I saw Carl Wilkens in a Ryan Dowd webinar I watched for work last year. While I didn’t think it was the best of Dowd’s presentations (his Homelessness training for librarians is excellent), I was impressed by Wilkens, and I wanted to read more about his time in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.
Wilkens and his family were there as Seventh Day Adventist missionaries, and when foreigners were being evacuated at the beginning of the violence, Wilkens decided to send his wife and children to Nairobi and stay behind himself. He and his wife agreed on this course of action, done because they didn’t want to leave their housekeeper and night watchman, both Tutsi, behind to be slaughtered. The connections they had made through their organization, ADRA, and the connections Wilkens made during the 90 days of chaos and terror, enabled him to keep them safe, but also allowed him to find his purpose during the genocide: transporting water to orphans who were being sheltered in various parts of Kigali, where Wilkens lived.
It’s a wild, inspirational story. Wilkens tells it with humility, attributing successes as answers to prayer and to the bravery of others. I had a hard time keeping track of groups, gangs, and organizations involved—their were quite a few acronyms flying around—and the help Wilkens received sometimes, perplexingly, came from people who were actively part of the genocide. It was confusing to me as the reader and it seemed confusing to Wilkens too, but he had a job to do, and he took help where he got it.
The formatting of the e-book isn’t great—footnotes show up in weird places, and at one point some paragraphs were in the wrong order—but it was still readable. I figure the print copies are probably laid out better.
I skipped the discussion questions at the end. This seems to be designed for classroom use, but I recommend it to anyone who could use a true story about people being brave, taking care of each other, and doing good things. ( )