Day 5, Part 3: First Memorial

It was going to be a very full day.
After leaving the child-headed households, we climbed back into our vans and made our way to a genocide memorial site - a church - in which 10,000 were killed. The transition from laughter and life to solemnity and death was sharp and cutting. The church, a red brick box, had a bullet-pocked doorway.
Inside, the clothing of the dead was piled onto benches. It looked stiff and grey with age. Shafts of sunlight sifted through the windows to pierce the hollow gloom.


The stained altar cloth remains intact.

And the Virgin Mary presides over empty clothes.
Down trapdoor steps into the mass grave in the courtyard, the bones and skulls of the executed are arranged on iron racks.


The woman who guided us has never spent a day away from this place; its memories haunt her and inhabit her. She stands as a guard and as a woman shattered. We left her with few words to say to one another.