Psalm 22

Salutations readers.

This week sure has gone by fast. With less than a month until my return, there are some things that I can finally start looking forward to, including apples, laundry machines and, of course, seeing all you wonderful people again. Without a doubt, though, I will miss Rwanda as well, especially now that I am starting to feel as if Aaron's and my work at the FHI/R office is having a true impact. We are not just gopher interns but are actually working at project and program development. The first project we are working on is buying furniture for the regional office... okay, so that's not the best example.


We are doing that, but it is by far our "back-burner" project. The bulk of our time is currently being spent brainstorming and developing a new idea for child sponsorship, E-sponsorship. It will be sponsorship entirely based online, hopefully providing many more options and features that connect you, the sponsor, to your sponsored child, family or community, including periodic videos of your sponsored individual or group and their village. Right now we are working on marketing strategies for university students and developing a framework for the program. Even using videos as a primary form of media, we still think we will be able provide more support for the sponsor for less money. I will refrain from sharing many of the exciting features, as I have in past blogs, but look forward to it.

Additionally, Aaron and I drafted a concept paper for an enormous potential program in the resettlement camp we visited some weeks ago, which will take a holistic approach to development, hoping to improve all aspects of life within the community for at least a three year period. As some may remember, we turned this into a Swiss organization for funding. Well, they have responded and have promised a good amount, but we still to find some other funding (if anyone's interested). In other news, we stopped by the resettlement camp's district office Tuesday, while visiting genocide memorials, to pick up some of their project proposals, so that our program does not overlap. However, the two men we spoke to gave us the impression that no governement projects were going to be done anytime soon. It was clear that they knew it was a emergency problem, but they simply had not prioritized the resources to manage it properly. I found this frustrating, but their desperation made them very inviting of our program. By the time Aaron and I leave, we will hopefully have "got the ball rolling" enough where progress continues. As far as I can tell, we push paper more than anyone else.

Other interns are keeping busy too. Monday, Aaron and I went with Karen to her work with Peacebuilding Healing And Reconciliation Programme (PHARP). There, she teaches English. We assisted, but were nearly worthless. The most we could was help the students, mostly women ranging between 18 and 30, distinguish the words "kitchen" and "chicken" or "fourteen" and "forty." While we were there though, we gave the trainees some fabrics we purchased and got measured. Hopefully in a few weeks I will have a shirt and hat while Aaron elected to get a full suit. He's gonna look ridiculous.

As I mentioned earlier, a few of us took Tuesday off to visit two genocide memorials about an hour away from Kigali, and I would like to talk about them. However, I will put a disclaimer here and warn people that I may be graphic, and therefore, if you do not wished to be upset, please do not read on. And for those of you who just skim these blogs:
THE REMAINDER OF THE BLOG IS ABOUT VISITING GENOCIDE MEMORIALS.
Sorry if some of you interpret these warnings as unnecessary, but I much rather be descriptive and simplify it all.

The first site we visited was a rural church none as Ntarama, currently the burial grounds for an estimated 5,000 Rwandan Tutsis. Along with their common graves, there was a stone wall with the names of the 260 victims engraved on it; those were the only ones they could identify. This is because women and children did not have identification on them, and the tragedy's ten survivors could only identify so many bodies. Inside the old church, now protected with a raised metallic roof, was the heart of the memorial. A warehouse shelf was a showcase for piles of bones, including a spread of skulls, some of which were shattered or cracked. The victim's clothes, many of them stained with blood, hung from the walls and rafters. On the other end of the church, were the material objects collected from the site: cups, papers, objects of faith... etc. At first, the sight all of this creeped me out, to be honest, but when I began to imagine the final minutes for those hundreds of skulls, I became quite emotional.


The second site was a Catholic church and is now a memorial for some 10,000 victims. Apparently, many of the Rwandans had been hiding for an entire week before the assault. Signs of struggle were still visible: the steel doors of the church were bent and broken, the handle of door had been chopped away were people once hid inside. I learned that it is quite unsettling to realize that the blood-stained floor beneath your feet was where some child or desperate mother met their gruesome end. We were told that because of the locked doors, the invaders threw grenades into the church, sending shards of debris in every direction. I could see that it had chipped the stone walls of the church and riddled its metal ceiling with holes, so to think of what it did to the people was torturous. Going around to the back of the church, we climbed down into the common graves, which resembled catacombs as oppose to piles of bodies. Surrounded by purple-wrapped coffins, I solemnly contemplated their last horrific minutes.


During the genocide, people would often retreat to the churches, because in past conflicts, churches had been safe from fighting. No matter the social tension at hand, both Hutus and Tutsis respected and protected the church and those in it. This is why in 1994, people made the church their refuge, unknowingly making the jobs of their murderers simple. These churches literally became slaughtering grounds for villages, the thought of which still makes me tremble. Even now, when I think about it, I can not help but question God's love. But it was corrupt people, not God, who chose to lead the genocide and invade the churches of Rwanda. It was pressured people, abusing their free-will, that instigated the mass murders. And honestly, if I was Hutu in 1994, living in village where tensions were extreme, I probably would have committed the same crime. We are a broken creation, and it is in our nature to sin. I have no set conclusion for this struggle raging on in my head, which is filled with worse images that I refuse to discuss here, but I feel that good will come out of it, and so I wrote about it here.

One last memorial to share. On our way to Kibuye, we stopped at a school that had a large stone memorial at back. Its story was this. When the murders came into the school to kill the Tutsis, they started by separating the school children by their nationality. But the majority of the Hutus refused to separate, claiming loyalty to their Tutsi friends. Years later, the few survivors of that Hutu/Tutsi child massacre have developed a group that teaches unity and friendship to the entire school district, in honor of their friends who sacraficed themselves for the sake of love. I told him, choked up, that it was one of the beautiful stories I had ever heard. In that classroom, and in those churches, I do believe that God was there, sparing his children from death and welcoming them into his eternal and painless kingdom.

By the way, read Psalm 22 if you have the time. Its the last thing Jesus says on the cross in Matthew and Mark. Well, he only says the first line, but everyone there knew he meant the whole thing. God bless.