Ride Against Genocide

Carl Wilkens stayed.

Most Americans, including Wilkens’ wife and three kids, evacuated from Rwanda in 1994 when the machetes were unsheathed — but Wilkens, a former shop teacher, stayed to help save all the lives he could.

Trip by trip, he took food, water and medical supplies to an orphanage, passing through checkpoints brimming with armed militia men. That orphanage became a sanctuary, packing in 350 adults and children, protecting them from the roving mobs.

Mortars fell around the city with such frequency, Wilkens says, that his African gray parrot began to imitate the shells’ high-pitched whistle as they sliced through the air.

“You can’t go more than a block or two without meeting a militia guy,” Wilkens recalls. “There were little fresh graves. There were little ones dying from dysentery and diarrhea.”

The Rwandan genocide is over, and Wilkens has long returned to America. But genocide and atrocity is hardly passé. Now Wilkens is fighting to stop genocide in places like Darfur. And he wants you to help.

This month, Wilkens and his wife will leave to ride around the country, speaking at schools, sleeping at the homes of teachers willing to take them in. They hope to use Sunday’s Spokefest (see page 11) as their launching point on their 4,600-mile journey, stretching from Spokane to California to Texas to the Southeast and finally, in June 2010, to New England.

They’ve spoken at schools before, but they traveled by plane. This time, for several reasons, they’re opting for recumbent bicycles. Schools won’t have to pay for their plane tickets. Wilkens says they’ll be more connected to the community if they ride through it. And the epic bike ride is more environmentally friendly. Being green, Wilkens says, goes well with concern for human rights.

Wilkens and his wife are not exactly Lance Armstrongs, but that’s part of the point. “I hope that people can say, ‘Wow, they’re not hard-body athletes,’” Wilkens says. “But everything they need is on the back of their bike.”

His conversation is not just about making people aware of atrocities. “Awareness without action,” Wilkens says, “is actually worse.”

Wilkens wants to help teach people how to actually do something about it, how to be effective. How to write your representative, how to raise the issue’s profile in the news. He suggests, for example, calling the donors of a senator and asking the donor why the senator has such an apathetic record on genocide.

“Perhaps we’ve saved… I don’t know… 10,000 people in Sudan,” Wilkens says.

Congress has developed a Darfur action plan, Wilkens says, but it sits languishing, unenacted. “The results can’t be the measure of whether or not we’re going to do something,” Wilkens says. “It can’t always be this quantitative, ‘Wow, good, we’ve ended the genocide.’”

But there are always smaller chances to help, he says. Committing genocide isn’t easy. It takes planning. It takes squashing of conscience. Yet at any moment, something might happen — somebody might speak up, ore events might change — in order to prevent additional atrocities.

One of the things Wilkens discovered while in Rwanda is that evil isn’t perpetrated by monsters frothing at the mouth. It’s complicated. Even the thugs in Rwanda clung — in an odd sense — to some tattered remnant of morality. “They’re trying to maintain a level of civility, like they’re human,” Wilkens says.

Col. Tharcisse Renzaho, for example, was charged with crimes against humanity. “I worked with this man,” Wilkens says. “You got to form relationships with the people in power.” And indeed, despite his documented penchant for atrocity, Renzaho helped Wilkens. Once he received the colonel’s blessing, the militia deferred to Wilkens: “I walked through the parking lot and they just parted like the ocean.”

In that sense, says Wilkens, there’s a subtler key to preventing atrocity. Use community service. Get to know your neighbor. Get to know the enemy, the “other.”

In the opening days of the Rwandan genocide, a band of thugs came to Wilkens’ house — maybe to kill him and his family. But his neighbors stopped the thugs, saying, You can’t come in here. The reason? Their kids play with our kids.

Inhumanity becomes a lot harder when the opposition, they realize, is human. Just like them.