Rwanda

Today, a girl named Clementine came to talk to our middle schoolers about the genocide in Rwanda. She stood in front of them and began with a story, "Sometimes, I would come home from school and I would say, 'Mama, a girl pushed me at school today. I hate her.' And my mother would tell me, 'No. You are just confused. You do not know her yet.' I didn't know what this meant." Then she launched into her story about the Hutus and the Tutsis and refugee camps and what it meant to not have, to sleep in tents and to move over the entire terrain of Africa for years, without parents, until she settled with her sister in the United States.

Randomly, they ran into a woman at a market who was ALSO a re-located Rwandan. The woman knew the girls' aunt; and they called her. Then they talked to their parents for the first time in six years; everyone had thought they were dead.

Her story wandered and because of the small children she said, "And on that day, many bad things happened. It is all I will say." She did not go into the terrors, but for these children, outside washrooms and the inability to relax, to stop walking when they wanted, was terror enough. In the end she said, "It all begins with something little. A shove and a little hate. And before you know it, people are killing. I bring a message to try to understand."

She was eighteen and poised and waiting to hear back from Princeton. Her story is virtually unbelievable in its scope and magnitude. It made me think of the feuds I've known or had. It all starts with something small, a shove or a push and an unknowing I hate you.

You just don't know them yet.

I wondered if this could be some kind of life-changing experience. You know, the kind that makes you give money to charity and burst through your self-imposed walls. I had the realization that perhaps I was too old to have a life-changing experience. I do not know if that could be true.

How do you get to know someone? How do you really get to know them?