MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Carl Wilkens, the only American known to stay in Rwanda throughout the genocide, discusses the choice he made in 1994 to remain in Kigali, the challenges Rwandans faced in resisting participation in the massacres, and how his faith and trust in God allowed him to take action. Carl is featured in the Committee on Conscience’s newest DVD, Defying Genocide.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Carl Wilkens. In 1994 when the genocide began in Rwanda, Carl and his family were living in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. When Westerners were evacuated in the early days of the genocide, Carl sent his family on but stayed behind. He is the only American known to have stayed in Kigali throughout the genocide and ended up saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. Carl, welcome to the program.
CARL WILKENS: Thank you very much; good to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: Carl, that day in April, or those days when the genocide was just beginning and there was a very massive evacuation operation for all of the Westerners really to leave Rwanda, how did you make the choice not to leave?
CARL WILKENS: I think it was definitely a process that started before that day. We had even had a meeting, probably a couple weeks earlier, as we saw tensions mounting. I had sent a fax off to the church headquarters actually using the term like we were “sitting on a keg of dynamite,” although none of us knew genocide was what was coming, but it looked big and it looked explosive, and we had said to our other missionaries who we met, “There is no heroes or anything else in this situation. We all need to do what we think God wants us to do here.” That kind of thinking and that kind of mindset had started some time before, so when it actually came down to it, Teresa and I realized that we needed to make a decision, and all the times that we had talked about it, now it was really here, and we took time to talk. We went away from the kids—and my folks were visiting—into another part of the house and just talked and prayed and talked some more, and each time we came up with a strong impression that I really needed to stay and she and the kids would go. It is kind of interesting; sometimes we want theories or formulas and yet the bottom line often is just what do you believe is right? For my wife and I, we really believed that that was the right thing come what may.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the things about that decision that has always struck me is, in part, how difficult it must have been for you to send your children especially on, but also how difficult it must have been for Teresa, your wife, and I only learned today that actually she had lost her father when she was quite young.
CARL WILKENS: It is easy to sit here and talk about some of those decisions, and yes, we made that decision and that was it, but no, there was just so much that went into that, and I think for part of the time Teresa and I were maybe blocking out possible consequences. I am sure that that is not a unique thing, but we just kind of set our sights on what was and we did not think about to some of the things that had happened in the past or what could happen—I should not say that we did not think back—but those were not major factors in the decision, and for her then to actually make that decision I have often said was so incredible because I was much rather be in the car that is going to have an accident then to have someone I love in that car with that potential. She has really played a key and major part in this, and yet her personality is quiet, behind the scenes, so she is hesitant to speak, especially in groups, but one on one you hear an amazing story from her.
JERRY FOWLER: You made the decision to stay, and one of the immediate consequences of that were that there were a couple of people in your house that you feared would be killed if you had left, but you spent the first three weeks basically hunkered down inside your house. How did it come about that you started moving about the city and rendering aid to other people?
CARL WILKENS: Those three weeks it was a pretty amazing time. I remember reading every book in the house and getting a terrible case of cabin fever, and yet at the same time, a secure cocoon developed around the house that you felt, “We have lived this long; I do not know that I want to go out,” but the government actually made it possible. They said that heads of organizations that might still be there could come to the government office and get a permission slip to drive around the city, so that was our cue that we would at least have something to tell soldiers, militia men, and people like that that we would meet on the road. “Who are you and where are you going,” and you would say, “Everyone heard the announcement on the radio and we are going to the office, getting this permission, and I am the director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International,” and that kind of started to get the door open for us to be able to come out and move about, and that too, is when we began to see more than what we just witnessed from our house, the devastation around the city.
JERRY FOWLER: What was that like? You had lived in Kigali for four years by that time and your children had been growing up there. What was it like after three weeks in the house and three weeks of killing? What did you see?
CARL WILKENS: It was a city where you knew the roads, you knew your way around, and every corner had a new site than what you had seen before. Fortunately most of the bodies were cleared away at this time. Those horrors were not as present as obvious, but you would see guys at barriers, sitting in couches that they had looted from the houses of the foreigners that had fled; you saw kids playing with little toys that you knew were not typical Rwandan children toys that were also things looted; you saw horses wandering in the streets—there are no horses in Rwanda; they had gotten free from the Belgian club; you saw dug in fox holes and trees cut down along the road to the bank where there had been big, beautiful trees; things cut down, used either to build their fox hole roofs or just places they would be cutting down bush and shrubbery so people could not hide; you saw destroyed vehicles, and of course, occasionally, destroyed homes and buildings. It was quite a different city.
JERRY FOWLER: What did you have in your mind that you were going to do? What did you think your mission was?
CARL WILKENS: That is a really good question because we did not know what we were going to find when we got out there, so how would we know what we could do. Yet, the first step—by the advice of a Rwandan pastor who was staying with me—was to go and meet the Colonel who was in charge, get permission to drive around, and then just see what there would be at hand. It worked out that we started working with orphans, but we really did not know that at the beginning. We just went to the Colonel and we said, “Colonel, what do you see needs and in what ways could I help?” and that to me is one of the most valuable things we can do. So many times we come to places with preconceived ideas, but I really found a level of cooperation and of help from the Colonel, I think, by approaching him—which of course was the wisdom of the Rwandan man with me—with that offer of “you tell me what you need,” and then he said, “I have a Social Affairs officer, and you can go with him and he will direct you,” and that guy, I remember this young gentleman with a limp—I do not remember his name. It is interesting; you would think that during the genocide that all organization was gone, just destroyed, but there was still organization, there were still guys in charge of different things, and this man was staying by doing the best he could for different social needs, and he is the one who took me first to Gisimba’s orphanage; he took me then, also to Mark Veda, a Frenchman who had not left the country and who had some orphans in a house. It was through him that we began to see the needs, and then had some cash available—which is another kind of interesting story—and with that cash I then began to trade it for Rwandan money with guys, I called them little princes in Kigali; they controlled different sections of the city, and when I would trade money with them so that I could buy stuff locally, that gave me a little bit of a rapport and an in with those guys, and that in turn then made it a little easier for me to move around when the bosses of some of these killers saw somewhat of an advantage to me being there.
JERRY FOWLER: I think that one thing that is a little difficult to understand is that when you talk about meeting this Colonel, this was a military officer, and the military was deeply implicated in carrying out the genocide. On the one hand, you had him being part of the organization doing the killing. On the other hand, you had him directing you to places where people needed to be protected from the killers.
CARL WILKENS: You saw that again and again; what appeared to be conflicts of interest, obviously, and yet on the one hand the people were trying to put on a face that it was a genuine war we were facing and denying that the genocide is going on, and here we have these gendarmes, these policemen who are still working, trying to bring order on the street, and yet, on the other hand, you knew that there was the blood of thousands of people on their hands. For me, I simply had to focus on the needs of the people and who could help with those needs and not try to be the judge of, “I am not going to work with this guy because he is definitely implicated in the genocide,” or not. It is simply working with whoever we can work with to meet the needs that are there.
JERRY FOWLER: Further along those lines, we often have these discrete categories of victims and rescuers and perpetrators, and as you are suggesting, some of the different lines can get blurred. I know one story I have heard you tell is about a man named Bernard who on the one hand was manning a barricade, and on the other hand, protecting some civilians, some Tutsi.
CARL WILKENS: I cannot remember his real name because he was killed during the genocide, and he was killed because he was helping Tutsi people. So many people were put in the position of this man. If they did not come out and man a barrier, if they did not come out and do their part for the community as it were, they would then be considered a trader, and their families would be at risk—they themselves and their families—so you found people trying to edge up as it were to the killers and maybe almost appear to be in collaboration in an effort to protect yourself and your family, and yet at the same time your heart would not allow you to totally turn your back on others. There are plenty of stories of people who hid, men who hid Tutsis in their homes and then went out with other men and killed Tutsis. These lines that we would like to draw of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, it is clearly illustrated that the good guys and bad guys live within each one of us. We have this potential, and so often we will rationalize things, and what one person calls rationalization and another person calls survival, and you have got that constant turmoil that goes on within a person to say nothing of somebody watching on the outside and then trying to pass judgment on people who cannot even figure out themselves why they are doing some of the things that they are doing.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the things that is important to you and the decisions that you made is your religious faith and your faith in God. I have heard you talk about a moment that allowed you actually to do the things that you did in Kigali, where you started out by thinking that you had a deal with God that if you stayed behind in Kigali that he would let you live. In some ways the idea of that deal paralyzed you, and when you gave up on that idea, you had the freedom to move around. Can you explain that?
CARL WILKENS: I wish I could explain that. It is almost like a mystery in so many ways, and yet it seems so simple in other ways until you are actually in a situation itself. I think that it is part of a process of surrendering that we are led to in many of life’s situations—I think that people who are listening right now can think back to situations in their life where they have been so fearful and actually paralyzed by that fear, and then there has been a time where they have come to trust, whether it may be God or whether it be another person, and when you actually do trust it puts you on a whole other playing field almost because you recognize for a while, I was simply trying to be in control of everything and even trying to use God as opposed to really surrendering and really let him use me. It makes all the difference in the world, that simple little analogy there of using God which I think we often have tried to do as opposed to simply surrendering and saying, “I am ready to be used by you however you see fit and if I die, I am ready still to trust you.” One person compared it to a movie script where the actor came out on the set for the day and he saw all the things and the stunts and he is asking where the safety nets are, and they said, “Today, we are not running them,” and he said, “So you mean, on the set, I could die today,” and the director tells him, “Yes.” That is a pretty wild idea, but I think it brings a level of peace and a level of trust that is not available any other way, and I think we have done way too much to try to tame God. There are just some very wild things about him and one of them is this both simple and yet unexplainable concept of totally submitting and totally trusting which is a process, but there was a time when I finally handed this over, and said, “Okay, no more deals. I am just going to trust you. All of the things I was worried about—my family and all of the arguments I was giving you—I am trusting you with those things too.”
JERRY FOWLER: A lot of people who—certainly people who lived through the Holocaust or who lived through the Rwanda genocide or similar catastrophes of similar scale—find it difficult to believe in God after those things happened.
CARL WILKENS: There was a time for me of some real anger, and while it was limited in terms of my anger at God—I think I was probably focusing my anger at other organizations and things like that—but still at the back of my mind there would be those questions and how do you reconcile the idea of a loving God with all of this horror, and I have come, I should not say that I have come to the conclusion, but I am in the process of discovering what it really means to value choice and that God, on the one hand allows this choice, and while he does at times intervene, most of the time he is working through people. When people like to say, “Where was God”—it was an obvious question; they do not like to say it, but it is just the obvious thing that pops out—the thing that comes to my mind is where are the people who will allow him to work through them and to be his instrument? That kind of turns things around from an outward focus and a blame to an inward examination and an inward questioning and searching, and for me, as I have said before to different people, when I start to feel out of balance and just really lost and confused, I personally go back to the life of Christ and I study that as my central focal point to bring me back on balance. Then the other questions about God, I am still wrestling with some and some I have laid down and you pick them up from time to time and look at them, but I think part of any relationship is maybe perhaps, is learning to live with certain questions and not throw out certain truths just because we do not have the answers to certain questions, but I choose to live with those truths and bit by bit hack away at those questions.
JERRY FOWLER: You now are the pastor at an Adventist High School in Oregon and you spend a lot of time traveling around and talking, especially to young people—college students and high school students—about your experience. What is the main thing that you hope that young people take away from the stories you have to tell and the experiences that you relate?
CARL WILKENS: One is that a person, one person, can make a difference; not that I was ever alone in Rwanda, but often when we think we are alone and that we cannot make any difference, if we will take the step, all of a sudden you will find that there are other people too, and your step may encourage someone else who was not going to, and so that idea of one person can take a step and then see what comes next, and I think so often we are paralyzed just by something as simple that it is not polite to speak out at times. Certain times you have to lay politeness aside and you have to act. I hope that people can understand that we each have the power to choose and to act, that every situation in life is an opportunity, no matter how lousy the situation may look and how much we wish we were not part of it, it is still an opportunity, and each of us have gifts. Will we go ahead and take a stab at it? Will we make an effort and not be held back by the fear of failure, or “it is none of your business” idea, or the idea that someone else will do it, all of these different things, but that we will act. Sometimes in acting, we will make mistakes and be embarrassed, but the cost of not acting is so much greater than some few little mistakes or embarrassment that we might have. That choice is one of the largest things. Then, also, to recognize that in our words, we have such a power in the way we speak and the way we treat power and that if we will stop—and this is something so much for me which is why I am so passionate about it; sometimes I just talk so much without thinking enough ahead and what really is that saying to the person. I might know what I want to say but is that what they are hearing? Will I be careful in my selection of words and choose to speak words of value to people, words that build up? I believe that the genocide is not a phenomena totally separate from all of our daily lives, but it is simply a huge culmination or coming together of the basic fact of “I want this and I am not going to let anyone else get in my way,” and that kind of a self-centered approach, self-centered prospective attitude is so destructive in school, in a marriage, in any organization, and in a country. If we can really stop and think, enter the other person’s world, that is probably it. I have said a lot of different words, but if we take the effort to enter another person’s world we would probably, no definitely, experience a lot more joy, a lot more fulfillment, than simply hanging on to our own perspective and being afraid to step out of our world.
JERRY FOWLER: Carl Wilkens was the only American known to stay in Kigali Rwanda through the 1994 genocide. Carl, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
CARL WILKENS: Thank you for this opportunity.
