I Am Killed Alive
I am seeing death wherever I am.
I am listening to death whenever I dream.
I am touching death in whatever I handle.
They say I am traumatized
but I am killed alive. Continue Reading…
Rwanda
Poetry of the Future
I am a collage of the people I have known. I can tell a million heartbreaking stories and yet none of them are my own. I can paint a picture of fear, pain and betrayal but my face would get lost in the images of the events that I know about but never experienced. I am a woman of my time. I live my life questioning the prejudices that were chosen for me long before I could make up my own. I am 20 years old and I am afraid to imagine what I’ll look like in ten years time if I do not make a legacy of my own. I dream of hope and of change. I fantasize about greatness and using that greatness to forge a perfect world, albeit a small one, but a perfect one nonetheless for that child who has experienced more than most read about in a lifetime, and for that one yet to be born. Continue Reading…
Witnessing Genocide: What Inhibits Intervention?
Every day, in troubled places around the globe, innocent people are slaughtered in the name of government, ethnic pride, and hatred. Families are torn apart, generations of children are mentally poisoned by images of burning towns, machetes dripping the blood of their loved ones.
Every day on this very same globe, so many people live day-to-day in peace. They have a different set of problems: which pair of shoes to wear, what to cook for dinner, or who will win the sports game.
Those being murdered know that peace is possible, that it exists somewhere in the world. What is shocking is that those who live in peace don’t know, or care to know, of the destruction, which is happening outside their own borders. Continue Reading…
Strange Rivers
They were cut as sorghum,
Blood rivers covered the country,
The life being meaningless
Hostility was man’s choice
5. While devouring people like a lion. Continue Reading…
Hand-in-Hand Fighting
Genocide, wherever it occurred in history, has always been the worst choice to resolving social conflict. To prevent it requires hand in hand fighting. Its memory deserves to live in the collective awareness.
This is just as true for the Rwandan genocide. I was fourteen years old when the machine of terror and death was perpetrated against the Tutsis. It is sixteen years ago but images with a non-defined color of sorrow are fixed in my mind. Continue Reading…
On This Day – April 7th
On this day, we commemorate the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. In just one hundred days, a million poor souls were taken for the sole crime of being born different. They were killed by their former classmates, pastors, and colleagues who overlooked their individual uniqueness, shapes and personalities and dubbed them “enemies of the country”. They overlooked the fact that we were all created in the image of God, the fact that God created all of us so that we can complement each other. The people who were lost were not just a number: they were parents, children, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings, all of whom brought joy to others. Their loss has brought loneliness and hopelessness to their loved ones. Their deaths have left a hole in the souls of so many people.
What is Genocide?
The definition of genocide varies among countries and people. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (Stein). Continue Reading…