Left to Tell - A Rwandan Woman's Story, and the film: Hotel Rwanda

If you have seen the movie "Hotel Rwanda" you may have a good idea of what "Left to Tell", by Immaculée Ilibagiza, is about. If you have heard about the Rwandan massacre from news reports, you may be surprised, as I was, to find a personal account of a Tutsi woman who survived the massacre. This book tells the true story of Immaculée Ilibagiza. It is the story of her life in Rwanda beginning long before the conflict, a relatively comfortable life punctuated only occasionally by episodes of tension. She recounts incidents that point to the escalation of tensions, until finally she is forced to flee and finds shelter with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor and family friend. At this point the incomprehensible inhuman slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus, many of whom were friends and neighbors, has become a reality.

For more than three months these eight women lived inside a single cramped bathroom. While they were hidden, they were not completely isolated - they heard the mobs outside calling out their names, and they heard much more that I will not relate.

Immaculée's story is a gripping personal account of her life in the midst of this impossible-to-imagine situation. It is also the story of her reliance on faith, on God, on prayer in the midst of terrifying circumstances, to sustain her. And this is the amazing thing about books, about being a reader - here, we find ourselves in the shoes of Immaculée - and seeing the scene as she sees it, we also walk through, with her, in faith and prayer.

In a similar way, one of the aspects of the movie, "Hotel Rwanda" that made it so powerful was its focus on the Paul, the hotel manager, who was able to save 1,200 lives by being, essentially, a very very good hotel manager. The film has been criticized for not depicting the genocide more completely, but (quoting from Roger Ebert's excellent review) "director Terry George and writer Keir Pearson have made exactly the correct decision. A film cannot be about a million murders, but it can be about how a few people respond."

And this is also what makes "Left to Tell" so interesting and so moving. The individuals in these two accounts of the Rwandan massacre do not feel courageous in the face of their terrible circumstances, but they make choices that require courage - and faith - and they defy the odds, each in their own way, by the way they respond.

Postscript: Convinced that she was spared for a reason ("Left to Tell"), Imaculee has written two additional books and has also established a charitable fund to help orphaned children in Rwanda and elsewhere on the African continent.

Hanoi Streets

Four months ago I was in Hanoi, Vietnam, with my mother and sister, there to adopt and bring home her two-year old son, Ryan. It was a time of watching and waiting - we did not speak the language, did not usually know where we were, precisely, did not really know how the process would unfold...we stayed in a comfortable western hotel with other families who were adopting children, and together we were ushered about by our Vietnamese adoption coordinator. It all went without a hitch and we left after twelve days with a little boy who wore his feelings right up front - stormy and eager and content and frightened though he was, he remained brave and willing to risk security for what seemed promising...how we love him already for this and his tender, generous, adventurous heart!


On the long ride out to the orphanage and back, as our driver took a winding route around and across Hanoi on busy streets, and then sped along rural roads, we saw glimpses real life here, glimpses of a life out of our context, gone in a breath... On the surface, all was calm and steady like the rain. Witness the street life - city residents, visitors, commuters in constant motion, walking and riding bicycles and motorscooters, rain and shine, often with two riding together. Women wearing dresses and heels, or pants and sandals; young men sending text messages while driving. Traffic flows here, it does not obey lights and signs as there are few of these. It winds its way, flowing through and around obstacles like water through a sieve, like a stream. And that is mostly what I see...there is a beauty in it and I am not sure if I am blind to the real story or just seeing what is.

Constant Kindness in my Inbox

On the eve of Albert Schweitzer's Birthday (January 14, 1875 - September 4,
1965), I found this article in my Inbox, from the director of the local Greater Philadelphia Albert Schweitzer Fellowship program - my friend and colleague, Nikki. I loved the story - true! - of a very comfortable couple and their huge decision - inspired by the life of Albert Schweitzer - to live for others.

At the bottom of the same email I found these words:

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."
- Albert Schweitzer.

I don't know much about Albert Schweitzer, except that his life has been an inspiration to many, and what I have read here. From my participation in the fellowship program, I have absorbed a bit: Schweitzer established and served in a desperately needed hospital in Lambaréné, in what was then French Equatorial Africa; he was known for his commitment to living with Reverence for Life. There is much much more to his life (see link above!), but with just this - just the words above - I find fresh and nourishing values to consider in these fearful, survival-oriented times.

Misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility - all are in the air, these days. We are tempted to "wait it out" - hoping for problems to go away, for the market to bounce back, for the ice to melt - not always the worst thing to do... But consider the claim: "Constant kindness can accomplish much...". It rings so true to me - I have been the surprised recipient of undeserved kindness many times, and have found that a soft word really can quiet a storm...but (I admit with great shame) I tend to think of a focus on kindness as a detour from accomplishing much. :(

So, it is amazing to consider instead an attitude of constant kindness, and what it might do!

Yet, it is not all that simple to contemplate the practice! Kindness...in the face of hostility? Is this wise, even? But the image of sun melting ice, of coldness 'evaporating', of hard feelings softening, hearts opening - this is the image to which we must cling...that these difficult realities might be transformed.

Into what, I ask (with you)? Real differences do not evaporate, nor is truth, simple truth, at odds with a heart of kindness. So, then one must consider this power of "constant kindness" - bold and true - with care, in the face of its enemies, in the reality of truth obscured, positions in conflict, a focus on gain and loss. Constant kindness is creative, it is reverence for life, all of life. And what is possible when we approach all of life, your life as well as mine, with this reverence? I have no easy answers, but I sure hope I get to find out.

Out Stealing Horses

I was about to embark on a three-hour train ride when I picked up Per Peterson's "Out Stealing Horses" in the bookstore at the station. Set in Norway, the book traces the life of Trond Sander just after he moves into a remote riverside cabin, alone, at sixty seven years of age - only to have "all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him". Norway is a far off land ...I have been only as far as Denmark, so I was curious enough, then saw a claim that the book was "...a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader's own experience of life". Who could resist a claim like that? And from the New York Times Review of Books, at that?

"Out Stealing Horses" is a trip into nature and story, interwoven; into the life of a man who has loved and grieved, who still has an achingly intense longing for his father and for understanding pieces of his own story, the mystery of his father and his past. When Trond was young, during the time of the second World War, when Norway was occupied by the Nazis, his father would disappear for months at a time. Yet Trond enjoyed a deep and trusting connection with him that was based on the depth and truth of moments lived together - beautiful moments, captured with the eye and heart. The intrusion of the bigger picture into the personal life and relationships is only understood many years later when Trond has a chance to talk with friend of his father's. I felt as hungry as Trond to know more about what was going on in his father's life, the village, and the country.

By chance, I picked up the October 20 issue of the New Yorker which also has a review of a book by Per Peterson: his newer novel "To Siberia". This reviewer also mentioned the "astonishing" earlier novel "Out Stealing Horses". He picked up perfectly what Peterson is about: "Peterson's real interest, though, is in the physical and emotional distances that separate his characters from each other and from their former selves". That may be true - but to me, the separation is always conveyed through longing for connection and understanding, and it is endured with meticulous attention to past and present - and with trust, always.

Every time I pick up this book I want to read it again. Maybe I will.

Here is the NY Times review

The first chapter is available, too.

Reflection - Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning is a slim volume that has earned much critical acclaim and has been discussed, reviewed, and studied by ordinary people and well-known scholars, as it well deserves. It is in its 74th edition, has been translated into 24 languages, and has sold more than 9 million copies. It does need another review! But having, at last, read it, I am eager to share my reaction, and to recommend this remarkable book.

Victor Frankl was a psychiatrist in practice in Vienna before World War II; he survived many years Auschwitz and other death camps. In this book he manages to convey his experience of living inside one of these death camps from the unique perspective an inmate who is also a healer, ever watchful and caring towards those around him. We enter into his descriptions knowing that he lived through an extended horrific nightmare that we do not even want to imagine. We can really only bear this because Frankl is with us along the way, helping us to see what he saw and to follow his desire to heal fellow inmates by noticing the details that point to this person's hope, that one's despair... His ability to continuously observe and synthesize these experiences ultimately bears fruit as the the new "Third Viennese School" of psychotherapy, logotherapy. For the reader, it provides a path to understanding human suffering, freedom, love, hope, and meaning in a way that no other writer can match.

You have to read it to find what it will reveal to you!
Sample below, and also PBS's The Question of God.

I find depth in every line of this book, but the thread that speaks the loudest to me in this reading is the one in which Frankl addresses suffering and meaning together. Here are long excerpts from the book...each one affects - and instructs - me at a deep level:

From p. 77 Meaning and life:

"We had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. ...Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

"Life" does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual...

"Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his fate by action...At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation ... Sometimes a man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross."

From p. 36-37 The centrality of love:

"A thought transfixed me...I saw the truth as it is set in to song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. the truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

"I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

"I did not know whether my wife was alive...but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved."

From p. 66-67 Suffering and spiritual freedom

"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.


"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not."


There is so much here, and so much more in this book - I will read it again and again, I know. It is not long...it is surely one of the most valuable books I have read. One reviewer has said that every human being should read this book...I cannot disagree with that! I will add that there is a time for each thing...so, when it is your time - read this book!!!

Keeping the Hope

Watching and listening to It's A New Day makes me feel like "it's raining hope" around here...

It was made by will.i.am - you can watch a good interview with him on Larry King Live. Maya Angelou is also a guest in this clip. For more by will.i.am, check out dipdive.com, where he has posted other great videos including "Yes We Can" - yet another inspiring music video, his version of then-candidate Obama's great speech of the same name.

Oddly, I found this while reading Joho the Blog (see Nov 9 2008) ... looking for hope in all the right places, this time!

Adopting Ryan

One of my first posts, and part of the urgency for starting this - my first blog - when I did was the pending adoption of a little two-year old boy (Ryan, see earlier post) by my sister. It is a huge event, in her life, and in the life of our family... we all think about the present, and the future in a different way now. And that is a blessing!

Linda liked the idea of blogging her journey so much that she took the helm - so I am happy to include this link to her very own blog: http://www.gettingryan.blogspot.com/

She tells the story that only she can tell. I love my sister! And I love my new nephew!