat in the back where I was able to look through the fence at the church. Charles still stood on the porch, smiling and shaking hands with other visitors.

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