Genocide Sucks

So I just wanted to give everyone a taste of where I'm at right now in Rwanda.

It's been hard. We've been doing all the memorials at the end of last week and today and tomorrow. We will get a break for three days at apparently this gorgeous location of Lake Kivu to process everything we've seen. To top it all off, my family decided this past weekend was the perfect time to tell me their story from the genocide.

I don't know. It's been hard. We saw a memorial at the national university on Thursday. Wednesday we saw a horrible, horrible memorial where you see all the bodies. And I still haven't fully processed it. And then today we went to the Kigali memorial, which is where my "Rwandan father" is probably buried. And the memorial was very much like the Holocaust museum, but even worse. You see so many awful pictures of mutilated people and streets covered in bodies. This museum also had an exhibit of other genocides that have happened throughout the world and the thing about Rwanda is that they want to tell you it like it is. The pictures were all graphic and I started to get a headache. I'm so tired of seeing dead bodies and people screaming in death and being surrounded by survivors who have horrible stories to tell me.

The last exhibit is an exhibit about the children of the genocide: the orphans and the ones that died. And they know where it hurts. They show these big, beautiful blown-up pictures of children and then have display boards giving you small facts about the children.

Name: Claudine
Age: 9
Favorite food: rice and sauce
Favorite drink: Fanta orange.
Favorite hobby: walking with her dad.
Characteristics: gregarious
Death: Machete to the head

Fuck the world and the people in it.

Sorry. It's just I feel like I'm surrounded by this all the time. Tomorrow I will go to 2 sites, one which is a church where thousands of people were massacred by the very priest that promised to protect them. And I don't get a break at home. I constantly imagine my family on the night they were dragged out of their house to be killed.

I'm just having a hard time right now. I just feel like there's death. Everywhere. I'm surrounded by an awful history of people in pain and I don't quite understand how everyone walks around like everything is okay.