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.