Los Angeles Times, CA
April 8 2007
Out of Rwanda’s horror, abiding bonds of love emerge
A Southland couple have become like parents to orphans of the 1994
genocide.
By K. Connie Kang, Times Staff Writer
April 8, 2007
This love story – and to its central characters it is indeed a love
story – began when experts and victims from around the world gathered
in Rwanda to discuss genocide.
Donald and Lorna Miller had traveled from California to the capital
city of Kigali to share the story of her father – an Armenian
genocide survivor – at a gathering of more than 200 scholars and
survivors in the historic Hotel des Mille Collines, where 1,200
people survived the 1994 Rwandan massacres because of the heroic
intervention of a manager who bribed the militia by passing out
liquor.
Donald Miller is a professor of religion at USC; Lorna Miller directs
a community outreach ministry at All Saints Episcopal Church in
Pasadena. The Altadena couple had been invited to the 2001 conference
because they had written extensively about the Armenian genocide,
including a book based on Lorna Miller’s interviews with 100
survivors. She had interviewed her father, now deceased, who was 16
when he lost both parents and six siblings in 1915.
Members of a group of young Rwandans called the Assn. of Orphan Heads
of Households approached the Millers after her presentation. The
parents of the young Rwandans were among the 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus slaughtered by Hutu extremists.
"I kept thinking, ‘It’s my father all over again,’ " Lorna recalled.
She is convinced that their encounter was a divine appointment, a way
for her to repay the care her father received from missionaries when
he was orphaned – and his eventual arrival in Pasadena to pastor an
Armenian church in 1956.
The Rwandan genocide started 13 years ago this month. Through the
Millers, the orphans have made connections with prominent clergy,
scholars, business executives and philanthropists in America. The
1,800-member group, which goes by the French acronym AOCM, also began
to collaborate on projects to preserve the historical record of the
genocide. And along the way, parental bonds began to grow.
Naphtal Ahishakiye, who lost both parents and all of his siblings in
the mass killings, wrote in an e-mail that after the group’s members
"observed their love day by day," the Millers essentially became
parents.
Naphtal, past president of AOCM, noted that except for his wife’s
doctor and himself, the Millers were the only ones who saw his
newborn daughter in the hospital to share in his happiness after she
was born.
Many e-mails the Millers receive from Rwanda begin with "Dear Father
and Mother" and relate goings-on big and small. In Rwanda, the
Millers struggle with their rusty French and the Rwandans’ limited
English. But it’s all English on the Internet.
In a recent "Dear Parents" e-mail explaining a long silence, Jean
Muyaneza said he had been sick: "I’m now in the new house, but under
construction, and I think that it was the source of the illness,
because we enter in it without glasses [panes] in the windows, so the
wind was too much."
"It’s wonderful to hear from you," Donald Miller replied. "We have
been worried! I will be in Rwanda from March 22 to April 3. I am
hoping to spend some time with you."
Miller’s recent trip was his tenth to Rwanda. His wife has traveled
there eight times. One expression of their ties is a course USC is
offering this semester: "What Can I Do? Personal Responses to World
Traumas/Crises." It is taught by Rabbi Susan Laemmle, dean of
religious life, and the Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray, retired pastor of
First AME Church in L.A. Both have visited Rwanda with the Millers.
Another effort was a photo exhibit, "Rwanda: Portraits of Survival
and Hope," at the California African American Museum in Exposition
Park that ran from September through March. The museum and AOCM split
the proceeds.
Bob and Beverly Bingham, family friends of the Millers and owners of
NorQuest Seafoods in Alaska, donated $100,000 after visiting Rwanda
with the couple. The money funds various projects, such as providing
tuition and books for orphans attending college and putting a roof on
a building housing Solace Ministries, a Christian outreach to
genocide survivors.
Donald Miller called the outreach program vital, because many
Rwandans, the vast majority of whom are Christians, found their faith
tested in the genocide. Miller wrote in a report to the John
Templeton Foundation, which is funding his research into
spirituality, that "when God-loving people affirm their humanity,
survivors interpret these acts of kindness as emanating from God
himself."
He added that survivors need hope, which is "the special province of
religion, that subtle, sometimes miraculous engagement with the
divine."
The drive to exterminate the ethnic minority Tutsis began April 7,
1994, the day after the plane carrying Rwanda’s President Juvenal
Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down as it approached the Kigali
airport. Ethnic tensions that went back decades erupted. By July, a
rebel group had defeated the Hutu regime, ending the 100 days of
terror.
The Millers visited sites of atrocities, including churches and
schools, and heard story after story of horror.
One woman at a weekly Solace meeting said all the men in her village
knew her body because, as Lorna Miller quoted her, "I was raped by
everybody in the village."
Naphtal, now 32, told how he survived by first hiding in a river,
clinging to roots. Later he hid in the forest, drinking rainwater and
coming out at night to eat bananas from people’s gardens.
After the Millers returned to Los Angeles from their first visit,
they kept asking themselves how they should respond. They came up
with the idea of an oral history project. The Millers would provide
equipment and training, and orphans would do the interviews. AOCM
went for it.
Seed money for the project came from a $25,000 gift from the Binghams
on the occasion of the wedding of the Millers’ son Shont a year
earlier. After funding projects to build latrines and stoves for the
poor in Guatemala, the Millers still had $12,000.
Donald Miller, executive director of USC’s Center for Religion and
Civic Culture, suggested that orphan leaders write a proposal for the
oral history project. They came up with a $7,500 budget to conduct
100 interviews.
In 2002, the Millers returned to Rwanda with tape recorders and spent
10 days training the interviewers. The AOCM members practiced by
interviewing each other and at first spoke so softly that the
recorders weren’t picking up what they said. When the Millers left
Kigali, the couple doubted the project would work.
But to their "incredible surprise," the AOCM team completed 100
interviews, Donald Miller said. They needed more funds. The Millers
raised the budget to $11,000. The team then had the interviews typed
on a computer and translated from Kinyarwanda into English.
"We thought the world should hear their stories," Lorna Miller said.
Donald Miller wrote philanthropists Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, whom
he knew from another project, and asked if they would be interested
in funding a book that would combine photos with excerpts of the
interviews. The Ahmansons donated $50,000.
Teaming up with Paris-based photographer Jerry Berndt, the Millers
published "Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide." The book gives full
credit to AOCM as partners.
One copy reached a person in Sweden who contacted Miller and
suggested that he nominate AOCM for the World’s Children’s Prize for
the Rights of the Child, sponsored by Children’s World magazine.
Although Miller thought the likelihood of winning the prize was
remote, he spent a day working on the nomination.
More than 3.2 million readers of the magazine, based in Sweden and
published in seven languages, voted for AOCM.
Last April, the queen of Sweden presented the prize, which comes with
$40,000, to AOCM leaders in Stockholm. The "AOCM kids," as the
Millers call them, are using the money to build housing for group
members. A two-room house costs $3,000.
The Millers traveled to Stockholm for the ceremony and celebrated
with five AOCM representatives, including Naphtal, who looked elegant
in a dark suit.
His daughter, whose birth the Millers had shared in, is named Arpi,
which in Armenian means early rays of sunshine. It is also the name
of the Millers’ daughter.