Marie Claudine Mukambano: A Woman of Courage

Marie Claudine Mukambano: A Woman of Courage

by Cindy Similien-Johnson

After losing her parents, sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, loved ones, friends, classmates and fellow countrymen during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, Ms. Marie Claudine Mukambano’s Catholic faith inspired her to seek the answer to the question of KUKI NDIHO? (Why do I exist? Pourquoi J’existe?).

This question now serves as the name of her organization which has helped thousands of women and children who were affected by the genocide. Ms. Claudine witnessed the gruesome killing of her mother. Her sister was raped, and then murdered by machete. As the years went by, Ms. Mukambano learned that there was a healing power in forgiveness.

She said, “After hearing or understanding that the people in my country, particularly the survivors, don’t really quite understand forgiveness on the same level, after having different conversations about forgiveness with the survivors, after doing research and talking to everybody (most from different capitals), I realized how people misunderstood and misinterpreted forgiveness. Sometimes, people think that to forgive is to give a right to a person who did wrong to you. Others think that to forgive is to forget. Therefore, they don’t want to forget the horrible things that happened to them. They don’t want to forget the memories of their loved ones. Therefore, they try their best to stay away from forgiving.”

She continued, “I felt I needed to do something to help them. Forgiveness heals us. It helps us to heal. Heal! Forgiveness heals the healer first. It positively changes the life of the forgiver first. Forgiveness helps the forgiver to benefit from joy and happiness. Forgiveness doesn’t prevent justice to prevail. Because someone who did wrong to me (for instance, the case of genocide in Rwanda), killed my relatives and did horrible things to me, he did horrible things to my country, to himself, and then to God. If I can get to the point, I can say that he did quadrupled wrongs. Therefore, he should face the consequences.”

“If I forgive him or her, he still needs to face the rest of the elements. I’m free. I don’t want to seek revenge. If you seek revenge, you either try to bring revenge to do wrongs and if you don’t find the person, you breed revenge inside of you. Sooner or later, you will bring revenge to your loved ones, or you will bring revenge to yourself. When I did research in my country, I saw that some people were confused about the meaning of forgiveness. ‘Why should we forget?’ they ask. ‘No, we don’t want to forget. We want to remember in order to prevent this from happening again.’ “It is true, if you don’t know where you are coming from, you don’t know where you are going. In order to be clear about your future, you need to understand your past. You need to deal with it, and to accept your past. It’s your past. There’s nothing you can change about it. It’s your history. It made you the way you are.”

Ms. Claudine’s past has made her the way she is, and it hasn’t deterred her from bringing peace, sustainability and empowerment initiatives for orphans in Rwanda. Nor messages to women and men enslaved by violence and violators from day-to-day, right here in the United States.

For more information about Marie’s organization, “WHY DO I EXIST? / KUKI NDIHO RWANDA ORPHANS SUPPORT PROJECT,” please visit whydoiexist.org. Her book, a work-in-progress, is scheduled to be published in late 2012/early 2013.

(Originally published in the October 11-17, 2012 edition of Our Time Press)