Wise words I once heard while buying bananas in a bar in Kigali, Rwanda in 2008: ‘Nothing can heal without truth; education seeks truth; so, nothing can heal without education.’ *** Occasionally on the way home from work at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, I would go down to a little grocery shop down…
Tag: inspiration-2
Sometimes on Tuesdays, always with tea (Part Two)
(To read part one of this post please click here) On one of our regular meet-ups Vincent* told me how he was rescued as a 13 year old orphan at the end of the Rwandan genocide by a platoon of soldiers. They took him, his younger sister, niece and brother to a UNICEF camp for…
Sometimes on Tuesdays, always with tea
Sometimes you can’t see how incredible a person is when you first meet them. Still waters run deep, people are like rivers whose long courses from distant springs are uncertain, or like books, whose covers give mere hints to what is inside. It takes time to get to know them, or perhaps it takes some…
Miss Freeman’s woodwork class: the end of my days of mischief
It took a moment of brilliance from a school teacher to turn me around and push me on to the straight and narrow. Her name was Miss Freeman and she taught woodwork .
Moonlight on the Waves
When lovers first meet on a chance encounter, there’s usually a chain of random events unfolding up to that moment. The less likely, the more meandering the route, the more remarkable the story. For my Uncle Chris to meet Auntie Rose, events conspired to involve a wrecked ship, being stranded on a coral reef for…
My friends, the survivors
I settled in to my role as an adviser at the Kigali Genocide Memorial – I got a desk, there was wifi and I had a workplan agreed with my boss Freddy. My colleagues made me feel at home as soon as I was introduced to them at our Monday morning meeting. What struck me at…
