I thank you all for your prayers and support during my last trip to Africa.
This has been a trip of many emotions. Many highs and many lows. We started in Rwanda for meetings with many of it's leaders, next went to Ethiopia for the Africa Regional Conference, and ended our time in Burundi with government visits. I got to visit two very dear friends in Rwanda, had my dad, mentor, and good friend in Ethiopia, and 5 entertaining Canadians in Burundi! Needless to say, if you know me you know this would have and did put me into relationship overload!! Despite that i loved my time in those regions of Africa and felt 'at home' there. I wanted to share with you a few pictures as well as a story i wrote after visiting a genocide memorial.
I'm living here in the UK until July 1st. I am and will continue to be preparing for an upcoming joint board meeting. If you could please keep me in your prayers. There are many logistics associated with this and the number of attendees has gone from in the 20s to almost 60!! Holy Cow Batman!
Genocide
In the last 50 years different parts of our world have gone through an unspeakable horror that we call genocide. You would think that in ours and our parent’s generation we would have learned our lesson. The Jews during World War II, Kosovo, Rwanda, Uganda, the Kurds, Sudan, DR Congo…unfortunately the list can and does go on. I cannot justify but I can figure out why our countries do not go in to help when they know such atrocities are occurring. What I cannot justify or understand is why as a global Church we have allowed it.
I am flying out of Rwanda right now and I have a new perspective on genocide, like anyone who has visited here would. Yesterday we went to a genocide memorial 3 hours outside of Kigali, in a place called Murambi. This former school was a mass grave to 50,000 Tutsi’s who came there seeking asylum but got obliteration instead. They have dug up the mass graves and laid the bodies on display in the classrooms. Before you even really know what is happening the smell of rotting flesh is brought to your senses and then as your eyes adjust to the rooms and you recognize the decomposing bones of humans. Children, women, and men’s skeletons are laying on the benches, some with clothing still on, some with hair, but all bodies are contorted in such a way that makes it clear in which they died.…painfully. I couldn’t help but start crying. There was room after room filled with bodies but I stopped after only 2 rooms. Many thoughts ran through my mind. To hate enough to kill the innocent, to kill children, to kill not because you are solider, but because you are told that a specific group of people are not worthy of living but of eradication. I had to turn my back on the room and stare off on the landscape. I was overcome by the instantaneous contradiction: inside lay something so horrific that it is unexplainable. Outside laid countryside more beautiful than I have ever seen. It was peaceful, calm, unaffected by the memorial and what it symbolized. It’s as if the surrounding area had needed to adopt a serenity to forget what had occurred there.
Up the hill there was a room that was a haven for the clothing of those that had passed away. The clothes were in cubbyholes like those children use at school. In them was the only way that families were able to gain closure over missing loved ones. You head outside the room and there are three signs surrounding you in the distance. Two are markers for mass graves that had been dug up and the third stated that in this spot the French had played volleyball. The complacent disregard for human life angered me instantly yet a moment later I realized that I was not above it, any of it. None of us are. It would be easy to say that we would never do such things and although most of us never will, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t within us.
