"A banner outside Nyamata Catholic Church boldly announced that what we are about to see inside has ended, for all time, the horror that man is capable of unleashing against his neighbor. "Never Again." Of course, we know it’s not true – without international intervention, we may be witnessing it all over again in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda. Ten years after the slaughter in Rwanda, we haven't learned anything."

We traveled from Kigali, Rwanda, with our mission team for two hours over deeply rutted roads to get to Nyamata. Travel is rough in this part of the world. Burundi, only 80 miles away, would have taken another ten hours driving over roads that are almost impassable at points. Nyamata is like any other village in rural East Africa, with one distinction -- today it hosts one of the largest genocide memorials in Rwanda. In an open space at the back of the town’s Catholic church, there is a mass grave holding the remains of as many as 20,000 people (noone knows for sure) butchered in and near the church during five days of hell, from April 14 to April 19, 1994. [Read an in-depth history of the genocide.]




The padlock is still in place on the iron door, but a grenade thrown by the Hutu militia blasted the door open. Today, the twisted metal at the main porch is a reminder of the terror that walked into the church on that day. Holes on the inside of the brick walls caused by shrapnel testify to grenades having been hurled into the crowded building before the killers broke in to finish their work.




Nyamata Church has been cleared and the victims buried in a crypt; but the benches, thick with dust, and the altar, still covered with a bloodied altar cloth, remain as they were in 1994. You can still smell the fear and almost hear the screams of the thousands who died here. The thousands of people who had taken sanctuary here were all bludgeoned, blown up with grenades, shot and matcheted.




Inside the sanctuary, I walked down a narrow stairway into a crypt where the remains of a few of the victims are held in a glass case. There are three levels: the top shelf contains bones — arms, legs and so on; the second shelf contains skulls, dozens of them, many with visible cracks where the machetes had sliced through. Below lies a wooden coffin covered with a purple cloth. The coffin contains the body of a woman named Innocent Mukadori and her child, who were killed horrifically by the same spear and hung on a tree outside the church. They are among the few who have been identified. The remains of thousands of other victims, mostly skulls and a few bones, lie unceremoniously in a huge underground vault behind the church. A Rwandan made this chilling observation, “Skulls and bones are as common as grass and trees."

"Iyo uza kwimenya, nanje ukamenya Ntuba waranyise",
reads a sign in over the entrance gate to the church, meaning:
"If you know me and you know yourself, how can you kill me?"

Flowers left by visitors still litter the floor of the church as rays of sun pierce through tiny holes left in the ceiling by shrapnel from the hand grenades. The stained glass window above the pulpit is eerily intact. Just below it, bullet holes and blood stains scar the walls and decorations of the church. Strangely at Nyamata, a statue of Virgin Mary stands unscathed overlooking the slaughter site. Our friend, an Anglican priest Rev. John Paul, tells us that a similar statue of Jesus was destroyed by the killers because “it looked like a Tutsi.”

As we moved out towards the mass grave yard, one of the biggest in Rwanda, we passed by the grave of Locatelli, the Italian missionary killed in 1992 after she alerted the international press to an earlier impending slaughter of the village Tutsi’s. The tombstone doesn’t reveal much. Just a slab and a tiny iron cross.




The door to the giant tomb is laid open. I was the only one of our team to take the stairs down inside, with just the sunlight from the open door to light my way. Immediately, I was hit by the musty smell of a cellar fully stocked with dozens of coffins, and many thousands of skulls and bones, cleaned and stacked. The sight of this brutal reminder overwhelmed me and I was gripped by a profound sense of mourning. None of these died peacefully, I thought -- nearly every skull showed signs of hideous trauma.

When it was time to leave Nyamata, we signed a visitors book where many others had before us with single word entries — speechless, tears, shocked. One entry read, “Never again? Sadly not.”

On the way back to Kigali a young woman asked for a ride to her village. We discovered that she too was a victim of the genocide. She witnessed both of her parents being killed in the courtyard of the church at Nyamata. She is struggling to face every day as an orphan with deep depression and horrible images of her parents murder that continue to play over and over again. We prayed for her to receive God’s love and mercy, and that He would enable her to forgive those who killed her parents.

“Never Again” – We must be the watchmen on the tower sounding the trumpet when we know this kind of injustice is occurring in the world – Sudan and northern Uganda are lands that have been filled with the blood of its people being massacred. As Christians we must not stand by and be a silent witness. Our faith cannot be dormant – the Light of Christ must shine into all the world.†