We wish to inform you that tomorrow, we will be killed with our families

This is the book I am reading at the present moment.
I picked it up after reading a series of article commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the Genocide in Rwanda. I picked this particular book because the Author had reviewed a book written by three former UN peacekeepers. On the back of the green, hard cover book, a man named Philip had said, Emergency sex was a true read. An eye opener. Something we should all read if we truly want to live our past-world-war-two lives under the slogan “never again.” Next to his name, were the titles of the two books he himself had written. So I bought one of Philip’s books.

Ten years ago, in the spring of 1994, nearly one million people were exterminated for no other reason than the fact that they were from a slightly different ethnicity: their hair was a bit straighter, there noses a bit longer, their skin maybe slightly lighter…Neighbors had killed their neighbors, children had chopped their school-friends with machetes, husbands had let a mob of drunk Hutus rape and shoot their Tutsi wives… Ten years ago, a radio station in Rwanda was promoting Hutu power.

Ten years ago, I was an eighteen year old girl living in a dorm in Paris; a dorm run by a few catholic nones. Every night, I would head to the cafeteria, grab an orange, plastic tray and place on it a bowl of soup, a plate of salad, and whatever crapy entrée the cooks had made us. They liked to combine the oddest food, such as a cheese omelet with a side of plain, dry couscous and a piece of onion pie.Every night, after my tray was filled up, I would sit myself amongst 130 girls from very respectable French families and start complaining about how stupid it was that we weren’t allowed to dine with our slippers on, because the nones thought it was too “indecent”. Ten years ago, I thought, it was even more retarded to have an 11 PM curfew on Saturday nights: Apparently, there had been a study done and the sisters concluded that a girl was more likely to lose her virginity late on a Saturday night. Therefore, they made sure we were nicely tucked in our beds before midnight. Just like Cinderella. This also insured them we would all be well rested for 10 Am mass the next day. A priest from the neighborhood church – Paris, Montparnasse- came every Sunday to lead us into a yawned version of “our father in Heaven”; palms facing up towards to sky, asking us to pray for those less fortunate.

Ten years ago, in April, a Rwandan pastor had lead Tutsi refugees to a church, where they prayed not for their lives, but for a quicker death, a death by a bullet as opposed to having half of their neck cut open and slowly bleed till their heart stopped beating. In that church they prayed and prayed for three straight days. Then, the genocidaires came. At first, they chopped hands and feet off, leaving them there over night. They came back the next day to finish off those who had survived the night. On the third day, they threw rocks on the bodies that were pilled up one on top of the other- blood and body parts mixed in together- to see who was still alive or not. And if some of the children that had managed to lie underneath their dead parents screamed from the pain of the rocks hitting them, or were not able to hold their breath long enough, then they would be discovered and killed. After, the Hutus set the church on fire and left to drink banana liquor.

How on earth did I miss that moment of April 1994, sitting in the TV-room watching the news with a chocolate sundae I had snuck in from McDonald’s, waiting for Beverly Hills 90210 to start? How did I miss that reading the paper in the metro on my way to College?
When I was still living at home, we used to watch it as a family right before dinner but that year, when I came home for Easter, I came home to discover that my father would watch the news alone, lying on the couch, the remote control in his hands; the rest of the family upstairs, sitting on my mom’s bed, telling my sister not to cry because my father was not speaking to her. And then Myriam would say through her tears that she didn’t give a shit and he could just die as far as she was concerned. The problem was that my sister, the eldest and favourite daughter, had decided to talk back to the drunken slurs coming out of my father’s mouth. So he had disowned her. “Shut up” he kept telling her. “You shut up” she’d snap back. “You’re a failure” he would spit out. “Like father, like daughter”.
Every night during my visist, Myriam would be sent to her room because my father was getting angry and every night, my mother, brother and I would finish our plates with tears running down our cheeks. I didn’t like eating wet and salty food. It made my stomach sick. So I stopped eating. And I didn’t eat for three whole years.

In April 1994, a Canadian General was sick to his stomach as the UN ignored his warnings. General Dallaire made phone calls, wrote letters, send faxes that were quickly read, then shredded: it’s part of the recycling program to save the environment. When it was all over, the General quite his job and lost faith in the world.The few Tutsis that were hiding in bushes, under corps, in the tiny back room of a church, trying to survive also started losing faith: They would ask God why? What had they done to be punished like that? They were sending faxes from hotel rooms they were hiding in to anyone they knew that was abroad, hoping someone would catch on and notice that the local Rwandan radio was advertising the genocide. “Do your work and help us get rid of the cockroaches". So Hutu men, women and children picked up anything they could use as a weapon and went to work. And the Tutsis were wondering why no one was fighting to stop the genocidaires. How come they never got tired of killing? Why nothing was slowing them: they were not getting sick; it didn’t rain…The ones that survived wondered why God wasn’t giving them the strength to run away? Instead they stayed, accepting that tomorrow; they will be killed with their families.

I was asking God why he didn’t make my dad stop: stop drinking, stop yelling, and stop making me so scared, that I never could sleep properly, even miles away, kept up in my dorm room, on the 4th floor, wondering what was going on at home, wishing I could go there to make sure they were safe. I kept asking him why my mother didn’t fight back, leave my father, and take us away. Or force him to go away. I asked God why, when my dad got so drunk he started to drive the car too fast on a rainy road, he always managed to make it home safe. i didn't want my father to die. I just wanted it to go away... Every morning I woke up more tired than the day before; every evening, I bought a calling card and called home from the pay phone at the corner of the street to talk to my mom. And every night, I would pop sleeping pills and hope they'd work this time. But they never did. And my mother never left, accepting that tomorrow, she will cry again in the arms of her family.

Reading this book, I am discovering details of the three first weeks of April, 1994, during which over half a million people were exterminated. Half a million: that’s the number of people who marched on August 29th in New York City to say no to Bush. Half a million.It's a lot: blocks and blocks filled with people. But I do not remember the genocide as it was happening. I only remember it after. When the UN finally went in, and mass graves were found, school rooms filled with dead babies were being shown on front pages of outraged French papers. Because by May, we were finally outraged. After our government had provided the guns and the money to the Hutu power regime we were finally crying, watching images on our screens. Tears in our eyes: that poor little black baby with no family, standing half naked in the middle of rubbles; so we took out our check books and wrote on to the Red Cross or Amnesty International, and we all felt better.
Today, I cry reading my book, ashamed because I should have noticed. Even if it wouldn’t have changed much. I should have noticed. How one earth did I not? How on earth did no one? We all have a drunken parent, an eating disorder, a depression lingering in the back, somewhere. We all have a hard time at work, in school, with cancer, making ends meet. Is it OK for us to have it take over our lives to the point that when 800,000 human beings are shred to pieces, we actually missed it?

Last week, a group of Chechen terrorists took a school hostage, kept 1200 children and parents locked in the school gym for 3 days, without food or water, forcing them to drink their own urine, they were so thirsty. And then chaos happened and over 335 beautiful children died trying to run for their life. Most of them shot in the back. It was on the cover of the New York Times, Metro and AM New York, and on every news channel there is.In August, on Friday the 13, millions of people worldwide settled themselves in front of their TVs to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. That same night in Burundi, a Tutsi refugee camp was attacked by a Hutu rebel group and 160 people, mainly women are children, were killed. I don’t even know if it made it onto the writings that scroll the bottom of the CNN screen… And on Thursday September 9th, Collin Powell labeled the deaths of 50,000 people in Sudan a Genocide. This, on the other hand does not make it to the front page.
This summer marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from the German Nazis…
“Never again”, we still claim.

A slice of pizza

On January 25th 1997, I had my first floor meeting on the 10th floor of the Hunter College dorms in New York City.

About twenty girls assembled in the common area: some sat on the couches covered in blue fabric with little white flowers and coffee stains. I sat on the floor, on cushions that were once white, but had turned gray from laying on the floor for months, and pressed my back against the wall. A skinny girl with brown shoulder-length hair stood up under a sign that read “WELCOME” in big red letters. She tugged on her black sweater and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Hi my name is Amber and I will be your RA for the semester.” She turned and pointed to the boxes of pizza stacked on top of each other. “Before we eat, I want to go around in a circle and introduce each other. I’ll start. I am Amber as you all know, I am in room 1024. This is my second year as an RA. I’m majoring in business law and I’m from New Jersey.” The crowd answered back in unison: “hi, Amber.”

The next girl up was the Asian girl who had the room across from mine- she always kept her door opened, and I had noticed that the little cloud of steam floating around came from the rice cooker she constantly kept turned on. The smell of rice overtook our half of the hallway and sometimes made me want to throw up. “Hey, I’m Lisa and I’m in room 1032 and this is my last year at here because I finally graduate this summer. And I cook a lot and like to experiment, so I apologize in advance for all the smells I’ll be infesting the floor with!” The group laughed.
Then a girl with long blond hair tied up in a messy ponytail and a boyish figure stood up. “Hi guys, I’m Kaitlin, I’m 22, from California. I don’t have a major yet so I am just taking Liberal Arts class for now. Oh, and I’m a surfer. Oh, and I’m in room 1010.”I was the fifth person down, so like the four girls before me, I stood up when I said: ”Hi, my name is Sophie, I am 21 years old. I am half French, half Arab and I am here to study for a semester and I am in room 1031.” And like they had done for the girls before, the whole group responded with a united “Hi Sophie, welcome.”After we had gone through the twenty girls, including Joanna- a blond-pony-tailed girl who also happened to be half-French- the RA Stood up again. “Let’s eat!” she said. She opened the first square, white, red and green box and took out a triangular slice of pizza, bigger than my head, and placed it on a paper plate. She handed it to Kate, a pale, blue-eyed girl with short brown hair, who then passed it along to the girls sitting on the couches.

My mind automatically wandered back to a year and a half ago, starring at another pizza.

In the summer of 1993, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, my aunt Claudine, my mother’s oldest sister, an overweight, diabetic woman with a double chin and thighs as big as my waist, came to visit us with her four children and her husband. That day, my father – a French Chef- decided he was on strike and wouldn’t cook, allowing us to eat whatever we wanted. My cousins had chosen to feast on Mc Donald’s chicken nuggets, dipped into sweet and sour sauce and a mountain of French fries. I got one of the individual pizzas from Dr. Oetcker, a famous frozen food brand in Germany. I had chosen the spinach and mozzarella one. The first bite was a delicious mixture of cheese, tomatoes, garlicky spinach and soft dough. I was halfway through my pizza when I heard my aunt speak.“Sophie”, she said, “are you going to eat all of this?”“Of course, it’s an individual pizza… it’s for one!” I answered back.“Well, it’s none of my business, but you should watch it or else, you’ll end up like me. Pizza has a lot of grease and cheese and it will make you fat!”
I didn’t finish my plate.

“Sophie… Sophie?” I looked up at Amber; she had a cup of Diet Coke in her hands. “Daydreaming?” she asked. “Yeah”. I grabbed the cup and took a sip, while watching the other girls eat. A few of them folded the pizza in the middle of the crust, eating it like a sandwich. I bit off a piece of the crust. Thick, bread-like and most importantly for me, no cheese or oil on it. After two or three bites, I felt knots of panic forming in my stomach and my throat, making it painful for me to swallow. The knots were telling me not to eat, because pizza was against the rules. It was rule number four. Forbidden foods: Pizza, fries, burger buns, sauces, pasta, any form of cake, chocolate, full fat milk or yogurt, butter and salt- it makes you retain water and get cellulite. The rule came before rule number 5: Lunches have to be made out of 1/3 cup of fat free cottage cheese mixed with 2/3 cups of fat free plain yogurt, slices of grapes, mangoes and peaches and one apple, sliced very thinly, to dip in the creamy mixture. My dinners were usually made out of a cup of fat free soup, and a baked apple, with fat-free cottage cheese.
My hands started to shake, I worried someone would noticed that I had barely touched my food, nibbling on the crust, picking off the mushrooms and peppers, and putting them in my mouth so it would look like I was eating. I folded my paper plate in three, making it seem like there was no pizza left.
I got up, walked towards the kitchen and threw the plate out in the trash. I went to bed, feeling slightly dizzy. But that was OK. I had felt that way a year ago, in Paris. I knew that it would go away if I drank a lot of water and ate an apple. So I did.

Later that night, I woke up convinced the ceiling was spinning out of control and falling on top of me. I lifted myself up and drank out of the plastic bottle of Poland Spring water I kept by the side, and lay back down, my head under the pillow so I wouldn’t hear my stomach growl. I started to panic. Usually the hunger went away after a few gulps of water. This time it didn’t. After 15 minutes, I got up and walked towards the little fridge I had placed under my sink. I opened it: There was a can of diet Pepsi and cottage cheese. I picked up the pink box, with the white dove on it and FAT FREE in big blue letters across the lid. I grabbed a spoon and shoved a spoonful of lumpy, cold cheese in my mouth: the texture of it against my tongue made me feel sick. I went to the sink and spat everything out. I looked at the clock: it was already 11:48!!! I frantically emptied the whole box into the sink, running water on top of it to make sure it went down the drain. I wouldn’t be tempted to eat it if it was no longer there. I wouldn’t fail like that night in Paris, where after 2 hours of tossing and turning in my bed, I had given in and eaten a piece of baguette before crying myself back to sleep, feeling like the failure I was. I couldn’t even follow a simple rule, rule number three: You can’t eat after 10 pm…

I tried going back to bed but started feeling dizzy again just 5 minutes later. The water I was swallowing felt like a ton of bricks in my empty stomach. I opened my bedroom door and walked to the kitchen. The floor was cold against my bare feet. I passed the common bathroom, the elevators and found myself in the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn the lights on and attract anyone so it was a bit hard to see, but I managed to lift up to cover and take a look in the trash can.I had to take a step back: the smell of rotten apple cores, potato peels, bagels hard as rocks, coffee filters with day old coffee made me want to throw up.

I couldn’t bring myself to use my hands, so instead I grabbed a plastic fork from the brown kitchen counter and started moving things around until I found the left-over slices of pizzas. I was hoping I could find mine, still neatly folded in the paper plate. Instead I found myself picking up pieces of over-cooked pasta stuck to one another in a big lump, empty bags of chips crumbled into a ball, slices of orange, cigarette buds, wrinkled tea bags, cereals soft from the milk they had soaked in, and stale slices of pizza with bits of napkins stuck to the cold, hardened cheese. I felt dizzy. I leaned on the wall for a few seconds to catch my breath. Touching and smelling all this made my stomach turn even more. But I knew that I would not be able to sleep unless I ate something; and there was nothing else to eat.
So I grabbed a slice that was stuck to an empty plastic bag, turned it around until I was sure it was the least disgusting one. I took a knife and scrapped the cheese off. I had to, because the cheese was the part that had the most fat; and I knew the rule. I carefully placed the pizza in a napkin that was lying on top of the stove and looked for the microwave. But except for a dirty pan soaking in the sink and an empty bottle of Coke on the counter, there was absolutely nothing in the kitchen.
I remembered Amber mentioning that the closest microwave was in the third-floor kitchen. If I wanted to eat it hot, I would have to walk down to the third floor and take the risk of having someone see me.I stuck my head out the door, looking left and righ and right and left. No one in sight. I ran back to my bedroom, slamming my door shut, locking it twice: top lock and bottom lock. To be safe.

I sat on the bed, lifting up the pizza to my mouth and just putting it down. It smelled. It was cold. It had garbage on it. But my stomach was hurting, my head was pounding from hunger, my heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my temples, so I knew I absolutely had to eat it. I forced myself to eat the dough. The salty taste I had in my mouth was coming from my tears. I kept eating it. I ate it all. I ate it as fast as I could, trying to swallow it without having it touch my tongue. Holding my breath not to smell anything. Just forcing it down, down, down, to my stomach as fast as possible. I was almost done with it when I felt everything come back up my throat. I ran to my garbage bin, fell on my knees and stuck my head in the bucket, waiting. My mouth was full of acid saliva and I could feel the pizza up my throat. But nothing. I tried sticking two fingers deep into my throat, but still nothing. And I forced myself to cough, hoping to bring it back out. My throat was too dry and there wasn’t enough food to throw up.

And I kept thinking I was being punished. For failing. I had not been able to resist the hunger and now, something terrible was going to happen. Someone was going to die because of me. Because I couldn’t be a better person and not eat the forbidden food.I laid down on the floor, next to the trashcan, on my stomach, the pressure of my weight pressing my body against the floor made me feel a bit better.

I kept thinking about the time I was 6 years old, and the kids at school had nicknamed me “Sophie Gharbi the garbage”, because they thought the two words sounded the same. I stayed on the floor for a few hours thinking they were right.