Immorality

When I saw the girl, I honestly did not think of the pain she was going through. What I cared about was that her dress should not be dirtied and she should not writhe that much, God knows what shards of glass were on the ground where she coiled, reliving the pain of going through the death of her family and her own near death.I did not realise the rules that are associated with trauma until I heard a resounding slap on my cheek! I realised that the girl was fighting back as well as she could and I knew if I got any closer, the slap would be the slightest injury I suffered. So I scooted back, but all the while I kept thinking, what pain must she be going through? Who knows what she has had to live through, day and night, slowly scratching her way from the valley of nightmares that engulf her every waking moment.They told me she was done with high school, and had passed with flying colours. I wondered, every time she went home to a dark house, with her report card full of straight A’s, didn’t she cry? Because I would. I did sometimes, if I thought my dad was paying too much attention to my sister’s continuously better grades, all because I was younger.Sometimes I think foreigners have no inkling of who Rwandans really are. No not sometimes; all the time.I studied, all my life in Uganda and the most common questions by my peers when I was growing up were calls to narrate every gruesome detail, I could find out about what went on in Rwanda. For my dad and mom, who suffered first hand, my questions were not welcome at all. They thought, and rightly so, that people did not fully appreciate the horror of the situation that was just a few years ago. But they did not and have never lost their temper narrating and patiently answering the ignorant questions that came their way. Rwandans are like that too. They never lost their temper, and they never tried to force the severity of the deaths, the massacres and those terrible 100 days and its impact on the young souls that had to live through it, on anyone. Rather, they slowly crawled from the despair and channeled their rage into building their nation. Despite slow justice and the pain that goes along with seeing murderers walk free, they did not dwell on that, rather they created their own justice system and it helped to reconcile a nation that had gone wild, frothing at its mouth for blood.I respect Rwanda, now more than I have ever done. 19 years and Rwanda is still going strong, incorporating its discipline into making the country habitable and welcome to all the nations that turned their backs before, the motto being, Nta Bwoba (No fear).