An Ordinary Man

This past week I completed another powerful audio book during my daily commute, Paul Rusesagina's An Ordinary Man. It is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary time, the Rwanda uprising in which 800,000 people were slaughtered, most of them hacked to death by machetes. Rusesabagina was a simple hotel manager at a Belgian luxury hotel who used the only weapon at his disposal to save, if possible, the 1268 people who had taken refuge there. That weapon was words.

The book really is remarkable, and is not about the slaughter per se. Rather, it is about the psychological chess games that must be played out during extreme times when human life is on the line. The killing madness extended 100 days, but Rusesabagina's daily enterprise was to keep the "guests" at his hotel/sanctuary alive for one more day... because with no guarantees about tomorrow today was the only day you had.

Sometimes he bribed, sometimes he flattered, sometimes he deceived, always he remained vigilant. His only aim: to keep the gangs at bay, to maintain the safety of those who had taken refuge there, to hold back the insanity.

The book does more than give an account of the author's experience. The story begins with a detailed history of Rwanda, of how it came about that Hutus and Tutsi's were perceived differently. A strong case can be made that this terrible event is directly rooted in the manner in which white colonialists perceived and labeled these peoples.

The trigger event in 1994 was the shooting down of a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents. Rusesabagina, however, notes that hundreds of thousands of machetes had been imported to Rwanda in advance of this event. The uprising had been planned, and the manner in which was carried out would have shocked the world, had journalists been covering it properly.

I remember exactly where I was that day. I was with Dr. Richard Roach, who lived here in Duluth at that time. Dr. Roach was well connected with a network of missionary doctors who were active at a Madagascar hospital. (I believe they each volunteered for a month a year to staff the hospital and administer services. I wrote about his daughter Tirzah on Tuesday this week.) Dr. Roach said, "This will be very bad." He had friend in Rwanda at that time who notified him, but the story was utterly absent in the newspapers.

The U.S. was not interested in hearing about another complicated African story. The year before saw the humiliation of U.S. efforts in Somalia. Despite every indication that a genocide was taking place in Rwanda -- Hutus slaughtering Tutsis -- the State Department and U.N. refused to label the atrocities as such because legally they would be bound to act. Rather than try to understand what was going on, those who had the power chose to turn their backs on it all.

The newspapers, rather than write about the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi's being hacked to pieces, wrote stories about Jane Goodall's gorillas who were killed, and how her work was disrupted there in Rwanda's jungle. Strange, isn't it? That Jane Goodall's gorillas got more ink than a race of people who were being deliberately exterminated, literally filling the rivers with blood.

The book, which later became the basis for the film Hotel Rwanda, is filled with insight. This humbly told story will have a profound impact on all who read it.

Hope Springs Eternal for Romania

This week Susie and I were invited to a fund-raising/consciousness-raising dinner for Romanian Hope Springs International and I want to convey some what we experienced there. But where does one begin?

I am reminded of the story of the little boy on the beach trying to save the lives of sand dollars (or is is starfish?) that have been washed ashore and which will most definitely die if left there out of the water. The boy is picking them up one at a time, throwing them back into the sea. A man who sees what he’s trying to do comes walking by and questions why the boy is wasting his time when the whole beach is awash with critters doomed to die. The boy will make hardly a dent and what difference can it possibly make when there are so many?

The boy has paused to consider the man’s words, then throws the next one into the sea saying, “It made a difference for that one.”

I’m sure that was a scene from a movie, and the simplicity of last night’s dinner could have been a movie scene, too. Silviu and Tirzah Pop were the organizers of the event, a Romanian meal extraordinaire. We were not only introduced to Romanian cuisine, we also heard Silviu sing to us some songs of Romanian origin…. In Romanian, of course.

There was also a silent auction in which people were able to purchase art and pottery, donated through Silviu’s local arts connections.

That Tirzah, our veterinarian extraordinaire, would have married a man from Romania and gone on to start a ministry in a foreign land comes as no surprise when you know her family as we did when we first came to Duluth in 1986. Tirzah’s dad is a doctor who is active annually in a Christian medical outreach in Madagascar. The family has missions connections of many stripes. I remember being with Dr. Roach the day the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down years ago. He commented with heaviness of heart that this was a signal that very dark days were coming in that troubled country. The film Hotel Rwanda describes that horrorific massacre of Hutus by Tutsis that resulted in a million deaths and rivers of blood.

Romania, like many nations outside the periphery of our daily news, has more than its share of sorrows. Silviu, who has maintained strong attachments with his homeland and family siince coming to this country, felt a special burden for the people of the mountain villages in Northwestern Romania. Several years ago, when he sought to bring blankets to help people through the winters, his pastor encouraged him to “think bigger.” This ministry is a direct outgrowth of those prayers and bigger thinking.

What moved me last night was how simple and pure Silviu’s and Tirzah’s ambitions are with this ministry. It is about the needy, not about the Pops. It is about ordinary people making sacrifices to do whatever they can to help other people in extraordinarily difficult straights.

A primary focus is to reach the children. There are countless orphans due to bad medical and political decisions during the past quarter century. Young people with disabilities are neglected in Romania, hence the mission includes serving disabled children.

Jacques Ellul, in his book Hope in Time of Abandonment, noted that Martin Luther's emphasis on faith was the key word for his historical moment. But the key word in our time is hope. The modern world has seen devastation on a mass scale like never before. This ministry, Romanian Hope Springs International, is focused on bringing hope to a specific people in a time of great need.

For more information contact romanianhopesprings@yahoo.com

Layoff... Anybody Want To Play

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” ~ Kris Kristofferson

Yesterday I noticed that there’s been a lot of buzz about a new game called Layoff. So much so that it was numero uno on the Yahoo! Buzz chart.

If you aren’t familiar with it, it is evidently a variation of a number of similar video games where you try to line up circles or spheres of the same color, which then causes them to ignite and disappear. In this case, instead of random colors, the game pieces represent employees with varying responsibilities. Theoretically (and I have only read about it, not played because it took too long to download) you, the game player, are a person in management who is downsizing his or her company by eliminating duplicate positions.

Like the other games, when you line up three or four of the pieces of the same color, they disappear. Unlike the other game, each individual marker is a real person with a real set of financial and familial needs. You didn’t just make a game piece go poof. That was George, the financially strapped disabled vet.

Several thoughts come to mind simultaneously at this point, but I’ll elaborate on one.

Is it an educational experience or is it exploitation? If the people in the game are not “real” real people but only examples of people in different types of circumstances, that might soften the jaundiced edge here a bit. Still, there is something a bit perverse about a game in which “winning” means getting as many people laid off as possible so that you only have the bankers left.

Arundhati Roy, in her essay Public Power in the Age of Empire notes how Hollywood and the U.S. news media specialize in exploiting the suffering of others. For profit. From her vantage point in India, it seems to her that when tragedy strikes our news cameras are Johnny-on-the-spot to keep ratings up so they networks can sell those commercial spots that fuel these infosystems with dollars. And Hollywood is seldom far behind.

Two powerful films about horrors in Africa that have won awards in recent years include Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland. Both films were powerful. Both films gave Americans a brief glance at the hard realities of the suffering that has taken place in two places in our lifetimes. It would be very easy to defend these films as informational, but I can also see Ms. Roy’s point of view: exploitation for entertainment purposes, and profits.

On the other hand, if writers don’t tell their stories, who will hear? It takes money to publish books like The Last King of Scotland. The publisher spends money to promote it because it is a story worth telling, in fact, remarkable. Selling film rights to the book motivates others to tell their stories, which increases our understanding. Life is hard. There is much suffering in our world.

I myself don’t know what to think. I once knew a man who survived Idi Amin’s brutal slaughter by hiding under a pile of dead bodies that once was his family. What would he have thought of the Forrest Whitaker film based on these selfsame events? Where is the line between informing and exploiting?

If you think I’m being too serious here, feel free to send me a note: Ed, lighten up.

VACATION PICTURE OF THE DAY
Since last weekend I've been blogging while on vacation. We flew to a wedding in Dallas initially. Wednesday we rented a car and have been heading west toward the Grand Canyon. Yesterday we spent time in Old Town Albuquerque, where this shot was taken. Today, it will be Old Route 66 to Holbrook.