Waiting for the Sunrise

SUNRISE

SUNRISE One Family’s Struggle against Genocide and Racism

by E L I Z A B E T H G ATO R A N O

Wilmette, Illinois

Waiting for Sunrise

Bahá’í Publishing 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091-2844 Copyright © 2008 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ 11 10 09 08

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gatorano, Elizabeth.

Waiting for the sunrise : one family’s struggle against genocide and racism /

by Elizabeth Gatorano. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-931847-45-2 (alk. paper) ISBN 10: 1-931847-45-2 1. Gatorano, Elizabeth. 2. Gatorano, Phanuel. 3. Religious biography— United States. 4. Genocide—Rwanda—History—20th century. 5.

Racism—United States—History—20th century. 6. Rwanda—History— Civil War, 1994—Refugees. 7. Americans—Rwanda—Biography. 8.

Rwandan Americans—Biography. 9. Refugees—Rwanda. 10. Refugees— United States. I. Title.

BL2525.G375 2008 973’.0496757100922—dc22 [B] 2007039122 Cover design by Tracy Heckel Book design by Patrick Falso

To learn more or to order this book, please go to: bit.ly/waitsun OR www.bahaibookstore.com

In memory of my mother, Anita Fenstermacher, who gave me a love for Africa.

To my in-laws Eliel Gatorano and Kezia Nyirabusoro, who died devoted to each other.

To Samuel and Penina, who walk with me daily.

To the many unknown Rwandan heroes who risked their lives to save others.

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Author’s Note Because of the large size of my husband’s family, a family tree is included on page 379 to allow the reader to easily keep track of everyone. The names of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

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Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................... xiv Part 1 .............................................................................................. 3 Part 2 .............................................................................................. 173 Part 3 .............................................................................................. 275 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 371 Gatorano Family Tree ..................................................................... 379 Bibliography ................................................................................... 381 Index .............................................................................................. 383

ix

Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without Phanuel. You have taught me the power of detachment and how to endure great adversity with grace and dignity. Thank you for trusting me and for never doubting my spiritual capacities. I am blessed to have you as my husband and my friend.

If it were not for my children Nicholas, Andre, and Natalie, I would never have been led to write his book and to document their family history. You give me joy, and I am blessed to be a part of your journey through life.

I am grateful to my parents, who taught me that the world was larger than a small rural town in Indiana, who made me conscious of our global community, and who taught me that it is a gift to serve humanity.

If it were not for my beloved sister Heidi, I wonder where I would have ended up. Thank you for embracing me and accepting me just the way I am. You never doubted that I would be okay. You make my life sweet.

I want to acknowledge Tracy Tolbert, who taught me that tests and difficulties were gifts from God. You gave me strength to tackle life’s obstacles. Thank you.

I want to thank all my Rwandan friends and family. Without hesitation, you accepted me and included me in your village. You have taught me to love, to forgive, and to embrace life. You have the most beautiful culture, and I am honored to be a part of it. xi

Waiting for Sunrise

When I was asked if I was willing to publish the manuscript I had written about our family’s story, I was apprehensive about going through with it. If it had not been for Terry Cassiday, who encouraged me to publish the book, it would still be under my bed. Thank you for believing that I was capable of taking the next step.

I cannot express in words my gratitude to my editor, Christopher Martin. You made this experience easy and wonderful. Thank you for your kindness and your willingness to ask the hard questions. I also want to acknowledge his wife, Genevieve, and his son Papa Nii. Thank you for all your loving support.

I would also like to thank Ariana Brown, another editor at Bahá’í Publishing, who also provided invaluable assistance in the final editing of the manuscript.

Lastly, I want to thank Bahá’u’lláh for revealing to the world the beauty in the oneness of humanity.

xii

Introduction Throughout the text of this book, I have struggled to ³nd the appropriate words to describe the murders of eight hundred thousand people that took place in Rwanda in 1994. At some points I have referred to it by the term civil war, which Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary de³nes as “a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country,” and at other times I have called it genocide, which is de³ned as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”

The problem with these terms, however, is that, while they are generally applicable in a broad sense, they do not capture all of the complexities of the situation. The people involved in the mass killings were not always clearly divided into mutually exclusive groups of victims and oppressors, and the murders were not always simple, clear-cut cases of one tribe killing another. The deaths of several members of my husband’s family bear silent witness to this fact. These family members, all Rwandan, were not murdered by members of a di²erent tribe as part of an organized strategy to wipe them out in 1994. Rather, they were murdered by members of their own tribe, and they cannot therefore be neatly categorized as victims of either a “civil war” or a “genocide.”

The murders of these family members were also not isolated incidents in the Rwandan con·ict. Today, if you ask any Rwandan about a family member who was killed in Rwanda in 1994, the answer is often that the person was murdered by someone of the same so-called “class” or “tribe.”

This demonstrates that words like genocide and civil war do not fully encompass the scope of the tragic events of 1994, and that words like xiii

Waiting for Sunrise

class and tribe do not fully explain the motivations behind the killings.

To call this tragedy a “genocide” or “civil war” without understanding its root causes is to risk glossing over it. The often overlooked truth is that many people in Rwanda were killed for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with their tribe or class. Their murders are a reminder of the words found in one of the Bahá’í writings, which states, “It is . . . certain that sins such as anger, jealousy, dispute, covetousness, avarice, ignorance, prejudice, hatred, pride and tyranny exist in the physical world.

All these brutal qualities exist in the nature of man.”

However, the heroic actions—both known and unknown—of sel·ess individuals who saved others from the killings call to mind the noble qualities that people can display. The Bahá’í writings refer to our sel·ess, spiritual nature in these words: “The attributes of his [man’s] Divine nature are shown forth in love, mercy, kindness, truth and justice, one and all being expressions of his higher nature. Every good habit, every noble quality belongs to man’s spiritual nature, whereas all his imperfections and sinful actions are born of his material nature.” The writings go on to say that we must all make a conscious e²ort to develop these noble qualities of our spiritual nature and to stamp out the brutal ones that can cause so much su²ering and anguish for ourselves and for others.

In retrospect, I believe no single group or tribe in Rwanda su²ered more than another. I also believe it is important to realize that no group or tribe bears sole responsibility for what happened. The lesson of Rwanda is a lesson for the entire world: All of us must learn to look beyond the labels of tribe and race to appreciate our common humanity and to forgive the traumas of the past. I hope that my story will help close the imaginary gaps that still exist between people of di²erent cultures, will help dispel the myths of tribe and race, and will help the reader understand that we are all one human family that can learn to celebrate its diversity. As Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet and Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, has written, “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”

—Elizabeth Gatorano

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Part 1

1

1 As I stirred in my bed, the sun felt hot against my face. I rolled over to the edge of my bunk, looked down on the ground, and studied the patterns on the Indian rug that covered the ·oor of my room. I could smell eggs cooking down the hall, and I could hear the bustle of people moving around outside my bedroom door. I knew all too well that I, too, needed to get up and get moving so I wouldn’t be late for Sunday school.

I was the youngest of ³ve children. My parents had been missionaries for many years, and they had eventually settled in Walkerton, a small rural town in Indiana.

Sundays were a ritual in our house. It was the one time when life stopped for all of us and we were able to spend the day together. No one questioned this family ritual; we all knew that the routine was set and not open for negotiation.

As I opened my bedroom door, I met my brother David face-to-face.

He appeared to be in his own world, trying hard not to miss a buttonhole as he slowly buttoned his shirt. Edwin hurriedly slipped past us both in the narrow hall. Having seven of us living in a three-bedroom house made it impossible for us not to enter each other’s space. I found my dad in the kitchen, preparing his famous omelets, and Edwin was already sitting at the table with a steaming cheese omelet in front of him. Maybe the fact that he was the middle child had something to do with his promptness. David, the second to the last, seemed to be aloof to what was going on most of the time.

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Waiting for the Sunrise

As we all randomly took seats around our table, Mark, my oldest brother, sat in a black high-back chair in our family room, which was a few yards from our dining room table. He was listening to a small radio and had a one-piece headphone placed in one ear. He was also looking pensive with the Sunday morning paper spread out over his lap. The fact that he was deaf in one ear made me think that the headphone was one way he could block out all the sounds from our noisy house. The two other women in our house, my mother and my sister, Heidi, were nowhere to be found. The only signs of their presence were the sounds of doors being opened and shut from the bedroom to the bathroom.

My dad announced to the whole house that we had ten minutes before we needed to leave for church. He then asked me, “Liz, do you want to walk with me?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Since the church was only a few blocks from our house, I always enjoyed the time we spent wandering down the street together. My dad would listen to the birds and then identify each bird by its song. I, on the other hand, never could really ³gure their names out or recognize their songs. Perhaps, being six years old, I was just more interested in watching my black patent leather shoes scu² the pebbles in the road rather than searching the sky above and taking in the morning.

Since we lived in a small town, I pretty much knew who lived in the houses we passed. Many of the people who lived in Walkerton had lived here all their lives. Their parents had also grown up and lived here—and before them, their grandparents had settled here. In our small town, nearly everyone was somehow related.

For instance, I never spoke badly about anyone to our neighbors because I knew that, most likely, I would be speaking badly about my neighbor’s relative. Because of this sense of “family,” Walkerton had its own unique culture and was, in a sense, closed o² from the rest of the world. Many residents of Walkerton had never traveled outside their town.

I, on the other hand, felt like an outsider. My parents had lived in Belgium, Africa, and Alaska, and my family had been exposed to many cultures. We had lived in numerous diverse settings. But even though I had been born in Nome, Alaska, my only memories were of Walkerton.

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My dad and I were now only steps from the church parking lot, and he began looking at his watch and then down the street in search of our big white station wagon. He softly mumbled, “Well, your mother is going to be ten minutes late, as usual.” We went ahead and eagerly walked toward the doors to the Walkerton United Methodist Church.

As soon as the benediction was spoken and the service was over, David and I found our way into the foyer of the church, where we stood near the stained glass window and patiently waited for my mother to wend her way through the many people who wanted to take a few moments to discuss one thing or another. My mother was always challenging the church congregation to broaden their minds. Whether it was o²ering a spiritually inspired book to help someone ³nd inner peace or starting a discussion on social injustice among the churchgoers, she always seemed to have a new vision to share.

I remember one of her agendas brought a lot of chaos to the congregation when she suggested that we become a sister church with a predominately Black church called South Bend United Methodist Church in South Bend, Indiana. South Bend was a city located northeast of Walkerton, and it took about thirty-³ve minutes to get there by car.

Mom’s plan to bring the two churches together came about when she discovered that some members of our church had never seen—let alone met—anyone who was Black. She began to drive up to meet with people from the Black church, and she successfully organized meetings on a few occasions. Though my mother often cringed when listening to the dialogue between members of the two churches— mostly because of statements made by members of our church—she always had a way of reconciling people and healing the racial slurs people sometimes made out of sheer ignorance. She would celebrate the process of reconciliation. For her, church was about breaking down walls and bringing people together.

David and I sat on the ·oor waiting for my mother to ³nish talking.

Often she would be one of the last people to leave the church, and I don’t know why it took David and me so long to discover it was much quicker to walk back home than to sit and wait for a ride from my mom. We both learned eventually to just wander home. Sometimes David would run and leave me behind, while I would cut through lawns rather than go the conventional way of following the paved streets.

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Waiting for the Sunrise

On this particular afternoon, as soon as the door to our house cracked open an inch, we could smell the roast. My dad was busy in the kitchen preparing the gravy for the roast, and he rushed around the kitchen as if he were being timed. He always wanted to get the table set and the food on the table by a speci³c time.

When my father began to call us to dinner, he would use three calls.

The ³rst call meant we should wash our hands. The second call was to inform us that the food was being placed in serving dishes, and the third call meant that we had better be sitting at the table. While waiting for dinner, I found Edwin and David in the family room watching The Twilight Zone. Being the youngest, I rarely, if ever, had any right to choose what program we would watch on the TV, and I mostly had to accept what others wanted to watch.

My mother entered the house with an expression on her face that said she was running late. Immediately, she headed toward the kitchen to join my father in the last-minute preparations for our meal. My father’s calling system always worked, and by the time he made his last call, we were all seated at the table.

We each had our speci³c seat. My father and mother sat at the heads of the table, and David and I sat to the left and right of my mother.

Heidi and Mark sat to the left and right of my father, and in between them sat Edwin. Today, as always, my father served my mother ³rst and then served everyone to the left of her, until eventually I was served— last, of course. After we all had been given our portion, the stories began.

In keeping with our family tradition, my mother started to share stories of Africa. She always spoke of Africa as if it were this mystical place, and she would talk mostly about the Africans. My mother was an educational missionary in the 1950s, and she married the father of Mark, my oldest brother, after she graduated from college. Soon afterward, they were stationed in Wembo Nyama, a small village in what would later become known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After a short time, my mother’s ³rst husband got sick with polio. When he died soon afterward, she found herself alone with Mark, who at the time was about one year old. Not only was her husband gone, she was ill with hepatitis, and on top of everything, she discovered soon afterward that she was pregnant once more. All these events hit her at once in the heart of Africa. She had no family around and had only the Africans to 6

Part 1

lean on to get her through this dark period in her life. She had to travel by ship to get back home to the welcoming arms of her parents. They helped nurse her back to health, and eventually, she gave birth to another son, Eric.

She stayed with her parents until Eric was three. At one point, my mother’s grandmother got critically sick. My grandfather had heard good things about a practicing doctor in the Indianapolis area, and he made an appointment to take my mother’s grandmother to see this doctor, who would later marry my mother. During the o¹ce visit my grandfather spoke about my mother. He suggested that they should meet, but it would be later, through a mutual friend, that they would ³nally go on a date. My father had never married, and he was a devoted Christian. It didn’t take long for them to be married.

In no time, they both began to talk about going back to Africa. During my father’s junior year in medical school, he had decided he wanted to be a missionary. He believed that being a medical missionary was the highest calling a person could have. Before meeting my mother, he had read an article my mother had written about the Congo. In his mind, he knew she would be willing to go back. She spoke highly of the Africans, and he knew she wanted to return to those from whom she had gained her spiritual insight. Soon both of them were making the necessary preparations to go to the Congo.

The missionary board decided that my father should study a course in tropical medicine before he and my mother left to work in the Congo.

The course was going to be o²ered in Brussels, Belgium. Before my parents left for Brussels, my grandparents decided to take my mom, one of my aunts, Eric, and Heidi, who was then one year old, to the Hershey’s chocolate factory in Pennsylvania. My grandfather was driving the car, and he had to navigate a curve called “Dead Man’s Curve.” What happened next would change their fates forever.

My grandfather lost control of the car and hit a utility pole. It was before safety belts had been invented. Eric was in the front seat of the car, and he hit the dashboard and died instantly. My grandmother was hurt and was not expected to survive, and Heidi had a broken leg. My mother was pregnant with Edwin, and she was also badly injured, although Edwin survived. My grandfather walked away with abrasions and bruises.

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Waiting for the Sunrise

My father was in the middle of performing a surgery at the hospital where the family was taken after the accident. A nurse interrupted the surgery and gave him the news of the accident, and he immediately went to identify Eric’s body. Everyone who had been riding in the car except my grandfather was hospitalized. Later that afternoon, my father had to pick Mark up from school and tell him the news that his brother had died. My grandmother survived, but she endured multiple surgeries and had di¹culty walking the rest of her life. From that day forward, my grandfather lived daily with the grief and the guilt over what had happened. Though I was not born at the time, I was reminded often of the day that changed our family. The event was referred to as “The Accident.”

Shortly after this, my parents, Mark, Heidi, and Edwin moved to Belgium, where my father studied tropical medicine before they continued their journey to the Congo. The course he studied was only taught in French, so before he could take the class in tropical medicine, he had to learn French. It took him a year to learn the language and complete the course.

Near the beginning of 1960, my parents ³nally found their way to Africa. It had to be one of the most di¹cult times to live in the Congo.

Political upheaval was a constant, recurring fact of life, and the country was riddled with all sorts of corruption. My father found himself in a small rural village, Minga, with very few supplies but many patients. My mother often spoke of the long lines, full of people needing to see a doctor, that would form early in the morning. She never saw my father much, as he was working so hard. He had to memorize the vital signs of each patient because he couldn’t ³nd any paper in the village. My mother, on the other hand, spent every moment with the Africans. She would talk with us about the spark of life she saw in the African people. She had never seen it anywhere else. Maybe that is why she had been so anxious to go back to Africa.

Life was precious in Africa, my mother related. Because of the harsh conditions, one had to rely completely on the mercy of nature and God for everything. A person really didn’t have much control over his or her own life in Africa. Each day often brought new hardships, whether the hardships came from disease, hunger, or political unrest. However, as my mother would recount to us, a person could develop a deep sense of faith from these hardships.

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Part 1

Within months after their arrival, my parents found themselves being dragged, along with their friends, into a revolutionary war. The situation was like a pot of hatred that had been boiling for years, and now it was beginning to spill over. My parents and my three siblings— Mark, Heidi, and Edwin—were evacuated out of the Congo. They could bring only one item each. The only peace my mother had from leaving all their possessions behind was the thought that most of their beloved friends would be able to take and use them. My family ·ed to Zimbabwe, where they lived with another missionary family. For two months they waited patiently for things to quiet down in the Congo so they all could return. Finally, many of the missionaries consulted, and the men agreed that they should return to the Congo, while the women and children should return to the United States. My father, along with the son of a doctor whom he had replaced in Minga, boarded a plane and ·ew back to the Kassai Province in the Congo.

For three months, my father stayed in the village trying to help any way he could. Without supplies, he found it overwhelming. There were many moments he barely escaped death. At some point, my father realized that the Africans were spending more e²ort taking care of him and protecting him than he was spending assisting them. Not wanting to be a burden to them, he decided to leave.

After he returned to the United States, my father never liked to talk about Africa. Whenever he did talk about it, we could hear the anger in his voice at the stupidity of the ³ghting that was taking place in the Congo. He would speak with outrage at some of the things he saw when he remained there. For example, he remembered that after he left Minga he was told, along with some of the people who were with him, that all people with glasses were being killed because they were considered “educated,” and anyone who was “educated” was thought to be a threat to the established order. When everyone was being evacuated from the country, my sister recalled, our father would remove his glasses every time he went through a military checkpoint. He never spoke of how it felt being one of the only White men in the Congo in 1960. On rare occasions he would share a story or two, but overall he remained silent about his experiences in the Congo.

Although my mother had also been through some of the same rough times as my father, she loved talking about her years in Africa. She would 9

Waiting for the Sunrise

often share the story of when Mark was napping on a bed in their home and she discovered a mamba snake in his room. She couldn’t reach Mark without the risk of arousing the snake, so she ·ed the house and ran to get her neighbors to help. She was terri³ed that the snake would ³nd Mark. Two villagers ran to the house with machetes and successfully killed the snake. They exited the house with the mamba in hand, assuring her, “Mama Otema, it is safe now.”

I also remember that, whenever she ate fruit, she couldn’t help commenting on how wonderful the fruit was in Africa. She would share memories of stocks of bananas hanging from her house, and she also frequently told the story of how monkeys would steal Edwin’s food and then would slap him when he tried to get it back. And of course, she had stories of people who were full of virtues and love. Privately, she would teach me African fables in Otetela, the native language of her village. Whenever I faced an obstacle in my childhood, whether it was the fear of the ³rst day of school or the frustration of putting on my rubber boots, my mother would always share a proverb she had learned from the Africans, and I would draw on the proverb to overcome my fear or frustration.

As soon as my mother began to recount stories of Africa, my father often interrupted and began to tell stories of the years our family had lived in Alaska. He loved to reminisce about picnics on the Bering Sea or stories of the Eskimos who had lived in Nome, Alaska, for generations.

In the spring of 1962, when my parents’ plane landed in Nome, the doctor my father had been assigned to assist was on a plane ·ying out, and that doctor was never heard from again. Once again my father was forced to work alone, and this time he was the only doctor in Nome. He worked in harsh, almost unbelievable conditions.

For example, he would speak of times during surgery when the generator in the hospital would go out, and he would have to go to the basement and get it working before returning to continue the surgery.

Though he worked relentless hours in Nome, he was much more open to talking about Alaska than about Africa. Sometimes I wondered if his experiences in Africa made him cynical toward God and man. He, being such a logical German-English man, found the chaos in the Congo beyond reason and unjusti³able from any point of view.

In the midst of the stories of Alaska, my mother would grow quiet and re·ective. She would reverently state, “And we should never forget 10

Part 1

Stephen. He was such an easy baby.” After David was born, she had found herself pregnant again. After moving to Nome, she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Stephen. One afternoon when Stephen was ³ve months old, my mother put him down for a nap. When she went to check on him, she found him dead in the crib. His death was reported as a crib death, and ever afterward my mother would question whether she had done something wrong. She would wonder whether she should have laid him on his back rather than his stomach, or whether she should not have wrapped him so tightly in the blanket. My father still had his duties as a doctor to take care of, so he couldn’t leave Nome to attend Stephen’s funeral. With only David to accompany her, my mother ·ew back to Indiana to bury Stephen next to Eric in Upland.

I remember that our Sunday dinners would usually last beyond dessert. Often our discussions would take us into the late afternoon, and eventually I would get restless and want to ³nd something else to do.

Our house was so small that even though I could choose to leave the table, the conversation would inevitably follow me.

I often played with my beloved beanbag dolls my mom had gotten me for Christmas. One was White, in a powder yellow out³t, and one was Black, in a bright orange out³t. I remember wishing I could take their clothes o² and trade their out³ts because the orange out³t that came with my Black doll reminded me of a clown costume. The out³ts were sewn on, so I couldn’t change them, and though I played with both, I favored the White one. The babies lived together in my imaginary world, and they had tiny, in·atable furniture. I would put their beds next to each other and watch them go to sleep as the afternoon became dusk.

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