After a visit to Kigali Genocide Museum

Last year around this time I was in Israel and Palestine, meeting residents on both sides of the divide, and also visiting the Jewish Holocaust museum in Jerusalem

The museum was harrowing to go round, but rightly so - what the Jews went through in the holocaust was far far far worse. 

And at the end of it the underlying sentiment was ‘never again’. Never again a genocide, never again trying to annihilate a people group or an ethnicity or a religion. 

Today I went to the Genocide Memorial museum in Kigali. Harrowing once again. The words, the images, the stories, the artefacts that all combined to tell of the 100 days in 1994 when Rwanda was changed forever. When Hutus tried in every appalling way to rid their country of Tutsi’s

And at the end of the museum was a section that mentioned other genocides that have happened since World War 2. The Balkans, Cambodia, Treblinska. 

And of course still it goes on - the Rohinga people, Yemen ......

So much for 'never again'. 

I came out weeping inside; asking myself ‘when will we ever learn?’; wondering how can humans get to the point where they somehow feel that they can justify killing each other, mutilating and torturing each other, treating each other like very less than a fellow human being?

And I came out wondering what am I supposed to do with this knowledge? Several answers to that - from personal response, impacting how i treat others and what my attitude to others is, through to sharing the experience to prompt thought in others

So that’s what this is. I’m still processing the museum for myself, but this is a brief note to you, the reader, to take from it what you will, to be prompted and nudged as you will, and to do with it what you will

May my simple words help in some small way to make the world a better place, through me, and through you.