Genocide From the Inside

Tracy Kidder's previous book, "Mountains Beyond Mountains," documenting the life of Dr. Paul Farmer is one of my favorites. This seems that this will be a worthwhile read as well...The description below of the hollow, caved in skills with empty eyeholes staring at you, imploring you....accurately describes my feelings as well when I was at the Holocaust Museum in Rwanda last year around this time..

Tracy Kidder asks how a traumatized African becomes an American.

We have preserved the massacre site. We have preserved the death," the young Rwandan man said to me with a bewildering smile. He was leading me briskly through a school where a decade earlier, hundreds of men, women, and children had been hacked to death. Pools of dried blood made the floor sticky. In one corridor, old bits of skull and bone made it crunchy. And then we came to the bodies.

The dead were covered in some kind of greenish preservative and laid out in long rows on the floor. A child—frozen forever at 4 or 5—had her skull split open in one clear blow. A woman's stomach had been hacked, and the contents must have spilled out somewhere: She was empty now. I would like to be able to say the faces of the hundreds of bodies I marched past had an accusatory stare that asked: How could you let this happen to us? But, in reality, they were glassy-eyed and gone.

What happens when you travel in a single 12-hour flight from the splattered heart of this genocide to the streets of New York City? That's what happened to Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a 24-year-old man who had narrowly survived a genocide in two countries and suddenly in 1994 found himself on a flight to a place he had only heard of—America.
(..)
Deogratias fled across a river already beginning to choke with Tutsi corpses into the forests. After days hiding out in the woods—to echoed screams—he realized he had to get out of Burundi. He thought he had an option for safety—to make his way across the border to Rwanda. He nearly didn't make it. He was stumbling from one catastrophe to another—straight into the heart of the Rwandan genocide. The president there was murdered, too, and the extermination of nearly 1 million people—mostly by machete, wielded at high speed–erupted. It took 100 days. "Before the end of the night, the cockroaches are not going to wake up again," the mobs would sing on their killing frenzies.

And suddenly Deogratias was standing in an American airport, with $200 in his pocket and trauma cluttering his head, claiming he had work to do in New York City. A friend had pointed him toward Burundi's airport and urged him to get as far away as he could. He slept in boarded-up buildings and in Central Park and marvelled: "Almost everyone looked happy. Or at least no one looked alarmed. And no one looked terrified. These were people just going about their business, greeting their friends and their families, as if they didn't know there were places where dogs were trotting about with human heads in their mouths. But how could they not know?"

Kidder's descriptions of Deogratias seeing New York for the first time are some of the best in the book. He was so shocked by people wearing their pants low and strolling oddly that he became convinced America was afflicted by an epidemic of broken hips. When he stumbled into Central Park one day, he exclaimed: "My God, I just discovered a forest!"