Forgiveness Is a Gift You Give Yourself

Of everything in Freddy's extraordinary life, the hardest part was not survival. It was forgiveness.

And it is important to say, clearly, that it did not come quickly, or easily, or all at once.

It took him something close to seventeen years.

The weight he was carrying

After the genocide that took his parents, four of his five sisters and his extended family, Freddy carried what anyone would carry: anger, bitterness, a suffocating grief.

For a long time that was simply the truth of his days.

What began, slowly, to change him was a realisation — hard-won, and profound.

He came to see that forgiveness, if it ever came, would not be a gift to the people who had destroyed his family.

It would be a gift he gave himself.

The bitterness, after all, was a weight only he was carrying. His tormentors did not feel it. He did. And he came to fear something even worse than the pain: that if he did not set the weight down, he would pass it on — that his own children might inherit the hatred, and carry the cycle of it forward into a generation that had done nothing to deserve it.

So he made a choice.

Not to feel differently overnight, but to begin, deliberately and at real cost, to lay the burden down.

Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting — or excusing

It would be easy to mistake what Freddy did for something soft. It was the opposite.

He was relentless about the truth.

He sought out Samson, the man who had killed his family — and found no reckoning there at all. No accountability. No remorse. Nothing.

Forgiveness, Freddy learned, is not always met, or earned, or returned. Sometimes you extend it into a silence.

And yet, in a different encounter, with a different perpetrator — a man who confessed his part, who admitted he had revealed where Freddy's family were hiding — Freddy found that he could forgive.

It taught him that forgiveness is not a single blanket act you perform on the world. Forgiveness is deeply personal. It is selective and must always be freely chosen. It is owed to no one. Which is precisely what makes it so powerful when it is given.

Forgiveness, in Freddy's hands, never meant forgetting what had happened, or excusing it, or pretending the wound was not real.

It meant refusing to let the wound rule the rest of his life.

The human spark: Looking in the mirror of our lives

There is one thing Freddy did that I still find almost impossible to comprehend.

He took perpetrators from his own village. These were men he knew, men who had killed his family and friends, his baby sisters, men who had once been his tormentors. He invited them to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, not knowing how they may respond. They accepted, and so Freddy arranged the logistics.

He has been honest about how hard that was, how deeply conflicted he felt.

His motivation was clear: the Peace and Values Education Programme he had helped shape at the Kigali Genocide Memorial was being piloted and he was the leader of this program.

Would he live what he was asking others to learn?

Would he be a man of peace, or simply tell others? Could he lead a program focused on peace, yet not address his own life?

In Michael Thurmond’s reflections on James Oglethorpe, we encountered a related idea:

looking into the mirror of our own lives, having the ability to change the things that need to be changed, and in so doing, change ourselves and then we change the world.

Freddy was looking at something different — not a fault, and certainly not his fault, but a burden he no longer wanted to pass forward.

But he looked in that same mirror, the mirror showing his own life and decided there was something that needed to be changed.

But he believed it was necessary. If he wanted to lead others, then first, he needed to lead himself in that same pathway: centering his leadership on what it means to be human.

In Freddy’s context, this was a choice almost none of us could imagine facing.

He was inviting the very people who killed his family to the place that honoured their lives: and where they, along with 250,000 victims, were buried. This is sacred ground, sanctified by innocent lives lost and their innocent blood shed.

Pause for a moment and dwell on this.

Consider a moment when someone wronged you — whether the wound was large or small, whether it came from someone you loved or someone you barely knew.

What was your reaction, what did you feel in the moment, what do you feel now?

There is no right or wrong answer, only a question — and a question that only you can answer.

Back to Freddy, and that moment at the Memorial, standing there, among the stark evidence of what they had done, some of them broke down and wept.

In that moment Freddy saw something he has never let go of: that even in men who had done monstrous things, there remained a human spark, some humanity.

At first he questioned whether his eyes were seeing the right thing. People who had committed such terrible evil were weeping at the inhumanity of their own actions, and the humanity of the lives they had taken.

This was not an excuse, not a forgetting. But a recognition that the capacity for change exists even in the most unexpected places — that if hatred can be taught, so can its opposite.

He had given up something incredibly important, something that had held his life together: a world of perpetrators and survivors, of them and us.

What he gained was an understanding that is beyond most of us.

Understanding is a powerful concept. There is a phrase at the Kigali Genocide Memorial which reads:

If you knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me

Freddy had gained a mission that would fuel him and the next stage in his life: to be a leader of peace, of humanity, to fulfil his mother's wishes: to be a man.

Character is built in the struggle

This is the third movement of the Champions Pathway — the slow, deliberate building of a human core.

And Freddy's life shows us exactly how it is done: not in comfort, but in the struggle itself.

Adversity does not automatically make us better. But when faced consciously, and with support, it can refine our values and deepen our empathy: it can strengthen our human core.

Forgiveness and courage are not fixed traits we either have or lack; they are capacities that grow, often painfully, over years.

Character is forged in exactly the fire most of us would rather avoid.

So Freddy's journey leaves the rest of us with a quiet, demanding invitation.

When adversity comes — as it will — we can let it harden us, or we can let it refine us.

We can carry resentment for the rest of our lives. Or we can do the harder, freeing thing: set it down.

And we can remember that the strongest people we know were not spared their suffering. They were shaped by how they chose to meet it.

Freddy gave himself the gift of forgiveness.

It was neither an easy choice nor a quick process. In many respects, Freddy is still living and learning what forgiveness means. It is not linear, not a switch that is off or on.

In doing so, he not only freed his own future from the cycle of hate — he showed a whole nation, and now the world, that the cycle can be broken at all.

Become a Champion

Freddy’s story shows that our humanity can be wounded, buried and tested — but it need not be destroyed. It remains the most powerful force we have.

When people choose empathy over fear, connection over division, and forgiveness over the cycle of hate, whole nations can be rebuilt.

If this story stirs something in you, don't let it stay a feeling.

Do what Freddy did — turn it into a choice, a connection, and then create the future you want to see; become that future.

• Join the 35Champions site as a free member, and follow the movement as it grows.
• Pay it forward as a paid member, helping young people join the Champions program and become Humanity Champions in their own communities.
• Most of all, choose a pathway of humanity — and make the courageous, human choices, one at a time, that ripple outward to those around you.

Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.

I'd love to hear your reflections below.

Glen