Ride a Tear Through this world Strong and beautiful. I have yet to experience a more poetic and moving combination of traits than those. In between Poetry lounges, speakers forums, plane rides, and long walks, I've found that beauty and strength come in abundance and are to be treasured like jewels fresh from their cave.

I sat in the back row. I forgot my contacts so I couldn't see the speaker; I felt her. I felt her soft voice, her dark skin, her rich spirit, her strength. She mummeled words that scorched my soul, burning holes into my comfort and placing burdens on my heart. She spoke of genocide, a machine fashioned only to kill without hesitation, attempting to mask and drown the very soul that makes us all human. Her country, Rowanda, has changed since 1994. People are still dying from the genocide, women who were raped as a war tactic and are now slowly disinigrating into death with HIV AIDS. Since the tolls took the men, the countries demograpohics reflect taht of the average American college; 65% females, 35% males. A place that previous to the destruction only let their women clean dishes and birth babies is now being run by females. One of the most progressive countries in the last 10 years in terms of womens rights, Rowanda stands underdeveloped and under pressure to make something out of their desperate situation. Norah, the woman up front, spoke with tears in here eyes as she told me a lesson I am mulling over in my head like lyrics that won't leave.

Her country was abandoned my the world; no one interviened. The movement of any one country in Africa would have been powerful enough to not only stop the genocide but harness the rebels. One could only imagine what would have occured with US involvement. The war was political, not for the people. In fact the country had been living in peace for the past 400 years. SO how does she live everyday, seeing the very faces of her people's killers, and not be bitter? How can she come to America and speak when we are her foresakers? How can she love anyone when no one showed her love? How can I look at the world with open, lit up eyes and feel good about tomorrow when the blood stains of Rowanda and Sudan and who knows where else block the sun?

Forgiveness and love. Forgiveness....and love. If those two traits aren't beauty and strength personified i dont know what is. Norah told how today, two of her 3 neighbors are hutu's whose husbands were involved in the massacre. Norah's whole family died in the genocide, and probably at the hands of those men. Yet she knows that retaliation, killing the killers, hating the people would only create further hurt, further bitterness in her nation. So she has to go to work everyday and leave her 3 year old daughter with her neighbors, the hutu themselves, and be at peace knowing that she has forgiven and must continue to fight with love. What power.

It makes me feel so little for finding it hard to forgive a friend who tells a lie or a teacher who grades me poorly. I must learn to develope my heart so that the world begins to look more like a wound to heal than a battle field which I must choose a side. I will choose, I choose life. Affirm life in the words or Suheir Amad, I am looking for peace.  ¶ 4:34 PM