Hey guys. I don't usually view or even create blogs (no offense), but I had to drop a little ad in for something big that's coming, bigger than Halo 3.
"Shake Hands with the Devil" is a major motion picture that will hit the theaters on Sept 28. It's based on my all time fave book by the same name.
It's a story of a Canadian general who was placed in charge of a U.N. peacekeeping mission to oversee a peace agreement in a tiny country in the middle of Africa. Rwanda. Rwanda WAS the most highly populated country of Africa, but that was about to change. In less than 100 days, Hutu Power extremists managed to slaughter over 800,000 Tutsi's and moderate Hutus, in what was the most effective genocide known to man. Most of the slaughter was commited with machetes. There was no elaborate system of trains and ovens, just lot's of men with tired arms and machetes.
Strictly awful.
I have read quite a few good books on the heart of Africa lately:
"We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families"
and "the shallow graves of rwanda" are both fantastic.
There are a few more, but no book has struck me more deeply than Gen. Romeo Dallaire's account of his involvement in Rwanda.
His writing left me staring out the window, wordless, just stuck. Traumatized actually. It took me 3 months to read that book. It was just so stinkin awful, you had to take breaks. The U.N. had given him a mandate of inaction, he could do nothing more than watch the horror.
Please go and see the film.
I won't be so gullible as to say "never again", because it is happening right now, in Sudan, mostly in the Darfur region.
I have thought recently, that the only reason why anyone gets upset about Rwanda, is because it is over. Now, we can be upset, and we will lose nothing. We must remember the 800,000+ who perished. But let's go further and adopt some World Vision kids.
Far out.
Steve.
I hope that made some kind of sense.
Bring back good old Canadian peacekeeping/peacemaking. Chapters 6,6.5, and 7!
Emily Elizabeth
