This past spring, I was blessed to have the opportunity to go to the beautiful country of Rwanda. Before traveling there, I didn’t know much about the history of Rwanda. I soon found out that the country was recovering from a genocide that wiped out one million people in about 100 days. 

This fact wasn’t exactly obvious when I arrived. The people of Rwanda are a welcoming and joyous people, and I found it hard to believe how they could be this way when they had also experienced something so awful. 

This paradox explained itself to me one day toward the end of out trip. 

We started out the day with driving to Bugesera to visit the Nyamata Memorial. The Nyamata Memorial was a Church that many of the Tutsi found refuge in during the genocide. One day, the Hutu perpetrators broke into the church using grenades, rifles, and machetes. They killed every single person out of the 10,000 that were hidden there.

Inside the memorial, the blood-stained clothes of the people who were killed litter the pews. From the shawls of older women to the smallest baby onesies, the sight was shell shocking.

We were led down a set of tile stairs to a crypt where a glass case held some of the skulls and bones of those murdered that day. Some of the skulls were shattered from what we could only assume was the blunt force of a machete. Others had the remnants of gunshots.

After we visited this crypt, we walked outside to the mass graves for everyone in the church, as well as those who died in the surrounding areas. The remains of about 50,000 people were buried in these mass graves.

The Memorial is a gritty remembrance of the brutal killings, but also a physical display of how far Rwanda has come as a nation in twenty short years. As a nation, Rwanda has united again. They have done what many of us have thought to be impossible: forgiving those who wronged them and their loved ones in one of the worst ways possible. This boundless forgiveness impacted me greatly, and the memory of Rwanda and its people will never leave me.