‘The gospel of grace’

Jackie Macadam learns about the work of Tearfund in Rwanda in reconciliation and rebuilding after the genocide of the 1990s and describes a powerful act of forgiveness.

EMMANUEL Murangia, Tearfund Director for Rwanda, is familiar with the plight of refugees fleeing violence, for he, too, was one.

“My family fled – not during the genocide in Rwanda thirty years ago – but of the fighting and violence in 1960s Rwanda, when there was violence against the Tutsi tribe.

“We were refugees in Tanzania when I was a young child. My parents fled with me and we stayed there until I was ten years old, when I was sent away to Kenya to school with my siblings.

“In Tanzania we lived in large refugee settlements, and when I was in Kenya, we’d only get back there on holidays from school.

“Being a refugee is hard work. No one wants to help you.

“I completed primary and secondary school, and I really wanted to go to university and study law, but being a refugee I was not allowed to choose law as I was not Kenyan. Instead I went to the University of Nairobi and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. “A refugee does not attract much compassion. It often seems as if you are being treated as if you have an infectious disease. You encounter hostility throughout your life. I remember vividly, when I was given a promotion once, a Kenyan ‘colleague’ shouted obscenities at me in a corridor.

“ Jesus’ forgiveness is simply the gospel of Grace. Of forgiveness. Forgiveness with strings attached will never liberate us. A 12-year-old child taught me that.

“There’s a stigma – and there’s trauma. We always identified as Rwandan and that identification both caused discrimination but also reinforced my determination to identify as Rwandan.”

Though Emmanuel wasn’t in Rwanda when the genocide of 30 years ago took place, many members of his extended family – those who chose not to leave in the 60s – still lived there. He feared for their safety and as soon as was safe, returned to Rwanda to try to find them and it became a life-changing experience.

“When I went back to look for my family members, it was still in the aftermath of the killings.

“It’s like you see in horror films. There were still bodies scattered in the streets. Corpses in the fields and lying in abandoned houses.

“There were many mass graves. There are still bodies turning up in caves and latrines. All these years later, there are still prisoners being released who can tell you where there are bodies that haven’t been found yet.

“We identify people by their clothing a lot of the time. Fabric doesn’t decay as fast as flesh, so we are still finding documentation and clothing wrapped round bodies and are able to identify people by what they were wearing.

“My family members did not survive. Out of a very large family of around 100 people, only five, four girls and a boy, made it out alive.

“One of the girls, Grace, came to live with me. She was three when she witnessed the death of her family and had been buried by the bodies of her siblings. She crawled out from underneath them and was spotted by a neighbour – one of the people who had killed the rest of her family. But instead of finishing her off, he stopped, and took her to the orphanage.

“That child, now a mother with three children of her own, challenged my faith in ways I could not ever imagine.

“At age 12 she attended a court session where her parents’ killers were tried.

“At the end of the trial, she approached the killer of her parents, and forgave him.

“I found that terribly difficult. I’m a Christian and I believe in forgiveness, but I was angry that the death penalty had been abolished. I wanted them gone.

“I was worried that she hadn’t thought it through; that she’d regret it, but she was absolutely insistent and forgave them. She said that only by forgiving could she let the burden go and lay it down. She didn’t want to carry the anger, the pain and the desire to hurt in retribution with her for the rest of her life.

“She made me think about faith differently.

“I wrestled with her decision – I had people I needed to forgive too – but I found it hard.

“But it gradually dawned on me that if I could not forgive, then how could I ever be forgiven?

“The whole foundation of Christianity is Jesus’ call to forgive. At no point does he qualify that. He does not tell us to forgive someone IF they acknowledge the harm they did. He does not say forgiveness is transactional – that you will forgive them IF they do X, Y or Z in return.

“When Jesus forgives, it is an act in itself, complete. It’s not even the child-like ‘I’ll forgive you this time but don’t do it again…’

“Jesus’ forgiveness is simply the gospel of Grace. Of forgiveness. Forgiveness with strings attached will never liberate us. A 12-year-old child taught me that.”

Emmanuel now leads the Tearfund team in Rwanda, who are working through the church to bring about community transformation and continued peace and reconciliation.

To find out more about Tearfund’s work in Rwanda and around the world, visit www.tearfund.org