It’s been almost five years since I visited Africa. I was there around the time of the 20th commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It remains a filthy stain on the history of our world. It was a time when voices were crying out but the world refused to listen.
While I was in Rwanda I met many people who are still suffering the effects of the events that turned such a beautiful land into a place of unspeakable horror.
While the killing had already been going on for some time, the 100 days of Genocide against the Tutsi began on the 7th of April 1994, ending on the 15th of July.
The world is currently remembering what happened in Rwanda and commemorating 25 years since the Genocide against the Tutsi.
In 100 days more than 1 million people were murdered.
But the genocidaires did not kill a million people
They killed one, then another, then another….
day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute.
Every minute of the day, someone, somewhere was being murdered, screaming for mercy.
Receiving none.
And the killing went on and on and on
10,000 each day,
400 each hour,
7 each minute.
My mind keeps returning to the Rwandan Genocide Memorial I visited in the hills outside Kigali. There are many thousands of people buried beneath the church and
I walked into the church and saw some of the belongings left behind by victims of the genocide including the blood-stained clothing they were wearing when the murderers took their lives.
I then walked down steps into the area below the church where I was surrounded by coffins stacked five or six high.
The church (pictured above) has become a permanent memorial and while everything I saw made the genocide very real, it became very personal when I met someone who lost most of their family in that building.
When the trip to Rwanda was planned I knew that I’d meet people who still carried the emotional scars of the genocide, but meeting a woman my own age who carries very obvious physical scars gave me a glimpse of what some people faced twenty years ago.
Even before she was introduced to us we knew that she had suffered. She carries a very long, deep scar down the left side of her face with other deep marks to the right side of her face and the back of her head. She now only has sight in her left eye.
Esther (not her real name) was a wife and mother. She had five children, the youngest just a baby.
Life as Esther knew it instantly disappeared on the 15th of April 1994.
Just over a week after the genocide began, thousands of locals sought refuge in their church, a place that should have been a safe haven. That only made their murder easier when the killers arrived and threw grenades into the assembled crowds.
Esther’s husband and three of her children died that day. She was injured and dazed lying among the dead. It wasn’t until the 18th of April that she finally made it out of the church building. She’d been left for dead but somehow survived.
That was just the start of her horror.
After crawling out of the church Esther found an empty home where she went to hide. The genociders returned and killed her other children in front of her in ways too graphic to describe here.
They then took their machetes to her and again left her for dead. Although she was suffering horrific injuries she survived and found another hiding place.
Some days later more killers arrived. This time it was people she knew. People from her own area.
The next time her hiding place was discovered was in June. She was barely alive and weighed only 19 kilograms. She couldn’t walk because she had been hiding in a cramped position for so long.
Thankfully this time it was members of the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), the group which was seeking to halt the genocide. They rescued Esther and took her to
Esther told her story with far more detail and while it was hard for us to hear her story, it was obvious that remembering the details was even harder for her.
Another place I visited in Rwanda was the Kigali Genocide Memorial. It tells the story of genocide in Rwanda as well as other genocides through history. If you’d like to know more about what happened over those 100 days in 1994 you can visit the website for the Kigali Memorial Centre.
The genocide resulted in the deaths of over a million people.
But death was not its only outcome.
Tens of thousands of people had been tortured, mutilated and raped; tens of thousands more suffered machete cuts, bullet wounds, infection
There was rampant lawlessness, looting
There were over 300,000 orphans and over 85,000 children who were heads of their household, with younger siblings and/or relatives.
There were thousands of widows. Many had been the victims of rape and sexual abuse or had seen their own children murdered.
Thankfully Compassion was working in Rwanda before the genocide and continues working there.
In fact, it was just after the genocide that the church where Esther’s family was killed called on Compassion for help. They were there within a few short months, ready to walk the the journey of recovery with local people.
Following the Genocide against the Tutsi Esther had another child, a daughter. When we met Esther, her daughter was in her final years of sponsorship with Compassion.
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