Month six will be a special month, we leave Asia and head for our first country in Africa. I will be spending January (my birthday month) in Rwanda.
Rwanda has a tough and tragically recent history. If anyone read my Cambodia blog, I know that it was a little raw and packed with facts. I’ll keep this one short and not go into so much detail of the genocide that happened in 1994.
The more I research my list of countries the more I realize how screwed up our world is, and how blind and ignorant I’ve been. I was three years old when this genocide was taking place, obviously a baby and unable to do anything, but how is it that 23 years later I’m finally learning something about it?
Maybe that’s mostly my fault for not paying attention to ‘Hotel Rwanda’ in high school.. but I don’t know.. maybe a huge part is just the lack of interest a majority of the millennial population has.
We get hit with so much information all of the time from the media, school, family, work and our social lives, it seems that if something isn’t benefiting our present, fast-paced, “need-it-now” lifestyle, then it’s easy to put it on the back burner because “there are more pressing matters now“. I know the term “entitled” gets thrown around with us, but I mean,
are they wrong?
I sit here reading about families and young adults who are living all over the world and their stories are haunted by tragedy. I’m also sitting here reading from my 5 bedroom home, with wifi on an “old” MacBook Pro that I want to replace.. poor me.
First world problems, right?
Now that doesn’t mean that I should give all of my things away and live on the streets and become a martyr and feel guilt and shame because “I’m so #blessed”, but I can at least start living my life in perspective.
There are so many people out there that are so obsessed with themselves, with judgement, with guilt, with appearance with all of the wrong things that this world flashes in their face. And me too, I’m so beyond guilty of this, but there just has to be something better – something more freeing.
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. – Galatians 5:1
There’s this one commonality I’ve been finding in my research of these countries and Rwanda is no different, and that’s happiness.
Now bear with me..
Rwanda was torn apart by genocide. Bodies that had been hacked and mutilated by machetes littered the streets. Tensions between two tribes, the Hutus and Tutsis, escalated and over a million people were murdered. That’s 20% of the Rwandan population.
This was literally 23 years ago.
We were alive when this was happening.
Something about that just makes it feel so much more personal.
I have to say that if I were a child and I watched both of my parents be brutally murdered in front of me, (which most did) I don’t think ‘happiness’ would be an adjective on my list describing my life. But I sit here watching videos and reading blogs of people who are working there now and there is so much joy and laughter and community among the people.
And it’s not just Rwanda.. it’s Cambodia after their genocide,
it’s in Thailand where wives and daughters are being sold into sex trafficking,
it’s in Nepal where lives were torn apart after the earthquake.
All over the world people are losing things, important things – homes, mothers, brothers.. lives are being torn apart in brutal ways.
And yet they laugh so much harder than I do, they love so much deeper than I do, and they believe in the good.
“The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” – Exodus 14:14
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” – Romans 8:28
Perspective.
That’s my take away from Rwanda.
I just want to be better. I just want to laugh more, and love harder and be thankful every single day for what I have. I want to go to Rwanda and let them teach me a thing or two about how to live life in perspective.
