#Bugesera #Rwanda - The most haunting experience of my life happened today and I have been to the memorials for Auschwitz, Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking and other heart wrenching locations where genocide, war and mass murders have taken place. I have learned about atrocities worldwide but here in Rwanda from April 7, 1994 to July 4, 1994 - in a mere 100 days - almost a million innocent people were murdered in the most horrific ways that one can imagine. Today, I visited two Catholic Churches, #Nyamata and #Ntarama, where 10,000 and 5,000 #Tutsi people, respectively, sought refuge in April 1994 as they had done in the past, bringing with them food, dishes, money and, of course, their children and who on April 15, 1994 perished at the hands of a government controlled by the #Hutus as well as by their own priests and nuns. On that fateful day, the killers approached these small churches and surrounding buildings where the Tutsis were locked inside. They threw hand grenades at doors and windows to gain access before brutally cutting down the people inside with guns, machetes, hammers and the like. In the Sunday school, the wall, still today, is stained in blood from where the babies were thrown against it. The women were brutally raped by sometimes 10-12 or more men before being skewered by a stick shoved into their vaginal canals and out through the crown of their heads. Today, these sites are no longer used as churches but are genocide memorials, and when you walk through them today, you will see thousands upon thousands of blood stained clothes that were removed from the decomposed bodies of the victims which are piled high on the pews; bullet holes in the roof and walls; the skulls of the innocents with holes from hammers, gashes from machetes, and arrows which were dug in through their victims’ eye sockets; the kitchen that was burned with hundreds inside before the walls were toppled over burying the survivors alive; and, perhaps most agonizing, the stacks upon stacks of open coffins with the bones of 5-6 bodies in each one, bloodied, some with their teeth still intact. Read more at: https://www.facebook.com/travelirvana/posts/521947431521665 (at Bugesera District)
