As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda - Softcover

Larson, Catherine Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310287308 ISBN 13: 9780310287308

Verlag: Zondervan, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Inspired by the award-winning film of the same name.

If you were told that a murderer was to be released into your neighborhood, how would you feel? But what if it weren't only one, but thousands? Could there be a common roadmap to reconciliation? Could there be a shared future after unthinkable evil?

If forgiveness is possible after the slaughter of nearly a million in a hundred days in Rwanda, then today, more than ever, we owe it to humanity to explore how one country is addressing perceptual, social-psychological, and spiritual dimensions to achieve a more lasting peace. If forgiveness is possible after genocide, then perhaps there is hope for the comparably smaller rifts that plague our relationships, our communities, and our nation.

Based on personal interviews and thorough research, As We Forgive returns to the boundary lines of genocide's wounds and traces the route of reconciliation in the lives of Rwandans--victims, widows, orphans, and perpetrators--whose past and future intersect. We find in these stories how suffering, memory, and identity set up roadblocks to forgiveness, while mediation, truth-telling, restitution, and interdependence create bridges to healing.

As We Forgive explores the pain, the mystery, and the hope through seven compelling stories of those who have made this journey toward reconciliation. The result is a narrative that breathes with humanity and is as haunting as it is hopeful.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

After graduating with a Master's degree in Biblical Studies, Catherine Claire Larson spent seven years writing with Chuck Colson for BreakPoint radio, Christianity Today, and Newsweek online. Today, she writes amidst the clatter and curiosity of six young children.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Inspired by the award-winning film of the same name.

If you were told that a murderer was to be released into your neighborhood, how would you feel? But what if it weren't only one, but thousands?

Could there be a common roadmap to reconciliation? Could there be a shared future after unthinkable evil? If forgiveness is possible after the slaughter of nearly a million in a hundred days in Rwanda, then today, more than ever, we owe it to humanity to explore how one country is addressing perceptual, social-psychological, and spiritual dimensions to achieve a more lasting peace. If forgiveness is possible after genocide, then perhaps there is hope for the comparably smaller rifts that plague our relationships, our communities, and our nation.

Based on personal interviews and thorough research, As We Forgive returns to the boundary lines of genocide's wounds and traces the route of reconciliation in the lives of Rwandans--victims, widows, orphans, and perpetrators--whose past and future intersect. We find in these stories how suffering, memory, and identity set up roadblocks to forgiveness, while mediation, truth-telling, restitution, and interdependence create bridges to healing.

As We Forgive explores the pain, the mystery, and the hope through seven compelling stories of those who have made this journey toward reconciliation. The result is a narrative that breathes with humanity and is as haunting as it is hopeful.

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As We Forgive

Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda By Catherine Claire Larson

Zondervan

Copyright © 2009 Catherine Claire Larson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-28730-8

Contents

chronology of events.....................................................9prelude: secrets of the Umuvumu's scars..................................151. Rosaria's litany......................................................212. ripening..............................................................293. luminous mysteries....................................................44interlude: justice and human flourishing.................................504. hide and seek.........................................................605. Joy's sounds..........................................................676. from torn to tapestry.................................................73interlude: wrestling with forgiveness....................................877. envy's aftertaste.....................................................948. buried in stones......................................................1059. the still point.......................................................112interlude: journeying toward reconciliation..............................12410. prey.................................................................13211. longing for death....................................................14012. Seth.................................................................148interlude: facing the darkness...........................................15713. snakes in the grass..................................................16314. unquenchable.........................................................16815. the pain bearer......................................................174interlude: comfort my people.............................................18116. bridges..............................................................18917. you cry, I cry.......................................................20318. we are all Rwandan...................................................213interlude: reversing the downward spiral.................................22519. a killer called me friend............................................23220. revenge's mirror.....................................................23921. wake up and dream....................................................246postlude: reconciliation as a transfiguration moment.....................258acknowledgments..........................................................265appendix 1: resources....................................................269appendix 2: choices on the way to peace..................................276bibliography.............................................................278notes....................................................................281

Chapter One

Rosaria's litany

"My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." Matthew 26:38

Cadeaux's eyes laughed. A grin flickered across her face and settled into a slight smile as she went to fetch water. Leaning over the bucket, Cadeaux splashed water on her cheeks, not noticing the dark beauty shimmering back at her. With a block of soap, she scrubbed her neck, her arms, her legs, her feet, and finally her sandals while her slender shadow bowed beneath Rwanda's fierce August sun. At the age of twelve, she was on the cusp of womanhood, but still had the frame of a child and a sheen of innocence.

Her sandaled feet skimmed along the path as she returned home. Were it not for the vividness of the yellow jacaranda trees, the seamless blue skies, and Cadeaux's swishing lavender skirt, the road, the homes, and the roofs would have seemed a still life in sepia.

Back home, Cadeaux broke a deep silence with her soft footfalls and the creak of a door latch. Inside, her mother, Rosaria, had been going about her daily chores cloaked with an air of solemn dignity, wearing her sorrow like holy garments. A crushed hand hung like prayer beads loosely at her side.

Rosaria's eyes lit on Cadeaux as she flitted past. Somehow, the saturated air felt less stifling with her there. Rosaria breathed more freely. More than bread or wine or water, Cadeaux seemed to her mother a sacrament-a visible sign of inward grace. The name Rosaria gave her had this ripeness of meaning. Born in December of 1994, nine months and four days after horror's opening night, Cadeaux is her mother's consolation, her laughter, and her hope. Her name means "gift," because, as Rosaria will tell you, "She was the only gift I had left."

In a place where each person's grief is strung together like bead upon bead, Rosaria must focus her mind on Cadeaux, on the gift before her. But sometimes, she can't help how her thoughts circle back to a painful past.

When Rosaria's son, Alexis, had become ill with a lengthy stomach sickness, she had taken him to the hospital in Kigali. That was three days before the fighting began. When the violence erupted, Rosaria's husband, a driver for an agricultural processing plant, gathered clothes and food and drove the three other children with him to work, hoping they would be safe there. Only months after the slaughter would Rosaria learn their fate.

On May 10, 1994, two weeks after the UN conceded "acts of genocide" had been committed and thirty-five days into the slaughter that had already consumed an estimated 500,000 people, the hospital where Rosaria and her son found refuge forced all the patients to leave. Ostensibly, the hospital had too many military soldiers who needed care. More likely, hospital officials were being pressured to turn out the Tutsi patients.

Sheltered from a month of horrors, Rosaria and her son were now thrust onto the center stage of the nightmare. Along the roadside, bodies lay in various positions of flight, glass from a smashed-in car windshield glinted in the sunlight, and a wild dog gnawed at something resembling a human leg. While the U.S. State Department argued over whether or not to jam Rwandan radio stations, Rosaria and Alexis walked by a radio blaring, "Search houses, search the marshes, search the ditches; make sure no rebels have slipped in to hide." A few miles down the road they found temporary shelter in the Holy Family Church, the largest cathedral in Kigali.

The church teemed with the barely living: a woman without an arm trying to nurse a baby, an old man moaning with bloodied cloths wrapped around his head, a child crying inconsolably for her missing mother. As Rosaria unrolled a blanket for her son, she saw the head priest speaking angrily with one of the nuns. He was a young man with a face full of hate, dressed not in a collar, but in a flack vest with a gun. After the genocide, the tribunal would charge this man with aiding the militia and also with rape. Two nights after Rosaria arrived, the militia did, in fact, raid the church. They came with a list of men, who were promptly taken outside. Alexis and Rosaria heard the shouting, then the shots. Rosaria and Alexis would not stay to see more executions; they decided to move at first light.

From there they fled to Nyamirambo Stadium and then along the Nyabarongo River out of the city toward Nyamata. They did their best to avoid the roadblocks where their fellow Rwandans, drunk on banana beer and blood, shot or butchered anyone without a Hutu identity card and piled the bodies in ditches beside the road.

Two days into the journey, Rosaria...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zondervan
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0310287308
• ISBN 13: 9780310287308
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SMM itaku(DVD)(SNDDP); www.sony.de; ; Sony Center, Building D, Kemperplatz 1; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland