Charting a Route to Restoration
Charting a Route to Restoration
Catherine Larson
Print
The machete gash across the face of Emmanuel Mahuro, a 16-year-old Rwandan native, is no longer an open wound. Today, like a jagged boundary line on a map, a scar juts down the plateau of his forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and up the hill of his right cheek.
It is impossible to look into Emmanuel’s eyes without also seeing this deep-cut ravine, a natural border-line of division etched across his face, the face of Rwanda, 12 years after the genocide.
To recall April 1994 and the onslaught of the 100 days of slaughter is to unleash memories of horror: men, women, and children hacked to death by machetes; mothers forced to dash their own babies against the walls; women raped; children burned alive. The scope of brutality exceeded the capabilities of the imagination; the rate of killing exceeded even that of the Nazis. By the time it was over, more than one million Rwandans were dead--this, in a country of just 8.5 million people.
A few years later, more than 110,000 men and women guilty of these atrocious crimes swelled Rwanda’s overcrowded prisons. Now, as tens of thousands of them are released, old wounds are re-opened. The horrifying memories of these slayings haunt everyone involved, irrespective of their role--survivor, orphan, widow, or perpetrator. One cannot chart a route to restoration in Rwanda without involving all of them and without returning to the boundary lines of genocide’s wounds. If this gash across the face of Rwanda can be stitched back together, repentance and forgiveness are the only thread strong enough to bind.
Prison Fellowship Rwanda is helping bind these wounds. And God has given its chairman, Bishop John Rucyahana, a burden to chart the road to restoration. But little did he know that the road would first lead him deeper into the chasms of pain, his own and that of others, before leading him to the road of redemption.
