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I listen to certain songs and I am there again. Pushed against the side of the bus, wedged snugly in the back corner on a row with more people than seats. The trees outside the window rush past me as I gaze at the gorgeous African sunrise beyond them. The music playing through my earbuds, Tears of the Saints by Leeland, speaks for my heart of the complete brokenness I had just witnessed in the previous couple of weeks.
I hadn’t talked very much about it. None of us had. We had all encountered a deep desolation unlike anything we even knew how to describe. Some had been able to respond with tears – tears of complete bewilderment at the pain displayed around us in the eyes and hearts of the people, the children of God, we had come to minister to. But not I. I would not be able to release any emotion about it for another week or so after being back in my own country for a few days. And yet it was in my heart. It was in all of our hearts; for despite the beauty of the sunrise around us, the excitement over the safari we were about to embark on, and the incredible relief and exhilaration over finally being together again after several days of emersion in the culture away from each other, pain was all around us. We had come to see the countryside in a new way in the past couple of weeks. Now when we saw the little hillside communities, the kinds we had only before seen in photos, we envisioned the evil that had taken place there only 13 years before – the mass extermination of nearly an entire ethnicity of people.
During my final year of college I took a missions class that was structured around a 2-week missions trip to Rwanda in the middle of the semester. I felt God direct me to go on this missions trip in a very different way than I had my previous trip to Paraguay. Other people were quite influential in nudging me towards considering this trip – including those who were leading the trip. After much thought and prayer, as well as consultation with my parents, I decided that this was something God would have me do, and I signed up to take the class. I knew I would be challenged in my thinking about world missions as well as be given an opportunity to see how God is at work in a very different part of the world and join Him in that work for a short time.
The missions class was set up so that each student would be able to serve in Rwanda through a venue that they specifically felt a calling or passion for. I would be interning with an elementary school for a week while living with a Rwandan family along with one other girl from my class. For the second week in Rwanda we expected to travel to several memorials from the country’s genocide in 1994 as well as visit the country’s university and finish up the trip by going on a safari at a national wildlife park. I had no idea how drastically those two weeks would change my concept of the world, of human kind, and of my God.
Why Rwanda? During the country’s genocide in 1994, which was a mass extermination of primarily one ethnic group present in Rwanda, 78% of the country’s children experienced a death in the family due to war, and 36% lost both parents. 80% of children were forced to hide to protect themselves, as they were specifically targeted for death. This tragedy left the Rwandan people traumatized physically, emotionally, and spiritually. God was at work in Rwanda, however, through the work of missionaries and local pastors such as Emmanuel Gatera, who our team would be working with.
With the knowledge of these statistics and a strong sense of our own inadequacy yet a deep desire to help and encourage, we set off on a plane headed towards Africa. The flight was long and we were all quite anxious about what we would find when we reached our destination, yet this apprehensive time of travel bonded us tighter as a team – a process that would only persist during the next two weeks. For while in Rwanda, we would become like a tight-knit family – saddened at the thought of leaving each other for a few days, and rejoicing at each other’s return. We would care for each other in sickness, hug each other in sadness, laugh together, cry together, and constantly pray for each other.
Upon finally arriving in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city, our first impression was of the overwhelming hospitality with which we were greeted. The people from Emanuel’s church had looked forward to our coming as though we were long lost children finally coming home. I will never forget the looks on the Rwandese families’ faces as they greeted their new “son” or “daughter” who would be staying with them for a week. It was quite a joyous occasion; I had never felt so instantly loved and wanted by anyone, much less someone of another culture and language. The people of Rwanda knew how to love on their family in Christ, and they showed us that from the first day.
It did not take very much time in Rwanda, however, for us to observe another incredible depth the people possessed, and that was a depth created through great pain. On our third day in the country, we visited a genocide memorial and museum in which we saw lists of names, mass graves, rooms covered with photographs of people who were killed, pictures of manslaughter, and video clips of family members recounting the death of their loved ones. Later, during a visit to another memorial, we would walk past the remains of thousands of people – people still rendering the twisted positions in which they had died at the hand of machetes, clubs, rifles, etc. We would hold our breath to keep from getting sick at the smell of death around us as we listened to our tour guide, a survivor who himself bore a bullet hole in his head, tell us of how five thousand weak and starving women and children had been murdered there.
The next day, however, the tone of our trip changed a little as we each moved in with our host families for the coming week and began our own internships in different locations around Kigali. I spent 3 days at Kigali Parent’s School, the local elementary school, visiting different classrooms, talking with teachers and students, and teaching in classrooms. It was so fun to take part in these small classrooms in which 50 to 65 African children were eagerly learning all they could. The children acted so excited to learn from a “mzungu” (white person) and give her a high five!
During this time I, along with my classmate, Jessie, stayed with a Rwandese lady we came to know as Mama Sheila. She had a nice (but very humble) home in Kigali that she shared with her son, daughter, mother, and uncle. Her husband had been killed during the genocide. Mama Sheila’s kindness and hospitality were no different than that of everyone else we met in Rwanda. She immediately made us feel very at home and like part of the family. She referred to us as her daughters, prayed with us, shared her heart with us, and took very good care of us while we were with her.
Mama Sheila’s testimony was, and continues to be an incredible inspiration to me. She spent hours in prayer every day, both as she went about her daily chores, and also in quiet meditation in the middle of the night. She told us that she liked to pray at 3:00 a.m. because it was completely quiet and peaceful then, and also because it corresponded to the time at which her savior died for her. So she would rise at that time each morning and talk with God for an hour. In reality, though, to Mama Sheila every occasion was an opportunity for prayer – before a meal, before bed, before leaving for work, at the coming and the going of guests, and often in between. The togetherness of brothers and sisters in Christ called for approaching and praising our heavenly Father.
Probably the most impactful experience for me in Rwanda took place alongside a group of teenagers orphaned and left in absolute poverty by the genocide. During our second week in Rwanda, four other girls from our team and I got to assist with a seminar for these genocide orphans led by our professors. There were about 70 orphans, all thirteen to twenty-three years old, and most of them had lost everything when the genocide occurred.
The seminar was structured around three main topics related to the struggles of teenagers in general and more specifically the struggles of these teenage orphans in Rwanda. Following each talk, the teens would divide into five discussion groups – each overseen and “enhanced” by one of the five of us visiting college students. The orphans would raise questions, discuss them as a group (in their native tongue which we did not understand other than through the help of a translator), and then direct the toughest questions to us.
I will never forget some of the questions they asked me. “Why,” they wanted to know, “would a God who loves them allow them to lose their parents, their homes, their livelihood, and all means of comfort and security.” “What would you do,” they asked me, “if you were dying of aids, the mother of a small child, and with no family, home, or income?” “How do people in America get through things like this?” Time froze in my mind each time I was asked one of these questions, and I felt almost sick to my stomach because of the responsibility resting on my shoulders due to this opportunity – the opportunity to offer hope and encouragement to people who felt complete despair.
It was overwhelming - stretching, and yet a blessing, to sit and talk with these orphans as they told us about the things they struggle with. I felt very inadequate to encourage or offer help to these young people, but one thing I could offer them was the love of Christ, and that seemed to be an encouragement to them. They were so appreciative of our being there. I learned a lot from them as well, for despite their dire circumstances, many of them loved the Lord and praised Him for His goodness.
One girl I met at this seminar was named Claudine. When she was six years old, her family moved from Uganda to Rwanda. The day following their move, the genocide began; and she lost her entire family. She was forced to run for her life several times. She had been fending for herself ever since. Claudine had been physically abused and raped countless times, and her emotional scarring was just as deep as her physical scars. After the first day of the seminar, she spent some time in counseling with one of my professors, who told me afterwards that that was the first time she had ever been able to share her story with anyone. Merely recounting all that she had been through was so traumatic for her that she had to be taken to a clinic afterwards.
The next day, however, she requested to see me, so I went to visit her at the clinic. It was such a blessing to hold her in my arms and pray with her. At one point while I was there, she saw some kids playing and she told me that the Muslim family she has been serving did not allow her to play. I thought about this, and decided to teach her how to thumb wrestle. So sitting there on her bed, I became the first person to play with her in thirteen years. What a blessing!
Claudine was so grateful to me for coming all the way from America to show her and her people that they are loved. This, I discovered, was one of the greatest needs that the countless orphans in Rwanda had. They had many physical needs, but they also needed a reason to keep on living. They needed hope, and they needed to know that they were worth something. Not only were my team and I able to show this to people in Rwanda, but they showed us that God can work through us even if we don’t feel adequate or worthy.
During my time in Rwanda I saw all kinds of pain and hurt, and heard stories of a hatred and evil that I cannot fathom. I talked to people who lived through things that I cannot begin to understand and yet who love God anyway because He is all they have. I heard stories of forgiveness that these destitute people extend every day to those who tortured and killed their family members mercilessly. This forgiveness was hard to take in, but an even greater mystery that beset my mind was the realization that God – a pure and completely holy Being who gave these individuals their very breath of life, extended forgiveness to the killers through suffering agony on a cross long, long ago for them.
As I worked through these thoughts in my head upon returning to the United States, the realization occurred to me that if these fellow human beings in Rwanda, a country home to the most friendly and kind-hearted people I had ever come across, were capable of such brutality and violence, then surely I myself would be capable of the same thing, were it not for God’s grace to turn my heart towards Him. And so it was, that my heavenly Father taught me to understand just a little bit better, the depravity of man’s own heart, the magnitude of the grace He extends towards us, and His miraculous power to work through nervous and incapable beings such as myself.
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people, and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength He exerted when He raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. Ephesians 1:18-21
