Surprise! I wasn’t always on A-squad. In fact, for 4 months of my race preparation, I was on Z-squad until they asked the entire squad (about 70? people at the time) if any of us would switch to A-squad (30ish people at the time) to even out the numbers between the two squads that launched in September.
Obviously, I chose to switch to A-squad. My reasoning was two-fold:
1. I absolutely wanted to experience Christmas in India, because that sounded crazy exciting, and it was.
*Me and my babygirl with downs in India on Christmas Eve
2. Every country on A-squad’s route has been historically plagued with some kind of social injustice, and my heart was really for trafficking victims, so…
I included Rwanda in my “Yes! I pick the social justice route!” because I knew there had been a genocide here in the 90s…
I just learned this week, though, that I knew absolutely nothing about that genocide.
I didn’t know anything about any genocide, really, until I moved into the city that experienced its own when I was 5 years old.
We recently visited the national genocide museum in Kigali, where I learned just how much I don‘t know.
The photographs lining the walls are horrific –
printed evidence that the streets of the city that I’ve been walking for the past several weeks were once lined with piles of mangled bodies,
massacred with zero discrimination between men, women, and children.
Historically, in as few words as possible, the Hutu tribe raised up a youth militia to believe that the Tutsi tribe was inherently inferior, dirty, and inhuman.
A single nation was divided entirely based on economic status, and those who had “less” tried to eliminate the threat of being ruled by completely wiping out the population of those with “more.”
Death of the Tutsi wasn’t the goal of the Hutu militia, though…
Torture, dehumanization, humiliation, and guaranteeing the impossibility that another generation of the entire people group would ever be born was.
The militia used dull machetes, the blunt end of rifles or other blunt objects, chains, etc. to brutally abuse and murder the Tutsi people.
I don’t know how I didn’t know that. This isn’t ancient history. This isn’t old testament wars.
This is what the nation of Rwanda was experiencing while I was eating ice cream cones and going to see my first movie in theaters (just to be clear, it was 101 Dalmatians, I likely slept through half of it).
A direct quote from the genocide museum reads,
“The world withdrew and watched as a million people were slaughtered.”
I couldn’t help but feel ashamed that no one really stepped in to put a stop to the genocide in Rwanda until an entire people group had nearly been wiped out.
I know I was 5-years-old, I know I wouldn’t have known what to do either, but really, America? We went with “nothing” as our response?
The day after visiting the genocide museum, we were asked to visit a boarding school that houses 1,000 students ages 11-23. We walked in and sat on a bench outside the headmaster’s office while students set up the main hall for our visit, and I noticed a sign nailed to a tree right in front of me.
I hope I never forget the image of this sign, my camera broke early last month so I had no way of capturing it, but it simply read,
“Never Again.”
And my heart was suddenly alive again.
Jesus, I'm sorry for so often forgetting the infinity of Your Goodness, but thank you for continuing to hang evidence it on a tree right in front of my face.
United Pursuit Band sings a song called “Break Every Chain,” about the power of Jesus’ name; and a refrain at the end of the song sings over and over again, “there’s an army rising up to break every chain.”
After I read that sign, all I could hear in my head was that TRUTH!
There’s an army rising up!
In the same nation where a youth militia was raised up and empowered to carry out acts of undeserved violence rooted in unprompted hatred;
my team and I had the privilege of worshiping with and preaching to a youth militia being raised up and empowered to carry out acts of unprompted affection rooted in undeserved Love.
Walking around Kigali, it’s not hard to find survivors with obvious scars on their bodies from abuse during the genocide…but God's goodness covers and restores even the extent of the hatred and sinfulness that carried out (and, honestly, is still trying to carry out) the genocide that forever changed this country's history.
What breaks my heart even more, though, are the scars I can’t see with my eyes…
more on that in my next blog.
By the way, I love you all.
Especially my family – mom, dad, shannon, cody, will, nataly, and baby will – I love you all a lot.
