Reflections

July 28, 2012

Yesterday at the memorial, I was triggered by some things that surprised me. While walking through the exhibit there was a picture of kids looking at a family search board after the genocide, and it brought back such strong memories of 9/11. I really wasn’t expecting those memories, and I just had to sit by the photo for a while. I was so strongly reminded of 9/11 and how it changed the world as I knew it…how my sense of safety and security was robbed from me…how I was old enough to know things would change but young enough to not really understand what was happening. I know one would be hard-pressed to draw parallels between 9/11 and the genocide, but seeing those kids looking at the search boards…I understood that their lives had changed, their sense of safety was gone, and they were too young to really understand why this all had happened. Even though I’ll never understand the depths of their pain, in that moment I had a window into their lives, and all I wanted to do was hug them and cry with them.



Courtesy Los Angeles Times, http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/11/encountering-the-dead-journey-to-rwanda.html