the thief he kindly spoke

i've just got back from rwanda. i love it enough to never leave. but that place is almost too much to take. the hills too beautiful. the people too generous. the death too rancid. all of it just so much. 

driving back to uganda, i recalled a memory i had not thought of for nearly 15 years. it was a sunday and i was wearing a dress. i was very young. or at least i remember being very short. i could only see the first two pie shelves in the glass display case. my family and i were waiting at a tippin's restaurant for sunday lunch. on our way to the lobby doors, there was a man alone outside. he looked tired and dirty. his hair was unwashed and his beard untrimmed. he was not wearing sunday clothes. i watched him with round childhood eyes as he staggered to and from the families outside, asking for money. before i could have much of a reaction, the restaurateur came out and made him leave. in the lobby, i sat down on a bench by the window. i had the strangest feeling. i wasn't sure what i was thinking or why i had to sit down. i was very young. but in a few minutes, my mom came over and sat by me.

what's wrong annie? why so quiet?

in the next instant, surprising both my mother and myself, i burst into tears. and through choking little girl sobs, i asked,

why couldn't we give him something? even 50 cents?

i don't remember what my mother said. it must have been comforting because i soon stopped crying and ate some pie. but i do remember that she held me. i remember her rubbing my back. i remember my face on her neck. and i remember for the first time being miserable because the world was unjust. did this man have a mother to hold him? why didn't he have any money? what was going to happen to him when he left? and why couldn't i help him?

murambi is a schoolhouse on a hill in butare, rwanda. 50,000 people were massacred there in 1994. since then, they've exhumed the bodies from the pile of mass graves that the killers left. they have reburied most of them in coffins and the rest they have preserved with lime. these bodies are laid out on picnic tables in the school rooms. you can't imagine the smell.

leaving murambi, i sat on the bus watching rwanda out my window wondering how many of the people i passed on the street didn't have families any more. no aunts, no fathers, no mothers. do they have enough money to eat these days? what's going to happen here in the next few years? and why, o God, couldn't we have helped them? i wished my mother were there. i wanted her to hold me so i could bury my face in her neck. instead, i put my head against the window and slept. i was just so tired.