Spirit in Action
Healing Racism Around The World - David & Joy Zarembka
David Zarembka is a tireless force behind the African Great Lakes Initiative to deal with the aftermath of the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. His daughter, Joy, whose mother is Kenyan, has a newly released book, "The Pigment of Your Imagination: Mixed Race in a Global Society" which explores the experiences of those of "mixed race" - including her own.
- Broadcast on:
- 26 Jul 2009
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- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be on the premises of the River Falls United Methodist Church. Visiting with a father and daughter team, doing different but related work. David Zeremka has a long history of connection with East Africa, even before he was a Peace Corps volunteer there, and he was the primary force behind the founding of the African Great Lakes Initiative to promote healing in the wake of the Hutu Tutsi genocide of the 1990s. Zeremka, by the way, is a Polish, not African name, although David is married to a Kenyan woman, which tells you a little of the story of their daughter, Joy Zeremka. Joy has recently released her book, "The Pigment of Your Imagination," part personal memoir and part history of the interviews that she did with other offspring of black and white parents across several continents. Both are dealing in different ways with issues of race, conflict, and therefore, prospects for peace and reconciliation. Welcome David and Joy Zeremka to "Spirit in Action." - Thank you. - Thank you, nice to be here. - Joy, I'm gonna start with you right away because I know that your dear father is willing to defer to his dear daughter. You just had a book signing event at the FGC bookstore. Tell us about the book you've just released. My new book is called, "The Pigment of Your Imagination." And basically what it does is it chronicles my experience and travels going around the world, asking people about race and racism. And what I did is I used interracial families as a jumping off point. So I looked for people who had one black parent and one white parent using U.S. definitions, and I interviewed them as well as their parents to see how they see race relations in their country. So I went around to Britain, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica, and in all those countries, people can figure race in very, very different ways. And they also had some really interesting things to say about race here in America and the way we think about it. So I took a lot of interviews, put them all together, talked a lot about my experience going around trying to find people interview and put it together as a book. - Since you are yourself the offspring of an interracial couple, I suspect that that might have been part of your motivation and also your ability to write this book. Could you give us a snapshot of how this is played out in your life? - Yeah, being a part of an interracial family has been very interesting for me. My mother's from Kenya, my father is a white boy from the Midwest, I like to say. But I grew up a birthright Quaker, and I grew up in a very, very sort of comfortable racial space. I grew up in the Pittsburgh Friends Meeting, and there I found other families that looked very much like ours. There were other interracial families, there were kids that were adopted, there were same sex families, et cetera. So the fact that I had one parent who was white and one parent who was black didn't even really occur to me to be anything outside the norm because of my friend's meeting. It was not until later that I actually realized that the rest of the world didn't quite look very much like my family. But I think that was a really good basis and a really good space to sort of create my racial identity. And my brother and I both had a very sort of nurturing community to grow up in. - The people you were interviewing for your book, Joy, were they the children of the interracial marriages or perhaps the marriage partners themselves? - I interviewed both the children of an interracial, black-white relationship as well as the parents, when I could. Sometimes the parents had passed away or weren't in the country, but if I could find them, I interviewed the whole entire family. - Including your own? - I did, actually, what I did when I first came back, I said, "Wow, now that I've heard the words "of 200 other people, let me actually ask my family "the exact same questions." And found out all sorts of things I didn't really quite know before I had left. So I did go around, interviewed my mother, my father, and my brother just to hear their thoughts on race relations as well. And that basically became the first chapter of the book. - Would you care to mention any of these surprises and the things you learned by going back and doing the centrifuge with your parents? - Yeah, nothing good came out. It was just like, "Oh, I didn't realize "the chronology of something," or... Let me see if I can come up with one of the examples. I think when I interviewed my father, I'm gonna say this only 'cause he's sitting right here, and he can correct me if I'm completely wrong, I had often talked about the interesting way in which I grew up, which is I learned a lot about what I know about race from my white father, which is, I think, different than what people expect. People expect that I was introduced to, you know, a racist society, perhaps by the person who would have experienced racism the most, and people would assume that would be somebody of African descent. But in my situation, my father, who I think is very clear about the way in which society has very racist tendencies built right in, he could talk about white privilege, he could talk about a lot of things that help me better understand sort of the world around me. So sometimes I would say, "Oh, you know, "my father says that the judicial system "is genocide against the black man." And I said that for a while, and when I talked to him, he said, "Well, I didn't quite say that. "That's not exactly how I configured it." And so we had some interesting conversations, and I was able to at least pinpoint better, you know, sort of some of the stories that I heard earlier. Is that right, Dad, do you remember that? - Yes, but my objection was using the word genocide because I don't like the word genocide, particularly. - See, this is why we have to keep the conversations going. - Well, I imagine, David, that you might have some sensitivity to the word because you've actually been dealing with mass genocide in East Africa. Is that part of your sensitivity to the word? Genocide? - Well, it's being used frequently in a very colloquial sense. I mean, legally, there's a very strict definition of what genocide means. And of course, in Rwanda, where I've been working, the strictness occurred. But in Burundi, where both sides killed each other, it's not a genocide because it wasn't one side killing the other side. So is that better that both people were killing each other? And then I can dart forward. There's a big debate if it's a genocide or not. Well, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference. People are dying, and the situation is chaos, and people are fleeing. And if it's a genocide or not, it has become like an academic question that really, to me, is not significant. - So, Joy, having completed the book, having got it out there now in the bookstore, are there lessons that you can pass on to us without us having to read the whole book? - You must buy the book. I can't give you anything. No, I'm just kidding. There's a lot that I think came out from the book. What was really surprising to me was how open and honest people were willing to be in telling their stories. And I think what ends up happening is you find the insight of what white people are thinking, what black people are thinking, what mixed-race people are thinking. And that is throughout the book. But a couple of things really popped out for me in terms of getting a better sense of what is it like for interracial families around the world, and what makes it easier for interracial families who are living in perhaps racist societies that look upon them, you know, unfavorably. Some of the insights that sort of pop into my mind are things like the idea of exposure, that, you know, just when you're parenting a child, and I think, quite frankly, any child, be they interracial or not, needs to have exposure to all sorts of people. It's when I talk to people who've lived very much in isolation in one community or another, and not really knowing the other side, that you hear people sounding like they don't quite know where they belong. When you talk to people who've had a really, really, sort of vibrant, rich array of experiences with people of different colors, of different races, different religions, and who are open to sort of experiencing that, you find people who are actually, you know, quite well adjusted. This whole tragic mulatto kind of stereotype that exists, you know, I didn't quite really find that. And when I speak to people here in America, I find that a lot of people that I know haven't really experienced that, even though there's this idea that if somebody is half black and half white, they'll be very confused and very mixed up. A lot of it had to do with environment, a lot of it had to do with weather, their parents were willing and able to talk to them about race. I think it also speaks a little bit to the fact that we as Americans are very uncomfortable talking about race. And there needs to be, I think, more honest dialogue with one another. Not the PC, I'm scared to talk, I don't know what to say kind of dialogue, but really open, honest communication about where we are with race, and particularly where we are with race within the Quaker community. - And where would you say that we are? And here, I'm talking about your experience. You said you grew up in a really pretty comfortable environment with respect to interracial families, just all kinds of diversity. And without the negative stereotypes or negative ideas about that, did you eventually run into racism? Did you eventually sustain some of that wounding? Where are we in the religious side of friends with respect to this kind of racism? - Yeah, I mean, I think the Pittsburgh Quaker meeting in the '70s and '80s was a great place to grow up, in part from what I said earlier, just the diversity that existed there. I went off to Haverford College after growing up in Pittsburgh. Had bit of a culture shock there just because it wasn't really a Quaker space. It's a sort of pseudo-Quaker space with a lot of Quaker tenants buried somewhere in there, but many of the students there aren't Quaker, and we're sort of, I think, grappling and grasping to figure out how Quakerism is gonna be infused on the campus. That wasn't a very big surprise to me. The surprise to me really comes from going to so many different Quaker communities, which are by and large, predominantly white, and I know that a lot of different meetings and yearly meetings and monthly meetings are trying to figure out how to diversify, and I think oftentimes we think just looking for the spirit and giving out love and giving out light will be enough, and it actually isn't. There has to be a lot more effort put in, and a lot of it has to do with being self-reflective about how maybe people in the white society function in a very privileged state without really recognizing it. So I think there's a lot of work that still needs to be done. I think it's an open space. I don't think I necessarily have been wounded. I'm just very surprised by how undiverse it is after so many years of fighting for racial justice. - I have a dear friend who I met while in the Peace Corps in West Africa. She's black, born and raised in the USA, and had, I think, experienced enough racism in her life in America that she was eagerly looking forward to going to Africa, and for the first time in her life being free of racism. I think it's fair to say that she was shocked and disappointed, maybe even outraged, when she was labeled by the locals in Africa as a yovel, a term that is given to foreigners most often whites. That and the sexism that was part of the local African culture really upset her. What was your experience being born between continents and races when you visited Africa? - I don't think I went in with that same idea of going back to Africa and thinking that it would automatically be home. Interestingly, I had familial ties, so I thought, okay, going back to my family, maybe it would feel like home. But I had also known that because of the color of my skin, because I've grown up outside of Kenya, that it wasn't necessarily gonna be, you know, home, quote unquote, when I first arrived there. So for me, it was a very interesting experience, 'cause the first time I went there, my cousins said the same thing. They thought that I was white, and they thought that I was very American, and so I had already had anticipated the idea that even when I was going back to the motherland, that it wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable when I first got there. And I got there, and I realized that people saw me as a tourist. And it took a while for me to talk to my family, talk to other people who looked very much like me, and realize that it's because I am a foreigner, I am American, I have grown up in a different society. Once I learned the language, once I, you know, sort of dressed a bit differently, once I presented myself a bit differently, I was eventually taken as a whole-hearted Kenyan. Now they often put me in a different tribe, because I looked more like a different tribe that was there, but as long as I spoke Swahili, even though my Swahili is pretty bad, as long as I spoke Swahili, I could, you know, I could pass as a Kenyan. So it was an interesting assimilation process, just to see what it was like. And most importantly, my family, no matter that I grew up in AmeriCorps, that I had a different skin color, my family wholeheartedly welcomed me as part of the family, so there wasn't a problem there. But I understand that very many people do go back to Africa, think that they're going home and get there, and get surprised that it isn't exactly what they had anticipated. - Joy, I'm gonna come back to you, but first I wanna spend a little time talking to your papa. But before I do that, where do we find this book? What bookstore, what internet site, where do we go to connect up with this book? - You can find the pigment of your imagination online is probably the easiest at thepigment.com. So you can get it there. You can also get it on Amazon, but I suggest going to thepigment.com because Amazon takes way too much money from authors and publishers. - And if we order it from thepigment.com, does this mean that you, Joy, personally, will be packing it up and sending it out to us? - I could if you'd like me to. If you wanted an autograph, you gotta let me know, but yeah, absolutely. - So you can get the pigment of your imagination from Joy Zeremka at thepigment.com and learn about the often difficult world where races meet, Joy and her father, David Zeremka, are my guests today for spirit and action, which is one of the programs produced by Northern Spirit Radio. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and we're going to turn now to David Zeremka, the founding force behind the African Great Lakes Initiative, helping the Rwandan people come to terms with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide between the Hutu and Tutsi populations there in Rwanda. - Well, David, let's get to know you and your work. What's your connection with Kenya and with the African Great Lakes Initiative? I'd just like to understand how you got so passionate about healing and peace in Africa. - Well, in 1964, so you can see how old I am, after my junior year I took a year off from college and went to then Tanganyika to teach Rwandan refugees from the violence at the time of independence. So I was up country in a very remote area on the Rwanda-Brundi Tanganyika border, and I taught Rwandan refugees for a year there. So I've been connected with Africa ever since that. I came back and finished my last year of college, which was extremely difficult to do. And then I went into the Peace Corps and again into now Tanganyika for two years. Well, after about a year and a half relations between Tangany and the United States deteriorated. So I moved on to Kenya, finished up my Peace Corps tour in Kenya. That was shortly after independence and they were starting a lot of what they call Harambe schools, which were self-help high schools and grade schools. And I started one in the eastern province of Kenya. And that's where I met Joy's mom and we were married. And then came back to the United States in '71. But I've been connected with Africa ever since. Now, the African Great Lakes Initiative began. It's part of the Friends Peace teams. And I was the Baltimore Yearly meeting appointee to the coordinating committee there. And in 1998, there was, whatever is going on in the Balkans then, we were talking about the Balkans, piped up and said, well, what about Africa? There's lots of problems in Africa. There are a lot of Quakers in Africa and we haven't done anything with them. And so they suggested, what do you wanna do? And I said, give me a night to think about it. And I came up with a proposal that we would go visit. The Quakers in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. And our objectives were three. First, we would go and see how the violence in those places had impinged upon their existence. Second, to see what kind of peacemaking activities they were doing. And number three was, was there any way we could partner with them in this peacemaking kind of activity? The quickest response I got, which actually was from Burundi, was that we need work on trauma healing. Now, at that point, I knew absolutely nothing about trauma healing. I didn't know Sunowalski who happens to be in the audience right here and others. And I knew a lot about alternative violence, which is a Quaker program, teaching non-violence. But that's what they wanted. So I found people who were interested in that. And so we've worked from there. We've both introduced the alternative violence program, but we've also introduced another program called Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities, which is Iraq. And this deals with healing the community between the Hutu and the Tutsi and both Rwanda and Burundi. - So what's your official post or role or job description within the African Great Lakes Initiative? - Well, I'm called the coordinator of the African Great Lakes Initiative. Essentially, I'm a fixer. I put things together. Like, I don't run workshops myself. I find people who can run workshops and I find the people who need them and I find the money to do it. And I work on all that logistics and mechanics. I'm an administrator. So my job has mostly been just to connect everybody together. But since American Quakers and Americans were very disconnected from particularly the Rwandan and Burundi situation, it has become a very valuable experience. - You know, David, my understanding about administrators is that they're usually vastly overpaid. Do you do a good job of earning every dollar you get paid? - Well, of course, I'm trying to, unless a lot of people buy Joy's book, I have to have a big inheritance for her. So that's why I'm saving up for all the money that I get paid for doing this. It's a semi-volunteer type of work because $1 spent here in the United States is worth about 10 in Africa because you can do so much more with your money there. So I'm always wanting to push more money into Africa and keep the administration. I'm a real lean administrator and I've kept the program very lean so that most of the money can be spent overseas. - Because of the deep roots that you already had grown in East Africa, I suspect that you may very well have been extremely sensitive to the news of the Hutu Tutsi genocide back in 1994. And yet it sounds like the African Great Lakes Initiative didn't get going till around 1998, four years later. Please share with us the process that led you to, I think really dedicate your life to healing work in that area. - Friends, peace teams only began in 1993. And so actually I contacted them in 1994 if there was something they could do. At that point I was not appointed by Baltimore Yearly Meeting and I was looking for openings for Quakers to do stuff in this region of the world and I had not found any, in fact we were absent. It's only when we began doing this work that there were opportunities for people to go and now the African Great Lakes Initiative recruits lots of people per year to go over and do various different kinds of things. There are other programs though, the Norwegian Quakers, there's 130 Quakers in Norway but they can go to their government and get grants to do what they want to. So they have a rather extensive program in Rwanda and Burundi and also the Eastern Congo and they've been doing it also since 1998. But prior to that it was the Mennonites through the Mennonite Central Committee who was doing the peace making work with the Quakers in Rwanda and Burundi. - I think a lot of people may have somewhat of an idea of what happened in the Hutu Tutsi genocide that happened in that area but a lot of us have pretty imprecise understanding of what went on. You have a lot of experience with people who were right there and spoke to you directly about their experience. What would you say was the cause and how this all developed this incredible nearly a million people who were slaughtered in the course of about 90 days? - Well, I've heard the testimony of many, many people both in Rwanda and Burundi. I was very well connected with Human Rights Watch and other groups both even before 1994 and they were predicting a genocide or disruption in Rwanda and nobody seemed to listen to them. I think what has to be understood, the media did not get this right at the beginning. The genocide was planned from the top down. There was a group called Hutu Power led by Thanos Bagasora. I mean, they had lists of people they wanted to kill, the other leaders and even moderates. They weren't only Tutsi, they were Hutu that opposed them. When the president's airplane was shut down, they put their plan into effect, the next, well, in less than 24 hours and the killing started and it was a method for them to seize power in Rwanda. Their idea was that if the Hutu killed all the Tutsi in the country, there would be a impunity because everybody would have been involved, therefore nobody would talk about it, nobody would worry about it. They would have a so-called pure Hutu country that they would continue to rule. I find most interesting about this theory is that, of course, it's exactly what we've done in America with the Native Americans. That rather than 100 days, it was a couple of 100 years, but we have pushed the Native Americans out of the best parts of the country and marginalized them completely. And even up to today, they're pretty much isolated from the mainstream here. And, of course, now are extremely small percentage of the population. So the white population of America does not have to ever justify what they did. They're never gonna be called to task, they're never gonna be any kind of justice because we, in fact, succeeded in our genocide of the Native Americans in this country. - Could you explain to me what is the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi? - Well, this is all based in 19th century European and early 20th century race theory is that there's a white race and there's a black race and some others. And according to the theory, the Ethiopians were the bottom cast of the white race. And the Tutsi came from Ethiopia and, therefore, since they were of the white race, they were the rulers. And the Hutu, which were Bantu people, agriculturalists and much theoretically darker skinned, were the servants and, therefore, should be the ruled. And they taught this kind of stuff in the school in the 1920s and 1930s in both Rwanda and Burundi. And, of course, you can take a group of kids and put the tennis shoes ones here and the sandal ones over there and make distinctions between them and you could have them antagonistic to each other in about 45 minutes. Well, doing a couple of generations of having the Tutsi ruled over the Hutu to create a tremendous task system. Now, during the genocide, the hate radio station was saying throw the Tutsi into the river so that they can go back to Ethiopia. Now, what that meant was that they would go down the river into Lake Victoria, go down the Nile River and then up somehow or the other Nile River to back to Ethiopia. Because of that talk, they pulled 20,000 bodies out of the Kaguera River where it enters Lake Victoria, people who have been thrown in the river to go back to Ethiopia. So this is total nonsense. I mean, there was no basis for this thing and recently they've done DNA analysis of the Hutu and Tutsi and also the Tuah who are a very short tigmoid type people. And they found that, actually, they're all very, very closely related. They speak the same language, they have the same culture, they live next to each other and they're very much intermarried. Well, then how do you recognize one from the other? Well, the Belgians in the 1930s put out identity cards and put down on each identity card if you are Hutu or if you are Tutsi. And you have to have rules. And one of the rules is you can't have anybody in the middle, which is what Joy is actually talking about. In Africa, you are what your father was. So if your mother is Tutsi and your father is Hutu, you're a Hutu. If your mother was Hutu and your father was Tutsi, you're a Tutsi. So that meant that Hutu mothers who had a Tutsi husband, their children were Tutsi and they were Hutu and during the genocide, they were asked to kill their own children because they were Tutsi. So that was the theory. And like I say, you got what was on your identity card. My human rights friends were trying to abolish those identity cards before the genocide 'cause they knew that was a really dangerous thing. Various embassies agreed to put up the money to make the change. They got the Rwandan government to agree to do it, but nothing ever happened. And so when the genocide came, they just would ask you for your identity card. And if it said Tutsi, that was it. And as you said, I lost it, they would assume you were a Tutsi. That's why they put up these checkpoints all over the roads and the made people man those checkpoints, particularly at night. And anybody who came by, they would ask them for their identity card. And if it was the wrong one, you were executed. - I believe that the friends peace teams and the African Great Lakes Initiative did a project where as a step toward healing, they invited people in to share their experience, their stories of the genocide. Could you share some of those stories that you know of the genocide and of the healing which followed it? And which is still going on? - All right, I'll tell you a couple of instances from a 13 year old boy, a 10, 13 years old now. I heard it when he was about 23. He thought that his whole family was killed in the first days of the genocide. He's from Kigali, his name's Patrick. So immediately he became, he said, the father of a family of seven children, which were all his neighbors and his own relatives who were younger than he was. And he was 13. He was sort of responsible for these kids. And he said, I was running, and I've seen the place where he said he was running a school with his little three year old cousin. And he heard a bomb, which he meant a grenade. So he wanted to run faster. So he picked up his cousin and he said, the blood was flowing everywhere. In other words, he was dead. So he put him on the ground, threw some leaves on him and ran on. Now he had a couple other interesting stories. The next one was, after a little while, some they're called Integra Homeway. These are the people who actually, the youth group that they organized to actually do the work of killing people. One of, he was a young man and he was caught. And in Africa, it's actually quite cold at night and they have coats. And of course, kids wear adult coats, so they're big. So he slipped out of his coat and started running into the forest. And the Integra Homeway man ran after him, but there was somebody else hiding in the forest. And that man got up to run. And so the Integra Homeway guy ran after him rather than Patrick. So that means that Patrick lived because probably somebody else didn't. Another interesting thing is he was hidden in a mosque for about a week or two during the genocide. With all the Christian Muslim problems, well, all over the world, it's really interesting to find that the Muslims were actually one of the groups that was most helpful in protecting people during the genocide. Now they're a very small group in Rwanda, but that they use their mosque and their homes and things to hide people. - What about the role of friends of Quakers before and during and following the genocide? How did they get involved? What did they do? What was their involvement in the whole thing? - Well, the Quakers actually only came to Rwanda in 1986. So that was only eight years after they had been there. By that point, they were a very, very small group. The missionary who was there at the time of the genocide said that he did not know of any people in the church, which then would have been very small, who had any participation in the genocide, although he knew many of their church members who were killed. And then of course later, a lot of the Hutu fled into the Congo later came back and many died there from cholera and other problems. But they weren't, they were a peace church even then, but like it was small and they hadn't, they weren't doing very much at that time. Perhaps I could make this clear by saying, when I first went to Rwanda with the African Great Lakes Initiative in 1999, that was about five years after the genocide. And by that point, the country had recovered to sort of normality to a certain extent. And people had, by that time understood how the genocide was organized from the top, how it had been enforced in different parts of the country and the mechanics of how it worked. But the Quakers and others still had the question, how could we have done this to each other? And really, that's a very, very difficult question. I'm not sure people can answer that, but they were still in that state of, there's stages of recovery. And one of the stages is just sort of denial. And it's part of a stage of denial is just, you know, how could we have done this to each other? Regardless of all the other things that happened, how could we have done this? And it's only, at that point, I think that they started getting into the thing of, okay, how can we make it so that it's not gonna ever happen again? And so that's when they really started their peacemaking work that covers all kinds of things, hoping to build a healed Rwanda where there isn't going to be another cycle of this violence. 'Cause this genocide was like the fifth or sixth cycle of this violence. - I take it that none of the previous genocide cycles were near as enormous, unbelievably enormous as this one was. How big were they? - Well, the previous ones, they wouldn't be called genocides at all because the number of people killed frequently, and they were usually regional, a certain region of the country or a certain province or a certain section. And there would be a small number of people killed to force a large number of people to flee the country as refugees. And of course, then their property, their cows, their houses, their fields would be taken over by the Hutu that remained. And that's another aspect of the whole thing. And of course, that happened in the United States when we interned the Japanese during the Second World War. We took their livelihoods. They were truck farmers in California. And then by the end of the war, when they came out, they didn't have their businesses anymore. So that was the kind of thing that made these little killings kind of useful for the people around them. And since there was no consequences for taking people's property and pushing them out and killing them, then of course, that encouraged it to happen more often. And it was a thing that when a government got into political trouble, they would stir up a little massacre somewhere or other and then they could clamp down on their opponents and things of that sort of saying, we need security and that kind of stuff. So it was used as a political tool frequently by the government in Rwanda before the genocide. And the genocide people just took it to the extreme. - I'm trying to get a grasp on how this worked and how big this was. For instance, was this genocide against certain villages that were Tutsi villages and they were being destroyed? Or what percentage of the Tutsi population was killed? I think that the numbers are around 800,000 were killed during the 100 day period. And I think these are primarily Tutsis. So does that represent half of the Tutsi population or 1% of it? How does this go? I'm just trying to get a grasp of how enormous this was in the thinking and the experience of the individuals right there in Rwanda. - Well, there were not Tutsi villages. People lived intermixed on the same hill. They would be neighbors. And there were probably a million or a little over a million Tutsi in the country and 250,000 survived the genocide. And one has to remember that every Tutsi that survived the genocide was helped by one or more likely many Hutu, hidden, fed, protected all kinds of different ways. And so it wasn't like everybody that was killed. It was planned from the top and there was one province, Putari province of the southern part, which had more Tutsi than others and had been the area of the Tutsi king. They refused to participate in the genocide. And after a couple of weeks, the government brought in outsiders to do the genocide in that province. And the whole, well, there were parts of the country that didn't have many Tutsi in the northern, northeastern part, but most of the rest of the country did. And it's a small country about the size of the state of Maryland. So the whole country went through the genocide. And like I say, anybody who was resisted, they brought in people who were willing to do the work as they called it at that time. They also had a hate radio station that actually started a couple of years before the genocide, which would spew out things like the Tutsi were called in Yenzi, which means cockroaches. And they would say, you know, kill the cockroaches. Actually, this radio station, they'd have songs on it and just popular songs and all kinds of, you know, usually kind of propaganda things. But during the genocide, if somebody had escaped that they thought could be on the execution list, he would be announced on the radio saying, such and such a person that, you know, needs to be founded in taking care of or things of that sort. And they had no other source of information and people in Africa listen to the radio a lot because that's the best means of communication. And this is what they were hearing. And you look around your neighborhood and see houses being burnt all over the place and all this kind of stuff happening, you know. So that's how it was propagated throughout the whole country. And government official, local government officials, as they were hesitant about being on the genocide, they were taken out of office and other people who were quite willing were put in their place. And so essentially, the scum rose to the top. And by the end of the genocide, by the way, as Alison Deforsch's book, which is called, "Let None Live to Hear the Story," they had killed most of the Tutsi and the Hutu had begun killing each other. In other words, different factions, 'cause you can always use that. It's like the French Revolution. Once the reign of terror came on, you can always use that against somebody else. So you would say, "This person's a Tutsi sympathizer," or "This one's grandmother was a Tutsi," or something like that. And so it actually was beginning to turn it in on itself but at the end of the genocide. ♪ I cried for my brother ♪ ♪ I cried when they came for him ♪ ♪ I cried for my brother ♪ ♪ I cried when they took him away ♪ ♪ But I won't have to use anymore ♪ ♪ I cried for my sister ♪ ♪ I cried when she was taken ♪ ♪ I cried for my sister ♪ ♪ I cried when they took her away ♪ ♪ But I won't have to use anymore ♪ ♪ I cried for the children ♪ ♪ I cried for the little children ♪ ♪ I cried for the children ♪ ♪ I cried when they stole them away ♪ ♪ But I won't have to use anymore ♪ That was "I Cried" by Battlefield Band. I'm Mark Helps meet your host for the Northern Spirit Radio Production called "Spirit in Action." Today I'm visiting with Joy and David Zeremka. Right now I'm talking with David about the aftermath of the Hutu Tutsi genocide in Rwanda back in 1994. And the healing that the African Great Lakes initiative has helped nurture. You said earlier, David, that you really prefer to share the stories of the healing from the genocide, the work that you've been part of. Would you share some of those stories for us? - Well, our tales of healing are actually, perhaps to Americans, actually more amazing than the genocide itself. Why don't I talk with this personal experience when I attended one of our workshops, Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities, He-Rock. We purposely take 10 survivors of the genocide and then 10 either release prisoners, which would be the Hutu who participated in the genocide, or their wives if their husbands are still in prison. And we spend three days together. At first, the Hutu on one side of the room and the Tutsi on the other side of the room, they're hardly talking to each other, even if they know each other, they're not greeting each other. And we go through a process of having them talk. One of the things is that Rwanda is a very stoic society. You don't show your emotions. You don't give out your feelings. And if you have problems, you sort of keep them in yourself. And particularly if you've had trauma in the past, you bury it. So in our workshops, we do a lot of letting people just tell their stories. Of course, for Hutu, it's the first time for them to hear Tutsi tell their stories. And for the Tutsi, it's the first time for them to hear the Hutu tell their stories. So all of a sudden, they begin to see the commonalities between their stories and what's happened to them. They come to the realization that they were both victims of this, what they call their bad government that was leading them through this genocide. So there's tremendously great examples of reconciliation. Now what happened in the workshop I attended, there was a woman, probably in her 50s named Fidelity, whose husband and five children who had been killed in the genocide. And by chance, one of the then young men, but now probably about 30, who had killed his oldest son was in the same workshop. He killed her son. He had just been released from prison. So this is the first time she had seen him since the genocide, which was 12 years previously. And she knew who he was. He was a neighbor and he played with her son, grew up with her son. And I think it was on the second day of the workshop that we learned that the killer of her son was there. And so the facilitators talk with her, they talk with the young man, then young man. So at the end of the workshop, there's a time for testimonies and the perpetrator, he was the second person to speak and he stood up and asked for forgiveness for what he had done. He spoke quite briefly, but she didn't. She went on all about her son. He was just finishing secondary school. He had just gotten a scholarship to the university because he was good in traditional arts. And she was clearly the apple of her eye. Like I say, Rwandans aren't emotional. Well, she was very emotional in that workshop because it was a safe space. Then in the end, she said, well, I forgive you, but never do this again and make sure none of your friends ever do this kind of thing again. So that's the kind of thing that happens in our workshops. Another story that I have is that one of the things they do on the last day of the workshop is a trust walk. You may have done this when you were a kid. One person's blindfolded and the other person escorts them around and then you change places. Well, this woman survivor of the genocide got paired up with the person who killed somebody in her family and then had to do the trust walk. She reports in her testimony that she was really, she was really afraid. I mean, here's this person who's killed. I forget who she had killed in her family. And she was going to be blindfolded and he was going to lead her around. But she did it and then, of course, they changed the places and they did it around the other way. We have another case where the woman who was there, her mother had been killed by one of the men that was in the same workshop. But after the end of the workshop, she and other people who know felt they needed to forgiveness and work for reconciliation and for a new Rwanda that were these distinctions were no longer there. So after the workshop, the report was, there were three days of unrest in the community because there were Tutsi that didn't want reconciliation and there were Hutu that didn't want reconciliation. And both of these two people had to have, the government gave them guards to guard their house at night to keep their houses from being destroyed or themselves being killed because they want a reconciliation. Now, what we found is when we go through these workshops and then we do a follow-up workshop a month later and say, you know, how are things going? One of the, I think to me, most surprising results of this is that people say, I stopped beating my wife and my children and started listening to them. Or the wives will say, I start yelling at my children all the time. And what people say is, now I'm human again. They've gotten out of that shell that they were in of trauma and of hate and revenge and now they can start being human beings. And the first place they start is actually in their own family. To me, that was one of the most surprising things that has come out of these workshops that we've done. But if you think about it, if you've been really traumatized and you're really hurt and you're really wounded, you lash out at the people closest to you, which is your spouse and your children. Therefore, if you're on the path of healing, the first place you're gonna go back to are your spouse and your family. And of course, if that trauma isn't dealt with, trauma goes on from generation to generation. And in Rwanda, children will not hear the stories from their parents about what happened during the genocide and they may not even understand what's going on or what had happened. And so they may be in worse shape than their parents because there's all this anger and hate and things of that sort. And yet they have no understanding of what it's all about. - What you're describing sounds nothing short of miraculous. And I'm wondering if you have any idea how it can happen, what helps it to happen. I really wonder if anyone listening can imagine sitting in a room with someone who has murdered their spouse or their child or their parent and saying to that person, yes, I forgive you. What kind of magic could bring about miracles like what you're describing? Is it that the people of Rwanda are just more forgiving than I can imagine being? Well, what do you see happening there, David? - Actually, it's a comment more on America and our society. I mean, we have a very, very violent society and I think we need to think about why we are so violent. And I think one of the reasons is because we don't do any healing. We're still arguing over the civil war nets 142 years. And like I say, with the Native Americans, we don't even, that's not even on the agenda. And I think part of it is because Western culture thinks it's innate that people want revenge. And in fact, of course, that's only the first stage of healing of the grief process when somebody's been violently killed. The first stage is revenge. And I think in our society, we have elevated that step of revenge to think that's the only thing possible. So we have to have the death penalty. We have to have closure. These are the kinds of things. I was listening on a radio station to a story of a grand opera. And it's from somebody coming back from the Trojan War. The brother of somebody or other had married the wife and became the king in the place. And so the brother had come back and finally killed his uncle for having killed the father and married the mother. You know, that kind of story. And the sister is singing this great song of praise about how her brother has finally revenge the family. I think this is very common in our culture that revenge politically, that's what George Bush has used against the Iraqis in Afghanistan. And it's a very potent thing because we think this is innate. But I don't think that's true. I think that's our problem. That revenge is just the first step. And we never get past that first step into the other parts of the grieving process. And the end of the healing process is reconciliation, forgiveness. And then, like they say in Rwanda, being human again, being a normal type person. When you're in that hate revenge period, you are not, let's say, a normal kind of human being because that hate and that desire for revenge controls your actions and your emotions and your thinking and actually does your whole life. In Rwanda, when people finish these workshops, what they say is a load has been lifted off of me. I can live again. I'm a human being again. And the other aspect of it, particularly with the women, and it starts with the women, is they see their children. And they see their children fighting with the children of the other ethnic group. And they see another cycle coming. And so they say, we have to break this cycle. I have to be the one, therefore. And people take a lot of responsibility in Rwanda for making the better place. They see what are the things that I can do that make even a small step forward. And if it means reconciliation with the enemy so that our kids can play together like kids normally play together, that's the stuff that they want to take. If you're willing, David, I'd like you to talk a little bit explicitly about Cecile Nirarmana and the work that she's been doing, her experience, and the work that it led to. Well, Cecile Nirarmana is the founder of a program called Women in Dialogue in Rwanda. And it's one of just many of the kinds of things that Quakers and others have been doing in Rwanda to promote healing. She herself is a Tutsi, her husband is a Hutu. When the genocide came, he got some of his friends to hide her under the bed in the bedroom for the 100 days, and she was pregnant. Then after the genocide was over, they actually went to the Congo, to the refugee camps for a little while, for a couple of years. Both were threatened to be killed. They came back to Rwanda, they had a second child, and then in 1998, her husband was put in prison. Somebody had accused him of participating in the genocide. My own opinion is people don't think that it was a valid accusation, but there are many people that are probably are fairly innocent in prison. And so since that time, she has had to raise her children by herself. So therefore, she's both sides. She's a survivor of the genocide as a Tutsi, but her husband is in prison. So she's the wife of a prisoner. And she was very traumatized not only by the genocide, but then of course, by the aftermath and by her husband being put in prison. - And I just wanna mention that this is really understating the amount of trauma that she went through, the dearly beloved family members that were killed and all the other threats to her life. It's completely inadequate to just describe it as trauma. - Actually, there's more, but I think we should not dwell on that. 'Cause again, we're back on the healing side of it, is she took some of the workshops, including one of the ones that we do as part of her healing process. Then she, as many of Rwandans do, she has thought by herself, what can I do about to make the situation better? And so she decided that her role was to work with the women and make an organization of Tutsi survivors with the Hutu women whose husbands were in prison. Because of their commonality, both of them were without husbands. Both of them had to deal with the children and raise those children if they survived. So those were the commonalities. She got great resistance from the Tutsi women. She got great resistance from the Hutu women at first. They did a three day workshop. I think it sort of went okay, but not great. But then when the second one came, I think it worked much better. And they decided they would work together and make an organization, a group that would support each other. Because all of them needed support. In Africa, it's a communal kind of society, so people support each other. So in other words, rather than having just your support in your own ethnic group, you would have support of both ethnic groups. And part of it was then we could show that yes, Hutu and Tutsi can to live together and peacefully, cooperatively, helping each other. As they will say, it was in the old days. So she started the first group. And when she came here in 2005, she had three of these groups. There's about 30 women in each group. And they decided that was like the maximum that the group should have. Now she has 13 of these groups. They're telling their stories together. And now she's also working on some kind of economic activity that the women can do together so that they can pay for school fees for their kids and other kinds of things. And frankly, I can give you my own testimony. I went around one day with Cecile visiting the people with some of the other women and the women of dialogue. And it's the only time in Rwanda that I've seen women together like women are supposed to be, sitting around joking, laughing, you know, egging each other on, just like happens everywhere. Well, that's the only place I've seen that in Rwanda. Otherwise, the people are not happy, as you can understand why. And they were both Hutu and Tutsi when this was going on. So you could see that in fact, they really had developed a primary relationship with each other that was mutually respectful to both sides. You know, if you want to talk about how you're going to heal your country, that's what you got to do. And it's going to be a tremendous, many difficult work in Rwanda. And like I say, Cecile and her groups are just astounding when you see what they have done with each other. - I can see by the gleam in the eyes of those in our audience that you may well have several new volunteer recruits to go to Rwanda and be part of the teams helping with these workshops. How many volunteers do you have going over now and how does a person get involved in this kind of work? - Well, each workshop has roughly 20 people in it. We mostly work in particular communities. When we first did our program, we worked with AVP with Kachacha judges. These are the ones who are-- - And AVP stands for? - Alternative Violence Program, which teaches nonviolent conflict resolution between people. And we worked a lot with the judges that were in these lower level courts. There are 10,000 of these courts and 90,000 judges. And we did workshops with them. And so they were chosen because they were in these courts. And we just spread all over the country and we found that we weren't as effectual as we could be because we had just a few here, a few here, a few there. So with our programs now, we try to do a lot of them in a particular community so that because if you just come to a community, you do one workshop with 20 people and you leave, not much is gonna happen. So we tended to do lots of workshops in one community, hoping that we can heal the whole community, small community of a couple of thousand people maybe. And how they choose people is always very interesting, but we ask them that they have diversity and they tend to really pick out, I mean, you go into one of these workshops and you'll find, they make sure they're all kinds of people. We've tried to make sure that there's half female and half male also. And most of the survivors are female and most of the perpetrators, now there's a lot of release prisoners are male. So actually it's not as difficult as it used to be. They just find people and sometimes they find the worst person in the community. But we've had times where we've done workshops where we had one where nine of the 10 Tutsi refused when the workshop came, they didn't show up because they decided they didn't want to meet with people from the other side. So they choose people and some people I must say, I guess say they don't wanna come and they find people who wanna come. I think that the people who do come are past that stage of total revenge. They're the ones that have done it long enough, they wanna do something different because otherwise they're not gonna come at all. So they're at somehow psychological at the stage where they're willing to at least think of the possibilities of meeting people from the opposite side in a workshop where they can interact. Now, if we wanna know how people get involved in our program with African Great Lakes Initiative, they need to go to our webpage, which is www.agglyonline, which is a-g-l-i-o-n-l-i-n-e.org. We have a section there on how to volunteer and there's our application there and we expect people to have a clearness committee to develop what they wanna do when they're overseas and they're really mentally and otherwise prepared for going. They send it to us, we've processed the application and see what's going to happen. And we also have, if you're not an AVP, alternates, a violent facilitator, or a psychologist that can do trauma healing, that's not very large segments of the population. So we do work camps for just anybody who can come. We've had, the youngest has been eight, the oldest has been 86. This year in Rwanda, the work camp is building a peace center right on the Congo, Rwanda border because of course, Congo and Rwanda have had two wars and we wanna, they wanna, it's the Rwandans who wanna start doing some reconciliation between the Congo and Rwanda. And I presume we're gonna do that next year too because I don't think we're gonna finish building a peace center in one year. So anybody who's interested in a work camp can look at the same webpage and there's descriptions and the application for that there too. - So the website again is African Great Lakes Initiative. That's A-G-L-I online.org, which I have of course at my website, northernspiritradio.org. So go to northernspiritradio.org, click on A-G-L-I-L-I online.org to find out about possibilities with the African Great Lakes Initiative. I wanna come back to you, Joy, because one of the things that I heard your father say is that we're not really good in the United States at doing the dialogue. And I have the feeling that some of the racial problems and tensions that continue in our country are because we haven't had the dialogue. I think part of what you're targeting in your book, The Pigment of Your Imagination, is raising the communication and understanding. Do I have that right that getting the lines of communication open is a big part of what you're about? - Absolutely, I think you've made the connection that I've been thinking about the whole time I've been sitting here, which is not surprisingly I am. My father's daughter, and I'm saying basically the same thing, that it's the dialogue from the two sides of people coming together and actually beginning to talk that really allows us to start the healing process. I think absolutely that's what we need to be doing here in this country. I think there's a lot of hand-ringing about sort of our race relations, and yet we aren't really willing to sort of sit down and have really true dialogue with one another. I've been in lots of spaces that are, you know, sort of one quote unquote "race" or the other, where people can talk about the problems, but it's very rare where we're actually honestly getting together and having those dialogues together. So maybe we can think about AVP workshops for some of the folks that I've had conversation with who are very interested in moving to, I think, the next level of racial awareness, and I think more honest diversity. But unfortunately, as I said, I don't think we're really doing it just yet here in this country, but I'm hoping that we will. - And a first step for that would be reading your book, and where can they find that? - They can find that at thepigment.com. And also, I think, like I said, I'm very interested in being part of those conversations, so if there are meetings out there who are interested in having further dialogue about this, I'd be more than willing to come visit their meeting. - Well, thank you, Joy, for raising up the communication on this crucial problem, racism, via your book, and to you, David, for dealing with racism from a couple of different directions, including healing the racism between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, and for calling out the all too common relative indifference of Americans to black Africa. You're both father and daughter doing great work to resolve conflict and to lead us toward peace. And thank you both for taking time in your busy schedules here at the Friends General Conference Gathering, to sit in and share the news of your work. - Thank you for having us. - Thank you, Mark. - You've been listening to a Spirit in Action interview with Joyce Remka, author of The Pigment of Your Imagination, and her father, David Sremka, founding force behind the African Great Lakes Initiative, working for healing in Rwanda. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]