Instructive forgiveness

MAYANGE, Rwanda - The late afternoon sun gleams off the tin roofs of this small farming village, as neighbors Xavier Nemeye and Cecile Mukagasana watch their children play tag around the banana trees. The two friends were born here and share much of Mayange's daily life. They talk every day, pray at the same church and send their children to the same school, the only one there is.

They are also both recovering from the genocide just 13 years ago - when he hacked to death six of her friends with a machete.

Now, let's read that again: "when he hacked to death six of her friends with a machete."

Amazingly, it was a relatively straightforward government (with donors) project that transformed bitter enemies into friends. The idea is based on the premise that peace and prosperity are reliant upon one another. Or, in other words, when people have enough money to meet their basic needs - in this case $75 per person per year - there is no fuel to feed simmering intergroup tensions. Or, in Xavier's words, "If your stomach is empty, you will have to think of ways to fill it, and that will lead to disruption."

Meanwhile, Cecile, who once dreamed of exacting revenge on the man who personally and horrendously killed her friends, came to recognize that Xavier was a cog in the wheel of the Rwandan genocide. She found forgiveness and even friendship as she worked along side him building their village.

As I read this article, I couldn't help but think of a another I read earlier last week, about the abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey. A woman, whose husband was murdered by a death row inmate (whose sentence has now been commuted to life imprisonment), seethed that she wouldn't get her blood. And though I can empathize with her pain and need for some sort of resolution, it struck me as so sad that she had placed all of her hope for such in the death of the perpetrator. I suspect that had he been executed, she would still have not found that peace.

I am not suggesting we build villages in the U.S. to help prisoners make peace with their victims but, as Rwanda's innovative approach to avoiding the 10 year genocide cycle (wherein, according to the article, "most African civil wars re-ignite within 10 years of a cease-fire.") shows, it is insanity to think we can do the same thing time and again and get different results.

The death penalty was reinstated in the US in 1976 and yet our homicide numbers continue to grow. We have impoverished people in the US - granted, not anywhere near the scale or severity of poverty in Rwanda or other third world countries, but still, people who have to spend most of their time figuring out what they will eat next. We have neighborhoods across the country that are so unstable that its residents are in perpetual fear.

We have to reconsider forgiveness, and where the beautiful individuality that America affords stops and caring for our communities begins.

P.S. Rwanda now has the largest percentage of women in elected offices in the world. Just some food for thought.

P.P.S. I received an email this weekend from a woman who wanted to know if Del Ray Wilson, Jr. had been executed for killing his wife, Rebecca Ann, last December. I find that kind of reader mail so unnerving...