Fingertips

For days I’ve been trying to come up with an effective way to relate what I saw and felt in Rwanda. I want to convey to you what it means when a million people are murdered by their neighbors, friends, and family. I want to understand it myself.

I want to understand how so many people could be killed so brutally. I stood in a church where 10,000 people where killed. I felt the bullet holes in the walls, in the communion table, on the floor. I touched the blood stained alter. I wept when a woman at a church told me that I wasn’t touching bullet holes, but marks left in the walls by shards of skull. The machetes had that much force. I touched the blood stains on the walls. Children were swung around by their legs and smashed against the wall, to save ammunition.

I saw rows and rows and rows of skulls and bones. I touched a blunt club used to shatter skulls.

I watched grown men break down as they tried to explain to me the complete and utter devastation.

I broke down myself as I looked at family photos of victims. Wedding pictures, pictures of mothers and baby daughters and the hospital, pictures of teenage girls dancing at a party, pictures of soccer players after a big game.

I wept when I looked at a picture of two sisters, ages two and three, who were grenaded while they hid in a shower.

I wept when I looked a picture of a beautiful two year old girl who was stabbed in the eyes and head until she died.

I wept when I thought of the 500,000 women who were raped. I thought about all of the women in my life.

I thought of the 300,000 children were orphaned.

I saw rows and rows of skulls, many shattered by clubs and machetes. I stared straight into where their eyes would’ve been.

In the span of three hours, my fingers touched the graves of 40,000 victims. 40,000 life stories, wasted.

I cannot understand what I saw, or the devastation that lives in the walking wounded.

Here is what I do know:

If we think that one million people were killed, we are wrong. One person, one life, one spirit, was taken from this world, one million times over. One million life stories ended. Their stories were cut short in ways that I wouldn’t believe if I had not seen with my own eyes.

A long time ago, I promised myself and you and the rest of humanity that I would never look away. This weekend that promise changed the core of me. I am positive that I am not the same person I was on Saturday morning. I am convinced that what I have touched with my own fingers has changed me on a fundamental level and has changed the direction of my life. These were God’s children. We are all children of God, and I owe it to all of you to never look away. Apathy and ignorance are not options for me. You and yours are much too valuable for that.

I want you to read a book called “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families.” It’s written by Philip Gourevitch.

That’s all I can say right now.

Fact of the day: Military analysts agree that the presence of 5,000 troops would have prevented the genocide.