1994

I'm writing this a few days late because I needed time to think... I still need time to think. As much as I have read, heard, seen and felt about the Rwandan genocide, it is something I don't think I will ever be able to come to terms with. I can't imagine how those that lived through it can.

The week I spent in Rwanda I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened. The scale of the killings was such that everyone in the tiny country would have been impacted in some way by the genocide: either knowing or being perpetrators, victims, or both. Driving through Rwanda there are signs every few minutes to mark massacres, constant reminders that the beautiful landscape was recently scarred by human slaughter.



On the last day I was in Rwanda, Abby and I went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial. There were displays showing events leading up to the genocide, the genocide itself, and how the country is trying to rebuild. Almost a million people killed by machete in a couple of months is something that is really difficult to comprehend. The numbers are so large and the violence so extreme that the people victimised become unreal to us and the perpetrators inhuman. The memorial did an amazingly good job of showing that the victims were people. Video clips around the memorial of survivors describing friends and family that were killed made the numbers seem real.

For me, the hardest section of the memorial were the quiet rooms on the top floor. Poster sized pictures of children were hung from the ceiling with a plaque describing the child below it. Name. Age. Favourite foods. Disposition. How they were killed.

There's nothing we can do now about the Rwandan genocide. There is something you can do about Darfur.