Home Sweet Home

We made it home Sunday night and our return has been bitter sweet. We both missed our husbands,families and conviences that we had to live without for a month, but I know that we also left a huge part of our hearts in Rwanda. The last few days have been hard trying to adjust the internal clocks in our bodies back to Edmonton time, and for me, to try to adjust myself accordingly to what people expect. It is hard to describe, but what we experianced there cannot be put into words easily as so many of our experiances need to be experianced with all of your senses. Last night while my husband and I were having a quiet supper, I could not get over how depressing it was to be sitting at the table with all the windows in the house open and not hear a thing other than cars racing up and down the street. The hundreds of birds that you could hear merrily chirping and squacking in the trees was gone, the laughter from children playing, and yelling "Muzungo" at you were gone, and the general conversation from family and friends celebrating life in the streets and surrounding business had been left behind only to reveal the dead quiet of our life here. The littlest things that we may have taken for granted there, have now become a huge void in my life.

I have had to force myself this week, to go out and do all the daily routine things that need to be done, such as getting groceries and keeping appointments, but is has all been with a heavy heart. In Rwanda there is such a great love of socializing and everyone greeting strangers and friends alike, but the past few days here I have noticed that nearly everyone you come across barely smiles and cannot make eye contact with you because they are too engrossed in their own thing. It is very confusing trying to understand why on our side of the world, where we are supposed to be so advanced in everything that we do, and yet we have lost the simple art of humanity.

The one true hope that I have for all that followed us through our journey is forgiveness and reconciliation. I hope that it has inspired you to look at your lives and at that lives that you touch and consider saying sorry to someone that has done you wrong in the past. There was no greater impact on this trip than that. There are not many Rwandans that were not touched by the horrible atrocities of the genocide and lost many if not all of their loved ones and yet alot of them have gone on to forgive and in alot of cases become great friends with the very person that may have killed their entire families. We will never be able to imagine the horror of what they went through but we can learn so much. There is nothing in our lives that is so terrible that we cannot forgive, but it takes that first step, sometimes the hardest but in the long run, the easiest. I hope that you read some of the books that we have recommended to you in the side bar, so that you can see for yourself what I mean.

Thanks for being on this journey with us and I hope that when we are able to talk to you more about it, you are inspired to help change the world....one child at a time.

Vickie