Bev Murrill

Not nameless, but certainly faceless and unknown, Patrice was one of 11,000 Rwandan people who in 1994 huddled into a Roman Catholic church that had been built to take about 300. They had gathered there for safety in the mistaken belief that the place in which they sheltered would be respected by their neighbours. It wasn't!

Patrice's skull sits alongside hundreds of others whose sightless eyes and mirthless grins betray no hint that would identify their owners. Their life's worth, their struggles and their value...all obliterated - except for Patrice, whose name is written large in felt tip pen upon her forehead.

Someone loved her. Someone raged against her loss so deeply that they refused to allow her to be sucked into the anonymity that had swallowed the others. In the weird way life has of mixing the tragic with the banal, that someone had found a marking pen in the midst of the carnage and marked her forever for all the world to see. No marble gravestone marks Patrice's entrance and exit into the world, but the stark print of her name across the discolouration of her ivory forehead tells a story in a way no gravestone ever could.

The massacre killed over 1 million people in 100 days. That works out to be 10,000 murdered every day, 7 every minute. Adults, children, old people and young, none were exempt and few were shown mercy. Most of the victims were Tutsi but about 20% were Hutu people who were seen as sympathisers or who were mistaken for Tutsis because of the shape of their face. At one point, bizarrely, the lengths of people's noses were measured as a means of identifying Tutsis, who traditionally have sharper and more European features than Hutus.

The nation, violently raped by its own people, writhed in the pain of its own treachery in the ensuing months and years. Thousands of widows, many of them subjected to violent rape, are now HIV+ and of almost half a million orphan children 85,000 became heads of families.

And yet, of all the countries of Africa, Rwanda is one of the most hopeful in the 21st century. Choosing not to wallow in their sorrow and loss, and led by a government whose objective is restoration rather than retaliation, Rwanda is being healed. The feel of the nation as you travel through is of cleanness and order. Villages of reconciliation have been built where perpetrators and victims live in community and tell their stories of repentance and forgiveness to visitors. Stringent laws have been put into place. Any racist comment by a Hutu or a Tutsi results in a jail sentence for 'genocidal ideology'. This is a nation that is not willing to return again to its infamy.

Health care and micro enterprises abound and it is impossible to miss the sense of life and hope that pervades the nation and its people. In that joyful, rambunctious way that life has of forcing its way into calamity, we arrived to tour a hospital only to be ushered immediately into the delivery ward to greet a baby who had arrived just ten minutes before we got there. Her world has no agenda but to be loved, and to learn to love...and in Rwanda, a nation so determined to never again have neighbour hate neighbour, this little one's agenda is perfectly suited to her environment.

Lena Horne once said it's not the load that breaks you down, but the way you carry the load.

Crimes of violence are not restricted to troubled developing nations. The rise of unprovoked attacks on innocent people is being documented throughout the western world. Words of 'genocidal ideology' are spoken every day in a myriad of ways. We are being enculturised to accept this as normal, despite the fact that we repeatedly see the devastation caused by bigotry in all nations of the world.

Enculturisation is difficult to avoid, its all-pervading influence is silent but forceful. Making a difference can only happen as individuals make the choice to be different themselves. The people of the nation of Rwanda are making what may be one of the most difficult transitions possible, cultural change, but they're succeeding...one life at a time.

It's not impossible. It just takes one person to make the choices not to be intimidated or influenced by cultural norms that are aberrant and which violate the rights of others, stripping away dignity and value from our neighbours. As each of us make our own choice, a new enculturisation begins to rise, and with it, a changed world.