Healing the Wounds of Genocide
Daily Beast - 8 hours ago
Psychologist Adelite Mukamana, at one of Rwanda's many genocide
memorial grave sites, talks about the group therapy she offers to
sexual assault victims.
LIVING NIGHTMARE
Healing the Wounds of Genocide
MAR 13, 2014 10:06 AM - BY MEGAN FELDMAN
Two decades after a nightmare of slaughter and terror, Rwanda's rape
victims are only now beginning to receive the help they need to heal.
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Constance didn't tell anyone what happened to her during the 1994
Rwanda genocide. But nearly ten years later, it was still written in
her blood.
Plagued by headaches and back pain, Constance visited a clinic in
2005. When the nurses ran tests and said she was HIV-positive, she
dismissed it-AIDS was a disease of loose women, she thought, not loyal
wives. Yet the nurses insisted that she would die without medication.
They also said there were other women like her-war widows who'd been
raped and infected with the disease-and that she could talk with them.
Constance, in her early 50s, began attending group therapy through
AVEGA, a non-profit that helps women widowed during the 1994 genocide
that killed roughly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in just
three months. Rape was used as a weapon during the bloodbath, and
roughly 500,000 women were sexually assaulted, many of them tortured
or mutilated, as well. Scarce mental health services for rape victims
led AVEGA to start offering trauma counseling and therapy groups. In
2011, the organization hired 38 psychologists and trained more than
1,000 community volunteers to educate people about common trauma
symptoms, such as chronic headaches and depression.
As Rwanda commemorates the 20th anniversary of the genocide in April,
counselors say many rape victims are just now coming forward for
treatment, while countless others are too ashamed or afraid to seek
help. And in spite of AVEGA's efforts, those who do seek treatment
still face a lack of options. Many rural women live far from any
healthcare services, and while the government does have a small number
of therapists, most public mental health resources are directed at
severe mental illness at inpatient facilities.
'I never talked about what happened to me for fear of being rejected,
judged, or misbelieved.'
Constance says she wishes more women could take advantage of the group
therapy in which she participated for about a year. While she was
nervous at first, she says the group became one of the greatest
blessings of her life. "I never talked about what happened to me for
fear of being rejected, judged, or misbelieved," Constance said on a
January afternoon at AVEGA's Kigali offices, sitting with her hands
folded in her lap over her orange and green traditional skirt.
"Listening to the others' stories, I began to open up and talk, and I
grew very close to the other women. It helped me a lot."
Constance's nightmare began in April 1994, when a group of young men
armed with machetes appeared at the door of the hut she shared with
her husband and four children in a western Rwanda village. They hauled
her husband away. As days passed, Constance remained in the hut with
her small children and infant, praying for her husband's return. Yet
when one of the armed men came back, her husband wasn't with him.
"Your husband is dead," the man said. "Be my second wife or you'll
join him." To survive and care for her children, Constance obeyed. She
recoiled in horror at sleeping with her husband's killer, but she
feared he would murder her and her children if she resisted. He went
on killing sprees by day and returned to brutalize her at night. "I
wanted to die," she said. This went on for months.
Once the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front routed the genocidal
government and its forces began fleeing the country, Constance's
rapist left, probably crossing the nearby border into Congo. Constance
did her best to care for her children by cultivating bananas and
vegetables. She went on anti-retroviral drugs and received a stipend
from a survivors' fund. Through it all, she drew strength from
attending group therapy. "I listened to what people went
through-people hacked with machetes, people who lost all of their
children-and I would think, 'I'm not alone, and people experienced
worse,'" she said.
Though groups like AVEGA have made progress, there is still a
troubling lack of services for Rwanda's survivors. "There's only
around one psychologist for each district, which is a real shortage,"
says Adelite Mukamana, a psychologist who leads group therapy for
victims as part of IBUKA, a network of organizations dedicated to
helping genocide survivors (the country's population is around 12
million and there are 30 districts, so that would be one therapist for
around 400,000 people). "We have group therapy to reach the largest
number of people, but we are so few, and there are so many who need
help."
Mukamana, whose group meets for two hours twice each month and usually
draws about 25 women, says it's crucial for women to be able to
process and release traumatic memories in a safe, confidential
environment. "Many of these women lost their entire families and have
no one left," she says. "The group is like a container that can hold
those emotions, those memories of unspeakable horror."
Francois Murekatete, AVEGA's mental health services coordinator, says
it will be crucial to have counselors posted at this year's 20th
commemoration events throughout April, since many women can become
re-traumatized while listening to survivor testimonies. This is both a
problem and an opportunity, since the overwhelming emotions often
prompt survivors to seek treatment instead of continuing to suffer
alone with symptoms of PTSD.
"Twenty years is actually not a very long time to recover when you're
talking about the level of trauma that happened here," says
Murekatete. "All the time we get new clients who are only now coming
for help."
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