Shadows of Rwanda

There were others in the room with her. “I can’t do this right now,” she thought. “Not right now.”

“Wasn’t it so good? Did you guys like it?” her sister’s friend sweetly inquired. She could only nod her head in agreement as she reached out to grab a tissue from the box beside her. There was nothing left to wipe. The shameful tears had been hastily brushed off as the two hour reign of horror came to an end. Of course, it was a happy ending. Those of us so far removed from the atrocities by space, time and reality, just couldn’t bear it if it didn’t. We couldn’t, but they could, and they did.

It wasn’t until the dark night had descended upon her part of the world and an eerie silence enveloped her surroundings, that she had a moment to herself. There were no barriers now. The wound so precariously sealed during the day lay bare and exposed, now numb and frigid from the pain that had burdened it since. No barriers now. Nothing to stop the wave of emotions gushing forth, crashing one atop the other. It wasn’t true—it couldn’t be true. How could it possibly be? It defied all reason, all logic. Only madness that forced itself from fictitious lands into reality, into her reality. Yet the tears defied disbelief and kept rolling down afresh staining her delicate face, wave after wave washing away its heavily guarded innocence, stripping her of the long held and passionately defended belief in humanity’s claim to inherent goodness.

She got up after a while, realizing such paralyzing sorrow could do no good, and walked up to the open window and glanced out. The moon, so full and round, gloriously hung in the sky, casting its pearly light into the blackness. “They see the same moon that I see. Yet I look at it from the cozy confines of my heavenly room. They look at it from under their shriveled up sheets hoping its light will lend some warmth to the frigid night; hoping its light will reveal lurking enemies with the evilest of intents, waiting to pounce; hoping they would one day cast their glances above to look at the glorious moon, but see a roof instead.” The thoughts gripped her mind, refusing to let any hope meander through.

Sleep having deserted her long ago, she decided to seek refuge in the same world that was to blame for the haunting images that played in her head over and over, again and again. The news channel seemed safest, but also the most riskiest, it turned out. A documentary greeted her—the horrifying images were absent; their words sufficed. And this wasn’t even a well-acted out Hollywood portrayal. You only got the bare truth.

By mid afternoon the next day, her head was simply pounding. Even as the earth cheerfully turned in her world bringing a blast of sunshine with it, the images from the strange, yet frightfully familiar lands stayed with her, persistently flashing before her eyes — hundreds of Tutsis robbed of existence lay massacred on either sides of the dirt road; some even dared to lie right in the middle; the horrified look dawning upon the poor man’s face as he realized their logic wouldn’t even spare children — no forthcoming generations to worry about; a refugee’s painfully simple assertion of not fretting about money; only that his kids be educated so they wouldn’t have to live his life; the scores of people lining up to receive food rations so un-food-like that the first glance easily deceives ones eyes into thinking it was only seeds and sand; the reporter, perhaps the only one standing in the tragic background, angry at the world for sitting and waiting while Darfur’s inhabitants succumbed to their fate and perished noiselessly.

She took a Tylenol to make the pain go away. “How many Tylenols,” she wondered, “before their pain would go away?” Only the prayer of a Prophet came to mind and lent some comfort: “God forgive our people, for they know not, what they do.”