The World We Live in

Meet Uwamohoza. Today she is twelve years old. She was five when she told her story to filmmakers at the SOS Centre in Kigali, an orphanage for children of the Rwandan genocide.

Uwamuhoza is Tutsi and as an infant, witnessed the brutal murder of her parents at the hands of Hutu soldiers. She was hit with a machete three times on her head and face and left to die. Uwamuhoza was found lying next to the bodies of her parents.

"We were hiding" she tells her interviewers. "My dad, my mom, and myself. And they came and killed us. They cut me with a machete and they killed me. I was running with my mother and my dad. They saw us and they came and killed us…they did it for nothing" (1).

Uwamuhoza is beautiful; she has a perfect button nose and chubby little cheeks. Her round chestnut eyes, however, are empty. On the top of Uwamuhoza's head, right after the hairline, is a scar from one of the machete blows she suffered. It will be with her forever; a constant, painful reminder of the day her childhood was stolen.

I could go on.

Uwamuhoza's story is not unique; from April 6 through to mid-July in 1994, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were murdered In Rwanda and many, many, of them were children. All over the world, millions of children have witnessed their loved ones being subjected to horrible, horrible things.

The Rwandan genocide is a dark part of human history, but we must not forget the children in Afghanistan, Africa, Bosnia, Columbia, Iraq, Israel, and Northern Ireland, to name but a few, that have also suffered at the hand of war.

An estimated twenty million children have been forced to leave their homes due to war and in the past decade, more than two million children have been hunted, abused, and ultimately murdered by war (2).

I do not know what we are fighting for.

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy