The Reflection: Section 7

Figure 9: The ghosts of the genocide still haunt those who were around to witness the destruction it caused. (Rwanda)

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a Rwandan civilian, farming your crops one minute and bang, the next you neighbor is lying dead next to you. Imagine yourself watching your neighbors and friends die before your eyes. I can’t, I can’t picture people I grew up with and knew dying before my eyes while I ran trying to find shelter from my world. I can’t believe the world stood by and watched these people die at their feet and did nothing until the numbers got too high to count. Millions of people died, are displaced, or being charged for taking away another human’s life. I think about the world around me and I could never imagine living in such terror, never imagine my world crumbling to my feet. If the tables were turned and I was in the situation as one of the young Rwandans, what would I do? I don’t think I could live through what these people are living through. Reading the information in front of me, I have to question humanity’s role in all of this, I have to question what went through these soldier’s minds when they killed kids without a second thought. I understand the idea of discrimination, I get it, I don’t agree with it, but I understand that people are different. What I can’t fathom is the idea of killing innocent people for the reasons of being different. The Hutu and Tutsis took shots at one another, and in this case both sides are wrong in the way I think, both sides killed people. What I don’t understand is why it got to be that big? Why didn’t the world step in and put a stop to it before 800,000 people were massacred at their feet?

Figure 10: Guarded by soldiers, they wait for peace in the heat. (Rwanda)

I’m a tiny speck on the world so my questions don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but maybe the world will change for the greater good. One can only hope to avoid a situation like this again. After the Holocaust I thought, that was it, the only one. No one was that inconsiderate to the feelings of the world, but after reading and researching it, I found that the Holocaust is only one out of many, and some of them are still going on today. Overall my research has made me believe that the world is broken, something’s got to give.