More Famous than Ben Affleck

On Thursday a delegation of VIPs from the Congo and UNHCR came to talk to the refugees. I asked if I could bring the bub and the Cripple along in the afternoon as we would just be sitting and listening to people talk (and I’ve learned that in Rwanda people really like to talk, so it would probably be quite a long event). The camp director said sure I could bring her, but we would be mobbed so it was my decision to make. I didn’t quite believe her.

See, everywhere we go crowds of people come to wave and shake and the bubs hand. She loves the attention! The first time I took her into the camp she probably drew a crowd of about a hundred children, and she was a bit scared (she was also not feeling very well and had just had a nasty shot), but she went in again the next day for a check up and just waved when all the children came up to her. Every day the Cripple takes her out on walks and she draws crowds of children from the nearby school that come and shake her hands and stroke her head. She blows kisses and raspberries at them. When the Cripple takes her into church she sings along with the music and spends all her time trying to get to the other children. So I figured she’d be happy to get the attention.

As soon as we arrived I realised I’d vastly underestimated the scale of the event. I think virtually every refugee (and there are about 18,000 of them) had come to hear the speakers. There were so many hoards of people small children had climbed up the basketball basket – I really can’t imagine how – and were sitting on the hoop or hanging off the net in order to get a better view!

The delegates were just beginning to talk so we were quickly ushered around the side to the benches behind them. Though there were a few, mostly older, refugees sitting behind us on the few seats provided for VIPs, the vast majority of the many thousand attending were standing in front of us. Behind us a refugee who I’d met the week before was sitting. He offered to translate the proceedings for us and sat there diligently writing what was said. After a good hour and a half the talk finished and we thanked him profusely for his kindness. Apparently the delegates had come to try to talk the refugees into going back the Congo. They were promised their houses and property back and told the situation is secure enough for them to go. We asked the refugee what he thought of this and he gave a rather neutral answer (I should point out, all the delegates were still sitting in the row in front of us).

As we were a bit distracted talking to the people behind us we didn’t notice all the VIPs leaving. Suddenly I realised there was just us and a few thousand refugees left. As we came round the side of the shelter a huge wave of children surged forward. I suddenly realised what the camp director had meant.

Oh dear.

The Cripple and I made our way, as best we could, in the direction of what we thought were the NGO vehicles in the medical centre. The children, absolutely fascinated by the bub, screamed in joy and threw all their weight into getting close enough to touch us. Some of the refugee guards stepped in and tried to keep the children back by hitting their legs with switches. We were appalled, but really, there seemed to be no alternative. We finally get through to a space in the crowd and groan when we realise we’ve come to the UNHCR boarding point, not our own. The medical centre is back around a long fence that literally thousands of children seem to be hanging off and squashed up behind.

Starting to get a bit frantic I ask the single police officer if there is a back way to the medical centre. He says no and turns his back on us. Not two seconds later the fence starts to collapse and dozens of children fall off. The police officer rushes over and says yes, there is a back way. We follow someone as fast as we can away from the hoards.

After ten minutes of speed walking through a maze of locked gates we’re back in the medical centre. The camp director laughs at us and says “see I told you you’d be mobbed.” A couple of months ago Ben Affleck came to visit the camp. As hundreds of children squash their faces up to the fence to get a better look, I ask the camp director if they acted the same way when he visited. “No, no, no. She’s more famous than Ben Affleck!”

While waiting in the security of the compound, we thought about the talks we’d just heard. We wondered how, twelve or thirteen years on, authorities could know which house belonged to whom, and even if the houses were still standing. I asked some other refugees in the medical centre what they thought. One of them said “How can I return? The Interahamwe have taken our village. They live their now.” That night one of the staff at the NGO we’ve been staying with commented that there was conflict in the region they fled from last week. Over the weekend an NGO worker in North Kivu (the area the refugees fled from) said with astonishment “But the Interahamwe are in their villages!”

A weekend break

The Fourth of July is Liberation day, a public holiday here, so we were blessed with a long weekend. We spent Friday in Kigali at a really lovely guesthouse and heard that the holiday was a very big deal for the manager of the guesthouse. He had hidden under a bed for five weeks during the genocide and was freed when the capital had been liberated fourteen years ago. It’s the kind of story you hear fairly frequently in Rwanda and makes you realise how incredibly resilient the people are.

On Saturday we went to Gisenyi, on the northern side of Lake Kivu, and crossed over to Goma (DRC) for the Cripple to get her visa renewed. Despite making several promises before leaving that I definitely wasn’t crazy enough to go into the Congo with bub, ahem, when it came right down to it, it was definitely the simplest option. The thought of spending nine hours on a bus – twice – in one weekend in order to get to Kampala was just too much. So the Congo it was, though in all actuality it was a very simple crossing. The closest we were to getting in hot water was when the Rwandan immigration official noticed the Cripple’s visa had expired two days beforehand. Thankfully everyone in the line behind us spoke up and said the date definitely looked like a 5 – not a 3 – and after a severe tongue lashing we were through.

We cruised around in Goma for a couple of hours and saw the destruction caused by the volcano erupting. There’s a ban on taking pictures of almost everything in the DRC, and the few things you are allowed to photograph you need a permit for (which we didn’t have) so we hid our picture taking as much as possible. The greatest excitement occurred when we (the Cripple being a photographer it’s rather hard to resist) took a picture of some fishing boats and were shouted at by the people nearby (who thought we’d taken pictures of them) so at that point we thought it was high time we went back to Rwanda. The return crossing was without incident and the Cripple’s visa is now valid for the rest of her stay here. Woohoo!

Gisenyi was gorgeous and a lovely break from reality. The bub enjoyed playing in, and eating, the sand and was delighted to meet another baby around her age who was happy to play with her too. We spent the evening at the nicest hotel in town and spent far too much on a couple of drinks and dinner. But it was tasty, definitely.

The journey back to Kigali was a bit torturous – I had a headache, felt travel sick, was squashed in an uncomfy seat with people sleeping on me on either side and the bub sleeping on my lap did nothing to ease the pressure on my bladder for three hours or so. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself until we passed an accident on the road. A crowd of people from the nearby village had gathered round a bus that had collided with pedestrians (I think)… seeing a body wrapped in cloth on the side of the road sent shivers down my spine and made the small inconveniences I’d been grumbling silently about seem like nothing. When we reached Kigali I found out four people had died in the accident, not just the one I’d seen.

In yet another example of people’s incredible generosity here, on the way back we were offered a place to stay by someone I had met during my first week here. He has a baby born a week before the bub and we’d bonded a bit over baby stories. When we arrived back in Kigali he arranged collecting us, finding us dinner (and amusing the bub while we waited), taking us to the house (a brand new just finished building in the suburbs, one of the nicest places we’ve seen), hot water, a guard and sorted a taxi for the morning to get our lift (at 6am!) back to Byumba. As we were driving down the back roads to the house I had a moment wondering if we were perhaps being abducted. I just couldn’t work out why someone would be so kind. To be honest, I still can’t quite get my head round it. The level of kindness and generosity I’ve experienced on my travels always astonishes me, especially when I consider the way foreigners are treated in my own country.

my weekend in Goma and Gisenyi

After quite a busy (and thankfully successful) week doing my research in Kigali I decided to take advantage of the weekend and explore the country a bit. I caught the last bus on Friday to Gisenyi, known as a gorgeous retreat town at the top of Lake Kivu, and arrived about four hours later well after dark. Being a bit of a spontaneous decision I had no idea where I was staying and jumped on the nearest mototaxi (the back of a motorcycle) sans helmet and flew off down wet and mostly dirt roads in search of a room. Gisenyi is so close to the Congolese border I found my limited Swahili very useful to ask the cyclist to slow down - pole pole! - which he thought was funny (but he did slow down!).

The first 'moderate' guesthouse I tried was closed. The second had no bednets (not something I'm willing to go without in rainy season). The third was completely full. Eventually I ended up in a Presbyterian church run hostel which was quite basic but clean and much cheaper than the others I'd looked at. It was too late to get something to eat at the hostel, so after stumbling around in the dark nearby I came across a local restaurant serving an almost finished buffet dinner and helped myself to the scraps before going to bed.

In the morning I woke up to rain, rain and more rain. Now, I know this is rainy season, but rainy season usually means a downpour every day or every few days, not all day without stopping! As sunbathing was clearly out I asked around and heard that the situation across the border was stable... I don't think I need to tell you what happened next do I?



I knew Goma was close to an active volcano (it errupted in December and covered the town in lava) - but it was quite amazing being able to see the smoke rising from the top and see just how small it looked because we were essentially on part of it. The hardened lava was piled up all over the place and roads on one side of the town were completely destroyed by the lava flows and the consequential road scraping to clear them. I was only in the DRC a very short time, but it was long enough to get a bit of a feel for the place. Even in a few hours, the sense of chaos across the border was palpable. Rwanda has a large police and army presence, but in Goma men in uniform swaggered all over the place. One of the reasons why I have so few pictures from my visit is my strong desire not to be "interviewed" by one of them and forced to pay a "fine" for being caught photographing something forbidden (and that really could have been anything!).



After a (surprisingly) uneventful border crossing back into Rwanda I spent the rest of my time in Gisenyi walking alot and enjoying the gorgeous views of the lake. On Sunday morning I was lucky enough to catch about two hours of sunshine. So far on my trip every single day I've put on sunblock it's been overcast and the few bright days I've forgotten to do so. Yesterday was not an exception to this and in two hours of sunshine I managed to turn a pretty crispy red colour.



My trip back to Kigali yesterday afternoon turned out to be the most exciting few hours of the weekend. Shortly after leaving Gisenyi the rain poured down in what seemed like sheets of water. Despite passing dozens of cars, buses and transport trucks that had crashed through the occasional guard rail and off the side of the mountains, our driver didn't seem to slow down, let alone stop. The three and a half hours back to the capital were spent almost completely in tense silence on the bus, marred only by shouts from passengers when it seemed we were about to careen into something!