Yesterday I made a short trip to the Nyamata and Ntarama churches in Kigali, two incredibly vivid memorial sites to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Words cannot describe the sadness that I felt being in those places, nor could they describe or the barbaric acts to which those walls hold witness. What took place during those hellish months, 18 years ago, is indescribable. One wall of the Ntarama church buildings is still stained with the blood of children who were killed there, in a manner so brutal and so inhuman that I struggle to believe that it’s not just part of some awful fiction.

Being amongst the bones, the clothes, the broken walls. The silence. The sounds of children playing outside. The feeling of decades old pain. It’s haunting.

The Rwandan genocide didn’t affect me in the least, not until I set foot on Rwandan soil. This experience is one that I will never forget.