Rwanda

Last week, on Thursday night (1/22/09), we were informed that the following Monday was a public holiday (Heroes’ Day) to honor the date that Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni took over the government. Meaning we didn’t have to go the hospital. So we decided to go on the weekend trip we wanted to take that had the longest traveling time, which was to Rwanda.

It was a whirlwind trip with really only a day and a half spent in Kigali because it is a ten-hour bus ride from Kampala. I think anyone who travels in Africa should experience African public transport. I had a window seat and about half an hour into the trip it began thunderstorming outside: big, black clouds with a torrential downpour so heavy everything outside just looked like green and brown blobs. So I started reading a book and a few pages in suddenly realized that my entire sleeve was wet – the rain was leaking all over me through the window. Other joys of the bus ride included: peeing in an uncovered, tiled, walled-off hole in the ground at a service station with my bare butt exposed to the rain; watching melodramatic Nigerian soap operas (the African equivalent of Latin American telenovelas) that inevitably involve crazy love triangles and witch doctors; the bus veering off the road at a 45 degree angle to avoid potholes; bouncing 6 inches into the air when the bus hits a pothole; and seeing two old overturned passenger buses and an overturned petrol truck on the side of the road. That said, the bus was relatively comfortable, I had my own seat (pre-assigned!) and I had no livestock or small children (who might wet their pants) sitting in my lap. Plus, the round-trip ticket cost $24.

We got to Kigali around 7pm and took a taxi to a hotel we thought we might stay at. However, the guide book we were using was two years old and it turned out the price was twice as high, out of our price range. Then we went to another place, but they only had one double room available. At this point we were tired from the trip and didn’t feel like running all over Kigali in the dark to try to find another place to stay. So the three of us all shared a queen-sized bed and were able to get another room for the next night. That evening we met up for dinner with a classmate of ours, Oliver, who is working in Rwanda. He speaks both Kinyarwanda and French, and knows his way around Kigali, so he was a great guide for our first evening (despite accidentally ordering three heaping platters of food that would have fed 8 people).

The next morning we wandered around downtown Kigali, stopping by Hotel des Milles Collines (the famous setting for the Hollywoood film Hotel Rwanda) before making our way over to the Kigali Memorial Center, which commemorates the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It was an intensely emotional experience – the only thing I have to compare it to is the Holocaust Museum in D.C. One major difference is that there are actually mass graves on the grounds of the Center. The grounds are beautifully landscaped with peaceful meditation gardens and fountains, but these are ominously interrupted with 8’x20’ slabs of concrete that cover the remains of victims of the genocide. There is a wall that surrounds them with the names of those who were slaughtered. However, our guide, Clauden, told us that there are many many names that are not known because entire families were killed. Even after almost 15 years they are still finding the remains of victims and some of the mass graves have not yet been sealed to allow for more burials.

The Center is split into two floors. The bottom floor has a time line, in Kinyarwanda first, followed by French and English, encircling the entire room that takes you from colonial times in Rwanda through the genocide and recovery period, complete with videos of survivors telling their stories and walls of victims’ pictures that were donated by their families. The top floor has an exhibit detailing a global history of contemporary genocide and a memorial to children who were killed in the Rwandan genocide. All of the staff are survivors of the genocide and were very gracious to share their stories with us. At times it seemed curious to us that this would help them cope and move on, to revisit it all, day in and day out. But somehow, for them, it did.

One employee of the Center asked ‘How is what you saw in the Kigali Memorial Center different from what you see in Hollywood movies like Hotel Rwanda?’ During college and grad school, I read lots of books on Rwanda and felt like I had a decent historical grasp of the genocide. But none of that prepared me for how personal and real it became to hear the stories of survivors and stare into the photographed eyes of the dead. There were many courageous stories – old women in their 80s who hid and saved so many, a man who dug an elaborate hole in the ground It was terrifying and beyond my emotional comprehension to walk into a room with skulls, femurs, and clothing and hear the names of those killed read off, one by one, like a roll call. I felt some strange internal compulsion to sit in front of each photograph clipped like clothes on a clothesline to the wall, as a way of paying respects to lives wrongly taken. When I was in the children’s room, something snapped inside me and my eyes flooded with tears. Seeing the enlarged faces of children with a plaque beneath with their name, their favorite food, pastime, the last thing they said, and how they died was just too much. It’s hard enough to read that a child who was nine months old was hacked to death by machete, much less imagine it actually happening. And walking through the streets of Kigali you see mostly young people, around my age or a little older. It struck me that all of those people were children when the genocide occurred. This is an entire nation of children who were traumatized.

But I don’t want to stop my description of Rwanda with this. A friend of a friend, who showed us around Kigali our last night there, asked us a very profound question. He queried: What have you seen about Rwanda that is not related to the genocide? Sara also complained that we don’t speak as much as we ought to about what is good about Africa, because there is much to be told, though mine is just a small glimpse since I was there for such a short time.

Rwanda is stunningly beautiful. As the bus crossed over the border the road snakes its way through rising smoky blue mountains, terraced with stairs of emerald green crops. Peasants are hard at work with hoes and shovels, trying to eke a living out of the land. Kigali is the cleanest African city I have ever seen. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, outlawed the use of plastic bags and on the third Saturday of every month it is a public ‘clean up’ day where everyone has to go out and pick up litter. Rwandan people are warm, generous and go out of their way to be hospitable. The clerk at the hotel where we stayed gave us a 25% discount for our second night, just because they didn’t have enough rooms the first night. The staff at the Memorial Center took hours of their time to talk with us and patiently answer our questions.

Rwanda is a country of survivors, living still.