How do
you put into words something you do not fully understand or comprehend
yourself? What I am about to write is an experience that I don’t know if I will
be able to ever fully grasp and therefore the words that I use will never be
able to fully capture the reality and emotional stirring that this experience
caused. I write this partially for you to read but also in an attempt to
unravel the many thoughts and feelings that are swimming inside my soul. I pray
that through reading this you come to catch a glimpse of the evil that is
within every human heart and the capacity and capability we have for violence
as well as our desperate need for a transformative power to work in our hearts
to subdue and rid us of said darkness. I ask that you read this with an open
heart and allow the words and pictures to move you and pierce you and allow God
to open your eyes to the truth of what really happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Very
early in my time here I have had the opportunity to go to the memorial in
Kigali, Rwanda that memorialized and discussed the Genocide of 94. It was a
beautiful building and the memorial was very informative but it was nothing
compared to what I was to see in a place called Nyamaba. I had heard about a
memorial that housed the skulls of the victims and had heard my mentor Pastor
Bohanon talk about taking people there quite frequently. I called him up this
morning and asked him if He would take me and he agreed. So we start heading
out of the city. We drive for about 40 minutes through a beautiful country and
as we drive he tells me some of the things that happened in the village where
we were headed. We come to a huge opening in between the hills that cover
Rwanda. It’s a swamp but not like the swamp’s we think of, rather it is just
wetlands with tall grass and a few trees scattered throughout. Pastor Bohanon
tells me that during the Genocide the Tutsi population would hide out within
the swamp as Hutu soldiers would shoot down on them from the hills surrounding.
He also told me that the village we were going to had been a somewhat of a
banishment zone for the Tutsi population during the 1960’s. This land was supposed
to be the worst land covered with flies and venomous snakes and the Hutu government
concluded that if the Tutsis were sent there the environment would kill them. The
opposite happened. The Tutsis thrived and made the ground fertile. When the
genocide began Hutu’s immediately started heading for Nyamaba knowing the vast
number of Tutsis they would find.
As we
continue driving Pastor Bohanon turns off onto a small dirt road and up to a
church. From the outside there would be nothing to really identify this building
as different from those surrounding it. It was a beautiful building with a
nicely kept landscape around it but as we walked the path up to the entrance a
different site started to emerge. The iron gate door that was used as to keep
thieves out at night had a hole blown into it and as soon as we walked into the
church horror and reality sank in. The church seemed to be just one big sanctuary
and filling it were stacks upon stacks of clothes. Clothes of the deceased,
those who had been killed by their fellow countrymen. Thousands and thousands
of clothes placed upon benches. It is something that must be seen to truly
believe. Knowing that every piece of clothing belonged to a son, daughter,
mother, brother, father, sister, people whose only crime was being Tutsi.
People who were shot, hacked, stabbed, clubbed, mutilated, raped, tortured, and
ultimately killed. The walls and pillars were riddled with holes from the
machine guns. The tin roof has speckled light coming through it from where grenade
shrapnel and bullet fragment had gone through. And there in the middle of the
room sat a casket housing the bones of three people. One 15, one 12, and the
third 2. Underneath the church was a glass case with around 50 skulls and femur
bones and another casket. The story behind the woman lying under my feet was
brutal. She was a Tutsi woman who had rejected the advances of a Hutu man and
instead married a Tutsi. They had 3 children, one of which was a newborn at the
time of the genocide. The mass killing started and the rejected Hutu found this
woman and drove a stake through her vagina and exiting through her mouth,
impaling her. He then took the woman’s baby, placed it on her chest and drove a
spear through them both, forever joining the two together.
At this
point tears are already rolling down my face and I am having to conjure up
everything within me to stay composed. We exit the building and I think that
the tour is done but there was an even greater horror waiting for me in the
back. Pastor Bohanon leads me to the back area and there, beneath a tin
overhand sit two mass grave sites. Now Kigali had mass graves as well but the difference
between Kigali and this one was that in Nyamaba, one is able to go down into
them. Pastor Bohanon instructed me to go down into them while he waited outside
(he has been there many times already, leading groups that come to Rwanda). I slowly
and hesitantly walked down the concrete steps. Already I could see a few
caskets on shelves directly in front of me but that was just the beginning. As
my foot touched the final step I had a choice to either go left or right but it
did not matter which way I chose for on both sides of me were walkways that
extended 15-20 feet and were only about 3 foot wide with a ceiling height of
about 10 feet. On both sides of the walkway were shelves, not filled with
caskets as the ones that had greeted me, but rather skulls and femur bones. There
were three compartments, one every 5-7 feet down the walkway and each compartment
had 5 shelves, one for every two feet and they were FILLED. The shelves
extended so far back that it took a flashlight to see the end. I counted one
shelf and found that the skulls went 10 deep and 12 across…..120 skulls per
shelf and over half of the 60 shelves were skulls. An estimated 3600 skulls of
the dead and they were not behind glass cases but rather right there, no
barrier, nothing between the skull and me. It felt like the air had been sucked
out of the room as I fought to keep it together… That is until I saw the small
one. Right there in front of my face was a skull no bigger than my fist,
smaller than the size of my 2 ½ year old nephews head. Tears started falling as
reality set in. These were no longer statistics, no longer just numerical figures
in a book, they were real human beings, people. People who had hopes, dreams,
aspirations. People who had loved and lost, who had emotions and experienced
life. People who had for years prior walked and lived beside their would-be killers.
Now that I think about it I realize that what I saw was only 3600, 3600 of
800,000. So many in fact that people are still uncovering mass graves 19 years
later. The number cannot be fathomed nor imagined and for good reason. I
suspect that if the mind could bring that many skulls together in one thought,
the magnitude would be over-bearing and would break the sub-conscious by mere
horror alone.
I sit
here now, a mere 3 hours removed from seeing something that will have forever
changed my life. Many of my blogs have meanings, morals to the story, but this
one is different. I do not find myself resolved, having finally answered one of
life’s big questions, having learned some life-lesson, but instead find myself
with more questions. How could human beings commit such crimes? What would
cause a man to go out and kill his neighbor, someone he would have lived next
to for as long as he could remember, someone who he very likely played with as
a boy? How could the world community sit by and watch for THREE MONTHS, 100
days as a country descended into the very depths of hell and chaos and destroy itself?
There is a quote that says “the only thing necessary for the perpetration of
evil is for good men to sit back and do nothing.” I believe that the U.S. is
just at fault for the atrocities committed in Rwanda between April and July
1994, as is the international community at large. The theme here in Rwanda ever
since the genocide has been Never Again, and I think it is time for the
International community to echo that sentiment. We failed in Rwanda, we failed
in Darfur, and now we are again failing in Syria. I do not have the answer but
I do know that the killing must end. So I honestly am at a loss about how to
end this so in the words of Forrest Gump “I guess that’s all I got to say about
that”.
PS most of the pictures are not from me but rather off google
images. I was not able to take pictures within the grounds.
The Swamp
The Mass Graves
This one was no bigger than my fist
