Hopefully, Michael Kelly won’t mind if I share part of his message with you:

“Very many thanks indeed for the many messages that you sent to me early last week. They arrived just as I was leaving for Rwanda, for a workshop on Stigma and Discrimination for personnel from higher education institutions from Rwanda, Botswana, Kenya and Uganda. It was a good but very full and demanding week.

When in Kigali last week I was able to visit the National Memorial Site commemorating the 1994 genocide. A very traumatic and harrowing experience. What was most moving was the hall with pictures of beautiful children, all of them aged five or six or less, and all of them brutally murdered during the genocide. You could almost feel the children jumping out at you in the pictures to get a hug or embrace, but all they received was the bullet or the machete. And it’s terrible to think that the world is letting something similar happen in Darfur, eastern Congo, and other parts. When will we ever learn? And will children help us to learn that we must stop this appalling destruction of innocent lives? Maybe, some year, a World Forum could go back to this issue of children and conflict situations (something you dealt with in Montreal and possibly also in Belfast, but that bears revisiting).”