As I reported last week President George Bush decided not to visit the nations who have had a high violence rate in which I personally thought that he was wrong for but this week I feel something totally different. In a gruesome genocide 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered over 100 days in 1994. But what is the most depressing is that many of the 800,000 were children. It is now 2008 and “skeletons are still being discovered and buried in mass on a terraced hillside.” On Tuesday President Bush and his wife Laura paid their respects to the dead by laying a memorial wreath. The president and the first lady also “toured a museum where the skulls of victims are laid out under in haunting, neat white rows, the subject of another conflict-genocide.” I felt that this gesture put points in my book because he did show a little respect.
President Bush participated in a news conference where he shared unusually personal terms about the frustrations and hard choices that he had faced in grappling with the situation in Durfur but he did not mention that he faced criticism from human rights advocates for not being aggressive enough with the Sudanese government.
This was President’s Bush first time visiting the museum but first lady visited the center in 2005 with their daughter Jenna. President Bush seemed very unlike himself as he kept a grim face and held the tattered clothes of the victims and countless pictures of the dead including life-size images of children. I hope this experience really touched his heart because just by reading and reporting on it each week it has touched mine.
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