We went off to a Rwandan church which consisted of some lively reggae style worship and probably an hour sermon. It was an english language service so were able to follow the service pretty well. He preached on a passage in 1 Chronicles about Jebez asking for more territorty that I have never heard preached on. All in all it was a pretty good sermon about overcoming challenges when listening to God, about trusting that God will give you what you need when you are out of your comfort zone, and about how God can work in different ways than we anticipate.
After the service, we headed to the Hotel Des Mille Collines for lunch that is the hotel where Hotel Rwanda took place. It was pretty crazy to be in the actual place. It is one of the two nicest hotels in Rwanda and we had quite the buffet feast. It was hard to imagine what it might have been like and the hotel doesn't really acknowledge what took place there and a lot of Rwandans believe the guy featured in the movie to be a liar.We then headed for a very emotional trip to a genocide memorial museum. We took the two student leaders, Collins and Jessica, with us. The genocide was largely Tutsis being slaughtered by Hotus. Many of the students in TNHF come from Tutsi families that had fled to countries like Uganda, The Congo, Burundi, and Kenya prior to the genocide in 1994. They were born in those countries and the families returned to Rwanda a few years later with a Tutsi leader who ended the genocide when his military forces came in from Uganda. Still most of the students have had family that were killed in the genocide, but Collins was very forthright with us about the conflict.
The genocide museum was at times very hard and emotional to walk through. We learned some of the history leading up to it with the German and Belgian colonization and the Belgians dividing the people into two groups before giving way to Independence in 1959. The Hotus came to power and there was killing in 1962 and along the way leading up to 1994 when the Hotu leader's plane was shot down setting off the massive genocide where somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were slaughtered in 3 months. Most of this killing was done at the hands of machetes or clubs and at times the museum was very graphic with the images of bodies piled upon bodies. Friends and neighbors would kill each other and families would turn on each other. It was utterly horrific.
There was a section dedicated to children who were slaughtered and horrible things were done to babies and very young children (a 4 year old stabbed in the head in the eyes) and others bludgeoned to death or burned to death or torn up with a machete. Following that, we entered rooms that actual skulls from people who died (some with large holes in them) and also containers with bones piled on bones. It was very hard to look at and it just boggles my mind how people can do those types of things to others. We finished by walking around several actual mass graves including an open one. IT was all a very intense experience.
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