A Message of Hope From a Pile of Bones

Rwanda is one of the most enchanting places on earth—and one of the most haunted. With its rolling hills and lush greenery, it could easily pass for paradise—if not for memories of 1994. Fifteen years ago, on April 6, the plane carrying Rwanda's president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot out of the sky. The murder set off an orgy of slaughter and cruelty so extreme that it defied description or understanding.

John Rucyahana, who had fled Rwanda as a teenager, was living in Uganda and visiting Atlanta when the violence broke out. The televised images of suffering and death convinced him that he should return home.

"I needed to be able to have the grip of the horror and then be part of the solution," the Anglican bishop told me.

When Rucyahana got back to Uganda in mid-July, he rented a minibus, hired a driver and took to the road with 10 other pastors. They crossed into Rwanda and made their way to Nyamata, near Kigali, the capital. The violence had died down but death was everywhere: "We saw mass graves; we saw dead bodies. In one home, we found 27 dead bodies, including a cat and a dog … Some of the pastors couldn't sleep; they spent all night crying … Two of them had to be taken back home to Uganda."

During a recent visit to Rwanda, I accompanied the bishop to a bridge near Kigali overlooking the Nyabarongo River. In 1994, it might as well have been the River Styx—a dank passageway to the underworld. "Many people were thrown into the river alive," said Rucyahana. "Others were killed and their dead bodies were thrown into this river. And they floated … through River Kagera, which continued to take these bodies into Lake Victoria in Uganda."

Rucyahana had to act. Initially, he ran seminars, urging people to repent and rebuild. But that wasn't enough. So in 1996, he packed up his family and returned to the land of his birth to preach hope standing on "a pile of bones," as he puts it. One of his first tasks was to build a boarding school for orphans: "Having lost a million people, lots of babies were left behind." The school in Musanze, near the Volcanoes National Park, opened in 2001. It is now one of the best schools in the country. It is called Sonrise, which, Rucyahana explains, "means the Son of God rises into the misery, into our darkness."