Called to action by suffering in Rwanda
Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Faced with the evidence of genocide, island artist Dutch Myer couldn’t make art.
Traveling through war-torn Rwanda transformed artist into activist, with a vision he shares in a slide lecture here Sept. 14.
Myer, who makes sculptures with civil rights and humanitarian themes, was invited to accompany photographer Robert Lyons to the African nation in 1999.
Lyons asked Myer to collaborate in an art project that would document the genocide that had been perpetrated there three years before, the slaughter of Tutsis and liberal Hutus that had left 800,000 dead.
“In going to Rwanda, I really thought I could do an art project,” Myer said, “but when I got there, I was overwhelmed. There were thousands of bodies everywhere you looked.”
Myer and Lyons found themselves in a nightmarish landscape where the smell of death was pervasive, where a garbage dump might hold 100,000 corpses. They visited a school where all 30 rooms were filled with remains.
“What did I know about what I was seeing?” he said. “What did I really know? About families hacked to death, women who had killed their own children because they had a choice of doing it themselves or having it done by a bunch of men with machetes. Horrendous things.”
Myer knew he was out of his depth. Tragedies in his own life were diminished beside the evidence of suffering that left Rwanda under a cloud of gloom.
“No one smiled,” Myer said. “No one smiled.”
Lyon photographed and both artists filmed, but they knew that response was inadequate. Myer determined he must bear witness; the act of seeing led him to the moral obligation to speak.
But even that wasn’t enough. Myer found the experience had transformed him into an activist.
His wife, who worked in the prosthesis field, had heard of an organization that distributed wheelchairs. He joined up with a Colorado-based nonprofit, the Mobility Project, helping the disabled in developing countries with donations of wheelchairs, crutches, walkers and other equipment.
In 1995, Myer accompanied a group of volunteers distributing wheelchairs in Kenya. Since then he has made trips as a volunteer for Hope Haven Ministries and the Mobility Project to countries ranging from the Dominican Republic to Afghanistan.
Myer was astonished at the desolation of Afghanistan, still seeded with land mines after years of conflict and foreign occupation.
“There isn’t any water. The Soviets and the Taliban cut down all the trees so there wouldn’t be any place for snipers to hide,” he said. “The Kabul River is a sewer ditch.”
With most of the wheelchairs stalled at the Pakistan border, Myer and others cannibalized broken chairs to assemble a few functional ones. At a Kabul hospital, they distributed 150 disposable hypodermic needles they knew would be used over and over.
The hospital had no electricity and had sewage running across the floor, Myer recalls. The group volunteered to go on a food distribution to a refugee camp in Kabul where a thousand people were contained behind barbed wire.
“We had food for 100 families, they had a thousand,” he said.
Myer followed a young refugee girl to the makeshift shelter her family called home.
“The walls were made of rags, tarpaulins,” he said. “There were three women just scurrying to cover themselves and two men trying to get up to bow to me – ‘Allah akbar’ – and I felt so terrible that I invaded there at the most vulnerable moment of their life, but I had to see it. I had to see it to get myself as angry as I am.
“I saw it, and I feel I can’t walk away.”
When Myer returns in October, it will be to complete the wheelchair project. This time, there are 650 chairs to distribute; he and other volunteers will open a shop where Afghanis will learn to make their own.
Despite having to travel with bodyguards, Myer says he felt no sense that the people he encountered were an enemy. He felt instead filled with “awe…at the awfulness of the way people live.”
While Myer doesn’t have answers to such entrenched and terrible problems, he points to a parable that has become a personal call to action. A boy goes to the beach and throws starfish into the sea with the receding tide.
Told by a man that he can’t save them all, the boy says, “Yeah, but I saved that one.”
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Dutch Myer, a volunteer for the Mobility Project, lectures and shows slides from his recent trips bringing wheelchairs to developing countries, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Bainbridge public library. The event is free and open to the public; call 855-8087.
