The smell of genocide

I would bargain most people wouldn't know what the smell to associate genocide with. I guess i didn't either until I smelled it. I was able to visit a church, now a memorial site, where 10,000 people were killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. They had sought out the church for safety in God's place of worship, but it seems as though God had left in the hours where those 10,000 terrified people were slaughtered. The church is filled with bullet holes, blood stained walls, and all the clothes still laying on the floor from the victims. As soon as I entered I imagined, just as a flashback, of the horror and fear that consumed that room 20 years ago from today. There was a distinct smell in there though, one I hope to never come across again. It literally smelled like a genocide--a place where evil had triumphed. I walked over to alter with still a blood-stained clothe draped over it and wept. I wept the words, "Father forgive us for we do not know what we have done." The brutality  and gruesomeness of the acts committed in that room were absolutely appalling--banging heads against walls, machete chopping, and knife stabbing--but that wasn't what made the floodgates of my soul barricade open. It was because I felt as though a piece of me died with them. I felt like I was a part of them in a strange way. As i've been here in Africa, my view has changed from "them" and "they" to "us" and "we". And although I will never claim to understand the pain of being Rwandan, but I feel as though they are a part of me. And the history of my generations and ancestry killed them. I was over whelmed with grief, sorrow, guilt, anger, and shame.

How do you move on after that? The people of Rwanda killed each other--Hutu and Tutsi. The people who were once neighbors and church member killed each other. How do you forgive someone who killed your whole family? I believe this to be a miracle. Behind the church there were mass graves where over 45,000 people now rest. The graves were open so I walked through thousands and thousands of skulls and femurs--humans reduced to almost the dust of the ground. There were no glass walls, just an enormous amount of eye sockets staring straight into me--able to jump out at me at any moment. I'll never forgot the gaze of those thousands of eyes, it was as if they were whispering, "why?". They torment me. But each one of those skulls  had a mind, that had a body, that had a story. Don't get lost in the number of people, because each person had a dream, a favorite color, a fond memory. The 1 million people who died in the 100 days of the Rwandan genocide were no different than you and I. 

As my emotions and thoughts were racing in 4 dimension ways, my eyes caught glimpse of this particular woman. she was sweeping and cleaning the graves. she stuck out to me not because of what she was doing, but how she was doing it. The way she took care of the graves and this gentleness about her struck me. I thought of how beautiful it was that this Rwandan woman was able to reconcile herself by taking care of those graves and that church. she was the silver lining for me. she represented hope in the midst of wounds and scars as deep as crevasses. she was the only in the church when I was weeping. I felt we had a connection that was not based on words. As we drove away she stood on the edge of the graves and waved at me. It was a different wave than what I was used to. She spoke to me through it, her eyes whispered, "Now you understand." It's like she knew. Because part of did--as much as I could being an outsider. I was processing this experience in my group that night and I spoke about the woman--how her presence really struck me but I didn't know why and I couldn't explain it.  And then the director told us the woman's story and everything made sense. She lost her entire family in the massacre at that church. And for the past 20 years she has been cleaning it and it's graves............

How beautiful is that?! she was making things new, restoring her heart by what she was doing. she was choosing to enter into forgiveness by showing gentleness and love when she would be justified to run from the village and never step foot on those church ground again. I wept. And what I didn't know at the time was that she was just one story of reconciliation. Rwanda is restoring relationships between the perpetrator and survivor to live again as neighbors. The woman whose husband and four children who were brutally murdered right in front of her by her neighbor are now working together and living again in the same community. They deal with immense shame and guilt and struggle with anger and the ability to forgive and love again. It has been 20 years but the wounds are still raw. But hearing there stories as a struggle for restoration is nothing short of a miracle. Why I came to share this experience and enter into a conversation about the Rwandan genocide is because it draws us back to look at our own hearts. We must face that we are not too far off from the same atrocities. They were neighbors remember? Fellow congregation members and co-workers. With the right influence and brainwashing, I believe all of us would be capable of killing. But even more than that, Rwanda teaches us about forgiveness. As I sit and listen to the stories of people forgiving their families killer, I am drawn back into my own heart of the people who have wronged me, hurt me, that I need to forgive. I see how much of a prisoner I am to my perpetrators and how they were weighing my down. And then i think about people I know, people in my own family, who have chained themselves to their perpetrator for decades--and they are still being tormented in their own heart. There is no room for hatred and bitterness in our world. It would seem as though closing the doors to our own heart would protect us, but it really just turns us against each other. As C.S. Lewis says, "The only place where we can be perfectly safe from hurt is heaven and hell." Yes the hurt is real, the pain is real, don't think it is easy for Rwandans to forgive, but anger doesn't co-exist with love. They replace it. So I encourage you, and i'm on this journey too, of letting go and forgiving. We are people carrying around too much baggage and it's weighing us down. We were never created to live like that. Rwanda teaches us that forgiveness is powerful because it's freeing--because as you forgive you realize the prisoner was always you.

Who is "We"?

I have officially completed my final hours in Kisoga at my internship with Compassion International! Praise God! I cannot believe I have spent 440 hours in the rural village of Kisoga—what a journey it has been. I did not really understand how much I had learned from the people there until it was time to say goodbye. I am sure I will discover so much more in the next few months as well. I came into my internship with the expectation that I was going to be doing social work, and I was going to acquire some significant skills to launch me into my career. And while this may be true in time, what I walk away from in my experience doing social work is nothing in the books. It is nothing that can be taught in the classroom. The most significant thing taken away from doing social work is this idea of “we”. At Compassion we are a team, so we refer to ourselves as we. When I am talking with people in the village they refer to us as “we”. This form of “we” is used to encompass a togetherness, a commonality of a group. So compassion is “we”, the people of Kisoga is “we”, and so on. This was very subtle at first but then it started to occur to me that I am outsider in Uganda and they were including me in their discussion of “we”.  Why? There could have been other terms used such as “her” and I could have used “them” or “they”, but no, it was “we”. They found it  fit to bring me to the inside, into their world to understand.

Our team at Compassion engaged in a bible study each morning of the work week and we would pray for various things including family members, Compassion as a whole, and personal issues. We would also pray for the county of Uganda. I admired how people would pray so feverishly for Uganda—how many times have a prayed for the United States? So at our last prayer meeting, I was closing in prayer and I said something along the lines of “Lord, I lift up the country of Uganda to you…” I didn’t think anything of it until the project director approached me later and sat me down to tell me something I will never forget. He said, “Ali, it’s ‘our’ country, not ‘the country of Uganda’.  This is your country too, you are now a part of it.” I was shocked, because I knew he was right. Even though my skin color is different, I don’t speak the native language, and I don’t have nearly the strength of an African woman, I now carry African in me. That is the most beautiful thing about this country is that Ugandans invite others into their life, they allow people to take part in who they are! This is seen in their unbelievable hospitality, encouraging words, and patience in letting outsiders learn their ways of living. They don’t have to do this. It would be easier to just keep visitors “out there”, that’s what the US does right? It takes too much time and effort to let someone be a part of you. This is another thing we need to learn from each other—to open up.

So as I leave Uganda, and prepare for 10 days in Rwanda, I exchange a piece of my heart, and she gives me part of hers. It is precious. No distance can take that away. And that’s the same with the people we have in our life too. Maybe that’s why saying goodbye is so bittersweet. Because we lose a part of ourselves in the exchange for a part of someone else. Uganda has taught me this, and I believe it to be vital in our world as division from race, language, tribes, ethnicity, gender, and social class rule how we live. When we look at the world as “we” and “us” instead of “them” and “they”, we become united people, capable of much more than we presently live.

Out of Anything in the World

I have always known that my international social work placement was different and that my roles are much different here than they would be in the US. But I have to say I never saw this one coming. My knew name around the office is "chicken cutter". Why? Because last week at my internship I killed a chicken. Yep. Stepped on it's feet held its neck and sawed through it with a knife (it was a dull one too). The bishop was coming that day and I was helping out in the kitchen, so of course, we were eating chicken and they had to be killed. So we buy them from the market, kill them, take out the feathers, gut them, cut, boil, and eat! Talk about fresh meat! I know you think that's gross but do you have any idea what is in the chicken you eat?

I tend to ask a lot of questions. For those of you who know me, surprise right? One of the question I have been asking people, is “If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?” In my mind, and I have asked this question to many Americans in the past, people start thinking about who their favorite person in history was or who is the most famous person of our time. Answers are typically Jesus, Oprah, or Justin Bieber. So  I asked this question to someone and the response I got was astonishing. So I began asking more people and I was continually astonished, so much that I found it blog worthy.  When I asked the question the first time, his response was his mother. I asked if he had ever met his mother—I thought she has passed away when he was a baby or something! But he laughed and said no, he sees his mother often as she lives in the same town. At this point I was a bit confused as to why he would want to have dinner with his mother. So I asked. And he just smiled again and said that he loves his mother, and would want to have dinner with her over and over again. I just thought, out of all the people in the world, you would want to have dinner with your mother?! It really took me back because I had not expected that. But after I thought about it, it was aligned with this sense of relationships in Uganda. To him, it made no sense to have dinner with someone he hardly knew, and what was he gaining from having dinner with someone who was famous? It made way more sense to him to engage in a relationship that he has already established and poured into, rather than with a stranger. And here I am, an American, always looking outside my situation to do something that is admirable. It would be way cooler to say I’ve had dinner with Oprah than it would be to say with my mother. But not for your average African. Do you think Oprah would remember having dinner with you? Probably not. But would your mother? The person who has given you life, loved you to the point where she would lay down her own life? Absolutely. Africans understand something we don’t. They understand that life is precious. And that each experience and relationship is of value and it matters. Because in the end, we will not be remembered by what we did, but by who we chose to invest in deeply.

Ali