What is there really to say about a story like Mr. Rusesabagina's?I saw Hotel Rwanda a couple years ago. Before I saw it I sort of knew what it was about, but only very superficially. I remember my friend Sarah telling me how important a movie it was and how I had to go see it. I didn't listen and waited and waited, sometimes I just have to be in the right mood to see a "good" movie. The thing that is pathetic is that not only was I alive when the genocide in Rwanda was taking place, but I was 14, totally capable of following current events, and I have zero memory of the event. The sort of random thing is that I was actually in South America when the killings were still going on. I wondered if my parents even thought twice about sending me, by myself, to a third world country while such horrible events were going on across the ocean. Did they even know about Rwanda?
The movie left me speechless, and the book did the same. From my memory, as well as the assertions of Rusesabagina, the movie was mostly true to what really happened. 800,000 people, in less than 90 days, that is how many people were murdered. And murdered doesn't even describe what happened adequately, they were butchered, slaughtered and any other more degraded way to say murdered. That comes out to over 5 people being killed every minute for three months. And no one did anything. Seriously?
1 comment:
It is hard to encounter Mr. Rusesabagina's story without being moved. Without question, he performed amazing feats of human effort in the face of atrocities that we normally reserve for horror films.
Thank you for highlighting his story.
If you want to discuss the book further, drop by my newly live forum ( jlmunn.com/community/forum/topic.php?id=3 ).
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