Cambodia, Armenia, Darfur, Sudan, Rwanda...
This land of a thousand hills is also the land of a thousand skulls. This weekend, I went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial and then to two churches outside of the city. One church where 10,000 were murdered mostly with machetes and another church where 5,000 were murdered. The two churches are now home to the skulls, bones, and grave for over 60,000 bodies, inhumanely discarded in April 1994.
I am not ready to write about my experience in these places, and this blog will not be the appropriate outlet for me to share my thoughts and emotions.
There is a lot to say.
There are a lot of questions.
One thing is clear: what happened in 1994 is REAL.
And it is still very much a large part of every day life here.
As I am coming up on less than three weeks until my return to the United States, I ask you kindly to have graciousness with me, as I cope with the traumatic things that I have heard and witnessed, that cannot be shared on this page.
My convictions are strong that the only way to prevent such mass atrocities of gross human violence is to educate ourselves and to shamelessly inform others. Therefore, if you want to know about what I saw at the churches, what I have seen here in relation to this topic, and the questions I am wrestling with, please email me and I am happy to share with you.
"To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."
-Elie Weisel, author of Night in the forward to his book
To say "never forget" is clearly not enough. We must not only remember, but we must find a solution that erodes the political barriers, that solves the questions of limited resources, that eliminates apathy for the plight of someone living on a different continent and deeply commit ourselves to ensuring that our children's generations will not live through such grusome hatred for the sake of hatred.
How many lives will such hatred mercilessly take?
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