An Ordinary Man
Jun. 5, 2007

"Between April 6, when the plane of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a missile, and July 4, when the Tutsi rebel army captured the capital of Kigali, approximately eight hundred thousand Rwandans were slaughtered. This is a number that cannot be grasped with the rational mind. It is like trying -- all at once-- to understand that the earth is surrounded by billions of balls of gas just like our sun across a vast blackness. You cannot understand the magnitude. Just try! Eight hundred thousand lives snuffed out in one hundred days. That's eight thousand lives a day. More than five lives per minute. Each one of those lives was like a little world in itself. Some person who laughed and cried and ate and thought and felt and hurt just like any other person, just like you and me. A mother's child, every one irreplaceable.

 

And the way they died ... I can't bear to think about it for long. Many went slowly from slash wounds, watching their own blood gather in pools in the dirt, perhaps looking at their own severed limbs, oftentimes with the screams of their parents or their children or their husbands in their ears. Their bodies were cast aside like garbage, left to rot in the sun, shoveled into mass graves with bulldozers when it was all over. It was not the largest genocide in the history of the world, but it was the fastest and most efficient.

 

At the end, the best you can say is that my hotel saved about four hours' worth of people. Take four hours away from one hundred days and you have an idea of just how little I was able to accomplish against the grand design." 

Required reading.

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I just finished reading a biography of a women who survived the genocide in Rawanda. It is an amazing story.....really unbelieveable what man can do to one another. I cannot remember how to spell her name and I returned the book to the library. If you are interested I can find out for you.

a-mothersmusings@blogspot.com

Sandi - 11:28 PM - Jun. 7, 2007

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thanks for the book review...

I put in on my wishlist. I have been burdened about the Rwandan people for sometime. Our church has been brewing and selling Rwandan coffee through A Land of a Thousand Hills, a ministry that is trying to restore their economy.
bill from http://www.provocativechurch.blogspot.com

Anonymous - 5:06 PM - Jun. 8, 2007

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