My First Dead Body

I saw my first dead body last week. He was a victim of a plane crash in the eastern Congolese town of Goma. I don't know if he was on the plane or in the busy market it crashed into. I don't know his name or how old he was. The hospital worker unzipped the body bag and I just started taking pictures. It wasn't until he had unzipped a few more bags that the smell hit me and I realized what I was shooting. I stopped for a few seconds to process everything and then kept shooting.

Later I was at an internet cafe sending my photos to the Associated Press and to the European Pressphoto Agency. A woman stood out in the in the middle of the road, hands raised to the rain, wailing at the heavens. I felt mildly nauseous as I sent my photos.



Grief outside the morgue at Heal Africa Hospital in Goma.

Tears for the victims.

There are four hospitals in Goma, all over-crowded due to the armed conflict in eastern Congo. Hospitals keep tight security to avoid being swamped by patients.

Remembering Genocide

At the Red Cross trauma center during the commemoration ceremony in Nyamata, near Kigali.

The skulls and bones didn't really get to me. Neither did the clothes of the 600 people who were killed here at the church in Nyamata, just outside of Kigali, 14 years ago. It was the screaming that finally got to me.

All through the commemoration ceremony Red Cross volunteers were busy carrying people, mostly women, to a trauma treatment center they had set up not 200 meters from where President Kagame was giving his speech. First you'd hear screams coming from somewhere off to the right, then to the left, then from behind in a chain reaction of grief and mourning. In the trauma center dozens of women lay around the ground, in tents and on stretchers. The worst cases were reliving the horrors of the past, fighting the volunteers, believing they were the militias coming to kill rather than friends trying to help.

The genocide that made tiny Rwanda a household name started on April 7, 1994 with the assassination of President Habyarimana. Over the next 100 days between 800,000 and a million people were killed. Commemoration ceremonies are held every year. Stores close, transportation stops. There is no pop music on the radios. The mourning officially lasts for one week. But in the villages the screaming continues. April is the worst, when most of the killing was done. Things don't really return to "normal" until after July 4, the anniversary of the day the Rwandan Patriotic Front marched into Kigali and stopped the killing.


Volunteer helping a woman to the trauma center.


Remains of some of the 600 people killed in the church at Nyamata.


Clothes of those killed in the church stacked on the pews. Bullet holes mark the baptismal font and the wall behind.


Mourners wear purple to remember those killed in the genocide. This man also shows his patriotism with a Rwanda flag lapel pin.


Seraphine Mukamusoni was in the church in Nyamata when 600 people were killed there during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. She survived by hiding under the slain. "I was covered in blood so they thought I was dead, too," she said. Here she stands at the gate of the church where those taking refuge locked themselves in.

Wapi

Wapi is a very useful Swahili word that can be used in almost any situation requiring expression on negativity. My students use it when they’re having computer troubles. People use it when cab drivers try to rip them off.
The other day our domestic, Athanase, was up a tree picking edible leaves when the branch he was standing on broke. I heard the crack and looked up from my computer to see a small red blur surrounded by a large green blur crash to the ground. Athanase, in the red New York Yankees basketball jersey he wears while working, climbed up out of the fallen branches, shook himself off, looked down and exclaimed “Wapi!”