Carl Wilkins, the only American to stay in Rwanda during the genocide, spoke to a crowd of Bellarmine students, faculty, staff and members of the local community last Tuesday evening. The event was sponsored by Bellarmine University's Quality Enhancement Plan and STAND, the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network. A national organization with satellite chapters across America that focus on genocide prevention, STAND has had a presence on Bellarmine's campus since the spring of 2010 when a chapter of the organization was founded by current STAND President, Katie Chal. Chal, along with the Quality Enhancement Plan Chair, Beth Davis, introduced Wilkins, who spoke at length about his experiences in Rwanda.
During his talk, entitled "Hope from Rwanda", Wilkins emphasized the importance of stories and seeing individual faces in the midst of tragedy as two of the most vital strategies to understanding what happened in places like Rwanda. He applauded organizations like the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, which give a human face to what in large scale conflicts are so often quoted as mere statistics. Putting up a picture of an elderly woman in an orange hood, he told the story of Sula Karuhimbi, a 70-year old widow who took in seventeen Tutsi to hide them from marauding Hutu, feeding them with food from her own fields. A consistent theme, Wilkins main focus was on the people he met and stories he heard during the genocide, not really on his own involvement.
Wilkins and his wife Teresa met in college and moved to Africa shortly after their marriage. They began in the early 1980s by working in Zimbabwe. By the time they moved to Rwanda in 1990, they had three children: Mindy, Lisa, and Shaun. While Carl and Teresa worked in the local community building schools and health centers, their children were playing with the neighborhood kids and having a normal childhood. He was with his family at his home in Kigali on April 6, 1994 when the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down, marking the beginning of what has been called the "worst 100 days of the last century." At the end of the three months time, 800,000 people had been killed.
The Rwandan genocide is understood historically as a predominantly ethnic conflict between a minority population of Hutu people and the ethnic group of the majority of the population, Tutsi. Wilkins stressed avoidance of making any such conflict black and white. "Hutu and Tutsi people married each other, so really there was more love than hate between them," He said, and the subject of the intermarriage came up many times during his talk. He did not address at great length the historical background and events of the genocide, but made it clear that the situation was too complex to simply be an "ethnic conflict."
In addition, Wilkins described the thought process that his wife and he had to endure as they watched the situation sour around them. He told the story of the night a mob of local men, armed with pikes and clubs, came to his front gate and one of his neighbors stepped out to stop them from looting and possibly killing. "You can't go in there," He quoted her as saying, "Their kids play with our kids." He recounted the story of how he stayed behind while his wife and children fled to nearby Burundi and then onto Nairobi while he stayed behind to do what he could to assist in the terrible conflict.
He made cassette tapes every day to record what observed around him, and labeled them with his address in the United States so that even if he was killed, the tapes might make it back to his family. The tapes make up the backbone of his book, "I'm Not Leaving" which he sold after the talk. All the proceeds went to World Outside My Shoes, a non-profit educational and professional development organization run by he and his wife. Wilkins spends his time traveling and speaking to schools, universities and communities, and when not on the road, resides in Spokane, Washington.
is a member of the 
