Denise Uwimana's From Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness recounts Uwimana's experience of survival during the
1994 Rwandan genocide, during which 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by
their Hutu neighbors in 100 days. That genocide was the beginning of my own faith crisis that ultimately led me to embrace a more hopeful universalism. So reading Uwimana's first-person account gave me a new perspective.
"How could ordinary people veer from a normal life -- looking for work, studying at college, or earning a living -- to butchering others? ... I can only answer that demons from hell were unleashed like seething lava over our land", Uwimana writes. The rest of From Red Earth tells her first-person narrative of moving beyond the massacre. Here, we learn what it's like to rebuild a life, to forgive one's enemies, to help others struggle through the crisis and to reconcile life in its aftermath.
Uwimana's is a spiritual journey that most of us in the West have neglected. She finds the Spirit leading her to help both Tutsi and Hutu "become human again". That healing ultimately leads to her work in founding her charity, Iriba Shalom International.
Because of the very human story told in From Red Earth, we gain a clearer historical perspective of life in Rwanda in the mid-90s. And in so doing learn another of those times and places where God has been at work for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
______________________
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.