April 6. Eric Irivuzumugabe. On this date in 1994, a plane carrying the president of Rwanda was shot down, launching a 100-day genocide against the Tutsis people by the Hutu people. More than 800,000 Tutsies died. Two million became refugees, and there were 120,000 new orphans. Eric was one of those orphans. But God showed up and turned the atrocity to good.
Within eleven years, Eric had founded Humura Minisitries to help fellow orphans. It currently has seventy volunteers for teaching entrepreneurship and fifty for counseling. He has written two books:
My Father Maker of Trees: How I Survived the Rwandan Genocideand
A New Generation with a New Legacy, which is written in Kinyarwanda, since the goal is help the Rwandan post-genocide generation to learn from what happened.
Today’s story starts when Eric is 16-years-old.
God never created a man he didn’t give a purpose.
“Don’t let anyone escape! Capture all the cockroaches.” Hutu extremists chanted as they swept into the village. They were bent on wiping out the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda.
Eric was 16-years-old, and he’d been happy, the son of a businessman/farmer. He’d had three sisters and two brothers. Cypress trees surrounded the village, and Eric thought of them as beautiful shelter for the animals. Until the day his grandfather told the family to run for their lives.
They should keep together as long as they could—but they wouldn’t be able to do it for long. They should run and hide and stay alive—but they wouldn’t be able to do it for long.
“I could taste the soot and ash,” Eric said. “The enemy quickly began looting, killing, and destroying homes, beginning at the edge of the hills and working their way through the village to dominate every Tutsi home until all was destroyed.”
Brutal widespread killing wasn’t enough for the Hutus. They hunted the Tutsis, raped, tortured and humiliated them all day long. At night, laughing and bragging about the slaughter, the Hutus fell back to their homes.
Grandfather pointed the family down a path, and Eric ran for an hour before the family reached the mountainside. Eric ran, driven by the sounds of looting, mothers screaming for their babes, babies crying for their parents, grenades exploding. Eric ran and gagged on the smell of burning homes and burning flesh. The brush was thick on the ground, and Tutsis crawled into it to hide. But the Hutu extremists searched every inch and slaughtered whoever they found. So Eric ran. Even after he lost touch with his family—Eric ran.
Legs screaming with pain and his head spinning, Eric darted past the fallen bodies of his friends and neighbors. Hutu hunters left the bush at night, and Eric was thankful for surviving another day, but he couldn’t block out the sights and sounds and smells of the massacre. When he woke, the Hutus were back chanting about exterminating the Tutsis.
Eric ran into the jungle and stayed there through the night, “terrorized, disoriented, and alone.” To Eric “God seemed like a distant fairytale … Though I couldn’t see him, he was present, lurking in the bush with me, chasing after my heart.”
“I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name,” (Isaiah 45: 3, NASB).
Exhausted, Eric sat on rock and for a moment felt grounded. Wonder of wonders! Two of his uncles hid there in the trees, and they installed Eric in his own tree to hide. In this rainy season, without food or water, forced to be still and silent all day, they watched the savage killing go on below. Eric hid in the trees 15 days.
He couldn’t sleep much, but at night he could climb out of the tree and rest his arms from clinging to the branches. About noon Eric heard a voice tell him to accept the branches as friends, and he called them: “Strong. Alive. A refuge. A majestic tower. And I wondered about the tree maker. Was he these things, too?”
Another time the same voice reminded him to be thankful for this place to rest. The seventh day in the trees the voice came: “‘I’ve spared you from seeing more evil, so let your heart rest.’ God gave us a Sabbath from the devils in the bush on the seventh day.”
The day came when the gunfire sounded different. Bigger guns. Hutu hunters fled. Tutsi refugees from Uganda had formed a rebel army, and they’d finally arrived to drive the Hutus out. Eric wanted to jump out of the tree and chase them, but he waited. A full 15 days.
When it was over, as Eric walked the 12 km. back to his village, he saw how beautiful the cypress trees were. He said, “I was beginning to believe that perhaps God planted the trees to take care of a scared, helpless 16-year-old boy like me.… If God gave such trees a purpose on earth, I thought, then maybe my life matters to him, as well.”
What have you been doing about God’s purpose for your life? God never created a man he didn’t give a purpose.
History.com Editors. “Rwandan Genocide.” HISTORY. A&E Television Networks. Updated September 30, 2019. https://www.history.com/topics/africa/rwandan-genocide
“My Father, Maker of the Trees.” Publishers Weekly.com. Accessed July 31, 2020. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780801013201
Irivuzumugabe, Eric, Lawrence, T. My Father, Maker of the Trees: How I Survived the Rwandan Genocide. Baker Books, 2009. http://www.treasuresofrwanda.com/index.php/about-us
Story read by Peter R Warren,https://www.peterwarrenministries.com/
Story written by Teresa Crumptonhttps://authorspark.org/