When elephants attack

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to try to post the link to our group leader's blog. Well, I got her permission, so if you are in the mood for a good story, see The Blog I Almost Didn't Survive to Write, by Joanna Roberston.

If you are scared of elephants, it will give you nightmares.
If you love elephants, it will change your mind.
And if you aren't going to Africa anytime soon, it will have you laughing!

Think that the battle is hopeless?

Think that the battle is hopeless? It's not! These pictures are of the same woman... the colour photo was taken only 40 days after she began receiving anti-retroviral drugs! To read the article I grabbed these pictures from, see The Lazarus Effect (the article highlights Rwanda specifically). And the drugs - although more expensive in Canada - are available for just $140 per year per person in Africa. So why are people still dying???

World Vision has a program called Hope Child Sponsorship. For $40 per month, you can sponsor a child living in a community affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This ensures that a child has access to water, nutritious food, education, and health care... things we definitely take for granted! Let me know if you want more information.

Six months after the genocide

I just came across this article online. It was published over 12 years ago, just six months after the genocide. It was in Vanity Fair, of all places. I've just included some excerpts I found important in here. For the full article, please see God and Man in Rwanda. There is no excuse for the world to have ignored the killings in Rwanda in favour of watching the Canucks and the Rangers fight over the Stanley Cup. But what I find hopeful is that at least this journalist was wrong in predicting that our indignation would soon end. If anything, I feel the world is just starting to awaken to what's been going on around us. Read on.

...Even the brutal way the killing was done had a carefully conceived purpose. People are so predisposed to thinking of Africans as savages that few paused to ask themselves why much of the killing was done with machetes, clubs, and iron bars. After all, the Rwandan army, which the authors of the genocide controlled, could simply have used the modern weapons the French, the South Africans, and the Egyptians had supplied them to exterminate the Tutsi far more quickly and efficiently. But they wanted to do more than kill. Unlike Nazi Germany, where, for all the talk of collective guilt, the killing was done by a small group in death camps set out of sight of the general population, the Hutu leadership wanted to implicate as many citizens as possible. The "artisanal" nature of the violence was a way of creating a nation of accomplices in genocide....

...It was while the genocide was going on that action was needed. But instead the great powers decided to pull most of the peacekeeping forces out of Rwanda, and left the Tutsi to their fate. By the time the C-130s began landing in Kigali again, the slaughter was over. It had ended because the R.P.F. had been victorious on the battlefield, not because the world was any better at stopping genocide in 1994 than it had been in 1944. What remained for the outside world was to minister to victim and victimizer alike. Inevitably, the distinction between the two began to blur, particularly as the news leaked out of killings of Hutu civilians and returning refugees by R.P.F. soldiers. But more predictable than the foreigners' indignation over this was the certainty that they would soon leave. Disasters are compelling for only so long. The CNN effect has a short shelf life.

When they do leave, they will quit a country that has become an eerie shell. Rwanda, once so overpopulated, is now dotted with deserted villages. Though the bodies have been removed, almost every mission and parish church in a country that had been among the most Catholic in Africa still bears the traces of the massacres that have occurred within their walls. The blood was hard enough to wash away. The memories of what people had done to one another were far more indelible...