On care, pain, parenting, and violence

I hesitate. I stand by the door. On the right wall, a sign: “The content in the following rooms will be distressful. The objective is to remember the lost dreams and lives of children”. I take a moment to breathe.

Why am I doing this? Do I need to do this?

This room is at the end of the Memorial. It is the last stop in a vertiginous descent to hell. This is how I imagine hell. It is hard, almost impossible to believe that it was us, humans, who did it.

A million people were killed over one hundred days.

Am I going to do it or what?

I see people who decide to skip this part and go to the gift shop. Some, poke their heads inside as if crossing an invisible umbral into the darkest place imaginable and quickly pull back, but it is too late. You cannot unsee these kinds of things. They will stick with you.

I hesitate again. My son just turned five. We had a party with unicorns and soccer balls and cake and small paper bags filled with candy and pencils so the children who came to sing and dance could write and draw.

I think about him. I think about them. When did I start to think of other children as my children too?

I was never afraid of life until I had children.

It is the middle of July. A Friday morning. On this side of the world, it is always summer. I think I should do it. I must. I am one of those people who need to hear the full story, see the rubble, and hold the hands of those who suffer. I need to see, touch, taste, to understand. It is a tricky balance, to keep myself sane while not shying away from suffering.

I take a deep breath and I cross the line between the world of reckoning and the world of unbearable pain.

Welcome to the children’s room exhibition at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. This is the moment when you can turn your eyes to another place and skip the next paragraph. There are things that literature should also carefully present to others.

Thousands of children were killed by other parents, grandparents, and other children. There are big pictures of children. Their ages are displayed alongside some toys and their favorite foods. Some, include the last thing they said. I walk in silence, reading as my eyes start to fill with tears. I hear the sniffles and gasps of those crying around me. People are sitting on the floor in corners of the exhibition, wailing inconsolably. By the exit, there is a door with a sign that reads “psychological counsel, knock please”.

I walked to the exterior of the building and found a chair overlooking the thousand mountains to cry.

As a parent, children become the closest tangible experience of what is mystical, sacred, and magical about life. In caring for them, we also learned that this work breaks you apart, tears you apart, it demands everything from you. It is mundane and brutal. You give up your body, your mind, your time; your physical health for someone else. You learn quickly that love is boundless and your heart fills with gratitude towards the multitude of hands, arms, and shoulders that cared for you as you grew.

As a parent, I know this. This is why the suffering of other children affects me, and affects us, because we know what it takes to care for someone.

I left Rwanda on a Saturday night, flying over the Sahara and landing in Europe. A short stop before coming back home.

As the days of that summer turned yellow and red, the belly of my partner kept growing. The seed of a new hope, elusive for years. On a warm day in mid-October, around five pm, my second son came into this world in a rush, as if he feared he was missing something special. I remember vividly the light of the sun hitting, almost caressing the river from the fifth floor of the hospital. The beauty of the sunsets in the north when the winter slowly takes over. These are the things that we, the migrants, don’t ever take for granted.

My son is younger than the latest war. A war that has made the world witness what reckless destruction looks like in practice. What dehumanization looks like in this time and age. A millenary abhorrent crime committed with ammunition of the twenty-first century. 

The genocide in Rwanda is 30 years old. And once again, we witness in detail the horrors of violence, the collective punishment of innocent people. In 1994, things came to us at a different rhythm and pace. Today, it is impossible to deny the voracity of war.

For the past weeks and months, I have spent the nights after the kids are asleep watching in silence the reports coming from Gaza and Israel. I can only watch Channel 4 from the UK. They seem to be genuinely interested in asking hard questions without waving flags. Trying to find some sense in the middle of this nonsense. Women who bring children into this world amidst war. 5,500 per month I read on the news. People without homes, without a place to go, water to drink, people without a sense of safety. When things seem to hit a new low, it becomes clear that we are just opening a new level of hell.

What would I do if I needed to get water for my sons?

I would break hell loose.

What would we do if all of us needed to get water for our children?

We would work together. 

Week by week, my newborn turns into a small baby, and I can see gray eyes turning blue or green, we haven’t agreed yet. His hands learn where the face is, I see him smile. He recognizes me now. Every day when I see this fragile, precious baby, I think about all the parents who will never see their children again. I sit with him, in my arms, in silence, and try to breathe the smell of his head and focus all the energy on my body to capture the essence of his innocence and presence.

There is a sense of cosmic injustice when a parent loses a child. When a brother loses a sibling. There is also no word to name the experiences of many of us who have been left behind, filled with memories when a sister, a brother, or a son dies. There are widows and orphans, and then, there are the rest of us.

When I was twenty-two, I came late home from a party. My mom was still awake waiting for me. I thought she was overreacting. With the benefit of time and two kids later, I can only imagine how nerve-wracking it must have been to raise a child in a country in war. I grew up in Colombia and my childhood was marked with memories of killings and brutality without limits. As a young adult, random bombs, displaced people, and killings from the state forces were commonplace.

When violence becomes the air you breathe, you get used to living with it, as if it were normal and justifiable. Violence becomes the connecting tissue.

I sit on the kitchen stool while my mom fixes me a quick snack. It is 1:45 am. The radio is on. In my house, there was no silence. Always the radio. As I wait in silence, half asleep and half drunk, my attention focuses on the voice coming from the airwaves. A young woman. She talks about her son. He just turned seven. He does not remember his father much. He was only 13 months old when his father was taken away. She talks about how much they miss him. It has been more than a year since the last time they heard news from him. She breaks down. Her sobs are a plea for answers. I start sobbing too. My mom thinks I am way too drunk, and she scolds me a little.

“When did kidnapping people become normal in this country? This is not normal”. I say.

That night, something finally broke inside me. I left Colombia the following year. I am getting closer to the point where half of my life has happened in a different place than the one that I call home. So, what is home, anyway?

It is so hard to love a country so madly and know that it will kill you little by little every day if you let it.

Can you imagine for a moment what it is like to live every day without knowing the whereabouts of the people you love the most? To spend every waking hour pushing all the buttons to assure your loved ones don’t become a number, a forgotten number in a war that became normal to the people who have no recollection of peace?

Voces del secuestro -Voices of Kidnapping- was a weekly radio show launched in 1994. It was an open mic space where families and loved ones of kidnapped people in Colombia sent messages with the hopes that those in captivity could hear them. The program lasted for 24 years. Many people never made it back.

I think about this when I see the families of the Israeli hostages marching on the streets, yelling at government officials of the war cabinet, pleading, demanding, and begging to bring their loved ones back from the tunnels in Gaza. No one should suffer this pain.

You might think that in a war there are good people and bad people. If only it were that simple. But the pain. The visceral pain is real, and it does not cherry-pick its victims. Pain is the language that links us, the one that we can all relate to. Pain and violence are the other side of care.

It is time for my baby to take a nap. I rock him softly as he finds his way to rest. There is a small window of time for me to swaddle him and leave the room quietly. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to put him down yet. I hold him a little closer, a little tighter, and think about all the people who must carry on and live without their children. The white swaddle that covers his body resembles the white covers over the bodies of hundreds, thousands of Palestinian children. Over 15,000 children. I also think about the Israeli parents who don’t know where their children are and those who will never know who their children were going to become. Parents that will never hear the voices of their loved ones again.

The oaks outside my window are starting to change again. Chestnuts are making their way down to the ground. My son is starting to walk and say many words, but none of them are Papá/Dad, not yet. When I hold him in my arms, I still smell in his head the newness and sense of possibility. He will be one year old soon, just like this senseless war that keeps making children die, people starve, and many of us, a little more indifferent as time goes by. Genocide has become the norm and not the exception.

Two nights ago, while I was washing the dishes, I kept thinking about “One of Us” by Joan Osborne. I put my earphones on and played it on repeat. The chorus of the song says, “What if God was one of us?”. I am not a religious person so there is something about that phrase that has attracted me and bothered me to the core since the first time I heard it nineteen years ago, but I did not know what it was.

While I was brushing my teeth, it clicked. “What if God was one of them, not one of us?”“Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make their way home?”.