Nyamata

We just got back from some time at Nyamata, a Catholic church about 45 minutes outside Kigali, where tutsis were killed en masse.

When you enter the church you immediately see enormous piles of clothing laying on the pews, the musty and blood-stained garments standing in for the people whose bones are encased in the catacombs below and behind the church. The ceiling is riddled with holes, some from bullets, others from shrapnel pushing outward through the room from the inside out.

Seeing row after row of fractured skulls staring out at you as you pass down a steep staircase to a narrow underground passage cannot adequately be described - nor should it. That is why we had to go and bear witness. Above and below the skulls were platforms of arm and leg bones, the quantity of which can be counted but hardly conceived. It is then you remember that this is one of 72 such sites around the country...

Outside the church were two older women tending the grounds, tilling the earth with simple hoes. While we were in the church it began to rain quite hard. As we came out we gathered with a small group of people under an awning. Everyone was filled with emotion and most of the people in our group had eyes brimming with tears. To the side hung a metal security gate, its frame twisted where a mortar bent its bars outwards giving the attackers access to the people hiding in the church.

Beth Mercer approached one of the older woman who was there gardening and greeted her with a few simple Kirundi words. She responded quietly, gently. Beth then asked her if she could take her photograph and she said that we could. As Beth and I continued to interact with her, she lifted her hands up towards us and spoke a phrase neither of us knew. Our friend Moses said she had asked God to bless us.

It was incredibly humbling and I felt like we should have all been asking God for his mercy instead...