Letters from Kigali

From April until July 1994, nearly one million tribal Tutsi men, women, and children were ethnically cleansed from the tiny African nation of Rwanda by tribal Hutus, many of whom were their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Letters from Kigali is an accounting of that genocide told through a series of letters sent by a naive young American priest, to his friend Sister Pauline, a nun back home.Father Patrick Murphy was never supposed to be in Rwanda. He was sent in place of another priest who suddenly turned up missing. With no one else available to him his superior, Father Edward Gonzalez, is forced to send the young Patrick. Somewhat innocent to the world around him the dutiful young priest heads to Kigali. Upon his arrival to the tiny African nation, Father Patrick meets Annjeanette, the Tutsi head nurse of the clinic he has been sent to manage. She will play a pivotal role in the story as she gives an accounting of the facts of the genocide while she is hiding and fleeing from Hutu murderers that are endlessly pursuing her. One of those murderers, Raul, the clinic's Hutu postman and Patrick's friend, goes from a bookish daydreamer to a merciless machete-wielding killer who holds Patrick hostage. Though fiction, Letters from Kigali is a factual accounting of the ghastly events that took place in that tiny African nation in the spring of 1994.