The Men Who Killed Me - Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence
Monday, September 14th, 2009
A few months back I was driving to pick up my 12 year old daughter from school, with my one year old girl sleeping in the carseat in the back.
I was listening to CBC radio and a woman , one of the authors of this book, was relaying a story. I started listening in the middle of the programming, so I didn’t have context and the story she relayed caused me to pull my car over on the side of the road and tremble.
It was the experience of a woman in Rwanda who was forced to take her infant daughter off her back, lay her in the mud, and was then raped repeatedly over a lengthy period of time. The men who did this were white men. Once through with her, she was thrown into a ditch to die.
Miraculously, by the Grace of God, this infant that lay suffering in the mud, somehow wiggled her way to the edge of this ditch, and fell in, near where her mother lay suffering. This allowed the mother to suckle her and they both survived.
I am a woman . I am a nursing mother of 2 girls. I am appalled, horrified at the suffering humans inflict on one another. I teach the precept of “Ahimsa”-non-violence as a cornerstone of all my yoga classes and am sure, that if we all were lucky enough to practice yoga as children, the world would be a more peaceful place.
“Fifteen years after the Rwandan genocide, The Men Who Killed Me features testimonials from seventeen survivors. Through their narratives and portraits, sixteen women and one man bear witness to the crimes committed against hundreds of thousands of others. Proceeds from this book will go to Mukomeze, a charitable organization established to improve the lives of girls and women who survived sexual violence in the Rwandan genocide.”
As Stephen Lewis, co-director of Aids Free World, stated in his foreword, “…the stories in this book, however painful, are exactly what is needed to jolt the world into sanity”.
http://www.menwhokilledme.com
