So, I signed up for this course on Africa because I want to be awake; I want to understand the things that have happened and are happening in the world. When I first started the course, I was afraid that I might be woken up to roughly and I was right. I think that conceptually I knew the kinds of things that I would be exposed to but there's a big difference between knowing and experiencing. There's absolutely no way you can prepare yourself for seeing an unarmed Tutsi civilian being cut down in broad day light in the middle of a Rwanda street (1994) or for seeing dying children reaching out to aid workers or their parents who can do nothing to help them, only watch them suffer and perish. It's insane and sickening the kind of cruelty and degradation that human beings can inflict upon one another. At the same time, though, there are also amazing people like the American man who stayed in Rwanda during the genocide to hide his Tutsi and moderate Hutu friends. It's all a whirlwind in my mind right now. Even though I haven't been able to keep up with the reading really, it's affecting me greatly. I don't know if that's good or bad. I just know that when I see the suffering of people in nations so far from me, people who would hate me and want me to die, I cannot help but be overcome by the profound sense that we are all connected because their pain causes me to suffer as well.

I don't know if any of this even makes sense...