I’ve been thinking about Rwanda. Look at what [Rwandan President] Paul Kagame has done. Yes, they’ve done a great job of getting investments, and, yes, they’re the best users of NGOs I’ve ever seen. But the most important thing they have done is to build a genocide memorial, which grippingly chronicles what happened. It’s on top of the most massive crypt in the world; it has the bones of 300,000 of those who were killed. Kagame said, “We’re going to do all this. We’re going to tell the truth and face the truth, and that’s all we’re going to do. And then we’re going to let it go.” And so he creates these reconciliation villages. You get a free plot of land for a house, but you have to agree to live next to someone of the opposite ethnic group. And they run all these co-ops where women from different ethnic groups are making baskets or whatever and selling them all over the world. Every person—without regard to their ethnic group—every adult male goes out and spends one whole day once a month on a Saturday cleaning the streets, from the richest to the poorest, and it’s all designed to say, “Hey, this happened to us and it was horrible, and the only way for it not to happen again is for us to let it go, to focus on what we have in common.” It’s a metaphor for what the world has to do.

Bill Clinton on Global Philanthropy

Source Newsweek