In 1995 I went to Rwanda to work on projects around Kibogora, a mission and hospital on a hillside above Lake Kivu. It was one of the most remarkable times and places I have ever experienced. About a year after the beginning of the genocide, Rwanda was a strange and often frightening place. I think of those days as serene beauty contrasted with chaos and an ever-present sense of darkness that threatened to overwhelm..
This image was a scene I witnessed a couple hundred meters down from the hill where I lived. For me the painting holds something of the feeling I had of the situation in Rwanda then…the boy badly wanting to get in the boats and paddle away to another place.
