Editor’s Note: Cynthia’s story on the Warrens in Rwanda will be the subject of an upcoming "Nightline" report. We will let you know when it will air.

I have read with much interest and heartbreak Ashley Judd’s superb postings here from Rwanda, in part because of my own journey there this spring. It is called, by some, "the land of 1,000 hills," by others "the land of 1,000 smiles." It is certainly the land of 1,000 stories.

We all remember 14 years ago when the world turned its face away from the Rwandan genocide: 900,000 people murdered in 100 days. And while, in many ways, the country has made a remarkable recovery, there are still so many who need so much.

I didn’t go to Rwanda expecting to have my heart broken. I have reported extensively from some of the most difficult and damaged places on Earth. Each time I think, "Perhaps this time it won’t hurt quite so much." But staying raw seems to be the only way to really see. Strangely, perhaps, it isn’t just the desperate need that wrecks you, it is the joy expressed by people who have lost so much and have so little.

The assignment was to travel to Africa and meet up with evangelical pastor Rick Warren and his wife Kay. For the past five years they have been deeply involved in a humanitarian project there.

The Warrens have a remarkable story of their own: Twenty-eight years ago they held a little prayer meeting in the living room of their Southern California condo which has now evolved into the fifth largest church in the nation, Saddleback. There are now 83,000 people on their church rolls.

Over the past couple of years I interviewed both Warrens for Nightline: Rick, in Davos where he was attending the World Economic Forum, and Kay, in New York where she was promoting her new book. Both of them told me about their plans to change the world: Over the next 50 years they believe one billion Christians can be recruited to provide humanitarian services around the globe using the model they are developing in Rwanda. Before you dismiss this as ridiculous, consider the Warrens have a good deal of experience in bringing people together.

In addition to Saddleback, Rick had written one of the largest-selling books of all time ("the best-selling adult hardcover in U.S. history," according to Publisher’s Weekly): The Purpose Driven Life. The success of the book turned the Warrens into "reverse" tithers … in other words instead of giving ten percent of their earnings to the church and living on the rest, they keep ten percent and give the rest to the church. When Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame read Warren’s book he wrote to him and asked if he’d come to Rwanda and help. Five years ago Warren agreed.

So I was intrigued. It took a while for Warren and his team to figure out how they might contribute. But after a few missteps they have created a development program based on this premise: Every little village will never have a health clinic but they all have places of worship and those churches and their members can be trained to provide much-needed help to the suffering whether providing health care or doing other jobs. In Rwanda the suffering are everywhere. The average income is $260 a year. Eight hundred thousand children are orphaned. Two hundred thousand people are HIV-positive.

Such numbers are too big to imagine. Too big to feel. But after a week of travel with the Warrens and their team, the big picture was captured for me in one very little face. I noticed her as Rick and Kay showed me around. The little girl in a yellow dress — who I later found out was four years old and named Antoinette — clutching the rail at the end of her mother’s bed as she lay dying in a hospital in Rwanda’s remote Western province.