{"id":103,"date":"2018-03-01T12:06:14","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T17:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webwerk.me\/evielovett.com\/m\/?page_id=103"},"modified":"2018-05-11T08:32:59","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T12:32:59","slug":"statement","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/photography\/eyes-on-rwanda\/statement\/","title":{"rendered":"Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statement
\nEyes of Rwanda<\/a>:\u00a0 Portraits From the Hospital in Rwinkwavu<\/strong><\/p>\n

In November 2006, I was invited to visit and photograph a hospital in Rwinkwavu, in eastern Rwanda.\u00a0 In 2005, the Boston-based organization Partners in Health, founded by the visionary Dr. Paul Farmer, was invited by the government of Rwanda and given funding by the Clinton Foundation\u2019s HIV\/AIDS Initiative to bring their model for AIDS treatment to rural Rwanda.\u00a0 The government selected this region, described by one Rwandan government minister as one of the most destitute areas in Rwanda, for this model clinic.\u00a0 They rebuilt the hospital, left untouched since the 1994 genocide.\u00a0 I was the first photographer permitted to photograph there.<\/p>\n

It was impossible for me to be in Rwanda without constantly thinking of the genocide.\u00a0 I passed people doing their community service work, clearing the weeds on the side of the road; I watched the bustling, colorful streets of Kigali, the capital; I walked by the lines of people at the hospital waiting for HIV\/AIDS tests; and I thought:\u00a0 what did they do during the genocide?\u00a0 Was he a killer?\u00a0 Did she turn her head so as not to see?\u00a0 Did she manage to hide?\u00a0 Did someone show him mercy?\u00a0 Is that why he is still alive today?<\/p>\n

In 1994, almost one million Rwandans, largely Tutsi, were killed by their former friends and neighbors, mostly Hutu, in a span of one hundred days.\u00a0 The scale of it is simply not imaginable.\u00a0 One Tutsi survivor said to me: \u201cit is incomprehensible\u201d.\u00a0 But imagine it we must:\u00a0 it happened.\u00a0 Neighbor slaughtered neighbor.\u00a0 Hutu husbands were forced to kill their Tutsi wives.\u00a0 Teachers killed their pupils.\u00a0 Members of a soccer team went after their former teammates with machetes.<\/p>\n

In Rwinkwavu, I saw hope, where everything would point to bleakness.\u00a0 Partners in Health believes that you deal with problems one person at a time, and you care for that person as if he or she were your family.\u00a0 You start with one person, one problem, and go from there.\u00a0 Each person is deserving of basic human rights.<\/p>\n

Clean white sheets.\u00a0 Women laughing over dishes in the kitchen.\u00a0 Hope, dignity, the possibility of survival\u2014all this in a place which is the most densely populated country in Africa, one of the poorest, where average life expectancy is 38 years, a place which can never run away from the horror of its recent history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statement Eyes of Rwanda:\u00a0 Portraits From the Hospital in Rwinkwavu In November 2006, I was invited to visit and photograph a hospital in Rwinkwavu, in eastern Rwanda.\u00a0 In 2005, the Boston-based organization Partners in Health, founded by the visionary Dr. Paul Farmer, was invited by the government of Rwanda and given funding by the Clinton … Continue reading “Statement”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":25,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-103","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103\/revisions\/411"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evielovett.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}