13 October 2007

Rwanda!

My last week of September was spent on a week-long vacation to Rwanda with Courtney and Sarah, two fellow Peace Corps Volunteers- we had a blast!

I thought I’d share some pictures and stories from our trip, but it’s difficult to write well about vacationing in a country with such a horrific recent past. When you hear “Switzerland,” you think- the Alps, chocolate. Australia? the outback. Hawaii? surfing. But Rwanda? ...genocide. I debated writing two separate posts, one about visiting the genocide museum and seeing the memorials, and another about the rest of our trip, but it’s too difficult to divorce recent history from the present. As you travel around the country you realize how much the entire country was affected- no place was left untouched by the1994 genocide. There are memorials absolutely everywhere— even the most remote hills house silent reminders—a purple banner, a mass grave. Several times when I was in a taxi full of Rwandans, I couldn’t help but think: Everyone on this taxi was HERE. Everyone on this taxi knows some who killed others, and everyone on this taxi knows someone who died. Maybe it was their neighbor, maybe it was their priest, maybe it was their child. While you can write about Rwanda’s stunning beauty or its wonderful people, it is impossible to write and dismiss its past horror. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our travels began with a 2 am departure from Uganda…

Courtney, Sarah, & Me on the bus:

We dozed as much as you can on a bus, and woke in the morning to a beautiful landscape. Rwanda is the “land of a thousand hills,” but the number of hills in the country must be a million…there are not many (any?) places that are flat. This is what you see out your window, almost anywhere you go:

Our bus arrived in the capital of Kigali about 9 hours after our departure. After finding a place to eat (cheeseburgers!) we oriented ourselves with the city and found both a supermarket and a place to stay for the night. We also made a brief visit to the Hotel Des Mille Collines, where over 1200 people sought refuge and were miraculously kept safe during the genocide, due to the courageous efforts of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina. (This is the hotel depicted in the recent film Hotel Rwanda.) The hotel still operates today:
Paul Rusesabagina now lives in Belgium and has since written about his experiences in an autobiography entitled An Ordinary Man, which I read while on the trip and highly recommend.


We were pretty tired, so we crashed early that night, but here’s us on the balcony of our guesthouse our first evening in Rwanda!
We slept very well and got up the next day to go visit the exceptional Rwandan Genocide Museum, sponsored by Aegis Trust.

The museum, located just outside Kigali, is divided into three sections: the largest covers the events of the Rwandan genocide, another section is dedicated to the children who would have been the future of Rwanda, and last section teaches about other genocides that have occurred in recent history: Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Namibia, the Holocaust. The museum is incredibly well-put-together and provides an excellent and humbling tribute to those who perished.

The site of the museum is also home to 14 mass graves in which the remains of approximately 258,000 people are buried:
Most of the mass graves, like this one, are sealed; however, some remain open, as remains are still being found today.

***The next several paragraphs recount our visit to a memorial, and may be too graphic for some readers. Look for the double row of asterisks to mark the end of the topic.***

After visiting the museum, we went to a place called Nyamata, about 40 km outside the capital. Nyamata is the site of a brick church where approximately 10,000 people were massacred. The people gathered in the church as a place of safety, only to be handed over to killers by their priest. The bodies have been removed but the church bears the marks of the massacre, and has now been turned into a memorial. The metal door of the church is bashed in. Light shines through a thousand little holes in the spangled tin roof- grenades were thrown inside. The alter cloth has been left in its original place, and showing how much blood was shed: it is completely stained up to knee-high level. There are also blood stains all over the ceiling and on the brick walls- particularly on one wall, where babies were killed when they were thrown against the bricks. There are small chunks of brick missing almost everywhere; even the Virgin Mary did not escape- the statue’s shoulder is also missing a chunk.

Behind the church are two mass graves, similar in appearance to the ones at the genocide museum— underground, made of concrete. Narrow stairs lead into the middle of the dim room with two narrow walkways, one to the right and one to the left, with deep wooden shelves on each side. In the first grave, the shelves are stacked with wooden coffins. There are up to twenty bodies in each. In the second grave there are a few coffins, and it was not until I saw an open one that I understood how twenty bodies can fit inside a coffin—the coffins are not full of bodies, they are full of shattered pieces of bone.

There only a few coffins in the second grave, because the rest of the shelves are openly full of bones. Rows upon rows of skulls, stacks of leg bones, arm bones. While the skulls are intact, they are far from whole; many have obvious marks from machetes, many have bullet holes. I counted one shelf: one hundred thirty-two skulls.

In the introduction to An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina writes,

“Between April 6 [1994], when the plane of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a missile, and July 4 [1994], when the Tutsi rebel army captured the capital of Kigali, approximately eight hundred thousand Rwandans were slaughtered. This is a number that cannot be grasped with the rational mind… You cannot understand the magnitude. Just try! Eight hundred thousand lives snuffed out in one hundred days. That’s eight thousand lives a day. More than five lives per minute. Each one of those lives was a little world in itself. Some person who laughed and cried and ate and thought and felt and hurt just like any other person, just like you and me. A mother’s child, every one irreplaceable.”

He’s right, eight hundred thousand is unfathomable. I couldn’t even fathom one hundred thirty two, and that was just one shelf in one mass grave in one small village.

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After a very sobering day, we got dinner back in town and retired early. The next day we took a nice bus ride south to a town called Butare. On the way we passed huge groups of prisoners, marching on the side of the road and carrying hoes on their way back from working in the fields. To me they were just any other people, but I can’t imagine being a Rwandan and seeing them marching on the roads, carrying hoes—the same people that used to march on the roads carrying machetes.

Butare is home to the national museum, which deals mostly with early history of Rwanda, and has displays on things like baskets, pots, farming, and the like. Us outside of it:
The museum wasn’t anything super exciting (and most of it was in French), but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. After our visit we had an early dinner (I had delicious fried tilapia), and made it back to our room before a rainstorm! The next day we got up and caught a taxi to Nyungwe Forest, a national reserve in the southwestern part of the country. We made it to the park office in the center of the forest too late to go on a tour that day, so they suggested we go back to the road and hitchhike or catch a taxi to the other office at the edge of the forest, 18 km away. We eventually did get a ride, but decided to walk for a while first- it was gorgeous.

Me and Court walking:

The three of us:

Eventually we got a ride to the edge of the forest, where we spent the night at nice guesthouse operated by the park. The next day, we got up, and with a guide, went to the forest, where we saw….
Colobus monkeys!

There were tons of them-
After that, we went on a couple trails through the forest, hiking up:

And down:

And stopping to see interesting creatures:

After our hike, we went back out to the road to wait for a ride to the next town, Kamembe—we hoped to catch a bus from there to Kibuye, a town on the Lake Kivu. We had fun while waiting:
We finally got a taxi and made it to the Kamembe taxi park just in time to find a bus. We were starving but there were two buses to Kibuye: the morning bus and the afternoon bus, and the afternoon bus was leaving. We hoped on, and crazy bus ride #1 commenced. As I’ve mentioned, Rwanda is extremely hilly. Add to the hills a medium-sized bus with bench seats, an unpaved road with serious curves, and a driver with a sense of urgency, and you get quite an adventure.

The ride was extremely scary but also extremely gorgeous, which made it totally worth it… to me. Sarah and Courtney didn’t really share my enthusiasm. Sarah, in all seriousness, put her passport in her pants, “so if we die they can identify our flamed bodies. Do you see how far down that is?!?” I said, “It’s beautiful!” and she replied, “It is gorgeous, but is it gorgeous enough to make it your last memory?” Touché. Like I said, it was an adventure.

Here’s one of the curves- we actually had to stop and do a very careful three-point turn on this one, so I had time to take a picture!

As we ascended and descended the hills, we passed people carrying baskets and sacks on their heads or pushing heavy-laden bicycles, kids chasing after the bus, small villages, tiny hillside genocide memorials. Since we were driving north along the western part of Rwanda, we also had great views of Lake Kivu, the lake that separates Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

Sarah got a great picture of the sunset:

We arrived to Kibuye at dusk and found a nice guesthouse right on the lake. That night, I wrote in my journal:
My favorite part of today and my favorite part of the trip so far was the bus ride itself. It was terrifying, exhilarating, amazingly gorgeous. I thought we were going to die. Multiple times- well, not really multiple times- more like constantly. The road was sharp curve after sharp curve… the driver was going twice as fast as you’d think he’d even be able to. It was the kind of ride where you automatically grip the bar in front of you- not because you mean to, but because you reach for anything stable in the midst of all that chaos. I loved it.

The next day, Sarah and I got up early and rented a canoe for a couple hours. We rowed out to a little island and back- we didn’t take a camera in the boat with us, but here’s us later, pointing to the island that we rowed to!
(Neither of us is actually pointing to the right island …the one we rowed to is the small one exactly in the center of where we’re pointing!)

After our canoe trip we hitchhiked into town and found our “bus stop”- a place at the side of the road, where we waited a few hours for the afternoon bus to Gisenyi, a town on the northern part of Lake Kivu. I think the bus finally showed up around 3, but by the time the conductor had issued tickets to everyone and we took off it was around 4. Thus began crazy bus ride #2.

The road for this journey was also unpaved, and the area was just as hilly as the previous day. I think we found it less scary this time though—because we left later in the afternoon, the sun set and a lot of our ride was in the dark. Not only was the bus driver was forced to go a bit slower, but this time we couldn’t see the deadly drop-offs on the side of the road. Ignorance is bliss, right?

The people on the bus, and throughout our whole trip, were incredibly nice. The woman who sat next to me the majority of this bus ride was beautiful.
We had no way of communicating, but we smiled and shared our food- I had crackers, she had Japanese plums. I showed her the picture on my camera- she laughed. She shook my hand as she got off with her rice sack at one of the tiny hillside villages.

We didn’t see very many foreigners the whole time we were in Rwanda, but I’m guessing these bus rides are not something that foreigners really do, even when they do visit the country. People were curiously commenting on our presence on the bus, and at one point a man sitting next to Sarah translated for us: “They are wondering how it is that they came to be on a bus with you.” I also wondered how I could be so lucky.

We arrived well after dark, but by good fortune were dropped off directly outside the guesthouse where we intended to stay. We ate omelets filled with unhealthily delicious amounts of cheese and fell asleep soon after.

The next day we got up and went to the beach!
We also moved to a much nicer hotel- after talking to the managers and getting a substantial discount, we decided to splurge. Our new place was not only by the beach, but had a hot shower, a hairdryer, a tv, a swimming pool, and a workout room with an elliptical machine! (These things are usually absolutely unheard of for our budget range.) Needless to say, we were pretty excited!

We hung out at the beach for the whole afternoon- it was great. Sarah and I on the rocks:
That night we took our dinner in our room and watched movies on tv! The next day I got up early to work out, then took a dip in the pool…hmm I’m realizing that none of those things sound very amazing, but trust me, they really really are. We headed to the beach again for a while, then reluctantly made our way to the bus park to catch a bus back to Kigali.

I sat by a really nice man originally from the DRC- we talked most of the trip, and he helpfully pointed out sites along the way. Because of flooding on the direct route from Gisenyi to Kigali, we ended up going through a town called Ruhengeri, which means we got to see volcanoes out our windows! They were massive:
We made it back to Kigali, and our bus for Uganda left the next day…we were sad to go, and are already talking about when we can go back. We met so many kind-hearted people, saw so many things, and learned so much.

I think each of us fell in love Rwanda in our own way.