Rwanda

I feel that the rat issue should be closed before any other subject is addressed: as of the day after my last blog, Rodnina was found in the laundry room, tailless and mysteriously headless. Where the head went, we are not sure, but at least one of our rats is officially dead and GONE.

Now I can talk about the last few days, which I spent in Rwanda. Rachael, Josh (the third intern here from Covenant), Jason (an intern who is here with AIM), and I decided to go to Rwanda with Dale for three days this week as a retreat/learning experience/why not kind of trip. It was a lovely six hour drive with our "chauffeur", Ben the Ugandan/Rwandan. I found that the farther south you go from Mbarara, the more hills appear. These hills are AMAZING. They are huge, rolling hills covered in tufts of green. By the time we reached the region of Kabale, I was just blown away, because not only had the hills gotten bigger, they were also cultivated with patches of fields all the way to the tip-top. I can't imagine what the calf muscles on those farmers look like.

Rwanda was even more beautiful, as it is actually called "The land of a thousand hills". It took us a while to get through the border, but when we did we immediately noticed a difference. Rwanda is a lot more organized than Uganda and the people there don't hassle you nearly as much. Plastic bags are not allowed there (they will actually take them away from you if you try to bring them into the country) so it's cleaner and smells better (no burning plastic trash). The roads are paved for the most part and the dirt roads are far smoother than the ones in Uganda. We stayed in Kigali, the capital city, and it was far cleaner than Mbarara. The boda drivers (as in motorcycle taxis, and they are called "motos" there) actually have helmets and even have helmets for the passengers, which you definitely don't find in Mbarara. The people even looked different, which I was not expecting. I came to the conclusions that Ugandans are just really hardcore, which is why they are left safe. Later I decided that this isn't really true at all.

We met some very nice missionaries, Fiona and Chris Turrely (I probably didn't spell that right, and I officially apologize), who gave us dinner and got us settled into a guest house. Then we got our first taste of the effects of the genocide as we watched a film called As We Forgive, which addressed how hard it is for the victims of the Rwandan genocide to forgive the perpetrators.

The next day we were hit full force by the reality of the genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center. In the beginning part of our tour, we walked through several memorial gardens, passed a wall of names, and walked around several mass graves--giant slabs of concrete that covered bodies beneath. Inside, we went through the stages of the genocide. Now I'll give you a history lesson: There had always been a rift between the two main tribes in Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis. When colonization hit, the Europeans used this rift to their advantage, made connections with the Tutsi ruling class, and issued identification cards. After they left in the 1960's, the Hutu power took over and many of the Tutsis fled the country. There were several sporadic killings of Tutsis by Hutus until tension escalated in 1994, when the planned genocide began. From April to July, over a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus (which is a lot considering that there are were only eight or nine million in the population to begin with) were slaughtered by a trained Hutu army. Finally, the killers were taken down by the Rwandan Patriotic Force; some were arrested and others fled to neighboring countries. Cleaning operations seem to have been successful, but giving grief counseling to an entire nation of people who lost family members has been a very difficult task.

The hardest part of the memorial was realizing that these were real people. There was an exhibit with actual clothes, photos, and bones of people who had been killed. There were testimonies of survivors remembering those who had died. The last exhibit showed photos of children who had been killed. Underneath each picture there were plaques about the children--their favorite food, favorite game, personality traits, and the way they had been killed (machete in the head, thrown into a latrine, smashed into the wall, etc). With each picture, I was seeing faces of the children in my classes here in Mbarara and I was heartbroken. Afterwards we went to a church memorial. The priest of this church had hidden 5,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus inside and then run to the Hutu army, who came back and murdered everyone inside. The clothes of the victims were laid out on the pews, there were still some bloodstains on the wall, and outside were open mass graves that you could walk down into. By the time we were finished, I felt about twenty pounds heavier.

Lunch was an extreme contrast. We went to the first mall that I have seen since being in Africa, and I had my first frappuccino in a month and a half. There was even a huge supermarket there that looked like Walmart and had Backstreet Boys music playing over the intercom. Talk about cultural confusion. I heard a Casting Crowns song playing somewhere else and I kept thinking "We're still in Africa, right...?"
Since the genocide, there has been a huge increase in security, so walking around the city was actually really nice and hassle-free. The boys made sure that we went to dinner at a restaurant with a TV so that we could see the Spain vs. Portugal game *rolls eyes*.

On the way home the next day, we ran out of gas, waited for about half an hour for Ben to go to someone's house on a boda to see if they had some diesel fuel, and had a really interesting experience in someone's backyard pit latrine--but hey, this is Africa. I also had the strangest "I'm home" feeling when we reached Mbarara again.

So, my impression of Rwanda: clean, organized, and breathtakingly beautiful. Also broken and painted with sadness. Rachael and I realized that nearly everyone there who was our age or older had probably been drastically affected by the genocide, having lost someone, been related to a killer, or been betrayed by a neighbor. I can't imagine what it would be like to live in daily, palpable fear of someone coming after my family with a machete. I also can't imagine having just one member of my family brutally murdered, much less my entire immediate family. It makes me think about how precious life actually is.