The museum is set amid a garden, on the side of a hill overlooking a valley with houses and trees that extend up the opposite ridge.
The museum displays are well-organised in a circular layout that makes it very easy to follow the events of 1994 and afterwards in relative privacy.
There are also small rooms hung with countless photos of people killed in the genocide, many of them children. The photos are just ordinary family snaps, typical of the pictures every family takes of its loved ones. Some are polaroids, now fading away, taken on some special occasion.
It is their very ordinariness that makes these pictures especially poignant. You can stand in their midst, in the dim light, and be overwhelmed by images of happy moments frozen in time, of people oblivious of the tragedies that will engulf them. In one larger room, you can sit in the centre and look all round at hundreds of such photos hanging on thin plastic strings.
Having been overwhelmed by the brutalities described and displayed inside the museum, it was a relief to go out into the lovely gardens. Here it is calm, amid the lovely flower beds, with small birds singing unseen. The tender sun of early morning warms you as you stroll about, looking across the valley where life flourishes, to the soft green hillside.
You walk down a flight of steps, along paths covered by trellises and climbing plants. Softly and serenely, you come to a long row of heavy concrete slabs several metres wide and possibly 10 metres long in each case. At the corner of one of these slabs you see flowers wrapped in plastic, with small cards that people have left in memory of loved ones.
You realise with a shock that, in this beautiful place, there are mass graves under these massive slabs. Later you learn that human remains were brought here from the places where they were killed in frenzies and ferocities scarcely to be imagined.
None of the slabs have any of the signs or official plaques that one might have expected of such a memorial. Yet this is oddly appropriate, driving home the anonymity of mass slaughter. The heavy slabs, industrial in scale, lack any of the refinements typically seen in, say, war cemeteries. Genocide is industrial killing.
I left the museum and crossed the busy car park to my own vehicle. There were small groups of people and individuals standing about, in their best clothes, preparing themselves to visit the museum. I would have loved to talk to these people, to hear their own stories so that none of those lost lives would be forgotten if enough people know of them and cherish them in their memories.
Of course this was impossible for me. How could I, a white foreigner, blunder among people wrapped up in their own memories, and ask intrusive questions? One needed time to walk tenderly among them, to allow our common humanity to emerge, to become trusted, to wait for grieving hearts to be opened - and then to listen with your own heart, your own inner being. To bear witness to the unbearable.
