Speechless
I continually feel compelled to share with you what I see as I travel, to bring you along with me to the various places I wander, to let you in on my thoughts and feelings so that you may step into the experience with me. It’s therapeutic to write my questions, observations and struggles out on paper. I love writing and journaling. I love putting words together to express the things within me. It frees me. But today, I can’t seem to conjure up the words to describe what I have seen today. I simply don’t have words. So I will simply say, I spent the afternoon in the church where a mass slaughter occurred during the atrocious Rwandan genocide in 1994. Gary Haugen of IJM was the head of the UN investigation for Rwanda and had to sift through the thousands of corpses in this little church in the middle of a paradise of lush hills. He had not been back to this place since then. The inside of the church was fairly untouched besides the removal of most bodies.
What kind of response is available when I walk through the aisle of the church that is littered by bones, skulls, shoes, hairbrushes, and remains of thousands who were slaughtered by the blades of machetes? Oh my God. There are no words.
posted by Jena at 5:50 PM
2 Comments:
Sometimes silence is the only appropriate response. I rememeber reading the accounts of one of my bbc colleagues at the time and not being able to process the story of what had happened at Nyarubuye Church. He was there a few weeks after it happened and then returned 10 years later still haunted by what he had seen.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3582267.stm >
As a journalist i've often been to scenes of great tragedy whether it was bomb sites in Belfast , New York on Sept 11th or most recently in London and my first reaction is often the same - trying to grasp a few inadequate words to describe the enormity of the crime. Often I stand in the silence reciting the Lords Prayer to myself - the familiarity of the words spoken to me as a child giving me something to cling onto.
peace
mark
5:16 PM
I agree with both comments...heartbreaking, and i too in moments of trying to explain the inexplainable find myself softly reciting psalms, which is ironically what Jesus did on the cross...went back to the words he would have learned at his mothers knee...
as hard and harrowing as it is, i do believe when expose ourselves to the brokeness of this world we become more like the one we follow, and in the midst of the horror and shit, that can't be a bad thing
grace and beer
paul
5:34 AM
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