I finally can cut the façade of fibbing once again. The blog title has regained its legitimacy. Benya is back in Kenya.
How could I commit such a crime to not only leave you hanging with a story of such sorrow but then to skip over all the good parts of Rwanda. So I shall not..
While we had our knee’s cut out from under us when we visited the scene of hell right next to the church, the following day not only gave us hope, but shined a blinding light into our darkening hearts.
Paul Farmer. Even the name isn’t a household name, then perhaps one might need to up the humanitarianism (and by that one person I mean me…how humble eh?) Paul is one of these sexy humanitarians along with Bono, Bill Gates, Don Cheadle, Jeff Sachs, and everybody else that been’s in the One Campaign commercials. He’s doesn’t sing how bloody the Sundays are getting, attempt to outdo that Jobs market, pretend to rob Casinos or concoct brilliant economic theories that will end extreme poverty, but instead just practices his trade: medicine.
The day after we walked through streets that had been far too bloody for this dear earth to ever see, we walked through a place where the streets had no name; a place that was truly heavenly.
Paul Farmer brought a revolutionary hospital to Haiti about 20 years ago, and recently just finished his next great creation in a small town in the middle of Rwanda. Dr. Farmer’s approach to medicine is what he called the horizontal approach. Unlike the vertical approach, which many hospitals and NGOs take, where they only address one need such as HIV or malnutrition or orphan care or well drilling, Paul took this horizontal approach: addressing everything. This hospital didn’t just exist to circulate the sick in and out only to let them return to another painful place where there was no clean water or no food, but to serve the sick and PREVENT the sick. He didn’t do this by billion dollar Kantian project research that manipulates nature, but instead by intentional, communal, and incredibly beautiful community development.
For example, at the hospital there was a malnutrition ward. The doctors didn’t just treat and feed the patient, usually a child, but trained the parents how to prevent running out of food by more sustainable farming techniques, while they also fed the families, and gave the family a 8 month supply of food. If there wasn’t a well in their area, they’d drill one. If the family consisted of mostly children (who raised children, a common occurrence after so many lost their parents in the genocide) then a social worker from the hospital would be sent regularly to check on the kids. The hospital also had an HIV ward, a TB ward, a pediatrics center, an emergency room and pharmacy with more medicine than a Wal-mart. The patients, families and surrounding community weren’t the only ones shouting joy and new life, but also the beautiful green earth. The hospital wasn’t stacked in a doldrumming tower of flouresents and scrub-robots, but instead was spread out by buildings, and in between each there were more flowers, more fountains, more life than I’ve ever seen at a hospital. Paul, this liberation theology believing and practicing truly understood horizontal, holistic life living and life giving.
Rwanda may have peaked at that point, for it was the following day that we went to the Genocide Museum. Here is where the greatest number of mass graves lay: over 230,000. The museum was beautifully done, yet terribly difficult to experience. It deserves its own post, so that it shall receive.
After spending sometime at a resort 2 km from the Congo, where civil war continues to rage, Nick and I split from the team and here we are inya Kenya.
One thing I did bring which I definitely should have left at home or at least in Rwanda was expectations. I’m only here for 9 days, so time is so precious. Unfortunately, we are running on Africa time, and are in Africa, so always expect the unexpected, or may your only expectation be unexpectations.
I’m going to Pokot again tomorrow. With Nick and Peter, the church driver. No Edward. For Edward left to go to the states for 21 days yesterday.
Yesterday was a national holiday, and Sunday Church lasted for 8 hours. One of the biggest objectives was to help prepare and accustom Nick for his 3 week Mirco-Finance internship. The car we were to use also is in the shop, so our means of travel is very slow. Yet after our 3 day trip to Pokot, and after 2 days of sitting, We’ll have only 2 days in Nairobi to get Nick into tip-top shape…and, Nick doesn’t have the father of the Micro-Finance program to work under.
I’ve only been back for 6 months in the states, but I can see the devil of rugged individualism, its all about me and my time, rat-racing tendencies have again seeped in.
I was a bit frustrated my first month in Kenya last year too. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything. Perhaps one musn’t attempt to do anything at all their first month out of the West, for maybe it takes that long to realize that many times all our western doing, is doing nothing.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Preceding Nyarubuye
The posts below are new territory. I strongly hesitate to post the following. There could be copyright issues, ethical mistakes, and the most raw result of sheer hatred I’ve ever seen.
We traveled to a Church yesterday where 26,000 were massacred. We had read about this church in Phillip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (the best piece of journalism on the Genocide that I’ve come across, I strongly recommend it. So we traveled out to the church to do just what Gourevitch did: to be stuck with the experience of seeing the murdered Tutsis.
I don’t think I can yet face personal reflection or prayer alone on what I saw. I don’t know if I’m ready. I am not yet at the point where I can write about my experience, so I give you the opening pages of Gourevitch’s great work.
Perhaps where I really cross the line is what follows the 4 page excerpt from the book: images of evidence. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These nullify that proverb. You will have no words.
Posting the pages probably is not legal. Displaying the photos may take the dignity away from the murdered. But perhaps the rules must be broken. It is the same government that enforces copyright laws that not only sat by and did nothing in 1994, but prevented other countries from intervening.
But maybe with the photos, the bubble of your world and my world will slowly start to dissolve, like a soap bubble that swirls with an array of colors right before it can’t take the oxygen any more and it pops. Maybe the photos will expose the genocide that happened, and the genocide that happens (savedarfur.org). I hope that for me these images tear down my comfortable limits that suburbia, America, consumerism, and Gnostic Christianity impose on me.
I hate that these images exist, but if we don’t look, then the hate will surely still exist.
We traveled to a Church yesterday where 26,000 were massacred. We had read about this church in Phillip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (the best piece of journalism on the Genocide that I’ve come across, I strongly recommend it. So we traveled out to the church to do just what Gourevitch did: to be stuck with the experience of seeing the murdered Tutsis.
I don’t think I can yet face personal reflection or prayer alone on what I saw. I don’t know if I’m ready. I am not yet at the point where I can write about my experience, so I give you the opening pages of Gourevitch’s great work.
Perhaps where I really cross the line is what follows the 4 page excerpt from the book: images of evidence. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These nullify that proverb. You will have no words.
Posting the pages probably is not legal. Displaying the photos may take the dignity away from the murdered. But perhaps the rules must be broken. It is the same government that enforces copyright laws that not only sat by and did nothing in 1994, but prevented other countries from intervening.
But maybe with the photos, the bubble of your world and my world will slowly start to dissolve, like a soap bubble that swirls with an array of colors right before it can’t take the oxygen any more and it pops. Maybe the photos will expose the genocide that happened, and the genocide that happens (savedarfur.org). I hope that for me these images tear down my comfortable limits that suburbia, America, consumerism, and Gnostic Christianity impose on me.
I hate that these images exist, but if we don’t look, then the hate will surely still exist.
May 26
Today-
From Phillip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families:
In the Province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp-and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyaruburye with two Canadian military officers. We flew in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the mourning mists, with banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the center of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.
At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.
The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers—birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. He head was tipped back her mouth was open: a strange image—half agony, half repose.
I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes .I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them—the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuy for memorial purposes—and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it. Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect.
That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. They had been killed there, and they were dead there. What else could you really see at first? The Bible bloated with rain lying on top of one corpse or, littered about, the little woven wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the water gourds, and the Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.
The soldier with the Kalashnikov—Sergeant Francis of the Rwandese Patriotic Army, a Tutsi whose parents had fled to Uganda with him when he was a boy, after similar but less extensive massacres in the early 1960s, and who had fought his way home in 1994 and found it like this—said that the dead in this room were mostly women who had been raped before being murdered. Sergeant Francis had high, rolling girlish hips, and he walked and stood with his butt stuck out behind him, and oddly purposeful posture, tipped forward, drive. He was, at once, candid and briskly official. His English had the punctilious clip of military drill, and after he told me what I was looking at I looking instead at my feet. The rusty head of a hatched lat beside them in the dirt.
A few weeks earlier, in Bukavu, Zaire, in the giant market of a refugee camp that was home to many Rwanda Hutu militiamen, I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was “Do your work!” And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. I took many hacks-two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?
Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victIm, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?
The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace. But mass violence, too, must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple ad at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people—ever a fairly small unresisting subpopulation of perhaps a million and a quarter men, women, and children, like the Tutsis in Rwanda—blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter like the one just inside the door where I stood need not enjoying killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.
So I still had much to imagine as I entered the classroom and stepped carefully between the remains. These dead and their killers had been neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, sometimes friends, even in-laws. The dead had seen their killers training as militias in the weeks before the end, and it was well known that they were training to kill Tutsis; it was announced on the radio, it was in the newspapers, people spoke of it openly. The week before the massacre at Nyarubuye, the killing began in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Hutus who opposed the Hutu Power ideology were publically denounced as “accomplices” of the Tutsis and were among the first to be killed as the extermination got under way. In Nyarumbuye, when Tutsis asked the Hutu Power mayor how they might be spared, he suggested that they seek sanctuary at the church. They did, and a few days later the mayor came to kill them. He came at the head of a pack of soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and villagers; he gave out arms and orders to complete the job well. No more was required of the mayor, but he also was said to have killed a few Tutsis himself.
The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. “It was a process,” Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscibable.
(Gourevitch, 1998, 15-19)
I didn’t have anything to say today, so I just let someone else. That is where we went. The experiences were very similar….That is all I have…
Works Cited…?
Gourevitch, Phillip. 1998. We Wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. New York:
Picador.
From Phillip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families:
In the Province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp-and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyaruburye with two Canadian military officers. We flew in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the mourning mists, with banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the center of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.
At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.
The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers—birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. He head was tipped back her mouth was open: a strange image—half agony, half repose.
I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes .I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them—the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuy for memorial purposes—and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it. Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect.
That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. They had been killed there, and they were dead there. What else could you really see at first? The Bible bloated with rain lying on top of one corpse or, littered about, the little woven wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the water gourds, and the Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.
The soldier with the Kalashnikov—Sergeant Francis of the Rwandese Patriotic Army, a Tutsi whose parents had fled to Uganda with him when he was a boy, after similar but less extensive massacres in the early 1960s, and who had fought his way home in 1994 and found it like this—said that the dead in this room were mostly women who had been raped before being murdered. Sergeant Francis had high, rolling girlish hips, and he walked and stood with his butt stuck out behind him, and oddly purposeful posture, tipped forward, drive. He was, at once, candid and briskly official. His English had the punctilious clip of military drill, and after he told me what I was looking at I looking instead at my feet. The rusty head of a hatched lat beside them in the dirt.
A few weeks earlier, in Bukavu, Zaire, in the giant market of a refugee camp that was home to many Rwanda Hutu militiamen, I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was “Do your work!” And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. I took many hacks-two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?
Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victIm, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?
The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace. But mass violence, too, must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple ad at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people—ever a fairly small unresisting subpopulation of perhaps a million and a quarter men, women, and children, like the Tutsis in Rwanda—blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter like the one just inside the door where I stood need not enjoying killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.
So I still had much to imagine as I entered the classroom and stepped carefully between the remains. These dead and their killers had been neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, sometimes friends, even in-laws. The dead had seen their killers training as militias in the weeks before the end, and it was well known that they were training to kill Tutsis; it was announced on the radio, it was in the newspapers, people spoke of it openly. The week before the massacre at Nyarubuye, the killing began in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Hutus who opposed the Hutu Power ideology were publically denounced as “accomplices” of the Tutsis and were among the first to be killed as the extermination got under way. In Nyarumbuye, when Tutsis asked the Hutu Power mayor how they might be spared, he suggested that they seek sanctuary at the church. They did, and a few days later the mayor came to kill them. He came at the head of a pack of soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and villagers; he gave out arms and orders to complete the job well. No more was required of the mayor, but he also was said to have killed a few Tutsis himself.
The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. “It was a process,” Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscibable.
(Gourevitch, 1998, 15-19)
I didn’t have anything to say today, so I just let someone else. That is where we went. The experiences were very similar….That is all I have…
Works Cited…?
Gourevitch, Phillip. 1998. We Wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. New York:
Picador.
Not Ever Again
a family:
the tools of evil that caused genocide also are the tools of beauty that cultivate creation
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Hotel Rwanda: Room 205
Hopefully you’ve read the first post since I’ve been back (if not read below, to understand why Benya is in no longer in a rhyming country). I actually write this blog at the same time I wrote the previous one. It had far too much content and information, and not quite the usual amateur attempt at poeticism and description, so I just had to even the blog out.
Hopefully you’ve seen the movie Hotel Rwanda. For me it may have been the first time I actually consciously heard of the genocide that took place here in 1994 (a terribly embarrassing and unacceptable thing since the movie just came out a few years ago.) The movie is about a Hotel Manager who housed and protected over 1200 Tutsis, as the rival tribe, the Hutu’s massacred over 800,000 people, many on the streets just right outside the hotel. It’s a true story, similar to Schindler’s List.
Things were probably very similar 15 years ago in this very spot, as I sit and pound these keys on my MacBook, in the Hotel Des Mille Collines lobby. Frank Sinatra plays over the speakers. The sweet smell of sunscreen mixed with Pina Colidas still lingers after the day’s traffic. The final empty glasses clink at the bar as they are collected. Most of the guests are Mzungus (white people).
Yet this hotel is much different than other four-star hotels, though it hard to tell the difference from a Ritz or a Four Seasons in the States. This Hotel was a sanctuary. This Hotel was the empty tomb when it proclaimed resurrection for over 1000 lives. This Hotel is Holy Ground.
I just finished watching the movie in my room. Many thoughts swirl in my head. One blog post cannot contain, nor can I formulate how I actually feel sitting in a place that was Holy Ground that is surrounded by a place where the Ghosts are still lurking. I do feel and do see the story of resurrection here, and see the angels here that embody many pastors, NGO workers, and a Micro-Finance Bank Director (a Baylor grad too). But the evil still lurks. It continues to ravage this great lakes region as we saw in Kenya and continue to see pockets of all around Africa. Eerie doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Yet Sinatra is still playing right now, I don’t feel like I’m in Africa as my feet rest on the velvet carpet, and most of the guest still remain W(hite)sterners. Much has changed in Rwanda for the better. But there is still a definite disconnect with the rich and the poor, just as in America. I experience time travel faster than ever before when I leave the state of the art luxurious French hotel of the 21st century and roll past the guard shack and enter the Middle Ages that is Africa today.
The U.S., the French, the Belgium, i.e. the West didn’t respond in 1994 and almost 1 million died. Its fresh on my mind as I just watched the movie and am reading numerous books. How would we respond today if the same thing happened…or happens(savedarfur.org)
For true change and true life to actually happen, then perhaps that guard shack should no longer exist. There no longer can be this literal/imaginagy wall. I shouldn’t be able to now order a 20 dollar glass of wine, while less than 200 meters away a widow of 5 makes 20 dollars a month. The disconnect must stop. How can we respond to genocide, how can we act, how can we love, if we do not know our brother, our sister, our neighbor: the poor? (Mt 25, sheep/goats)
Below is a exert from the Movie, a conversation from Nick Nolte’s character, a UN worker and Don Cheadle, as Paul:
Colonel Oliver: You should spit in my face.
Paul: Excuse me, Colonel?
Colonel Oliver: You’re dirt. We think you’re dirt, Paul.
Paul: Who is we?
Colonel Oliver: The West. All the super powers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you’re dirt. They think you’re dumb. You’re worthless.
Paul: I am afraid I don't understand what you are saying, sir.
Colonel Oliver: Oh, come on, Paul, you're the smartest man here. You got 'em all eating out of your hands. You could own this frigging hotel, except for one thing. You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African. They’re not going to stay, Paul. They’re not going to stop this slaughter.
So there it is. Just the second blog post in and I already maybe have crossed the line.
-bc
Hopefully you’ve seen the movie Hotel Rwanda. For me it may have been the first time I actually consciously heard of the genocide that took place here in 1994 (a terribly embarrassing and unacceptable thing since the movie just came out a few years ago.) The movie is about a Hotel Manager who housed and protected over 1200 Tutsis, as the rival tribe, the Hutu’s massacred over 800,000 people, many on the streets just right outside the hotel. It’s a true story, similar to Schindler’s List.
Things were probably very similar 15 years ago in this very spot, as I sit and pound these keys on my MacBook, in the Hotel Des Mille Collines lobby. Frank Sinatra plays over the speakers. The sweet smell of sunscreen mixed with Pina Colidas still lingers after the day’s traffic. The final empty glasses clink at the bar as they are collected. Most of the guests are Mzungus (white people).
Yet this hotel is much different than other four-star hotels, though it hard to tell the difference from a Ritz or a Four Seasons in the States. This Hotel was a sanctuary. This Hotel was the empty tomb when it proclaimed resurrection for over 1000 lives. This Hotel is Holy Ground.
I just finished watching the movie in my room. Many thoughts swirl in my head. One blog post cannot contain, nor can I formulate how I actually feel sitting in a place that was Holy Ground that is surrounded by a place where the Ghosts are still lurking. I do feel and do see the story of resurrection here, and see the angels here that embody many pastors, NGO workers, and a Micro-Finance Bank Director (a Baylor grad too). But the evil still lurks. It continues to ravage this great lakes region as we saw in Kenya and continue to see pockets of all around Africa. Eerie doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Yet Sinatra is still playing right now, I don’t feel like I’m in Africa as my feet rest on the velvet carpet, and most of the guest still remain W(hite)sterners. Much has changed in Rwanda for the better. But there is still a definite disconnect with the rich and the poor, just as in America. I experience time travel faster than ever before when I leave the state of the art luxurious French hotel of the 21st century and roll past the guard shack and enter the Middle Ages that is Africa today.
The U.S., the French, the Belgium, i.e. the West didn’t respond in 1994 and almost 1 million died. Its fresh on my mind as I just watched the movie and am reading numerous books. How would we respond today if the same thing happened…or happens(savedarfur.org)
For true change and true life to actually happen, then perhaps that guard shack should no longer exist. There no longer can be this literal/imaginagy wall. I shouldn’t be able to now order a 20 dollar glass of wine, while less than 200 meters away a widow of 5 makes 20 dollars a month. The disconnect must stop. How can we respond to genocide, how can we act, how can we love, if we do not know our brother, our sister, our neighbor: the poor? (Mt 25, sheep/goats)
Below is a exert from the Movie, a conversation from Nick Nolte’s character, a UN worker and Don Cheadle, as Paul:
Colonel Oliver: You should spit in my face.
Paul: Excuse me, Colonel?
Colonel Oliver: You’re dirt. We think you’re dirt, Paul.
Paul: Who is we?
Colonel Oliver: The West. All the super powers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you’re dirt. They think you’re dumb. You’re worthless.
Paul: I am afraid I don't understand what you are saying, sir.
Colonel Oliver: Oh, come on, Paul, you're the smartest man here. You got 'em all eating out of your hands. You could own this frigging hotel, except for one thing. You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African. They’re not going to stay, Paul. They’re not going to stop this slaughter.
So there it is. Just the second blog post in and I already maybe have crossed the line.
-bc
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