You Alone May Live

LOOKING BACK TO MY ROOTS FOR RELIEF

My new career change as a complementary therapist was inspired by my mother.

My informal introduction to massage and herbal remedies began, I confess, somewhat less happily. I was in my early teens when my mother used to ask me to accompany her to the forest to fetch local herbs. I would follow her around, listening to her go on and on about the names, the curative properties of different herbs. “Today you don’t understand the importance of what you’re doing,” she would tell me, “but one day you will have a use for all this in your life”.

My mother was a registered midwife and ran her own private clinic, but it did not generate enough money to support us. As a single parent bringing up ten children, she was often stressed to breaking point. On weekends when I was not going to school, she would lie on a comfortable African mat, and call me or my siblings to massage her head. We did that in turns. I hated missing playing with local children to give her the head massage, nonetheless I never complained.

After the massage mother would be in a good mood, she would burst into a song and we would dance together all evening. That’s the only time she would most likely listen to my requests without telling me, we couldn’t afford to buy this or that. Those were the happiest moments for my mother.

Years later, in 2009, after dedicating my life to running Survivors Fund (SURF) – a charity I founded to give a voice and practical support to survivors of the Rwandan genocide, I stepped down as director. For 15 years my natural tendency had been to avoid thinking about the painful memories of genocide. I suppressed them and hoped that they would go away. But, they didn’t.

It was only when I left SURF that the enormity of the memories became apparent. I was slowly sinking under my own weight. On the surface everything was alright, but I spent many nights locked away alone, distressed, anxious, and grieving for my family. Not even my husband would stand the changes I was going through. I was my mother’s daughter, the strong one, the fighter. He would tell me to pull myself together. He would bring newspapers home and offer to help me find another job. He wanted our life back again, but I didn’t know how. I did not know where to turn, everyone seeing me as a tower of strength. But the only strength in me was driven by empathy, and the pain of genocide was consuming me.

I began writing my memories down, to make sense of the anxiety, grief, and total chaos in my head. I waited for my family to go to sleep and cried all night alone. I remembered my mother; times she was stressed and unable to cope. But there was no one to give me a head massage. I spent days living in my head, speaking to myself. Flashbacks of survivor’s stories, once safely locked away in my memory, began filling my head. Skeletons and the remains still displayed in churches and schools that I had come to know would speak to me. I was leaving SURF without giving them a decent burial; the world outside, including survivors, blaming me for everything that ever happened to them.

But carrying other people’s pain, or fighting back, was not an option anymore. I had lost the fire in me. The life of high stress, high speed, high burn out, had caught up with me.

My mother made me aware of the value of massage when I was a teenager so I suppose this became my focal point, my return to normality. Knowing how it feels to nearly lose your mind, I felt a need to find an intervention that could benefit survivors, because I know how they felt. I took up the opportunity to become a visiting scholar at the Wagner School at New York University to research more on different methods of dealing with intrusive memories.

I was then able to write every letter, word, line, paragraph of my book, You Alone May Live, from my heart, from my personal experiences. By the time the book was published, I had no doubt my life was changing. I was my mother’s daughter. I was strong and able to face the world again, to look beyond my physical condition, to have a balanced body, mind and soul. I am relieved I made the change in my life.

I completed studies in Complementary Therapy in 2011. I am now a qualified practitioner of Aromatherapy and Oriental Medicine, Aromatic Acupressure and Meridian Massage; Spinal Reflexology and Foot / Hand Reflexology.

My practice focuses on clients with mental health issues, stress, anxiety, worry and depression. I am now working on utilising this new skill set to benefit Rwandan survivors, who continue to deal with the effects of the genocide, in particular PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as well as the intergenerational inheritance of trauma now experienced by children born and raised by survivors.