A story of forgiveness

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS INFORMATION THAT PEOPLE MAY FIND DISTRESSING. 

Bosco has been our guide and friend throughout this trip. His passion for Jesus and for helping people is infectious. Everywhere we go, people know Bosco and the man does pretty much everything too. If you've ever watched the cartoon Peppa Pig, Bosco is the Burundian equivalent of Miss Rabbit. He is the Youth Pastor at Eglise Vivante in Gitega, he has an office at the Health Centre where he co-ordinates the projects for the street children. He runs the "Pig Programme" and, as a trained agriculturalist, teaches people how to grow crops. Bosco works with the Batwa people (Pygmies) and also owns a restaurant called "Faith". The man seems to do everything. We're half expecting to hear his voice come over the tannoy on the flight home: "Welcome to this Kenya Airways flight. This is Captain Bosco speaking..."  

Yesterday we travelled to a Batwa village that ARM have been working with for a few years. The journey there was an adventure. Red dust billowed behind Bosco's car as it rattled down the uneven dirt road. As we chatted with Bosco, somehow we got talking to him about his parents. What followed left us speechless. 

Bosco's father was an agriculturalist like him. His mother was a nurse. During the civil war in Burundi, when Bosco was just 15, he heard the news that his father had been killed. That was the Friday. On the Sunday he found out that his mother had been killed too. In the space of three days he had become an orphan. Apparently a group of men had attacked his mother. It was a frenzied attack. One of the men kept shouting "kill her, kill her" and led the attack against Bosco's mother. They hacked at her with machetes, first cutting her hands off, the same hands that had delivered the baby of the group leader a few months previously. They then proceeded to butcher her, cutting her, as Bosco described, into bits. All this was witnessed by at least one of Bosco's siblings who was four years old at the time. She is still  troubled by images from that day. 

At the time, Bosco was a Catholic, and prayed regularly. After that day he stopped believing. What was the point when God didn't protect his family? But after over a decade he came back to Jesus and decided that he had to forgive his parents' killers. 

"There is no point not forgiving these people. I know that it was Satan working in them that made them do these evil things. If you don't forgive, it is like an illness living inside of you. It kills you too. I choose to forgive."

Bosco shared this story and then added "I know these men who did this to my mother. I see them around."

At that moment we pulled into a village along the dirt road. 

"There is one of them. He was the leader."

He stopped the car and tooted the horn. A man looked up, grinned and came over to greet a smiling Bosco. They shook hands and exchanged greetings. These were the hands that had held the machete that killed Bosco's mother and here Bosco was, warmly holding them. We were speechless. Utterly speechless. 

I have heard stories about amazing forgiveness before, but never have I witnessed such an event. It was shocking and yet beautiful too. Through Jesus, Bosco had been able to forgive these men and had befriended them. He was no different with his mother's murderer than he is with the street children in the project. Bosco had taken the Lord's Prayer seriously: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. He had refused to let anger, hate and revenge take over and had instead decided to let love win. What a testimony of forgiveness.