At the Kigali Memorial Centre on the outskirts of town, 258,000 people are buried, their bodies exhumed and re interred on the site. Overlooking the capital you see that Rwanda really is the land of a 1000 hills, les mille collines, undulating, green, lush, verdant, a country recovering from madness. You can’t go to Kigali without visiting at least one genocide memorial. This April marks the 15th year since that genocidal madness.

With that I found myself walking through the museum wandering around the upstairs rooms. The exhibits in those rooms explored other equally horrific genocides in the hope that maybe understanding them will stop them or at least alert the world when they may be about to occur. The signs were there in Rwanda, but the world chose to look away. Man, unfortunately, never learns from history despite not forgetting.

To view the full story please visit The Huffington Post.

Originally published in The Huffington Post on the 1st of May, 2009.