Nyamata

Today was a public holiday in Rwanda. As all the offices were closed I thought it best to take the day off and venture out of the capital to Nyamata about 30 kms away.

On my way to the main bus station a little boy came up to me and asked me for something to eat, so I popped into the nearest shop and bought him some peanuts and chocolate milk. Within seconds about a dozen more streetkids appeared from nowhere and I had to go back and get food for them all - some of them wanted a picture taken so I snapped it quickly and kept walking before any more streetkids could arrive and I would have no money at all left!

The bus station was quite a bit further than I anticipated from the centre, but eventually I arrived (with a few new blisters). I quickly found the right bus thanks to some helpful strangers who thought a pregnant muzungu was one of the funniest sights ever, and climbed in ready to go. The minibus (same as a dalladalla for those that followed the Tanzanian adventures) didn't leave until it was full a good forty minutes later, but the trip to Nyamata was mostly smooth and took less than an hour passing gorgeous scenery along the way.


About half way there an old man got on the bus and says "How are you today young lady" quite loudly to me as he sat down. It's the first thing that anyone on the bus had said to me other than confirming it was the right bus, and everyone turned towards us to listen. He tells me he spent 33 years in Uganda so he has good English and starts chatting to me, asking what I think of Rwanda, and then talks mainly about the genocide and how difficult it is for people to learn to live together now, though they are trying very hard.

When we arrived in Nyamata the bloke next to me asked if I knew where I was going and offered to show me the way. As we walk along he tells me a bit about himself - he's 25 and studying at the university in Kigali. Next week he will defend his thesis and hopes to do well enough so that next year he can begin a Masters programme in Kampala at the big university there. He tells me he has family in the area so I asked if his brothers and sisters lived there.
He replies "No, they're all dead."
And then I said "and your parents...?"
"They are dead too. They were all killed in the genocide, there's only me and my aunt left."


The memorial used to be the church in Nyamata. When the president's plane crashed Tutsis from all around Nyamata gathered in the church thinking it would provide them with a refuge, instead they were slaughtered.

He walks me round telling me about what happened: pointing out the bullet holes in the ceiling, the machete wounds on the skulls, the clubs used to kill people that were left in the vault as a reminder, and the entire time I'm thinking to myself - this is where his whole family was killed.

He showed me the orphanage where he grew up behind the church and the schools he went to. I asked him how he felt about people coming to look at the memorials from overseas and he told me it made him really happy that people were learning from it so it wouldn't happen again.

...sadly, it is happening right now in Darfur.

1994

I'm writing this a few days late because I needed time to think... I still need time to think. As much as I have read, heard, seen and felt about the Rwandan genocide, it is something I don't think I will ever be able to come to terms with. I can't imagine how those that lived through it can.

The week I spent in Rwanda I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened. The scale of the killings was such that everyone in the tiny country would have been impacted in some way by the genocide: either knowing or being perpetrators, victims, or both. Driving through Rwanda there are signs every few minutes to mark massacres, constant reminders that the beautiful landscape was recently scarred by human slaughter.



On the last day I was in Rwanda, Abby and I went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial. There were displays showing events leading up to the genocide, the genocide itself, and how the country is trying to rebuild. Almost a million people killed by machete in a couple of months is something that is really difficult to comprehend. The numbers are so large and the violence so extreme that the people victimised become unreal to us and the perpetrators inhuman. The memorial did an amazingly good job of showing that the victims were people. Video clips around the memorial of survivors describing friends and family that were killed made the numbers seem real.

For me, the hardest section of the memorial were the quiet rooms on the top floor. Poster sized pictures of children were hung from the ceiling with a plaque describing the child below it. Name. Age. Favourite foods. Disposition. How they were killed.

There's nothing we can do now about the Rwandan genocide. There is something you can do about Darfur.

The wheels on the bus...

On Tuesday evening we set off from Mwanza on an overnight ferry to Bokoba, Tanzania. We had been assured that on the other side of Lake Victoria we would find a bus to Kigali, Rwanda. A bus that would wait if the ferry was delayed. This sounded a tad optimistic, but ever hopeful we set off. At about 5 in the morning I woke up to find the ferry docked and people disembarking. I poked a seriously disoriented Abby awake, jumped off the top of the three level bunk beds, scrambled to collect my things and marched off the ferry half asleep. We were just about clear of the dockyard when it occurred to me that not *everyone* was climbing off the boat, and maybe I should check where we were. A few minutes later, Abby and I slunk back into our cabin, much to the amusement of the ladies who had been chattering about the muzungos most of the trip.

When we did arrive in Bokoba a few hours later we found, not surprisingly, there was no direct bus to Kigali. We would first have to spend a day travelling to Kampala, Uganda, and then another day travelling down to Kigali. The daily bus to Kampala had already left, so we would have to wait a day in Bukoba before we could get going. Bokoba was a pretty sleepy town: we discovered the very slow internet connections, a New Rose cafe with good Tanzanian grub, and not much else.


scenes from Kampala

We stopped once on the long bus ride to Kampala at the Tanzania-Uganda border. We grabbed the chance to use the loo, and when we returned we asked the border guard which one was our bus. He pointed at it and said "I think it is even having mechanical problems" as if that were a good thing! Sure enough, the bus was having a tire changed, as the bumpy roads had bounced the previous one off.

Kampala was a chance to regroup, though after Tanzania everything seemed much more expensive! In the morning we set off again down to Kigali. The long Uganda-Rwanda border crossing, made even longer by a stupid muzungu who had her iPod stolen after she left it on the bus unattended, made us long for the tire change of the previous day.


the Rwandan countryside

After a full sunrise-sunset day on the bus we finally arrived in the capital of Rwanda and checked into our hotel. Though far more expensive than Tanzania or Uganda, the chance to soak in the bath was well worth it :)