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Faxes from Rwanda
How a café in Connecticut became a hub for dispatches from a genocide.
On a recent Friday afternoon in New Haven, Connecticut, Lulu DeCarrone , a chatty woman with choppy bangs, darted between coffee orders at her small café, Lulu’s. When I spoke with her, by phone, she paused to tend to customers—“I’m sorry, what was that, love? You had an espresso?”—then recounted the role that her café had played, twenty years ago this month, in bringing a small part of the Rwandan genocide to light.
In 1994, John Sundin, a surgeon and clinical instructor at the Yale School of Medicine, became a frequent customer, and friend, of DeCarrone. (The two bonded at a neighborhood party: “Tequila was involved,” she said.) One day that spring, Sundin stopped by Lulu’s and shared his plan to go work for the International Red Cross in Rwanda, where the killings had just begun. DeCarrone remembers telling him, “You can’t go—it’s a bloodbath.” But he flew to Kigali nonetheless, joining a small team at a field hospital that was run out of a converted convent.
Kigali’s main hospital had been evacuated, and Sundin found that he was one of the only available surgeons in the city. For all the amenities that his outpost lacked—reliable electricity, sufficient anesthetic, adequate staff—it did have, somewhat miraculously, a satellite fax machine. By May, Sundin was faxing handwritten dispatches to DeCarrone’s neighbor, a graduate student named Tom Mikita, who would carry the pages over to Lulu’s.
“That first fax came in, and I just passed it around,” DeCarrone said. “Then I got another one, and another one, and another one—I was telling everyone in the store, ‘Hey, you’ve gotta read this.’ ”
The early dispatches were unsentimental but alive with emotion, often laced with bits of dark humor about, say, a Dutch “nurse from hell,” who “looks like she was sired from stick insects.” On May 13th, Sundin described the converted convent: “It is situated on a hill, looking out over the green hills of Rwanda. Rwanda is known as the Switzerland of Africa, but the comparison stops at the landscape.” He went on to offer a quick taxonomy of the weapons that defined the conflict. (The injuries that he treated resulted less often from “planes, bombs, tanks or missiles” than from “machetes, clubs, and spears.”) Frequently, he signed off to the sound of gunfire. Mikita pinned the early letters to the wall at Lulu’s. (This was before Facebook, when walls were actually walls):
May 21st: “A woman buried alive in a mass grave dug herself out after twelve hours. She’s pretty freaked out. I would be.”
May 22nd: “No flights and no convoys out. No supplies or people moving. We’re running out of red wine—a major catastrophe. Fifteen wounded today.”
May 27th: “I hid in a corner today fully expecting to be murdered. They wanted the medical team that’s ‘not treating their people.’ That’s me: I’m the surgeon, the only one. This is really no joke.”
Within a few weeks, DeCarrone noticed that people were coming to Lulu’s just to read the letters. “People really cared, and they were getting information that they couldn’t even get on CNN,” she said. “The news media started camping out in front of Lulu’s in a way—the New York Times, the New Haven Register.”
Sometimes, Sundin would call to check in. One day, DeCarrone said, “as he was talking to me, a bomb exploded mid-conversation, and the phone goes dead.” For the next three days at the café, customers were nearly as “hysterical” as DeCarrone; fearing that Sundin was dead, they stopped in to find out if there was any word. On the fourth day, he called Lulu’s and explained that artillery fire had taken out the telephone. After that, the dispatches resumed. DeCarrone and Mikita compiled the faxes in a small red notebook that they labelled, simply, “Rwanda.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/05/in-a-cafe-waiting-for-word-from-rwanda.html
How a café in Connecticut became a hub for dispatches from a genocide.
On a recent Friday afternoon in New Haven, Connecticut, Lulu DeCarrone , a chatty woman with choppy bangs, darted between coffee orders at her small café, Lulu’s. When I spoke with her, by phone, she paused to tend to customers—“I’m sorry, what was that, love? You had an espresso?”—then recounted the role that her café had played, twenty years ago this month, in bringing a small part of the Rwandan genocide to light.
In 1994, John Sundin, a surgeon and clinical instructor at the Yale School of Medicine, became a frequent customer, and friend, of DeCarrone. (The two bonded at a neighborhood party: “Tequila was involved,” she said.) One day that spring, Sundin stopped by Lulu’s and shared his plan to go work for the International Red Cross in Rwanda, where the killings had just begun. DeCarrone remembers telling him, “You can’t go—it’s a bloodbath.” But he flew to Kigali nonetheless, joining a small team at a field hospital that was run out of a converted convent.
Kigali’s main hospital had been evacuated, and Sundin found that he was one of the only available surgeons in the city. For all the amenities that his outpost lacked—reliable electricity, sufficient anesthetic, adequate staff—it did have, somewhat miraculously, a satellite fax machine. By May, Sundin was faxing handwritten dispatches to DeCarrone’s neighbor, a graduate student named Tom Mikita, who would carry the pages over to Lulu’s.
“That first fax came in, and I just passed it around,” DeCarrone said. “Then I got another one, and another one, and another one—I was telling everyone in the store, ‘Hey, you’ve gotta read this.’ ”
The early dispatches were unsentimental but alive with emotion, often laced with bits of dark humor about, say, a Dutch “nurse from hell,” who “looks like she was sired from stick insects.” On May 13th, Sundin described the converted convent: “It is situated on a hill, looking out over the green hills of Rwanda. Rwanda is known as the Switzerland of Africa, but the comparison stops at the landscape.” He went on to offer a quick taxonomy of the weapons that defined the conflict. (The injuries that he treated resulted less often from “planes, bombs, tanks or missiles” than from “machetes, clubs, and spears.”) Frequently, he signed off to the sound of gunfire. Mikita pinned the early letters to the wall at Lulu’s. (This was before Facebook, when walls were actually walls):
May 21st: “A woman buried alive in a mass grave dug herself out after twelve hours. She’s pretty freaked out. I would be.”
May 22nd: “No flights and no convoys out. No supplies or people moving. We’re running out of red wine—a major catastrophe. Fifteen wounded today.”
May 27th: “I hid in a corner today fully expecting to be murdered. They wanted the medical team that’s ‘not treating their people.’ That’s me: I’m the surgeon, the only one. This is really no joke.”
Within a few weeks, DeCarrone noticed that people were coming to Lulu’s just to read the letters. “People really cared, and they were getting information that they couldn’t even get on CNN,” she said. “The news media started camping out in front of Lulu’s in a way—the New York Times, the New Haven Register.”
Sometimes, Sundin would call to check in. One day, DeCarrone said, “as he was talking to me, a bomb exploded mid-conversation, and the phone goes dead.” For the next three days at the café, customers were nearly as “hysterical” as DeCarrone; fearing that Sundin was dead, they stopped in to find out if there was any word. On the fourth day, he called Lulu’s and explained that artillery fire had taken out the telephone. After that, the dispatches resumed. DeCarrone and Mikita compiled the faxes in a small red notebook that they labelled, simply, “Rwanda.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/05/in-a-cafe-waiting-for-word-from-rwanda.html
