4 days in Rwanda

Hello again,

We've spent several emotional days here in the land of the mille collines (thousand hills). Observing the beauty of this verdant, lush, and peaceful countryside makes the atrocities of the 1994 genocide of Tutsi people by their Hutu neighbors, friends, and sometimes relatives, seem unimaginable. In just 100 days, 1 million people - including children and babies, as well as people of all ages - were tortured, bludgeoned, shot, or hacked to death. Thousands of women were raped by men with HIV to ensure that any possible future generations would not survive.

Every person living in Rwanda today has been affected in some way by the genocide. The word didn't even exist in the native language (Kinyarwanda) ; it had to be borrowed. The whole country still suffers to some extent from post traumatic stress disorder as counseling is not widely available.

We attended a church service at an organization called Solace Ministries, an NGO committed to serving orphans and widows of the genocide. We were privileged to hear several survivors' gruesome eyewitness accounts of horrific murders of family, friends, and strangers, and testimonies of faith and survival by God's grace. The experience was powerful and moving. It humbled me when they told us that because of our visit to them in Rwanda, we were close to God's heart, that our presence assured them that they had not been forgotten by God. Afterwards, a young Rwandan praise band/choir sang (including Refiner's Fire in English) and danced and the whole mood lifted.

The international community is now pouring billions of dollars into the reconstruction of this devastated place. There are areas of Kigali that look sleek, modern and high tech, much more so than any of the other places in East Africa we've visited on this trip. Hope slowly seems to be appearing, like a Phoenix rising from its ashes.

We were also able to connect with John Sondra and Eric, the two orphans Dave befriended 2 years ago, and we were welcomed as old friends. We are working to help them know how to best proceed with their university educations. They are wonderful young men, now aged 22 and 23. We visited the impressive (and grim) Genocide Memorial with them. Eric had been there before but not Sondra or myself so it was pretty overwhelming.
We are currently in Zanzibar, at an internet cafe with a terrible connection. So I'll sign off for now and try to continue again soon!

Happy Thanksgiving this week!

Love, Judy