Current Events

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/world/10-years-later-in-rwanda-the-dead-are-ever-present.html

This article is about a man named Mr. Murangira. He's from Rwanda and he was a victim of the tribal dispute that turned into a genocide. He is a survivor of the shooting and chopping of people at a technical school in Rwanda.There were only three other survivors that day and Mr. Murangira, with a deep indentation in his forehead from where the bullet was removed, wants to make sure that the attack is never forgotten. He guides visitors down the hallways of the school and unlocks doors to classroms that are partially covered with the remains of those who were killed by Hutu extremists. Closer inspection of the remains, which have been treated with a traditional substance to slow decomposition, reveals exactly in what manner many of them died. In the article, it says that a woman has her arms over her face, as if protecting herself from attack. One of her forearms has been hacked off. Another, a youngster, has a thin crack across his skull, the imprint of a machete. All across Rwanda, there are similar scenes of butchery, preserved by survivors just as they were. But with the 10th anniversary of the mass killing approaching in April, the Rwandan authorities are working to bury the bones while still preserving the memories of the estimated 800,000 Tutsi, who make up a minority in the country, and moderate Hutus who died. The memorials are just one part of Rwanda's attempt to recover from the events of 1994.  Prosecuting the people who killed, an international tribunal is slowly working its way through the big fish while Rwandan courts handle the lieutenants. With too many offenders to possibly try, President Paul Kagame recently released tens of thousands of people from jail and ordered them to face community trials, known as gacacas.

Introduction to Night:

On Wednesday, when we took the Holocaust pre test, I learned that more people had died than what I had originally thought. Yesterday, when we watched the movie I learned that it was very like, unbelievable. The movie was very graphic. Some of the things I saw made me sick and to know that people were actually treated like that just makes me feel something more than sad. It's undescribable. Seeing all those things that happened really makes me want to know why. Like, there was no reason for people to be treating like they were less than animals. When I saw the starving people that you could see their ribs through their body it made me extremely uncomfortable to watch. They were so helpless. I wanna know more about to Nazis and their reasoning behind this because I can't make any sense of it, at all. Nobody can. I wanna know that after seeing all the damage they caused, if they had the chance to take it back, would they? I'd hope so. I knew a lot about the Holocaust before we started talking about it in this class but it always makes me sad, seeing the things that happened to millions of people for no reason. I don't really want to read Night. It's going to make me sad all over again. But it is nice to see how it for from a boy's point of view, since I only read the Diary of Anne Frank. It had to have been worse for a boy.

Introductory Post

The name's Jennifer. I am a very good reader, however, I don't like to read that much. I guess my favorite type of books are like dramatic ones. I really don't like to read long books unless I absolutely have to. I am not reading any books at the moment. The last book I read was Right Behind You by Gail Giles. That book was very intersting. I liked it a lot. Probably one of the best book I'll ever read. In summary, it's about a kid that gets in some trouble when he's younger and because of it, it follows him through his whole life. It's kind of sad. You have to really be able to relate to things like that to read that book.