On my way home from work today, I saw a young girl passed out next to the sidewalk, her long legs sprawled in the grass and stick-thin arms encircled around an emaciated body. I was with one of my students who immediately crouched down and started to rouse the girl and ask her questions in Kinyarwanda. Slowly, as a small crowd began to develop around the scene, I learned that the girl was an orphan. She was the first child of her family and had to provide for two younger sisters. A couple weeks ago, she was hospitalized for an arm fracture and issues pertaining to her stomach, but she did not like her doctor so she ran away. She fainted by the road because she had not eaten for days.

Kigali Memorial Centre

A woman quickly appeared on the scene with a large bottle of water, a container of milk, and a packaged lunch of local Rwandan food. Two people helped the girl to sit up and relocate to an area of shade. After helping the girl to eat a couple bites of food and drink the water, my student and several others began deliberating what to do. They finally decided to help the girl find her younger sisters, so two of them pulled her up and supported her toward the buses.

All of this happened just a hundred feet from Novotel, where wealthy businessmen and Western tourists sauntered in and out in their flowing sundresses, polished heels and suits, eating chocolate croissants and sipping on strawberry daiquiris. You knew immediately who they were because they were the ones who saw the scene on the sidewalk, stopped for a moment, then took a large detour around the commotion.

Why is it that so often the Good Samaritans of the world are the ones with the fewest resources to help, but still give out of their poverty? Why are the people with money the ones who are least inclined to let go of it to help others?

Life is precious in Rwanda. Given the 1994 genocide in which nearly everybody lost a family member or a friend, people recognize the tenuousness of life and value it highly. As I’ve mentioned before, there is such a strong sense of community here and people welcome strangers into their own homes because they know that they would’ve wanted others to do the same for their children and relatives. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the hospitality and the lengths to which people go to show you their country, their families, and their culture.

Just last week, I mentioned offhandedly to a new acquaintance that one of the things I missed most about home was my piano. In addition to my Bible, the only other two things that I bring everywhere with me are Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 and Liszt’s “Un Sospiro.” I thought perhaps that I would be able to find a piano in a hotel to practice, but even though I visited the nicest hotels in Kigali, I couldn’t find a single piano anywhere. Well, this new acquaintance called me last week to tell me that he wanted to introduce me to a friend that he “loved, but did not know.” Intrigued and curious, I agreed. We had dinner and then he took me to his “friend’s home,” which looked oddly like an abandoned church – and there, sitting in a dusty corner, was a worn but still functional upright piano. I must have played for nearly three hours after going into ecstasies upon seeing it. Apparently, this acquaintance had spent an entire day searching and contacting people to locate a piano, and finally, he heard of a piano that had been imported years ago by a Westerner who loved piano but would only play a couple times a month when he was in Kigali for business. Can you believe it? I was so blown away by his kindness and thoughtfulness.

The beautiful walkway alongside the graves of those who were killed in the Genocide.

I visited the Genocide Memorial last week and walked away feeling more confused about the events of 1994 than when I walked in. Even though I have spent the past three years studying the history of Rwanda and learning about the events that culminated in the genocide, I still can’t comprehend how an entire population was motivated and mobilized to murder over one million people. The stories are chilling – but it’s one thing to read about how people hacked their neighbors to death with machetes, how women were brutally raped by men known to have HIV, and how parents were forced to kill their own children or pay to save their loved ones from more painful deaths – it’s another to know friends who survived the genocide and to recognize the people giving testimonials in the documentaries. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to understand the experience of so many of my students and the traumatic horrors they witnessed as children. I cannot comprehend the nauseating dread of approaching each check-point and seeing leering machetes covered with the blood of people in the previous car. I don’t understand how a five-year-old can think that each minute might be his last. I cannot grasp the pain of seeing friends and family members mutilated and killed in the most painful ways possible, and then having to return to the sites of their deaths after the genocide to wash their bones to prepare for burial. But even more than this, I do not understand how – after seeing hundreds of thousands of skulls, bones, and graves – people can pick up the remains of their lives along with the remains of their loved ones, forgive the perpetrators of violence, and continue to live. It is within the context of this history, this shared experience of an entire population, that Rwanda’s remarkable advances become all the more extraordinary.

It is impossible to escape the overwhelming sense of death of just sixteen years ago, but that has not stopped people from living, learning, and loving.