Education

Today is community service day in Rwanda. I went with Amani Africa and Global Youth Connect American delegates to a construction site in Nyamata, where homes are being built for the most vulnerable genocide survivors. The development is government subsidized and is also receiving aid from SOLACE and Comfort Rwanda. Together, with Rwandans, Scots and Dans, we cleared a small area upon which a house will be built, and a family will live. The project is also attempting to give each family a cow along with their new home. The Mayor emphasized the importance of this aspect. Families not only need shelter to escape from poverty, they need the tools to produce a livelihood for themselves. Comfort Rwanda is also trying to provide fruit trees with each plot of land to also expand each family's economic potential and to work towards an improved diet.

I see Amani Africa as completing the final component that makes this community an example of development done right. Nearby, they are building Amani Village, which will house a primary and secondary school, in addition to a vocational school. The vocational school will train students in tourism and hospitality management. Rwandans have emphasized that highly skilled and educated Rwandans proliferate throughout the country. Poverty, however, stems from the lack of employment. Amani is overcoming this obstacle in the strategic focus of its vocational school. Additionally, Amani will provide the school fees for all children in attendence at Amani Village.

At noon, when service day ceased, the Mayor spoke of his appreciation of our presence representing the international community. However, I could only think of our, the international's community's, contribution to the travesty that occured a little over fourteen years ago. Decisions were made, despite copious amounts of evidence, of the human rights violations taking place. We have blood on our hands that will not wash off until the International Community illustrates that the Convention Against Genocide is not a mere piece of paper, and that "Never Again" really means "Never Again."

On a final note, I felt that I should include something that the Mayor emphasized in his speech to the community and to us as its guests. He said that the genocide did not just start in 1994. It was the product of decades of education in hatred. This gave me hope as I see so many efforts to educate the new generation in collaboration and peace.

The Capacity to hate

Although I have been in Rwanda for ten days now, I haven't really had a chance to get to the computer and sit down with my first post. I spent my first five days in Rwanda observing/participating in a workshop on Human Rights, Advocacy and Action put forth by Global Youth Connect. To go over everything now would take to long. However, I will discuss one point that left an impression. We were to consider our own relationship with human rights. The Rwandan delegates seemed to have considered this question in the past, while I sat there dumbfounded, squirming for an answer. Luckily, I wasn't forced to give a response. As cheesy as it sounds, I was slapped in the face by how much I take for granted.
Today we visited two genocide memorials and a school. By the time we left the second memorial, most people were in tears. I, in contrast, stood their utterly confused. I couldn't understand the hate that led to such violence. In contrast to the Holocaust, carried out by the state apparatus, the Rwandan genocide was perpetrated by victims' neighbors, family members and friends. I am naive, yes, but still, despite what I have read, I can't fathom how so many people could hate so much to commit such brutal violence. People weren't silently killed, out of the immediate site of their murderers. They were killed using machetes and masus. We were in a church building where many children were killed. The guide described how one of the children was crucified on the wall, while others were thrust against the walls and were killed by the impact of force.