[Photos courtesy of Peg Henjum.]
She is my age. We were born a few months apart…but to very different worlds.

Her name will remain in my heart; she lives in the Kigalingali Province of Rwanda, approximately 40km south of Kigali City.

When it happened, she was 36 years old, married with eight children. It was spring 1994 and by summer, her husband and six of her children had been brutally murdered.

Left alone she began the long, tedious 9½ year journey of wandering from house to house, seeking shelter for herself and her two remaining baby daughters across the southern border into Burundi, where she had escaped.

I sat with her on a wood frame couch in her brand new home of five months. Actually nice for rural Rwandan standards, approximately 15’ x 24’, made of mud brick with a concrete floor and a tin roof. Between us sat our interpreter Beatrice who soon became our comforter as it became impossible for her to tell her story and for me to listen without the two of us embracing each other’s hands.

Around the coffee table sat four men from this newly developed neighborhood, along with my guide Zbi from Prison Fellowship International. Behind them stood, tightly packed, 20+ children wanting to take a look at the muzungu (white person), possibly the first several of them had ever seen.

I listened with a broken heart and after I had cried, held her hands, and expressed my deepest empathy with her, the man sitting in the chair next to me who had waited quietly while she spoke, began to seek my attention that he might tell his story.

When we had arrived in the village, we had first gone to the pastor’s home to greet him and ask for directions to her house. The pastor was not home, so the man now sitting next to me, had been nearby and had offered to ride with us and show us where she lived. He knew the home well because he and the other three men in the room had helped her build it.

He had begged to build it because he had murdered her family.

The man sitting next to him had murdered the pastor’s family; the other two men had similar stories.

I may never recover.

For a book assignment, I had spent the previous day photographing in horrific detail two of the most gruesome genocide sites developed—Nyamata and Ntarama (possibly the areas where these people lost their loved ones). Thinking they would find refuge at the church, families were herded into what they thought was a safe place and had been unknowingly trapped in the church buildings. Literally thousands were slaughtered in less than 60 minutes. At Ntarama, I stood in the remains of the lost lives and bodies with one of approximately 20 survivors, presumed dead under the mass of bodies.

Now, I am sitting in a room with four of the men responsible for such merciless butchery. Needless to say, this is a remarkable community, with an extraordinary pastor.

Bishop John Rucyahana is the president of Prison Fellowship in Rwanda. Their work with the Rwandans is beyond comprehension. As the men responsible for the killing learned they were still loved by a redemptive God, they were given courage to take responsibility for their actions. They named their acts, confessed, repented, and in the most difficult act of all, returned to those they had offended begging for forgiveness. Prison Fellowship then stepped in with heartfelt counseling for both victim and perpetrator. They also provided funds to build (as well as create) an environment of working together which, over time, would restore hearts, humanity and hope.

I did not get the name of the man who killed her family. I have chosen to call him Paul because like the biblical Paul of Tarsus, he has been remarkably restored from the most horrific sin. He attempts to live his life now, hoping to stand as a witness to the unbelievable, passionate, and redemptive love of Jesus.

There is more to this story, but it deserves to be told in person, because, as this 21st century “Paul” said, “You would not believe this is possible unless you actually saw us here together with your own eyes.”

Peg Henjum
June 2005