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The truth is, you’ve heard it all before

Warning: If I had to rate this blog it may be rated PG-13. I wanted to avoid a few details of this story, however they are very important.

This week I watched Hotel Rwanda with a few of my team mates. It wasn’t my first choice, however I had watched all the movies I was interested in such as P.S. I love you and Nick and Norah’s infinite playlist. As we watched, my heart felt so much sympathy for the people that endured the genocide in 1994. Especially since I am currently in Africa, it felt so much more REAL. Then we went on and had dinner, and laughed together about Jenaes weave.
This week I also met Anna (I changed the name for privacy reasons). Anna is learning English and figuring out her purpose in life. Anna had a story to share with us, and through broken English and Swahili translation this is what she shared:

Anna grew up in Rwanda for most of her life. When she was a child there was tribal tension between the Hutus and the Tutsis. She was a Tutsi. She had lived a pretty comfortable life when one night her mother called her into the house. Her mother told her that they had to leave…NOW! They went to a church seeking refuge. Many Tutsis were hiding within the church, praying to God to protect them. She hid under a table crouched down, shaking throughout the night. Her mother laid in front of the table, protecting the rest of her siblings. A few hours later the Hutus came in. They showed no mercy to the Tutsis. They began to slaughter the Tutsis…adults and children. Blood splattered the walls while the Tutsis were killed with unsharpened machetes. Then one of the Hutus grabbed Annas mother. They raped her while laughing. They raped her violently in front of all her children. Then they grabbed her daughters and raped them as well. (Anna took a deep breath while sharing this part of the story, and then started sobbing). After they were done with the raping, they killed her brothers and sisters. She hid underneath a curtain in all of the chaos, keeping her eyes on her mother. They then grabbed her mother and cut open her stomach. Her mother was 7 months pregnant. They grabbed the unborn child out of the uterus and threw it against the wall. The mother laid there shaking, and bled to death. Eventually the Hutus left. Some people came several days later and helped Anna. They brought her to Tanzania. There she lived with other refuges and found one of her brothers. She now lives in Kitale, Kenya and serves God.

When you ask her how come she is able to serve God after suffering so immensely, her response is “What the Hutus did…that’s what happens when you don’t serve God.”

I’m reading a book by Donald Miller and he talks about his friend Kathy who visits a memorial of the Rwanda genocide. I read this part of the book, in the midst of writing this blog. When Kathy was in the memorial in Ntarama she felt so much anger mixed with sorrow. The museum laid out the bones of the dead bodies as a memorial. The genocide site is a church where Tutsis had hidden. (This very well could have been the church Anna watched her family die in.) As Kathy prayed God said to her “This is what happens when people walk away from me, Kathy. I have brought you to this place to show you something important.  This is what happens when my compassion and love leave a place.”

It is when people don’t allow God to show up through them, she realized, that the world collapses in on itself.