July 12, 2009 -- Part I

As we trod the path to the church, I knew it would be difficult. The day was hot, just as it would have been during the genocide, and the trees offered shade to us after a long day of walking around Kibuye. I had known that we would be travelling there today, but that doesn’t mean I was prepared for the vast shades of emotion that washed through my body.

A sign shone like a beacon, complete with bright blue paint, commemorating the massacre of 1994. We had seen the church this morning, as we awoke at dawn to watch the sunrise. We walked all of two hundred yards to the church, and in the back of my mind, I wondered.

I walked to the front of the church, where a mass grave had been dug. There was a window from a smaller building that looked out upon this garden on concrete, and through the window stared at least twenty-five empty skulls. Human skulls. The skulls of the victims of the massacre committed at this church. I stared in silence, unable to make a sound as the voices of singing and laughing children filled my ears from across the way. The same sounds many of these people had made before the Interahamwe raped the country and entered the church.

We entered from the back of the church, and found complete emptiness. The stained glass shone with the light of the setting sun, and our footsteps echoed through the lines of bench upon bench. Thousands of people we slaughtered here. Thousands. Herded in like cattle. Thinking they were safe under the eyes of God. Thousands. Murdered. Massacred. Killed. Here. And there was nowhere to hide. Even if it were one person trying to hide in the empty church, it would have been impossible. It’s incredibly open and empty, but for the hundreds of benches that on Sundays—today—are completely filled with bodies.

Beautiful, devout, hardworking, terrified mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandmothers, brothers died here while praying for forgiveness and crying for a way out. Under the eyes of God. “Please, Father, let me not be Tutsi anymore,” came the plea of a little boy. “I promise I’ll be good.”

There are hundreds of churches like this in Rwanda, each with its own, distinctive past, and each filled with hundreds or thousands of human beings, beings who deserved life, freedom, and the right to feel safe in their own church and home. Hundreds of these churches existed, herding people in like cattle only to leave one or two survivors, hiding under the corpses of their mother for days, wondering if they were alive or dead. Breathing in the stench of rotting flesh. Flesh that was left in a building under ninety-three degree weather for months upon end.

And still people attend this church. Hundreds, if not thousands. How they found it in their hearts to forgive their brother’s murderer, found it in their hearts to forgive their failed God, I will never understand. These people are much stronger than I could ever even pretend to be.

We can not look away. We can not turn our heads and wait for another race of people to be eradicated. As I type this, the Sudanese government believes it can do what Rwanda did not. What Armenia, Bosnia, the Holocaust, and the United States could not do. They believe they can rid the world of the Fur, Massalit, and Zagahwa peoples. And again the international community looks away. Incomprehensible.

I’m not religious, but I said a prayer. I said several.

Amen.