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Must-Bleed TV




THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 25, 2000
MUST-BLEED TV; The Limits of Reality


To the Editor:

Several years ago I worked as a contract videographer for a segment of ''Trauma: Life in the E.R,'' a show mentioned by Craig Tomashoff in his June 11 article [''When the Reality Is Inside the Body'']. What surprised me more than anything else was how readily accident victims allowed their private pain to be submitted to public scrutiny (often with as many as three videographers jockeying for space in the overcrowded and blood-stained emergency room); we were instructed by the producers to have the patients sign waivers as soon as they were well enough to hold a pen and, with rare exception, they signed.

But don't kid yourself. There are limits to this so-called reality television. The team of videographers, awash in blood and gore, worked under strict orders: under no circumstances were we to film a victim's face at the moment of death (even though it happened every day) and there were to be no shots of bare breasts or genitalia. These rules came not from the hospital but from the producers: they argued that spilled brain matter and horrific knife wounds made for great television, but viewers would just not accept death and private parts.

CLAUDE ADAMS
Toronto

Subverting Fidel

                                          Thanks to Mother Jones Magazine

Havana—Mixing tourism and politics is rarely a good idea. The traveler usually doesn’t have the language, the cultural sensitivity, or the familiarity with a country’s history, to make value judgments about how a society should be run. So better to stay on the beach, and out of the barrio, and leave revolution to the locals.

Cuba, however, may be an exception to the rule. Fidel Castro’s illness creates a wonderful opportunity for change on an island that’s in a deep economic (and social) malaise. There’s not much that Cubans can do—Fidel’s security apparatus is still a powerful disincentive to dissent in the Western Hemisphere’s only Communist state. But tourists can do a lot with their dollars: tourism is fast becoming Cuba’s most important industry, and the government will bend over backwards to keep visitors feeling secure and happy.

Thus, how you spend those dollars, and how you manage your contacts with ordinary Cubans, can make a difference. I recently spent a month in Havana, where $1 a day is the average wage, and found there are all kinds of opportunities for creatively undermining a tough, one-party regime. Most of the suggestions in my Handbook for Subversive Tourism are risk-free, and of benefit to Cubans. Besides, Fidel himself has always been a proponent of social activism. Why shouldn’t foreign visitors take him at his word?
With that in mind, here are some things that tourists can do:


1. Pass out subversive literature

At a second-hand bookstand in the Plaza de las Armas, I found an English-language copy of George Orwell (Inside the Whale, and Other Essays), and a wrinkled paperback of Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Both are classic anti-totalitarian texts that, if read carefully, have pointed things to say about Communist regimes like Castro’s. When I handed them to Marta, my Spanish tutor (not her real name), she couldn’t believe that they had escaped the notice of Fidel’s Interior Ministry snoops. I made sure to underline relevant passages. Excerpt from Orwell: “The highest state of totalitarian organization (is) when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force.”
The best part of the deal is that, once Marta has absorbed (and hopefully photocopied) the books, she can sell them back to the Old Havana booksellers and earn enough to eat for a week or more. Talk about recycling revolution!

2. Eat local

As a grudging (and temporary) concession to entrepreneurship, Castro has allowed families to open restaurants in their homes, and even to advertise. I ate at these so-called paladares as often as I could because, in spite of crushingly high taxes, they put money directly into the pockets of Cubans. You also meet real Cubans here, and the restaurants have a homespun character. My favorite paladar was a joint not far from the Havana Libre hotel in Vedado called El Jinete (The Horseman). It has a Wild West theme, with Clint Eastwood posters on the wall, and even a hanging noose next to the front door, and it sold a decent red snapper filet, with rice and salad, for $15.

Most paladares have a short life span because they pay a set monthly tax, whether they have customers of not. Bruno, for example, has to pay Fidel $3000 a year for the right to feed people in his home in the middle-class Vedado district, and many nights in the off season, his six tables sit empty. Also, sale of beef, lobster and shrimp, for example, is strictly prohibited because of a state monopoly; however, most paladares flout the law by offering lobster because of a higher profit margin. So, do your bit for the people, and order the under-the-counter lobster!

3. Sleep local

The subversive tourist will avoid the money-sucking hotels, and stay with Cuban families who operate what are called casas particulares (private rooms.) Fidel tolerates this form of private enterprise only because of a chronic shortage of hotel rooms, and he’ll probably shut them down as more rooms are built. (Canada is a major foreign investor in hotels and resorts.)

As in the case of the private restaurants, the tax on these rooms is prohibitive (about 40%) whether they are occupied or not. Still, they’re a useful source of hard currency for middle-class Cubans (if there is such a thing.) I negotiated a month’s stay with Yamila and Mario for under $1000 CDN, with $5 extra per day for breakfast. I got a bed, air-conditioning, a private bathroom with hot-and-old water shower and a sitting room, with a private entrance. No mini-bar, but a small functioning Russian fridge.

4. Learn local

Many long-term tourists take Spanish lessons in Cuba. You can do so at the University of Havana, or through an authorized tutor. If you do so, you’ll be subsidizing Fidelismo. On the other hand, you can ask around and find a private teacher who needs the money a lot more than El Jefe. I found Marta, a former university chemistry professor who charged $6 an hour to teach me Spanish irregular verbs. “Please don’t tell anyone about this,” she begged, “or they’ll force me to teach at government rates (about 60 cents an hour.)” While she taught me, Marta was her family’s main breadwinner: Her son, an anesthesiologist in a major hospital, earns $25 a month.

5. Be discriminating about what you buy

Don’t buy that Che Guevara T-shirt. His authorized photograph is striking, but Che is an over-heated, over-hyped propaganda icon who, as a member of Fidel’s regime, achieved almost nothing of value. It’s ironic that this mythic, vain anti-capitalist is now Cuban’s hottest commercial item. Every T-shirt perpetuates the bloated myth and fattens Fidel’s treasury.

If you must buy a souvenir, buy some local art (and try to buy it directly from the artist, rather than the shop) or better yet, buy on the street. Alberto and Teresitta, a retired Havana couple, make their living by introducing themselves to likely-looking tourists, and selling pirate CDs of classic Cuban music, for $10 a pop. If they sell one or two a week, that’s enough for groceries and rent.

I found a stunning piece of copper sculpture in an Old Havana handicraft shop. But the price was too high. So I spent two days tracking down the artist—a sickly-looking underfed 27-year-old too poor to afford a studio—and he recalled it from the shop. I bought it directly from him at a discount. He even found a local carpenter to build me a shipping carton. I figured both the artist and the carpenter needed the money more than Fidel.


6. Look “behind the façade”

One of the most impressive things about Havana is the reconstruction of the historic old part of the city—a stunning reminder that in the 17th and 18th Century, Havana was the leading city, culturally and economically, in Latin America. The rebuilding program is jaw-droppingly beautiful, and it’s a major draw for tourism. But, warned my Spanish teacher Sonia, “you have to look behind the façade.” Those old buildings have people living in them. Many of them are poor, and some are squatters. And when Fidel’s demolition teams move in, the residents have to move, and most of them are being shipped out to drab housing developments away from central Havana.

Tourists owe it to themselves to stray from the main tourists routes, like Calle Obispo in Old Havana, to take a first-hand look how Cubans really live. Only a couple of blocks away, people still have to carry their water in buckets up three flights of stairs, and they live in crowded squalor. “Sure, Cubans dance and sing a lot,” said my guide Jorge, “but look at their eyes. What you see there is not happy.”

7. Spread the news

Cubans have little if any access to uncensored news from the outside world. There are no foreign newspapers, access to the Internet is strictly limited, and Cubans are not allowed, under pain of arrest, into the hotel rooms of foreigners who can watch CNN on television.

But for about the price of what a Cuban doctor earns in a week, I could access Google News for an hour a day at most of the major Havana hotels, and then prepare a synopsis of world news for Marta, Jorge and anyone else I might have contact with during the day. Then we could contrast those stories with what appeared in the weekly Granma, the official Cuban Communist Party organ. (A sample Granma headline: “In case of hurricane, it’s 15 times safer to live in Cuba, than in the U.S.”)


8. Hire local

You can pay an authorized tour guide, who’ll help you spend those Convertible Pesos. Or you can find an out-of-work Cuban, like Jorge, who, for $20 a day, will take you to all the same places and who, as a bonus, will tell you what life is really like in Castro’s Cuba. He may even show you his squalid overcrowded apartment building just off the tourist track, which has no running water.

Be forewarned: What Jorge is doing is illegal. So, as he guides you through Havana’s streets, he will ask you to walk 10 paces behind him. Otherwise, the police may arrest him for illegal fraternizing with foreigners. Second warning: On the day before your return flight home, Jorge will ask if you can leave him your clothes. Modern clothes and shoes are prohibitively expensive in Havana because of the American embargo.

An Assault on Sovereignty--Four Years Later


                                                     Photo by Kim Ives


Four years ago this month, Canada supported a discreditable act of regime-change in Haiti – a chain of events that ended with the removal of a legitimate head of state. It’s a useful incident to remember as politicians and military men put on their most earnest faces to justify Canadians dying for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

Here is what’s happening in that re-configured Haiti today:

• According to the United Nations, half of all the young women in the country’s shantytowns have been raped or sexually assaulted. At least a third of them are under 13.
• Haiti's National Penitentiary has 3,200 inmates. It was built to hold 1,200. Many prisoners are held for months, even years, and only a tiny percentage are ever convicted. Some jails are so crowded that prisoners must sleep standing up or in shifts.
• Some Haitians, mainly pregnant women, are so hungry and under-nourished that they eat “mud pies” made mostly of clay, salt and vegetable shortening.
• Recently, mobs attacked two suspected kidnappers in Port-au-Prince, the capital, and stoned one of them to death. Vigilante justice is not unusual because authorities are powerless to prevent kidnappings. In the first 11 days of February alone, there were 15 abductions.
• Last August, a noted Haitian human rights activist, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, met with a US delegation. After the meeting, he was kidnapped, and nothing has been heard of him since.
• Keeping the alleged “peace” are nearly 9,000 foreign troops and policemen. In the eyes of some critics, they’ve become a permanent fixture. The monthly health-care bill for this UN contingent is greater than the annual health budget for Haiti’s 8.7 million people!
• Meanwhile, Haiti’s most popular politician by far remains in exile thousands of miles away, and Canada, along with other countries, is actively lobbying to keep him there indefinitely, a violation of Haiti’s constitution.

Canada has never revealed its full role in the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The sins of commission (or omission) happened below the radar. Thus, Canada can argue that it is blameless in the continuing deterioration of the Haitian economy. It can point to the aid money it spends on Haiti—more foreign aid, in fact, than any country except Afghanistan. We have police there; we’re helping with the justice system; we’re supporting social programs.

The truth is that Canada helped set the stage for Aristide’s removal, and one can make the case that the social dislocation caused by his departure cannot be fixed until he is back on Haitian soil. Right or wrong, Aristide and the political movement he represents are still at the core of the Haiti’s aspirations. Twice, in 1990 and in 2000, he was elected by overwhelming margins. Twice he was removed from office, and the masses who voted for him were effectively disenfranchised.

It begs the question: How is it that our government can have “constructive engagement” with a never-elected Fidel Castro, but not with a popular leader who respects the ballot box?

Aristide's Last Day

The story of the last Aristide “coup” is worth retelling:

On the morning of February 29, 2004, in a scenario many believe was choreographed by the U.S., France and Canada, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife fled Haiti on a private jet. It was made to look like an abdication: A president running away as the country teetered on the edge of catastrophe.

But it was more than that. In fact, Aristide was told in the middle of the night if he didn’t leave, and right away, Port-au-Prince would be convulsed in a bloodbath. American officials told him that he, his family, and thousands of Haitians were in imminent peril. So in the early morning hours, under armed guard, and quite probably seized by panic, Aristide signed a resignation letter, boarded a waiting jet and was flown to exile in Africa. Canadian Special Forces troops were on duty at the airport, part of what Aristide would later call “an illegal foreign occupation which was ready to drop bodies on the ground.”

I happened to be in Haiti in February, 2004, and I met some of the people who were said to be ready to instigate this “bloodbath.” They were anything but a realistic military threat. In fact, they were a pack of swaggering well-armed cutthroats who had had some success terrorizing villages and killing policemen in the Haitian countryside, and who were slowly approaching the capital. Their leader was Guy Philippe, an ex-policeman who'd been trained in counter-insurgency at the School of the Americas. His deputy was a notorious right-wing killer, Louis-Jodel Chamblain, suddenly thrust into the international limelight. (Rumor had it that the guns and spending money for this ragtag rebel “army” came, circuitously, from the US government.)

The "Opposition"

Complicating matters in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, was a growing “peaceful” opposition to Aristide led by Haiti’s bourgeois elite – the sweatshop owners like Andre Apaid. Apaid was a high-strung colorful character. When reporters came to visit, he would rattle a glass jar on his desk full of machine-gun bullet shells. “Look,” he would say. “These bullets were fired just outside my office window by Aristide’s hired guns.” True or not, it made for great television and served the narrative of a president losing control.

Apaid and his business colleagues—part of an organization called The Group of 184 – hated Aristide. They called him a dangerous hypocrite and demagogue. But what they hated most was Aristide’s determination to double Haiti’s minimum wage, and to resist the privatization of Haitian industries. Simply put, Aristide stood between them, and unlimited plunder. And while Aristide, his back to the wall, was ready to compromise, they resisted all calls for power-sharing.

This convenient convergence of anti-Aristide rebels and robber barons gave Washington (along with Canada and France) the pretext to shoehorn the president out of office. The three governments would have to hold their noses and make common cause with scoundrels. And that’s exactly what happened.

How Much Did He Know?

I visited Aristide in the National Palace 11 days before his overthrow. On the wall hung a portrait of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the father of Haitian independence. Near his desk sat a bust of Robert Kennedy. Both men had died violently. Aristide liked to surround himself with the icons of idealistic struggle. In our interview, he was clearly nervous about what might happen if the paramilitaries—he called them “terrorists” – tried to enter the capital. He didn’t seem to be aware that much larger forces were arrayed against him. In asking for help from his “friends,” including Canada, Aristide believed that a small complement of well-armed peacekeepers, even a few dozen, would be enough to keep the rebels at bay.

But Washington and Ottawa had other plans. With Aristide gone, their formula for “fixing” the Haitian economy would be much easier to implement. And his removal, they thought, would bring calm to the streets of Haiti during a uneasy time.

As we now know, the exact opposite happened. Haiti slipped deeper into chaos. According to the respected British magazine Lancet, in the 18 months that followed Aristide’s expulsion, an estimated 8,000 Haitians were killed in violence—at least half of them by the paramilitaries who leapt in to fill the political vacuum. Aristide’s slum supporters, dismayed at the sudden departure of their leader, also cranked up the violence. It took 9,000 peacekeepers to bring some order to the streets. And they’re still there. Four years later.

From his exile at a university in Pretoria, South Africa, Aristide told writer Naomi Klein that Canada has “blood on its hands” for its part in his overthrow.

Even today, the country we helped “liberate” from Aristide is listed, by Forbes magazine, as one of the most dangerous destinations in the world, along with Somalia and the Congo. Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre calls it a “fake democracy”— a country that serves only the interests of a small bourgeois elite. “Today,” Pierre writes, “we must eat dirt to let the mansions grow . . . Pregnant women eat mud cookies.”

Clearly, something happened on the way to nation-building!

Why did Aristide have to go?

It’s simple, says Peter Hallward, the author of a dense and meticulously researched new book called Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment. Aristide had to go because “the movement he led (Lavalas, the Creole word for ‘flood,’) posed an intolerable threat to Haiti’s comfortable ruling class.”

Haiti’s poor have been raped, plundered, trodden underfoot, exploited, lied to and cheated almost without surcease since 1804 when they defeated Napoleon’s army to become the world’s first black republic. Lavalas, says Hallward, gave Haiti’s poor an historic opportunity to get off their knees. After 200 years, they had finally found a political voice. But that didn’t fit in with Washington’s hemispheric plans.

Canada’s Liberal government, still doing penance for not joining the US military adventure in Iraq, was happy to lend its support. Along with many of the 80,000 Haitians living in Canada, official Ottawa was displeased with Aristide, saw him as corrupt and increasingly dictatorial, and believed he could never reconcile the various levels of Haitian society. (As Hallward points out, Aristide’s so-called “dictatorial” behavior was the result in no small part of an aid embargo, again the work of Washington and Ottawa, that made it near impossible to lift Haiti from the economic trough.) Because of his massive popularity among Haiti’s poor, however, the Canadian and American governments realized there was no legitimate way to remove him.

Five months ago, I submitted Freedom of Information requests to both Foreign Affairs and the Department of Defense in Ottawa, asking: What, and why? What role did Canada play in the planning and the execution of Aristide’s demise? And why would we dirty our hands, and risk alienating millions of Haitians who voted for Aristide time and time again? Ottawa hasn’t offered any answers yet.

In Damming the Flood, Hallward, a British academic, puts February 29, 2004, in stark terms: “The effort to weaken, demoralize and then overthrow Lavalas in the first years of the twenty-first century was perhaps the most successful exercise of neo-imperial sabotage since the toppling of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1990.”

Strong language. Little wonder the Canadian government would rather the whole sorry affair be forgotten. But 8.7 million Haitians deserve better. Theirs is a history of more than 30 successive coups d’etat over two centuries. Aristide and Lavalas broke the depressing pattern, and opened the door to real representative government.

They, the Haitian people’s voice, deserve a chance to govern.

"Tears Flow Within"


       Photo By: James Nachtway 


Last spring, after a five-week visit to Rwanda, I produced two television news pieces for the CBC. Together, the stories challenged the prevailing view about healing and reconciliation in that Central African country, 13 years after the genocide. 
(You can find my documentary Rwanda: Out of the Darkness here.)
The stories were anecdotal. They featured two Tutsi women and one Tutsi man who survived the slaughter, and one Hutu man who had killed a dozen people with a machete, and was now free. I used their stories as a frame for my thesis:  that Rwanda was far, far away from healing, despite the platitudes of the government. My script said that for the victims I had met (and by extension, for all the survivors of the genocide), the memory of the slaughter was still too fresh to expect them to forgive the people who had carried out the killings.  
This thesis flew in the face of official orthodoxy, but the final edited stories did not quote a single high government official. In fact, there was only one pro-government voice: A low-level village-level functionary who echoed the official line on ethnicity in Rwanda, namely, that henceforth, there were "no more Hutus, no more Tutsis, no more Twas (Rwanda's third ethnic group)" in the country.
I realized, after the stories aired, that my journalism could be viewed as being unbalanced, unsupported, polemical. Where were the voices of the Rwandans who insist that they have indeed forgiven their tormentors? Where were the stories of the Rwandans who were hunter and hunted in 1994, but who in 2007 had reconciled, and now live as neighbors?
Had I not crossed the ethical line by focusing on the negative? Indeed, some Rwandan officials could even argue that I had left myself open to criminal prosecution, under Rwandan laws against “negationism” and “divisionism.”
On the surface, these criticisms are valid. But they fail to take into account the extraordinary realities on the ground in Rwanda, and the obstacles that are placed in the way of a Western reporter trying to understand the social dynamics.  I don’t say this lightly: If ever there was a story that required the application of “situation ethics” in reporting, that was it.

The Problem of Forgiveness

The essential reality of Rwanda, I believe, is obscured behind a carefully calibrated campaign based on the mantra of reconciliation and forgiveness. Survivors are expected to put the past behind them, to “make peace” with the confessed killers, even when the killers hide behind moral alibis (i.e. they were “provoked” into committing genocide by ghostly voices.)
To work effectively in Rwanda, you need special strategies, special filters. My first concern, when speaking to survivors of the genocide, was: How open will they be with a Western journalist? How honestly will they respond to my questions? In my preliminary research (while preparing for my trip, I reviewed dozens of academic papers, read scores of newspaper articles, and several books dealing with reconciliation and forgiveness) I came across a poignant Rwandan expression about how “tears flow within.” In Rwandan culture, one survives sorrow if one has a certain inner strength. Grief is often internalized, and not openly expressed, so it is traditionally understood that one can help someone by genuinely listening to his or her suffering.
In Rwanda, I met a European academic who was doing field research on the social effects of the genocide. She told me, on deep background (since she wanted to protect her sources), that Rwandans who lived through the trauma of the genocide spoke about their experiences with two different voices. The external, public voice said, “I forgive.” But the deeper voice, the soul’s voice, often expressed much more negative emotions. (My source insisted I not use her name, or even the town where she was working, lest somebody identify the people she was studying. There would be reprisals, she said.)
I spoke to students at the National University of Rwanda. They struggled with the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation. One young man, whose family was wiped out in the slaughter, said he understood why the government wanted Rwandans to forgive. But he himself could not. Why? Because he had never learned who killed his family. Until he looked the murderers in the eye, he could not even think about forgiveness.  Nor could be ever marry a Hutu woman, he said through clenched teeth. The killing, for him, had created an impassable ethnic divide.
A Rwandan psychologist told me the government was wrong when it urged genocide survivors to forgive before they were ready to do so: Forgiveness had to come in its own time, on its own terms, without compulsion.
At the same time, academics are casting a critical eye on the Kagame government's policy of de-ethnicization. Writes Andrea Purdekova of Oxford University: "Today, the Rwandan government tries to impose co-existence by pretending that there
is no reason not to coexist. The government tries to attract to the pole of unity by prescribing its own vision of it and by forbidding anything that runs against. It thus creates a ‘false togetherness’ by swamping individuality and discouraging dissent." (January 2008)

Words Behind Words

All of this information came into play when I met survivors, and turned on the camera. It cast a special light on their answers, and how I framed these answers in my script. It informed my reaction when one of my interview subjects, Pelagia, told me, with downcast eyes and a halting voice, that she had forgiven a notorious killer, Eric, who was now her neighbor. “We are like brother and sister,” she told me. But her demeanor projected an altogether different message; she seemed perplexed, afraid. I was convinced she was saying the very things that local officials wanted her to say. It was Rwanda’s “culture of obedience” prompting her public voice.
Was it presumptuous or paternalistic of me to characterize her answer this way in my script? I don’t think so. A reporter in the field, especially in a post-conflict zone, must be more than a stenographer. It’s our job to give context, to paint the grey zones, to listen and observe with our hearts and a quality of discernment. Had I just recounted the words verbatim, I felt it would have been a lie. Context is the deep tissue of journalism.
Another possible criticism of my journalism in Rwanda is that I did not spend enough time getting the official version of things. I didn’t interview the president. I didn’t interview the official survivors’ organization. I made no effort to counterbalance the negative things I was hearing from survivors.
This is true. And intentional. The government’s position is well known, and didn’t need me to amplify it. Kagame’s information machine (some critics would call it a propaganda machine) is very effective. He controls the print and broadcast media. When the New Times newspaper published a photograph of Kagame that he found unflattering, the reporter was summarily fired, and the staff put on notice. The relationship between the government and the newspaper, they were told, would be like “husband and wife”. An editor who published an article highly critical of “Tutsi justice” was jailed for a year. Reporters critical of the government have been badly beaten.

News and Guilt

Meanwhile, his government’s warm and fuzzy message of reconciliation between Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus has gotten wide international press, in a West still burdened by guilt for its indifference to the 1994 genocide when it was happening. Well hidden behind Rwanda’s new, modern image, are some harsh realities: Overcrowded prisons, a limping economy that cannot help many of the 300,000 genocide survivors, a Hutu majority that is woefully under-represented in government, and lingering distrust between the two dominant groups.
Against this backdrop, how would I apportion the few minutes of air time the CBC was giving me? What would stay? Who would I leave out? In a choice between the official with his polished message, and the broken widow struggling to keep a family alive on $30 a month, it was an easy call. There wasn’t room for both. My guiding principle in difficult parts of the world has always been this: To follow the humanity, to value the Anecdote over the Big Picture.
And it’s not only a journalist’s social sensitivity that leads me to this principle. It’s also practical. The Big Picture stories, the ones that carry the voice of authority alongside that of the victims, are often complex and difficult to verify. The small stories, the tightly focused human narratives, are far more reliable guides to the truth.
Is this classic “balanced” journalism as we know it? Perhaps not. But I believe that in the final analysis, it is just as valid. Because it relies on the journalist’s most important skills: discernment, integrity . . . and the ability to verify from the gut.

 NOTE: The Rwandan proverb is: "les larmes coulent dans le ventre" which translates literally to "tears flow in the belly".
I found this in an academic paper written by Deogratias Bagilishya, a psychologist at the Transcultural Psychiatry Clinic of the Montreal Children's Hospital. The paper is personal testimony from a Rwandan father whose son was killed in the Rwandan genocide and is titled "Mourning and Recovery from Trauma: In Rwanda, Tears Flow Within."