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.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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
Saturday, May 24, 2008
I’M BACK ON DUH, IN RWANDA
It’s been many moons since I last posted on this great blog that I learned to love and hate. (It was great to reflect and hear your comments, but so hard to reflect on many of the things I saw in Kenya). But finally, I’m in Kigale (another cheesy rhyme if you know your African city pronunciation)(and if you thought the parenthesis were bad that last round, then you haven’t seen nothing yet)(…exactly).
Enough of the attempts at wit and onto the intel. Here I am, once again, on the African continent. This time around, it’s both Kenya and Rwanda. I left for Rwanda on the 18th and after 40 hours of travel, finally made it. I’ll be here in Rwanda until the 31st and then in Kenya from June 1st through the 10th.
I’ve come with a Baylor team to Rwanda with 25 students and 7 faculty. I’m on of 6 on the Religion team (because it wouldn’t be Baylor if it didn’t have Religion). Our goal of the trip is to interview various pastors, students, and state leaders on genocide and its effect on culture, society, the Church, and how the global church can better respond to future genocides. (didn’t we say never again though?....savedarfur.org). In case you aren’t caught up on your Don Cheadle films (our team is actually staying in the same hotel), Rwanda suffered from the worst genocide since the Jewish Holocaust. 800,000-1 million were killed in 100 days, most by machetes. Read about this, google it, wikipedia it, watch Hotel Rwanda/Beyond the Gates RIGHT NOW.
And Kenya happens in about a week. I’ll be going back to work with City Harvest participating in HIV ministry but this time will focus more on Microfinance and Microlending. Edward, the man the myth the hero, studied Microfinance at Oxford and is has integrating microloan programs with the Church. He calls it Holistic ministry. This time I have the amazing pleasure to experience community with Nick Deere as well (also a man a myth and a hero down at the good ole BU). Nick is a University Scholar focusing on Economics and Religion, so City Harvest’s next intern will be tons more helpful than its last.
I’d love all your love, prayer support, comments, and emails (ben_carroll@baylor.edu), so send those away.
I promise to be much better this time around, and hopefully less LOSTesque cliffhangers.
Much is to come, much is to be told, so lets love one another and share stories.
-Benjamanda in Rwanda
Enough of the attempts at wit and onto the intel. Here I am, once again, on the African continent. This time around, it’s both Kenya and Rwanda. I left for Rwanda on the 18th and after 40 hours of travel, finally made it. I’ll be here in Rwanda until the 31st and then in Kenya from June 1st through the 10th.
I’ve come with a Baylor team to Rwanda with 25 students and 7 faculty. I’m on of 6 on the Religion team (because it wouldn’t be Baylor if it didn’t have Religion). Our goal of the trip is to interview various pastors, students, and state leaders on genocide and its effect on culture, society, the Church, and how the global church can better respond to future genocides. (didn’t we say never again though?....savedarfur.org). In case you aren’t caught up on your Don Cheadle films (our team is actually staying in the same hotel), Rwanda suffered from the worst genocide since the Jewish Holocaust. 800,000-1 million were killed in 100 days, most by machetes. Read about this, google it, wikipedia it, watch Hotel Rwanda/Beyond the Gates RIGHT NOW.
And Kenya happens in about a week. I’ll be going back to work with City Harvest participating in HIV ministry but this time will focus more on Microfinance and Microlending. Edward, the man the myth the hero, studied Microfinance at Oxford and is has integrating microloan programs with the Church. He calls it Holistic ministry. This time I have the amazing pleasure to experience community with Nick Deere as well (also a man a myth and a hero down at the good ole BU). Nick is a University Scholar focusing on Economics and Religion, so City Harvest’s next intern will be tons more helpful than its last.
I’d love all your love, prayer support, comments, and emails (ben_carroll@baylor.edu), so send those away.
I promise to be much better this time around, and hopefully less LOSTesque cliffhangers.
Much is to come, much is to be told, so lets love one another and share stories.
-Benjamanda in Rwanda
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