Genocide

I need to apologize for how long it has been since my last update. I know there are many people who want to know what's going on in my life so I should be updating more often. I haven't written partly because I have been busy with classes but also because I haven't known how to write about a lot of what has been going on. More specifically, a huge part of all that I've been learning and thinking about has to do with the genocide and I just don't know what to write about it. I think I am ready to try though. I want to tell about two genocide memorials we visited. Both were at churches, where people went fourteen years ago to seek refuge from the mass killings that were happening all across the country. They went there thinking it was the only place they could be safe. Even in a church though, there was no refuge.

The first church we visited is called Nyamara. I had fallen asleep on the ride there and woke up groggily to some children running alongside our van yelling and waving as we arrived. We all smiled and waved at them. We climbed out of the van and sauntered towards the church building. We had been told that at this church 3,000 people were killed. I definitely was not prepared for what I was about to see.

My first sight as we walked into the church was skulls--hundreds and hundreds of human skulls lined up on shelves that went all the way up to the ceiling. Some of them were so tiny, the remnants of small children who were killed mercilessly along with their innocent parents. Many of the skulls had holes pierced at the temple or back of the head, likely deadly machete blows from their murderers.

After the initial shock of seeing the skulls of thousands of murdered people, I looked around the rest of what was once a sanctuary. The pews were still there and untouched. In a few places in the walls, there were huge holes from grenades. The murderers and victims alike were from the Nyamara community. They were neighbors, some friends even. They had once lived, worked, and worshiped alongside one another. But the labels of Hutu and Tutsi became lines of division and of hatred, and Hutus murdered their Tutsi neighbors. They had entered the church with machetes and clubs to beat and hack thousands of people to death. Then to finish them off, they threw some grenades into the sanctuary.

The walls were covered with the clothing of the victims. There was nothing separating us from the realness of what we were seeing. There were no glass encasings, no plastic sheets with facts written on them. We could walk up to the walls and touch the bloody, decomposing clothes of the people killed there. We could smell everything--the thick, old smell of blood and dirt. At the front of the sanctuary were shelves of the people's belongings. Books, blankets, and shoes were separated and thrown into heaps of similar items. I stood and stared at all the shoes for a while. There were so many of them--sneakers and converse and heels and flats. I saw a little girl's black buckled dress shoe strewn across the shelf with hundreds of others. A little girl who could fit that shoe was probably about six years old. Six years old and murdered because she bore the ethnic label of Tutsi.

The lady running the memorial told us about how many of the killers still live right in the community. Many of them were never convicted and many of them have already served their jail time and have been released. We asked if they ever visited the memorial. She said they did not. As we got back into the van, the same children we saw upon entering ran from their homes to wave at us again. This time some of their parents came to the road too. I couldn't help but wonder where they had been fourteen years ago. What part did they play? And what did those kids know about the genocide? What did their parents teach them about it?

We drove right from there to Nyamata, another church. We were told that this area was one of the worst areas for the genocide. Over 10,000 people were killed. Still today they are finding the remains of people who were murdered and left on the side of the road, in a ditch, or in a pit latrine. In the church, victims' clothes were everywhere. They were piled two feet high on every pew and two feet high on the floors along the walls. Sweaters, coats, jeans, skirts, blankets, shoes, and tee shirts were all thrown together and heaped around the room. Some of them were covered in blood and again, the smell was overwhelming. Looking at all the clothes I learned from the number or coats and blankets that it must have been a cold April that the genocide happened during.

I felt so overwhelmed by the death around me. Not just death though, but innocent death caused by the hatred of humanity. How could one group of people dehumanize another group of people to the point that they could think it their duty to exterminate them? How could anyone have such a sense of superiority over another human being? How, when we are all God's children, beautifully made in His image, can we deny that beauty in a group of people? As I tried to take everything in, I leaned up against a column in the sanctuary. I pressed my cheek up against the cold stone and wondered who, fourteen years ago, huddled up against that same column as the killers barged into the church yelling and waving their machetes. Was it a mother holding her children against her, trying to shelter them? Was it an old man terrified of what had come of his community? Was it a little boy filled with dreams of the future? I can only imagine the terror the people must have felt when they realized death was upon them.

Learning about the genocide is a lot to take in. I don't understand how humanity is capable of such evil, because I believe we are all essentially the same. We are learning a lot about the hatred and evil of humanity but we are also learning about reconciliation and hope. I would write about those things but this entry is getting really long. So I will save that for another day. Maybe I shouldn't leave you with only dark thoughts and stories, but the Rwandan genocide was undeniably a very dark time, surely one of the darkest points in our human story.