She felt ill when she heard how blunt tools were used deliberately to inflict as much pain as possible before death.
She began to cry when they showed her how the children were tortured and mutilated.
She listened mutely when she heard how they cut their tendons so they couldn't run away.
She became despondent when they explained how mothers were forced to kill their own children.
She looked at the piles of skulls heaped before her. She looked at the piles of bones stacked in front of her. She wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, this was all just too much for her to bear.
Here are the facts:
The French government armed and trained the Hutus.
In 1994, an informant revealed that an extermination plan had been developed which would kill up to 1,000 people every 20 minutes.
During the Rwandan genocide, French soldiers participated in identifying Tutsis.
Genocide was instant. Death lists were prepared and those on the list were the first to be slaughtered in their own homes.
With urging from the state, neighbors turned on neighbors, friends turned on friends, and even family turned on family.
The Catholic Church - ever present in Rwanda - turned a blind eye.
The number of foreign troops used to evacuate diplomatic staff and foreign workers, could have stopped the genocide in large measure.
Over one million people were killed in the Rwandan genocide.
Over 300,000 orphans resulted from the Rwandan genocide.
Countless raped. Countless widowed. Countless traumatized forever.
But it wasn't the biggest numbers that bothered her the most, it was the littlest. It was that one three year old girl in the white dress. It was that one teenage boy with the black eyes. It was that one mother wearing a gold ring. It was that one grandfather with the grey hair. Murdered in ways too horrible to imagine. But........... she imagined them.
She closed her eyes and she still saw their faces.
Top image by Samer, bottom image by voodoonoel.
