15 years

That is exactly what the label obnoxiously says it is: a giant candle.

And why do I have a giant candle in my room with construction paper covering all the waxy goodness inside?  I don’t know.

Anyway, I’m rather tired right now, and believe it or not [actually you really can believe this] this took my an hour to do from start to finish because I an obviously un-photogenic, and being on camera, well hey— super unphotogenic.  And yeah, c’est moi.  Surprising.  The mysterious blogger makes her appearance as a dark-eyed, just-showered, and still fizzled late night, or more correctly, early morning sleeper.

But all jokes aside, this really is a solemn occasion.

April 06, 2009.  15 years since the Rwandan genocide in which over 1 million people were brutally murdered in the span of 100 days.  That’s 10,000 people every day, 400 every hour, 7 every minute.

In the span of those 100 days, we, as in the bystanders and those in the UN, pulled out all our troops with barely a smidgen of a scratch.  We were not hurt.  But in the span of those 100 days, 1 million people were still killed, forced to wonder why they had been abandoned, why they were not part of us but an altogether cast of identity, abandoned from the global scene and the global community, wondering why as countries that proudly parade and nurture words and ideas like liberty, democracy, and human rights so incestuously looked away and refused to acknowledge this massacre as a genocide.  Genocide has such a strict definition- we are not sure that what is happening in Rwanda can legally be called a genocide.  And so an entire nation suffered in the acknowledgement that her people had been abandoned by these so-called great heroic forces because we’re not so sure it’s really a genocide or not.

We have ignored the genocide and brushed it off, blaming Rwanda for not being able to defend itself, showering in pathetic bliss that the US cannot possibly intervene for anyone’s behalf.  We have ignored those thousands of people who were burned alive in their own churches. We have ignored hundreds of thousands of women who were beaten, raped, murdered, and now the only thing those women have inherited are orphaned children and terminal diseases.  We have ignored those million being machete’d and gunned down.  We have ignored radio transmissions and scripts of those who propogated this “ethnic cleansing.”  And we still had the nerve to say it’s not a genocide.  That it’s not our fault.

15 years later, Rwanda is scarred and burnt, but there exists a hope.  Corny as it is, when your entire family is raped and chopped up to pieces, hope is the only thing you have left to survive.

I am not at all seeking to eliminate and absolve the anguish these people have endured.  I just offer my moment of understanding, humility, and shame that I acknowledge the hell they have emerged from. They are no longer forsakened; they are no longer abandoned; they are no longer alone in the belief that the world left them in their time of need.

And so I light a candle of hope for Rwanda.