Missed Connections Lead to New Perspectives
Building positive peace comes through community driven action.
Sunday morning, May the 15th, and I was preparing to finally leave to go to Salt Lake City (SLC) International Airport for my flight to Kigali, Rwanda to study the genocide that had occurred in 1994 and Rwanda’s reconciliation efforts since. It was supposed to be a relatively easy flight experience. Leave SLC at 2:30PM, land in Amsterdam for a three-hour layover, and then take the final nine-hour leg to get to Kigali.
Come Sunday afternoon, and my flight had been delayed from 2:30PM until 4:30PM. Our 4:30PM departure then turned into sitting on the plane for two hours, having our departure delayed until 6:30PM. From SLC to Amsterdam, I could not relax because I was only able to think about how I was going to miss my connecting flight, and I had no idea what to do. Once we landed in Amsterdam, I had indeed, missed my connecting flight.
Delta then scheduled me to take a flight to Kenya, but I had not prepared to go to Kenya. My anxiety only grew. I had been planning on going on this study abroad for months, and my travel plans quickly fell apart around me. Following only what my Delta app was telling me, I got onto the flight to Nairobi with two other people in my study abroad group. Once we had gotten to Kenya, we waited at the airport until 5AM to catch a connecting flight to Rwanda. In the chaotic, disorganized mess of my flights, my bag had gotten lost along the way. After many phone calls and wearing the same smelly, sweaty, clothes for two days in Kigali I had traveled in, I finally got my bag back.
As I read over this quote at the Kigali Genocide Memorial while my bag was still ‘lost’, I felt incredibly dumb. Here I was, along with other Westerners, being overly emotional about missed connections and potentially lost bags. Donata, along with other Tutsi children, had lost everything in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda that lasted for a hundred days and resulted in around a million deaths of the ethnically assigned Tutsi group and Tutsi symptherziers1. I read over this quote again, only imagining what that feeling must have been like for the survivors. In the hot, humid afternoon in Kigali, I received a healthy dose of reality. My perspective completely shifted; my inconvenient flight is such a minute problem when compared to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
In the days following our tour at the Genocide Memorial, we met with several different governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are helping to facilitate reconciliation in a post-genocide society. Something that struck me, is the resilience shown from the Rwandese citizens. 1994 is only twenty-eight years ago, and through community driven action, the state of Rwanda has been able to rebuild and create positive peace2. For example, the NGO group Avega Agahozo. Avega3 was formed in October of 1995 by widows who had lost their husbands in the 1994 Genocide. They offer legal assistance, health care, and psychosocial services throughout Rwanda for not only survivors of the genocide, but for any vulnerable people who need assistance.
One of the founding members and current President, Étienne, sat with our group and had her story told through a translator. It would be easy, and understandable, to give up and lose hope after surviving such a traumatic event. To witness your family members, neighbors, and friends be killed via machetes and other methods of war that are so atrocious is something that is incredibly difficult to comprehend. But Étienne and the other widows did not give up. They found solidarity through each other, advocated for themselves, and grew an incredibly successful NGO.
A majority of us, myself included, will hopefully never have to figure out how to rebuild our society following a genocide. No nation-state ever imagines that they will experience the inter-generational trauma that shadows a society post-genocide. A genocide does not occur over night though, as there was meticulous planning into creating societal divisions and staggering inequalities among the Hutu perpetrators and Tutsi victims and survivors. Dr. Gregory H. Stanton has listed the steps to a genocide as the following: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial4.
You might be thinking, “this would never happen to my society,” but, when examining current affairs within the United States (US), it should come of great concern to us all that there can be parallels drawn with our own societal divisions and inequalities to the ten steps to a genocide. We are halfway through 2022, and there has already been twenty-seven school shootings5. On May 14th, ten people were killed at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York under the guise of racist and abhorrent ideologies6. These examples are just a few of many civil, political, and economic inequalities currently happening in the US. We cannot become complacent, or numb, to the crises of division happening within our own borders, as these issues are the seeds that lead to violent outbursts of conflict.
Rwanda did not find reconciliation or positive peace through individualist behavior. Just as Étienne provided humanitarian services through community action, I ask that those reading this article examine the ways in which they can come together with their community to create positive change in fighting the divisions and inequalities within our own society. The international community largely ignored the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, and I know that we do not want to find ourselves in the same position when examining our own country.
“We were never to think, This orange is mine. I’m giving you what’s mine. We were to think, This orange is ours. We’re sharing what’s ours.” The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clementine Wamariya7
Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print.
* “Defined by a more lasting peace that is built on sustainable investments in economic development and institutions as well as societal attitudes that foster peace. Can be used to gauge the resilience of a society, or its ability to absorb shocks without falling or relapsing into conflict” https://positivepeace.org/what-is-positive-peace
“© 2021 Avega Agahozo.” Avega Agahozo. https://avega-agahozo.org/.
Stanton, Gregory. “10 Stages of Genocide.” Genocide Watch. http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/.
Diaz, Jaclyn. “27 School Shootings Have Taken Place so Far This Year.” NPR. NPR, May 25, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1101050970/2022-school-shootings-so-far.
Jesse McKinley, Alex Traub and Troy Closson. “Gunman Kills 10 at Buffalo Supermarket in Racist Attack.” The New York Times. The New York Times, May 17, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/14/nyregion/buffalo-shooting.
Wamariya, Clemantine, and Elizabeth Weil. The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After. New York: Broadway Books, 2019.