Everyone has a story

When I traveled to Germany and Poland to visit the sites relating to the Holocaust, I came back with a greater appreciation of what it means to say that 11 million people were murdered by the Nazis, 6 million of whom were Jewish. It meant that 11 million individual lives were cut, unnecessarily, short. Indeed, each victim had a family, was a mother, was a brother, was a friend. Upon my return to Canada, I heard about the 'paperclips' project. A group of grade school students took it upon themselves to collect either 6 million or 11 million (I forget which) paperclips, to represent each life lost. There project was ambitious, but with the help of donors from around the world, the persistent students succeeded in their goal and turned their collection into a memorial.

This as a preamble to the fact that I have come to learn very quickly that every Rwandan has a story. Some are genocide survivors, some lost family in the genocide, some must live with the burden of knowing that there loved ones were perpetrators etc... In short, it is not enough to say that between 800 000 and 1 000 000 people were killed over a period of 100 days in 1994. Because, each of those people had a story, each of those people had a future and I believe we lose something when we group these stories together, because they are each unique. At the genocide memorial in Kigali, there is a section dedicated to infant victims. The photos of several children are displayed and a brief write-up about each is provided. One in particular had a lasting impression on me. For one of the children, who's name is David, the display included his last words: UNAMIR will come for us.

In a country like Rwanda, with a population around 9 million, everyone has a story worth telling.

Raffi