Rwanda | Preview #2 for hands holding the line...
Raphaël’s hand rests quietly on the arm of a chair. Nothing remarkable in the gesture, until you notice the air in the room. Jeanne is speaking. Emmanuel, of the Rwanda Network of People Living with HIV (RRP+), listens attentively to her testimony in Kinyarwanda. My attention splits between the anguish on Jeanne’s face and the video feed squared on her hands. I am left with only hints of meaning and emotion, yet tears still well up.
Her words circle back to 1994: to violence that stripped her of choice, to infection forced upon her, to a life rebuilt around medication, memory, and the slow, deliberate work of survival.
In Rwanda, these stories live not only in archives, monuments, or memorials but in rooms like this. Jeanne tells of weapons of war, of the virus carried with them, of the long shadow cast across her years. And yet, her story does not end in that shadow. It turns outward—toward younger women she counsels, neighbors she visits, and the small acts of giving back that tether her to life now.
The photo is not of Jeanne. It is of Raphaël, seated beside her at the Association of Widows of the Genocide (AVEGA). His hand, relaxed, carries a weight too: the act of bearing witness. In silence, in presence, in choosing to sit with another’s testimony, he embodies a different kind of frontline.
Rwanda’s HIV response is often described through protocols, viral load suppression rates, and streamlined systems. But beneath the charts are human textures: hands at rest, voices breaking, stories of violation, resilience, and futures once thought unimaginable.
What lingers is the interplay between past and present, between wounds carried and futures shaped. The hand in the frame may appear still, but the echoes around it tell us otherwise.
About this article:
- Learn more about the work of local organizations mentioned in this article.
- Pseudonyms are used for individuals who requested anonymity.
- Part of the hands series: Previews of the people and themes at the center of the response to HIV.
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