When Laura Waters Hinson visited Rwanda in 2006, she was stunned to see the survivors of genocide living side by side in peace with people who had murdered their friends and family.
Some genocide perpetrators released from prison had gone through a reconciliation workshop and wanted to do something tangible to help the people they had brutalized. So they voluntarily built houses for their victims’ families.
“I felt like I was in some kind of crazy land,” Hinson said. “We all sat down in a room together one day, these killers and survivors, and they just told their stories. [One person said ] ‘ That guy over there, he killed my niece, but he asked me for forgiveness and now we’re neighbors again. ’”
Hinson had come to the east African nation to film a documentary on Rwanda’s reconciliation process more than a decade after the Hutu majority butchered nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The resulting documentary As We Forgive, which is narrated by Mia Farrow, will be shown at 7 p. m. Thursday at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock. The film chronicles the reconciliation process through the story of two Tutsi survivors and the two Hutu men who murdered their families.
Hinson, the film’s director and producer, will answer audience questions about her work following the screening. For the filmmaker, the screening will be a homecoming of sorts. Hinson, 29, lived in Helena until she was 8 and still has grandparents and an aunt and uncle who live in the Little Rock area.
Admission is free, but Hinson also plans to take up a collection for the Living Bricks Campaign, a group she established to fund more building projects such as the one she saw in the Rwandan village.
A number of Arkansas Christians are helping Rwanda rebuild.
Fellowship Bible, Mosaic, Pulaski Heights United Methodist and St. Andrew’s Anglican churches in Little Rock are involved in Bridge 2 Rwanda, which strives to provide the country’s children with basic necessities.
Mary Cavin, who is organizing the screening, lived in Rwanda for 16 months while her husband was chief executive officer of a microfinance bank.
“We heard many stories of the struggles to offer forgiveness on a daily basis,” she said. “It is truly a miracle to offer and obtain forgiveness in those circumstances. It is a great example of how we all strive to reconcile with those in our lives where issues keep us apart.”
Farrow, a Golden Globe-winning actress and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, agreed to lend her voice because of her commitment to ending genocide.
The film takes its title from a phrase in the Lord’s Prayer.
“The core of Christian theology is reconciliation between God and human beings,” Hinson said. “And so a lot of people said, ‘ I have been forgiven by God, therefore I know God will give me strength to forgive. ’”
Hinson first visited the troubled country in 2005 on a mission trip with her Washington church, which is under the oversight of the Anglican Church of Rwanda.
While there, she learned that the Rwandan government was releasing tens of thousands of prisoners because it did not have the resources to bring all of those accused of participating in the 1994 genocide to trial.
Instead, the government had resurrected a traditional form of community-based justice that predates the country’s colonization by Belgium. Under the gacaca system, each village has weekly hearings in which the released murderers confess their crimes before being reintegrated back into the community.
“I was pretty shocked by that,” Hinson said. “I couldn’t quite believe that killers were going home and the government was encouraging people to forgive. I wondered: Is this even possible ? How does this even work ?”
A year later, after raising money from family and friends for the project, she returned in June 2006 with a film crew to chronicle the work of forgiving.
More than 90 percent of Rwandans are Christian, according to the CIA World Factbook. But churches largely failed to give refuge for those fleeing genocide in spring 2004. Instead, many church leaders allowed Hutu militia leaders to massacre those Tutsis who took shelter inside church walls.
Despite that, many of the Rwandans have continued to hold fast to their faith, and most of the reconciliation projects Hinson encountered were organized by Christian ministries.
Hinson was especially touched by the faith of Rosaria, one of the women she met. Hutu militiamen had slaughtered Rosaria’s entire family, including her four children, and left her to die of machete wounds.
Somehow she survived. She told Hinson that she awoke to find herself surrounded by dead bodies and managed to crawl into an abandoned house, where she lived for weeks with maggots in her wounds. The Tutsi army eventually found her and got her to a hospital.
“She said it was a miracle that God saved her,” Hinson said.
The filmmaker met Rosaria through a reconciliation workshop organized by Prison Fellowship International, a global Christian ministry aimed at helping prisoners as well as the survivors of crime.
Rosaria participated in the workshop with Saveri, the man responsible for killing her sister. Rosaria told Hinson that she had forgiven Saveri because God had forgiven her.
“She indicated that it had brought peace to her heart and that it was helping to rebuild her community,” Hinson said. “She said she was able to trust him again, but not fully. She isn’t best friends with him.”
But not everybody found forgiveness so simple. Hinson’s film captures the first meeting in 14 years between a woman named Chantal and the man who murdered her father.
“He came to her asking forgiveness, and she reamed him out for two hours,” Hinson said. “She says what everybody else is thinking. She said, ‘ You destroyed my life. How can you ask me to forgive you ?’”
Still, by the end of her time in Rwanda, Hinson said, Chantal was beginning to work toward forgiveness. Many Rwandans see forgiveness as essential to restoring their country, Hinson said.
“I went to Rwanda really questioning whether God would be present in the wake of genocide,” Hinson said. “I wondered if God was big enough to speak to the heart of a genocide widow. I came back with my faith grown in ways I never thought possible. I saw true reconciliation happening.” As We Forgive will be shown at 7-8: 30 p. m. Thursday at Pulaski Academy Connor Performing Arts Center, 1901 Napa Valley Drive in Little Rock. More information about the film is available at www. aswefor givemovie. com.
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