Never Forget. Thoughts on Rwanda

It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago I was In Rwanda. I had just arrived a few days earlier. Now I was participating in Genocide Memorial Week. While parades and ceremonies went on outside, images of murder and hatred flashed on the every tv screen turned to public channels.

I still vividly recall mass graves. Thousands of bodies dumped into the earth, unceremoniously left to rot. A woman I met, missing part of her skull from the swing of the machete, her husband murdered just a few years before by Hutu militia attacks, was left her fending for her children on her own.

I was 18. The nightmares I had are still vividly burned into my memory. The nightmare that killed nearly 1 million Rwandans and left so many more with broken families struggling to survive, dwarfs mine in comparison.

With a slogan of “Never Forget”, Rwanda works towards rebuilding, yet the threat of Hutu militia still looms over unprotected towns and villages in the Congo and Rwandan countryside.

I’ve been to Uganda and Kenya since then, and this summer I head to Cameroon to work with a the Cameroon Football Development Program. We will be working with schools to leverage soccer to start a conversation on HIV awareness and prevention, conflict resolution, leadership skills, and basic health and other life skills. To learn more visit CFDP and take a look around.

If I have time to get home this week, I’ll find some of my very amateur photos from the trip. Until then visit the link and view James Nachtwey’s amazing photos from there in 1994.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 9:09 am. It is filed under All Posts, New Posts, Non Profits/NGO's, Travel, Uncategorized and tagged with genocide, Hutu, Rwanda, Tutsi, UN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.