This is just a brief blog about Rwanda to bring my East African account to a close! I am actually back in sunny Shropshire, UK, at the moment, gearing up for my year of work in Human Rights in Mexico. I set off April 20th. I hope to keep the blog going out there!
One thing I've decided to do in future is to list my location as the most appropriate for the blog I'm writing. ie. I am not in Rwanda at the moment but have listed my location as Rwanda as that is where I'm writing about, if you get me! So don't be surprised when I put some more Ethiopian photos on here later and my location is listed as Ethiopia. I'll still actually be here in Treflach!
So, anyway, I just wanted to write a very short blog on my impressions of Rwanda, where Suzie and I stayed from February 7th to February 15th before flying home.
Rwanda is beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous, and possibly my favourite scenery of the trip. It's only a tiny country and thoroughly deserves its nickname of 'Le Pays de Milles Collines' (Country of a thousand hills). The country is simply huge hill after huge hill, and most of them are cultivated in lush terraces of banana trees and other produce.
However, scenery aside, the thing which immediately struck us about Rwanda was how 'developed' it seemed. The roads were a joy compared to other parts of the region we had travelled, and Kigali is a super-clean city of wide, peaceful streets which stand in stark comparison to their counterparts in, say, Kampala or Addis Ababa.
Paved roads and sturdy new buildings appeared to be the order of the day other towns and cities too, not only Kigali. I imagine that piles of aid has arrived since 1994, from an international community keen to try and make some fraction of amends for their utter failure to intervene in any positive way in the events of the genocide which killed 800,000 people in just 100 days.
It is incredible how well Rwanda appears to be functioning, and developing, and moving on from such recent horrors which most of us cannot even imagine. But to simply put this development down to the impact of foreign aid would be to do a huge disservice to the survivors of the genocide. For what I found so impressive about Rwanda was the strength, heart and vision of normal Rwandans. There may be a lot of foreign money and agencies in Rwanda, but if the Rwandan people weren't so committed to forgiveness and reconciliation in the name of progress and a brighter future, if survivors and politicians were bent on revenge rather than positive development, then this money would be swallowed up in peacekeeping, law and order rather than invested in programs which hope that, though not only peace and reconciliation but through the eradication of extreme poverty and the deeper causes of unrest, such horrors will never be repeated.
Ubiquitous in Rwanda are pink pyjamas - for these are the uniform of convicts. We saw convicts in the fields planting crops, building schools, and sometimes being marched to court houses, always accompanied by armed police. But still, security didn't seem very tight for these bands of genocidaires who had committed such atrocities. Civilians passed these groups on the way to work, passed them in the street, and yet never did we see anybody scream or shout at these people who, perhaps, had killed their loved ones. We spoke to the Oxfam Country Director about this and she told us how impressive the spirit of forgiveness was in this country. She also suggested that most people were able to see that abusing the prisoners would achieve nothing, whilst allowing them to work in peace sees the construction of impressive public works from their labour.
We visited contrasting Genocide Memorials in both Gikongoro and Kigali. Kigali's ultra-modern memorial centre and museum details the origins of the genocide, its execution, and the failure of the international community to intervene, whilst putting it in the context of other genocides the world has witnessed.
The memorial at Gikongoro, however, is housed at a former technical institute, to which thousands of innocents fled in terror, searching for shelter, in 1994. Here, 50,000 were massacred and buried in mass graves.
It is a haunting walk through small villages to and from the former educational centre, in knowledge of the unknowing march to execution which occured here. In the light of the genocide denial stories which emerged in some quarters in the 90s, it was decided that the bodies of the victims of Gikongoro would be preserved using lime. Now the old classrooms contain the corpses of thousands, many bearing the same, obviously pained, expressions they carried to the grave. It is harrowing to see the tiny corpses of babies, missing chunks of their little craniums where bludgeons impacted. It is an unnerving tribute, but few things truly manifest the horrors of 1994 like the memorial of Gikongoro.
But when visiting Rwanda one is impressed by the positivity of many people there, and it can be a wonderful and inspiring place to visit as well as a harrowing one.
We loved the relaxed University town of Butare, and were impressed by the beauty of Lake Kivu straddling the border between the Democratic republic of Congo. And I will never forget the scenery.
Rwanda has so much to offer the visitor, and I would certainly recommend it.
