CHANGED.

Me. I am changed. I thought I knew stuff. I thought I understood the genocide from the hours and hours of research and the numerous papers and books I've read. I thought I got it. I thought I could handle it. I thought I knew. I was wrong. Please note that I will try desperately to express into words the things I saw this weekend (sorry, now two weekends ago...), but I nor any one I have spoken with will ever be able to relay into any written language the experience we had in Rwanda, Africa. As most of my readers know there was an atrocious genocide in the 1990s in Rwanda that killed almost 1 million Tutsis. Our small group of mzungus had the sacred opportunity to walk the grounds where thousands lay dead and to pay respects to their graves and to the Rwandan people. We left our little house in Lugazi around 4:40am Saturday June 8th and traveled to Kampala to get on the huge bus from the Jaguar Bus Company that would take us to Kagali, Rwanda in approximately nine hours. It was supposed to leave at 6am and left 20minutes later of course. Strangely our seats were sopping wet which was uncomfortable and awkward, but we were all so desperately tired we ignored that. I sat next to Jackie in the very front and the bus ride was fairly enjoyable with no complaints other than the massive pot holes in the road. Then to my complete surprise (though I should have known better) a couple hours into it we pulled over. People began hopping out and I was thoroughly confused because we were literally in the middle of no where until I realized this was our little potty break. The bus just pulls over and everyone gets out and lines up next to each other and does their business, quite literally, on the side of the road/bus. Well, a bunch of my mzungu friends got out as well and joined the peeing party. It was beyond hilarious. (SIDENOTE: I am the only one awake sitting here watching the ridiculously huge black cricket/cockroach jump or fly or crawl on the couch Ashley has fallen asleep on. It scares me every time it moves. AND I just saw a gecko scurry across the wall so I am hoping it will find the large black insect of sorts and eat it. EW. Also, all of this doesn’t phase me one bit and I am thinking of capturing the large black insect maybe…oh shoot it almost landed on Ashley. I really should get up and get it before it gets lost in her blanket… ALSO, I really have to go to the bathroom, but we have absolutely no water—which is an absolutely ridiculous story I will tell later, and it is too late and scary to go use the latrine, especially if these types of creepy animals are inside our house next to me I can’t even imagine what is out in the latrine waiting….so sorry, back to the important weekend.) So we had our potty break and then an hour or so more into the ride our bus pulls over again, but this time it is because uh the clutch broke. UGH, no big deal right? Who needs a clutch anyhow?! So we waited and waited. And it was so hot and stuffy and lame so a few of us got out and sat in the grass on the side of the road and played travel scategorries. We were on the side of the road for about two to three hoursssss. ALSO not a big deal, they fixed the clutch with grass. It took several hours on the side of the road, but that is what they used to fix it and it worked. We arrived in Rwanda much later than anticipated, but we arrived and were greeted by Richard, the contact Aunty Peggy told us about. Richard is the General Secretary of the National Town Council for all of Rwanda. . . and he was the nicest man we have ever met. We were all starving so we went to a bank ( which did not take our ATMS. It became quite the hassle the whole weekend) and then to a sit down restaurant. Several of us got pizza (very popular w/ our group when we go to any type of restaurant that looks legit). I got a chicken salad which had an odd dressing on it, but I actually liked it a lot. Rylee got a vegetarian pizza which was quite disgusting in fact. We tried once more to change our shillings into francs, but alas no success. We went back to our Chez Rose Guest House which was pretty nice set up. There were two of us to a room and I was with Rylee. There were two beds to a room and a nicer bathroom than what we are used to with a very tall shower with HOT WATER. Oh my gosh we were all in heaven! We had a great night sleep and the next day (Sunday) we woke up and had a complimentary breakfast of bread, omelet, bananas, and steamed milk. We went to the Kigali Memorial Centre which was an incredible place. We walked around the grounds and the several mass graves that surrounded us were filled with 250,000 bodies. It was very intense. We had the opportunity to place a large bouquet of flowers on the mass graves and had a minute of silence out of respect for those lost and the lives affected by the atrocity. We then entered the building and walked around the numerous rooms that explained the history of Rwanda and the genocide. Reading the very detailed explanation, movies from survivors, and very intense pictures became pretty emotionally draining. They had a room full of photographs of people who were murdered and another room of skeletons. There were also rooms explaining other genocides that have occurred throughout history and the whole experience was overwhelming, but necessary. Upstairs there was a room dedicated to the children. There were large portrait sized photos of individual children with a plaque underneath describing who they were. It would say their name, age, favorite song or food, best friend, and favorite activity. One little girl, Channel’s favorite song was, “This Country My God Chose for Me.” I will never forget staring at her picture and having a ridiculous, helpless, devastated feeling overwhelm me. Tears just started and continued pouring out. I’m sorry if this is sounding dramatic, but I guess it was a pretty dramatic experience that won’t be forgotten, ever. I walked outside and sat with Corbin and Heidi and we just had to talk through the process that we were experiencing. We had spent four hours learning about the genocide and being surrounded and educated about the horrendous inhumane events. We felt helpless and sad and that we didn’t deserve the lives were living and couldn’t understand how something so cruel could happen in our world. How can power corrupt people to harm one another, but not just to kill, but to kill with such force and in such a gruesome manner? What we saw and what we learned was absolutely unreal. . . . . .except that it was very real.
We decided we needed a break from learning about everything and went to lunch at a buffet because our last restaurant experience took us three hours to get food. Literally. The buffet was delicious and we were all rejuvenated and continued to try to process everything we had seen. We then had the incredible opportunity to go to The Hotel De Colline. As most of you have seen Hotel Rwanda this is the exact hotel where all of that took place. Richard had arranged for the hotel manager to show us around and we got a small tour. The hotel is completely different from the movie set up and looks nothing like it. It is a very large hotel in the middle of Kigali (pronounced CHigali). I thought the hotel was more protected like in the movie but on one side there are only bushes separating the hotel from the street. We also met a man ( I think his name was Andes or something like that) who was the technician at the hotel during the genocide. He told us his story which was amazing to hear. His wife actually had their baby in the hotel while all the chaos was occurring. Also, during the movie (HOTEL RWANDA) there is a part when Paul sends his wife and family in a UN truck to escape the hotel and then the truck gets ambushed and barely gets out of the hacking machetes and returns back to the hotel. This man’s wife was also on that truck and barely survived. He also said that they lived in the hotel for two months and their were 1,000 people living as refugees there as well. He said that out of those months he only saw the front of the hotel maybe two times and he kept repeating how dangerous everything was. I asked him specifically why the Hutus didn’t attack the hotel like they often attacked churches full of people and murdered everyone inside. He said that he wasn’t sure, but that he did know that they had a huge UN flag on the top of the building so maybe that kept the Hutus from attacking. No one died out of those 1,000 refugees staying in the hotel. It was so great to be there and to hear his story and especially after I have seen the movie I could place in my mind how it must have been. Amazing. We then went home early and hung out at the hotel and then went to bed. The next day Richard had his friend, Nadine, take us to other places we were planning on seeing. We got in a taxi and drove for about an hour until we reached a little store where the locals sell peace baskets and other carvings and crafts. After stopping for an hour we jumped back into the taxi for 2 ½ hours and traveled to a museum that told us the history of Rwanda and all of it’s culture which was pretty interesting. There was a huge life sized hut of a king and queen that we went into which also seemed like a pretty saweet set up . We then got back into the taxi van and headed into the mountains. We had no idea what to expect or where we were going. We knew we were headed to a memorial sight but we assumed it was going to be similar to the Kigali center we had been to the day before. We were wrong. We were up in the middle of no where in the gorgeous mountains when the taxi turned down a dirt road and took us to this huge beautiful landing. There were mountains all around and we were on the top of this hill that had nothing except a random building. So we got out and walked up to the building which i guess used to be a technology school of some sort. They began talking to us and explained what happened at this site. The government in the area had told all the tutsis to gather atthe top of this hill at the school so that they could be protected better. 50,000 tutsis were living here expecting to get some the promised help from the government during the genocide. The government came and counted all the people and told them they were doing so so that they might know how many supplies were needed. Instead they were planning a systematic attack of this group of Tutsis and needed to know the exact number of people. After a few weeks of living there the people began starving and getting very weak which was a part of the Hutus plan. Then on the night of April 20th the Hutus attacked with guns and other artillery weapons supplied by the French. The Tutsis were weak and only had bricks and stones to throw back at them. 48, 996 people were killed that night within two hours. A complete massacre. The French then came back and put the bodies in a massive hole to and covered up the evidence with a volley ball court. Only four people survived that night and we met two of them and heard their story. It was unreal. One was a women who was a Hutu but her husband was a Tutsi. She had her identification card which saved her, but she saw everyone around her slaughtered. She was holding her baby and they kept trying to go after her with a knife to kill her daughter. Miraculously, her daughter also survived and is now in secondary school. A hutu soldier actually helped her escape because he said, "I have killed enough. I do not want to kill anymore." The other survivor was a man and we could see where he had been shot in the head. He hid under all the dead bodies and then escaped after they all left and went into the mountains. It was so insane to hear their story and made it so real. We also toured the grounds and the took us into the different classrooms in the buildings. Each classroom was full of skeletons. There were at least 10 bed frames to a room and they were completey covered with skeletons. Everywhere. The stench was overwhelming. Some of the skeletons still had hair. A few still had a shirt on. One still had their wedding ring. In several of them you could see where the machete had killed them. You could see the position they had died and their facial expression. It was like a nightmare being in those rooms, but i couldn't get myself to leave. I felt helpless and weak and small. I could do nothing for the dead that surrounded me. All i could do was enter every single room and pay respect to them. One room was filled with smaller skeletons....children. A room full of dead children broke my heart. Les and I started crying. We were these children's ages when the genocide happened. Why did we get to live and they had to die? These kids would be our ages right now if they hadn't been hacked by a machete. It was the most frustrating experience and the most devastating. We could touch their skeletons if we had wanted. It all seemed so unfair and wrong and cruel. We also saw the room full of the people's clothes and saw the mass grave and talked more to the survivors. We couldn't believe what we had just seen. On the bus ride back to the hotel we had some serious conversations about life and what we were doing with ours and what those children would be doing with theirs if they had the opportunity. Again, why was i born in America instead of the rolling hills of Rwanda? I was sick to my stomach. It is experiences like that that make one wonder about the life we're living and motivates you to be better everyday. Well, to me at least it makes me wonder why have I been given this opportunity and this life that i could never have deserved, and what am i doing with it???

more updates later.
please keep praying for us--we need it.

love,
tor