Sorry about posting this a bit late, Rwanda was a life changing experience for me. Our team went to Rwanda and arrived February 17th and on the 21st. We went to the village of Magegere and for me was eye opening to see how the rest of the world lived. I'm mixed with a feeling of helplessness and happiness that I helped many children, but there are still so many. In our first days there, we were shown the memorial sites for the genocide in 1994. Little did I know that in 1992, test killings were held to see how fast the target Tutsi population could be wiped out. The Hutu majority did not want another Holocaust, just a quick eradication of the Tutsi minority. We visited a church in an area where the tests were held, many ran to the church and were spared. In 1994, many more than two years before came to the church, 10,000 inside, 25,000 in all inside or near the church. They believed they were safe, they believed that the Hutu would not touch them. They were wrong.
I walked into the church, untouched since that day, the emptiness, the doorway twisted by grenades as the owner described. Inside the spots of light on the floor led your eyes up to the ceiling, where machine guns had torn holes through the thin tin roof. The place has a feeling I can only describe as the vacuum of death, the absence of human life, unlike a deserted area, but you can feel that there was supposed to be life here. I walk farther inside and we are led down to a chamber. In that chamber are the skulls of the victims inside the church, for many it "clicked", for me it did not. It still seemed 
very unreal. I looked into the eyes of the skulls and I could not see how any human could do this, it seemed that humanity had completely left the killers. We then walked out and were led to large tiled mass graves, where many of the dead are. There were three, with flowers and large purple crosses on them. As I walked around the church compound, it still did not hit me. I walked back into the church and saw a pulpit, stained in blood, dark and red. Then as I turned around I saw a door, I walked up to the door and peered inside. There I saw what made it become a reality for me. There, clothes as high as the ceiling were piled up. Old clothes, rotten clothes, bloody clothes. Bags, blankets, suitcases, dresses. I did not need an explanation of whose clothes they were, I knew, they were the dead's clothes. There it became real, the genocide, the planning, the pain, the death. It cut into me, it changed me, then and there I somehow knew. The relation change my view from a crazed killing to a meticulously planned extermination, akin to the Holocaust.
After our introductory to the Rwandan Genocide, we spent the next two days heading to Magegere and witnessing the the housing conditions. Houses are made of mud brick and are covered in metal corrugate. 
Inside, the houses are small, 10X10 in some houses. One house we saw was a young woman with a child and brothers living in such a house. To live inside this cramped and impoverished house made me wake up to the living standards of Rwanda and Third World Countries. I then felt compelled to do as much as I could. Before the trip, I believed that missions teams actions were a drop in the water, insignificant to the situation. The thought "What can 15 people do?" was in my head. But when I saw the conditions, I knew the answer, the drop is insignificant in the big picture in the start. Yet, for some reason I felt that drop could change the world, the way the few we helped in their lives.
After spending time in Magegere, we headed to a school to hold a Vacation Bible School and plant a field of fruit trees for the children. After we planted the trees, I was assigned to the games section. There, Jamal and I thought up a duck duck goose variant called chicken, chicken, goat. The game, unlike duck duck goose where you just say it, here you say bak, bak, bak, baaaa. This created lots of laughs from the children and before long they could play the game themselves.
During this time we also repeatedly vised PHARP, the organization we worked with to present the sewing group with sewing machines. The sewing group is a project that Anastase (right, with teacher of a group), PHARP leader and our guide, has a large hand in. The projects goal is to get women to work for themselves and make their own money. It has spread to the farthest corners of Rwanda today, all the way to the edge of Lake Kibuye. For the last two days before our trip to the Congo refugee camp, Danny, Jamal, my father Tony, and I fixed the computers at PHARP headquarters and had to deal with a nice virus that no anti virus software detected that copied itself in every folder on the hard drive (that was a hair pulling day).
Near the end of our journey, we headed to Lake Kibuye that is shared by Rwanda and the Dem. Rep. of Congo (actually its a war torn area with Western funded armies from the nations around it fighting over diamonds and other natural resources, along with many Hutu refugees w
ho do not believe that the Rwandans forgive them) The camp we visited was a large hill, at least a mile and half long, covered in mud brick and white UN tops. In the middle of "The Land of 1,000 Hills" was a hill pockmarked with white rectangles. There we walked into the camp and was led by the overseer of the operation. The UN camp has been in operation since the early '90s and is a place of "no hope" as many will just spend their lives in the camp. We also learned that the camp only got half of its needed food in February. As we presented the leaders of a church there with clothes for the children, we began to go back to Kigali to head home the next day. On the way, we saw around half a dozen men in their late teens walking with blankets and all their belongings, one van we had that was half empty picked them up, since they were heading to Kibuye , which was on the way there. They said they were from the camp and had just finished secondary school there and were heading to a college in Kibuye. The next day, we headed back the way we came, over the green mountains of Rwanda, to the stereotypical "Africa n" savannas, over the Mediterranean, over Paris and over Greenland and Iceland. Funny, people always said Greenland's frozen white, and Iceland's green, they're were both white, with massive sheets of ice connecting the Arctic Circle.
As we drove back home after landing in SFO, I had many thoughts about Rwanda. I knew at least one thing, with our help, and others help whether direct or indirect, through church or the UN, we can give Rwanda hope, the same hope the men probably had going to college, out of the UN camp with a better future ahead of them, just like the rest of this new generation of Rwandans, not separated by Hutu and Tutsi, but as one.
- Michael Leija
