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Is God Still Sleeping?
By David Zarembka,

Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called the Children of God.
Matthew 5:9

As with people all over the world, Rwandans think that Rwanda is a special place. There
is a proverb in Kinyarwandan (the language of Rwanda), which says, “God goes about
the world doing good, but he sleeps in Rwanda.”
During a trauma healing workshop for survivors of the genocide, one participant changed
this proverb slightly to “God goes about the world doing good, but he fell asleep in
Rwanda.”

In April 2004 I was in Rwanda and heard the testimony of genocide survivor, Patrick
Mwenedata. Now 21 years old, he just finished George Fox Secondary School in Kigali
where he is a member of Kagarama Monthly Meeting. During the genocide ten years ago
he was eleven years old and he tells the story as an eleven year old saw it. I share only
one particular incident of his long story. After he saw his mother and sister hacked to
death by the interehamwe (young men organized by the army into a militia which was
responsible for most of the killing during the genocide), a neighbor helped him. There
was a total of seven children and as the oldest, “I was the head of the family,” he said. At
one point he was running holding the hand of this three year old cousin. He heard a
“ bomb” (meaning a grenade) and knew he was hit. He continued, “In order to run faster,
I picked up the boy. Blood was flowing everywhere. I put him on the ground, covered
him, and ran on.”

During this trip, I also attended the Fifth Quaker Consultation for the Peaceful Prevention
of Violent Conflict in western Kenya where I heard Malesi Kinaro speak. On October
21, 1993 when the Hutu president was assassinated and violence erupted in Burundi,
Malesi was General Secretary of Friends World Committee for Consultation—Africa
Section. She visited Burundi five times, commenting that there were only one or two
people on the plane going to Burundi, while the planes leaving Burundi were completely
full. Between October 1993 and the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda on April 6,
1994, there was an opportunity to forestall the impending genocide.

Malesi also visited Rwanda during this time and, as most people knowledgeable about the
situation in Burundi and Rwanda, realized that Rwanda was ready to explode into
violence. She went to the African Union in Addis Abba and raised the alarm. She visited
the Quaker United Nations Office in New York City and raised the alarm at the United
Nations. Few were willing to listen and in April 1994 Rwanda erupted in a well-planned
and organized genocide in which approximately 850,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were
slaughtered.

Malesi observed, “If the international Quaker community had sounded the alert, they
could have prevented the genocide.” In other words, as the Children of God who are
doing his peacemaking work here on earth, we fell asleep.

Perhaps Malesi is naïve to think that an aroused peacemaking community could have
forestalled the genocide. The reality is that we didn’t even try--we were asleep.
I also visited Northern Uganda. Here for the last eighteen years, the Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA) has been fighting the Government of Uganda mostly by destroying the
countryside forcing over 1.6 million people into internally displaced people’s camps (IDP
camps). The LRA “specializes” in abducting children and turning the boys into killers
and the girls into domestic/sex slaves. I observed the situation in Soroti where the
African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) had conducted some trauma healing workshops for
children coming to town each night to avoid being abducted by the LRA.

In Lira, also in Northern Uganda, AGLI was beginning a series of Alternatives to
Violence Project workshops and I attended their first session to make an introduction. As
I sat in front of the White House Hotel in Lira, I noticed a young man in a mango tree
picking all the mangoes, which I thought were quite green. In about 20 minutes he had
expertly picked all of the hundreds of mango, which were on the side of the tree where I
could see him.

Later I visited some of the IDP camps near Lira. So little attention was being given by
the international relief organizations and the Uganda Government that some of these
internally displaced people did not even have plastic tarps to cover their small dwellings.
They told me that when it rained—and the rainy season was just beginning—they ran
across the road to the school and waited there until the rains ended. I am not sure what
they did when they came back because their houses would have been all wet.
I met a young girl about eight years old named Pamela whose parents had been killed.
She was making adobe bricks with her grandmother and was doing a rather nice job.
Making adobe bricks is very strenuous work usually done by young men. It takes
thousands of adobe bricks to make even a small house. Moreover, this meant that Pamela
was not attending “school” in a nearby IDP camp where I saw one teacher with a
blackboard and chalk under a large tree teaching over a hundred students who sat on the
ground.

The next day I was in Kampala and I read in the paper that people in Lira were getting
sick from eating unripe mangoes.

Peacemakers are God’s children here on earth doing the work of making peace. If we are
asleep about peacemaking in Africa, then God is also asleep. Is God still sleeping?