Grace Abounds: Face-to-Face with Genocide

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.