"No one can rob these children of their joy."
Terry Tempest Williams journeys to Rwanda to build a memorial with the survivors of the 1994 genocide.
I am sitting against a tree wishing I could disappear. The physical and psychic assault of Africa has deflated me. I close my eyes. Three girls suddenly grab my hands and pull me up, pushing me toward the school where dozens and dozens of children follow, running, laughing, and tugging at my skirt. Meghan is behind me with her own group of children. Desperate to stem the chaos, I sit down on the ground, making a circle with my hands. Miraculously, the children sit down with me, and then with Louis’s help, they move back to enlarge the circle so more kids can join us.
“My name is Terry,” I say, then clap, looking at the child sitting next to me. “My name is Olive,” she says and claps! “My name is Jean Claude.” Clap! “My name is Vincent.” Clap! The tempo picks up. “My name is Yvonne.” Clap! And so the children’s names become a game of cadence and rhythm moving energetically through the circle like an electrical current. And then spontaneously the children begin to sing. Olive sings with a deep, haunting voice. More songs emerge, many of them Christian songs the children learned in church.
Suddenly, the children start clapping their hands and calling my name. I don’t know what they want. Louis turns to me and says, “They want you to sing them a song—teach them a song.” My mind, in a panic, goes blank. A song? I can’t remember any song. Finally (with Louis translating), I say, “Okay, this is a very silly song. It’s about a food called ‘Jell-O.’” I jiggle my body, and they jiggle theirs, all of us laughing. I began to sing:
Oh, the big red letters stand for the Jell-O family—
Oh the big red letters stand for the Jell-O family—
It’s Jell-O—yum, yum, yum
Jell-O Pudding—yum, yum, yum
Jell-O Tapioca pudding—try all three!
The children are laughing hysterically, at me, at my singing, and I cannot believe that the only song that came to me was a Mormon camp ditty, that I learned when I was eight years old.
Louis tries to explain to the children what Jell-O is. He looks at me completely puzzled, “What should I say?” “Tell them it looks like a fat man’s belly that jiggles when he’s laughing. Tell them its green and comes in cold square cubes.” Louis raises his eyebrows. “Tell them it’s like squishy candy and you can eat it with a spoon.”
Whatever Louis tells them, the children are rolling with laughter.
Meghan moves us forward with a chant of her own. We enter a musical trance. In the dreamscape of afternoon heat, the African sun beats like a drum, moving one tiny girl. She jumps into the center of the circle and dances. With her eyes closed, she twirls and twirls. The children clap as she rises and falls like a scarf being blown up and down by the wind. Other girls join her, one with her hands in a prayer shape above her head. More begin to dance and sing on the edges of bones, impatient bones that are crying to be buried.
Louis whispers in my ear, “No one can rob these children of their joy.”
Excerpted from Terry Tempest Williams new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World with permission from Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
