Day Three

Our first full day of filming. Morning fog; interviews with Fred & Damien, two Rwandan school teachers; construction on the Wellspring site, bulldozing an old building; and an interview with a journalist & historian from the New Times newspaper. Busy, productive, educational.

Right now I'm sitting in the site office. We're chatting about trying to comprehend 250,000 bodies buried in one place, 800,000-1 million people killed in a hundred days. We're trying to understand as outsiders what people live with. Have survivors gotten to the point where most days are normal days? Or are they still a living hell?

It's wierd being here. We took pictures yesterday at the Mille Collines; each day we drive by the president's compound, where the 10 Belgian soldiers were tortured and killed; and past the bombed-out Rwandan parliament, a purposefully left reminder on the highest hill in the city, the last stand of the perpetrators of the genocide. It's a country with huge challenges, but as Richard just said "if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here."

Other places I've been across Africa, I've experienced genuinely friendly people, hospitality and general curiosity. Here, there are people with angry eyes full of rage, hard stares and anger, emptyness and souls hardened by their pain. The few people we have been able to connect with are those who seem to have a genuine change of heart thanks to Jesus. The Christians are the few who seem to be able to put their hate behind them and spend their days serving others.

I can see why they would be angry... we were just talking about one Richard's Rwandan friends. To this day she has a hard time looking at dogs and cats. She begged and pleaded with the soldiers who came to evacuate the westerners, asking them to take her child. They refused, pushed her back, and she watched as they loaded the dogs & cats of the foreigners onto helicopters and evacuated them instead of her child.


I'm getting some production stills a little later from BJ, so I'll post pictures later tonight. Standby for Jesse perched atop a bulldozer...

Housekeeping item: comments are now allowed from people without blogger accounts... didn't realize that had been turned off.