Rwanda: a country still in post war syndrome--twelve years later

Rwanda, a small country in Central Africa is still trying to survive and rebuild itself some 12 years after the initial deadly war between two ethnic rival groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis. Since my visit in October, 1994, with a handpicked health team (two senior nursing students, an internal medicine physician, social worker, and a nurse volunteer from the District of Columbia community) on a six week mission that was a collaborative effort between Howard University and the Washington, DC based organization, Africare, Inc., very little has happened to better the lives of the citizens. The task at-hand was to assist in the promotion and repairing of a near-fatal health care delivery system, that occurred just six months after the major attack in April. Rwanda experienced a war, noted as the most brutal in the memory of the country, that killed so many people and destroyed so much of the country and its resources. Since our mission, so much has been written and new concerns have surfaced such as "Hotel Rwanda", a million dollar plus movie that truthfully tells the story of how a real-life person actually saved some 1,200 countrymen in what is carefully termed a "genocide", and the book "Left to Tell", written by a female Tutsi survivor, Immaculee Ilibagiza tells the story of how she survived the genocide and discovered that "with God all things are possible." This present article has attempted to discuss the genocide and how it relates, bringing a connection from within the inner world to the outer world through my experience of "having been there and done that" as seen by the naked human eyes.