I'm Not Leaving

I'm Not Leaving

I'm Not Leaving â€“
Rwanda through the eyes of the only American to remain in the country throughout the 1994 genocide.

Wilkens writes:
It must have been about the 2nd week of the genocide that I got the idea of talking on a cassette recorder, to record what was happening around me. I honestly did not know if I was going to survive this dark time, and if I didn't survive I wanted to leave something for my wife and our three children.Â

I always scribbled our home address in Spokane, Washington on each tape in the hope that if something did happen to me and our home here was looted, some kind person might find these tapes and send them to their intended destination. Â The vast majority of this book is based on those tapes, about eight hours of recordings.Â

In a NY Times article about Carl Wilkens, Nicholas Kristof wrote:

â€œSo what would you do if, like Carl Wilkens, you were caught in the middle of a genocide?

â€¦ U.S. officials and church leaders ordered Mr. Wilkens to join an emergency evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda, and relatives and friends implored him to go. He refused.

Ms. Wilkens and the children left, but Mr. Wilkens insisted on staying in Kigali to try to protect Tutsi friends...

This continued for three months as 800,000 people were slaughtered. During all this time, President Bill Clinton and other Americans dithered, and there was an utter moral failure around the world.

But Mr. Wilkens plodded on each day, saving lives on a retail scale. Survivors describe him as extraordinarily courageous, not only for staying in Rwanda but also for venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire and pushing his way through roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers armed with machetes and assault rifles.â€

Wilkens concludes about his book:
â€œWhile the stories written here happened during the genocide, this is not another book about genocide. It is about choices people made, actions people took, courage people showed, and sacrifices people gave in the face of genocide.â€
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2011-04-30
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2011-04-30
Format	Kindle eBook

You might also like...