Hope for Africa
Setting: Kinyanwi, Rwanda
Date: July 23, 1994
The entire scene was a bloodbath, more devastating than any nightmare the young wolf from London had ever seen in his life. Nathan Edelstein's mother and father had told him of the Blitz which occurred during Germany's failed invasion of Britain in the 1940's but the destruction of entire villages was a disgusting sight to behold. Even by African standards, the hopelessness and despair of this situation was unbearable.
Corpses lay everywhere, some slit through the throat, others shot at through the head, still others beaten to death, and to make the peacekeeping forces question their beliefs in basic decency, babies could be found lying in a pool of their own blood. The entire Tutsi population, a minority tribal group which made somewhere between 10 and 15% of the population of Rwanda had been mercilessly slaughtered on account of hate-filled propaganda messages delivered by the government-controlled radio stations. For years, the Hutu, a group which 4 out of 5 Rwandans were a part of had resented their countrymen but they never acted them out- until last January when the lying messages of a planned coup against the Hutu government plunged the entire country into madness, into a devastating genocide. Four months and 800,000 murdered people later, here the world stood cleaning up one of the great cataclysms of their age and wondering how the events of 1933-45 had repeated themselves yet again, this time in Africa.
When Nathan Edelstein a young wolf with a thirst for social justice announced to his family his plans to join a peace-keeping force in the UN in 1992, he had no idea this would be one of his missions. His entire family had been affected by the Holocaust as some members of the German half of his family escaped in 1935 to Britain, others weren't so fortunate so he knew from his parents how decency and compassion to others can be lost in a nationalist fervor to find, and ultimately kill a scapegoat. Such is the case with
The wolf was no stranger to Africa or the poverty that wraps around the continent, having run some relief missions in Somalia to help the impoverished refugees living there- later he had volunteered to teach farmers in Mozambique how to plant even in the sub-Saharan heat. But nothing could prepare this wolf for the total collapse of sanity that gripped the nation of Rwanda in four short months.
"Report that the entire city of Kinyanwi has been destroyed. We have found survivors. We'll need food and clean water, stat.", Edelstein buzzed in over his mobile phone to the commanding officer. He was a member of a military force, trained as most soldiers are but not in the science of war and killing but in relieving the victims of wars. In all of his years, he had never seen anything this grisly. It was though the citizens of this town were destroyed in much the same way as a team of lumberjacks would go about clear-cutting a forest. Old and young alike were all caught in the mindless destruction and senseless wholesale slaughter. The aftereffects of this terrible massacre, in concert with the ever-present stench of death and dying, caused Edelstein to surrender the contents of his stomach several times. Sometimes, he wished he was dreaming and would wake up from his sleep in his parents' flat on the humble side of London. Even Mariam and Joel's poverty could not compare to this.
"Where- my baby?" a lioness asked Nathan in broken English after attempts to use her native language had failed, to which he could only respond "I don't know". He feared the worst for any of the unfortunate
And the most graphic scene was the collapsed church, where the soldiers had killed 37 citizens, including a lion Catholic priest, all huddled in the safety of the church. The soldiers had killed them by firebombing the church and leaving the building's roof to collapse on top of them. That afternoon, Nathan and his unit would go about removing the roof and the cadavers within- each one with a face contorted into a permanent look of terror and each one belonging to someone who had a life story, a hope for something better. The wood and thatch of the church would have burnt too easily for anything to survive but on the simple stone altar, he saw something which seemed so completely out of place amidst all this death and suffering. A lightly-burnt bouquet of purple flowers, no doubt an adornment for the podium had miraculously survived the fire, its color browned slightly by the wilting flames yet still showing purple. The presence of these flowers in the midst of such terrifying destruction awakened within the wolf a sense that in spite all of this senseless pain, perhaps something might have survived annihilation. That's when he, as well the survivors, some nursing gunshot wounds and lacerations delivered by the Hutu soldiers, heard it.
"Waaaaaah!", the sound of a baby's cry. Looking behind the podium revealed a naked baby lion, thrashing about helplessly. The lioness had found her baby, even though nearly every other innocent child in this nightmare would have either been killed or left an orphan, mother and child had somehow found each other. And there amidst the ashes and rubble of a destroyed church, Nathan the wolf saw for one transcendent moment, hope- the phoenix rising through the ashes in a blaze of everyday glory. He saw the faint yet still living dreams of a new, prosperous, and peaceful Africa when this great miracle, a woman and her child alive hugging each other for the first time in days in a war-torn country happened. Perhaps there is hope for Africa, Nathan thought as he took a single one of those burnt flowers from the podium, something he would keep with him during his tour in the peacekeeping force was complete and keep somewhere special at his flat in London.
Soon, the helicopters would come and take the lioness and the others back to Kigali, where the UN would give the lioness and her cub the food and water they would need to survive the heat of an African summer. But as for Nathan, he would take one of the flowers as a reminder that there is indeed hope for Rwanda, Africa, and the universe as a whole, so long as people are willing to fight for peace and justice.