About Rwanda

When I first started talking to the Koonces about coming to Rwanda, they told me I should read some books about the genocide that happened there in 1994. I don't really think the word "genocide" registered until I started reading about it. It's so hard to explain unless you read everything that I read, and even then I'm not sure I can explain it very well. There is so much that happened, I can't tell everything so I'm going to tell the things that stood out the most.

- The genocide lasted about 100 days and during that time, about 20% of the population was killed.

- The people who killed were normal people, normally not a part of the military or anything like that. The people responsible for organizing the killings used a radio called RTLM to tell people who to kill. - From the things I've read, the politicians responsible for the killings were called Hutu Power (supposedly representing an ethnic group) and they killed Tutsis (another ethnic group) along with anyone who defended the Tutsis and even those who didn't take sides.

- This genocide got almost no publicity and no help during the times of the killings.

- People were killed mostly with machetes and many people suffered so much before they actually died.

I hope this gives you a little more information about the place I'll be going. This happened 15 years ago, but I know that so many people still suffer because of what happened.