A Sudden Memory...

I was a teacher for many years... Part of that time, I taught English to immigrants and refugees... It was an interesting - and often humbling - experience: I taught them English while they taught me about life in the rest of the world.

My own parents' immigration stories showed me that life can be unspeakably hard. Governments can be cruel... Had Stalin not taken my grandparents' farmland in Europe and killed so many of their neighbors, they probably wouldn’t have immigrated to Canada - and I wouldn’t have been born here...

But ... aren't things better in the world these days? 

Not necessarily.

 I remember one of my students - a girl my daughter's age - telling me how she happened to come to Canada :

***

I escaped being killed in my country by hiding in a bathroom, a young woman from Rwanda told me one day. 

Can you imagine living in a bathroom?!

My sisters and I were at boarding school when civil war started. Everyone was able to get away except us. So a man who worked in the school hid my sisters and me in a small bathroom in the school... Can you imagine what that is like?! For days, we never left the bathroom... We had to be quiet all the time. If soldiers would have found us, they would have killed us - maybe raped us first.... And they would have killed the man who was hiding us and giving us food.

One day some soldiers came and checked the building. What's in this room? they asked, trying to get into the door.

It's an old storage closet full of junk, the man told them. It hasn't been opened in years - and I've lost the key.

Fortunately the soldiers believed him and left.

Eventually relatives came and rescued us. We were able to escape and leave the country...

***

Where was I when all that was happening? I wondered... When I got home, I googled Rwandan genocide: It was the spring of 1994, from April to July. 

That was the spring my parents traveled to Europe - where my father contracted bacterial meningitis and died... My poor mother returned home in mid-June without him. Our family of five drove across Canada for his memorial service at the end of June. July was spent helping my mother organize her affairs, and get legal paperwork done. Eventually we drove back home - a six-day trip across the continent... 

I'm sure I heard about the Rwandan genocide in the news... But I didn't pay much attention...

Isn't that the way it is so often in life...? We're so caught up with our own problems of the moment that we don't see unspeakable tragedies happening around us in the world...