Are we really over this?

John first came to Rwanda in 1997 to manage the healing, peace-building and reconciliation program for World Vision. I caught up with him on a rainy Saturday morning in Kigali in December 2007. It was his sixteenth visit to Rwanda in ten years.

“They were tough days. You had this cauldron of a million people who’d lived in exile for up to forty years and two million recent refugees, all coming back to mix with the survivors and with perpetrators who hadn’t yet been identified.

I saw a country moving at half pace, things taking so long to be done. People sitting around, people full of fear, people suspicious of other people, whispering against other people, "watch out for this person... watch out for that person." Just a complete absence of trust.

Annet came to Rwanda from Uganda in September 1994 and took a job helping to re-unite orphan children with any surviving relatives. Her parents were Rwandan but she had grown up in Uganda as an exile.

"There was a lot of suspicion and a lot of questions. Where was the international community? What did the UN do? Where was God during the genocide? Why did he leave us? Why does God hate the Tutsi? Why do the mzungu hate the Tutsi? They didn’t do anything to save us.”