Rwanda 2/14/11

Today is my last full day in Rwanda, and I am having a hard time coming to terms with that. I miss the ease of my life back home, along with friends, family, and the boyfriend, but I just feel like being here brings out the best in me, and I’m scared to go home and lose that. We had quite the ordeal trying to get breakfast somewhere, (we had to keep reminding ourselves about Africa time) but finally settled for getting a few groceries at Nakumat, our favorite grocery store.
After that we made the long bus ride out to Neomatta, which is a town that houses a church, which is now a genocide memorial.

During the genocide 10,000 Tutsi’s went into hiding at this small church. They though that if they were in a place of God they wouldn’t be murdered. They overestimated the killer’s morals, and as a result every last one of them were tortured and killed. Inside the church they had heaps of clothing all over the pews. The clothing was a reddish/brown color stained from the blood of the victims. All of the clothing was from the people who were murdered there. Out in the back they had mass graves. You could walk down underground to look at them, some were in coffins, but there were hundreds of skulls and bones just set on shelves.

Seeing all the cracked skulls, and how many of them there were, made the genocide so much more real to me. It was a very haunting experience I will never, ever forget.
Marit, Ellen, and I decided to visit another church nearby. We hitch hiked our way there, we got really lucky. This man took us all the way up there instead of just dropping us off on the main road. If anything, I will always remember the kindness everyone showed us there. This church memorial was even worse than the last one. In one of the Sunday school rooms there was a huge red/brown stain covering a wall. The man there told us this is where the babies and small children were murdered, by being smashed against the wall.

I have no words to decide how I felt standing there looking at this. I know I will never be able to get that image out of my head. I will never understand how people could do such things to innocent children.
Later that night I had a tearful goodbye with my sisters as they took the bus back to Gisenyi, which I am already homesick for. Lynn (who is flying out the same day as me) and I then went and had a romantic Valentines Day dinner together. Haha. When we went home to the guest house I’m unfamiliar with, my moto driver dropped me of on the wrong street, and I spent the next hour wondering around in the pouring rain, walking down deserted, dimly lit alleyways searching for the right house. I was trying not to panic, and then out of nowhere like an angel Lynn appears with an umbrella to take me home. I have never been so happy to see someone in my life.