Touchy Stuff

We move onto Rwanda... Today was our final day hear in Uganda. Last night we arrived in the southern city of Mbarara and today spent the day meeting with Rwandan refugees living in camps outside the city. It was interesting to see a functioning refugee camp and to see the way things are run. However, meeting with the people was uncomfortable, at least at first.

So with any historical event the story is always retold from a certain perspective. It really is impossible to be entirely unbiased and objective. This applies especially to wars. Look in any history textbook in America and read about the wars that our country has fought in. I would imagine you'll find a fairly blatant bias. The story that is reproduced most often is that of the victor. In Rwanda, as many of you know, approximately 800,000 Rwandese were killed in three months from April 1994, to June of that same year. The story that is most often told in Rwanda and around the world is of a terrible genocide of the Tutsi population at the hands of the Hutus. This is true, Hutus killed Tutsis, and a lot of them. But at the same time massive amounts of Hutus were being killed by Tutsis. The Hutus have no memorials to them, they have no special treatment like Tutsis because they're not labeled "survivors of genocide." The reason I say all of this is background to the conversations we had today with the Rwandan refugee population, who happened to be Hutu. The pain in their stories as forgotten victims, seeing their scars, hearing the fear and anger that they carry because of events they've experienced. It was at times heartbreaking, at times enfuriating, but most often extremely enlightening to hear a side of the story that's never told.

I will be posting more about this in the days to come, but I wanted to post something today. It's a subject that has very little black and white in terms of victims and killers, good guys and bad guys. A sticky subject to say the least.

That's all I have time for now... stay tuned for more.

Peace,
Matt