Outside reading #4: An Ordinary Man

This week in An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina I found a connection with population, and numbers. "Kigali itself held about 350,000 people a the time-a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota-and the strain on the infrastructure was very great"(Rusesabagina 68). This just shows how many people really were effected by this genocide. 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered. Over double the population of Minneapolis was killed; but to add to it, it is completely unimaginable how many people were affected by this terrible genocide. People's whole families were ripped apart and their neighbors quickly became enemies. Rwandans knew that this was going to happen for a while, but it didn't add up to anyone until it was too late. Rusesabagina expresses that no one even made a protest against these horrible events. Fear won in that time and nobody spoke up. This was a terribly scary time for citizens of Rwanda and the not even the government was helping them. The government was simply turning their citizens against one another, ending in a confusing mess of anger.