Dear President-Elect Trump:
Grace is a Rwandan Christian. She was a young mother when government-sanctioned genocide motivated the spontaneous creation of Hutu death squads. These death squads went from house to house throughout Rwanda, ferreting out Rwandan Tutsis and murdering them. It didn’t matter whether you were old or young, male or female, full Tutsi or part Tutsi. The death squads sought to kill them all.
The Tutsi prayed—not to be spared, because that was beyond the belief of most. Instead, they prayed for a humane death—from a bullet—rather than from a machete.
The death squads murdered Grace’s husband, father, and siblings. Her mother somehow survived. Grace, her baby daughter in tow, fled to a Christian Hutu neighbor seeking protection. “God does not love you anymore. It’s time for you to die,” was his response.
She fled from him to her other Hutu neighbor—a Muslim. He agreed to protect Grace and her baby girl. By day Grace and her baby hid under the man’s bed as the death squads roamed the neighborhood looking for Grace, her baby, and any other unseen Tutsi.
When the killing finally stopped after 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis were butchered, maimed, and murdered. 8000 Tutsi each day died.
Grace, her mother, and her baby daughter were among the survivors.
Carnage littered the streets, the stench unbearable. Grace fell into an understandable state of deep depression, almost in a vegetative state. Her friends and loved ones, save her mother and daughter were dead—many of them before her eyes. She could not care for herself, her baby, anything. Her mother kept her alive—for almost two years.
Finally, a realization came over Grace: She must move on. She must rebuild. Marshaling her pain toward progress, she knew what she must do. She must find a home of her own and a job to support her aging mother and daughter.
She must forgive.
Grace joined a group of Rwandan Tutsi women in a sewing co-op named Amahoro ava Hejura, Kinyarwandan for peace from heaven. The women spent their days making dresses, bags, hats, and other clothing on foot-powered treadle sewing machines. They were their support group. They forged through their pain seeking inner peace and reconciliation. They took meals to the Hutu death squads, now in prison.
Grace needed to raise money to buy mud bricks for a house. Rather than take a motorcycle taxi to Amahoro each day, she walked three hours each way from her mother’s house to Amahoro, saving the taxi fare for bricks. For two years she made the daily walk to Amahoro. After two years she had saved sufficient money to make a small mud brick home.
She built the home by herself and the help of friends. When the house was finished, she moved in. But she realized that if she continued walking to Amahoro each day, she could build a second house and rent the first one out.
My daughter Danielle introduced me to Grace in 2011. When I met her, she had walked back and forth from Amahoro for enough years to build four mud-brick homes—the one she lived in, two rentals, and one she used for a chicken house to raise and sell chickens and eggs.
I ate dinner in her home—cooked on charcoal fire stove. The sacrifice I saw all around me humbled me. After dinner, she walked with me to a vacant field near her home. Charcoal fires filled their air with the aroma of a mega BBQ. It was dinner time.
With the sun setting in the perpetually warm, evening sky, she said: “Over there, they killed my family. Over there (pointing in another direction), they killed much of my village.” Her face radiated hope, peace, and happiness as she said it, her pearl white teeth and dark black skin creating a warm contrast from each other.
“How can you be so happy?” I asked. “Your life was destroyed on this spot, and you radiate peace and love.”
“Pain and peace are very different things,” she said. “I feel pain every day. But I forgive and move on. I reach outward. I serve. It brings me peace. “The pain and hate take some people to very dark places. It’s a choice. Pain can make you hate, or it can help you love. I have chosen to love.”
In Grace, I have seen the fruits of love.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
