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Published: June 25th 2010
Bonjour (or wiriwe in Kinyarwanda) from Kigali!
I haven't written much in the past week because we were mostly in transit. We spent a few days in the city of Mbarara in western Uganda to prepare for Rwanda. Things are much different here and it important we are prepared. In Gulu, the Acholi openly discuss the most brutal details of the conflict. Everyone there has been effected by the LRA. Most people have a brutal story about losing a family member or even being forced to kill their own families. The people still speak of their memories without hesitation. The genocide is a taboo subject in Rwanda. If you bring it up you could end up with an informant in tears for the next half hour. Just today I rode to work with a woman who lost most of her children and her husband in the genocide. My new homestay father says he does not know her story though he knows her well. It is far too difficult for people to discuss.
This hesitance may be due to a few different things. My opinion is that the people refrain from discussing it because of the personal nature of the killings. In Uganda, the killing was done by armed military forces, even if the soldiers are forced to enlist in the LRA. This makes it much less personal. Rwanda was a far different conflict in 1994. Neighbors hunted down neighbors. Priests of many denominations welcomed people into their churches then invited the Hutu Interahamwe to slaughter the masses taking refuge. Even human rights workers with NGOs participated in the attrocities. The level of betrayal and hate between neighbors and respected members of the community with the Tutsi population makes the conflict difficult to discuss. On the other hand, Rwanda culture is much more reserved than Acholi culture. This does not mean they sit in silence, just that the Acholi are extremely open about everything.
Rwanda is full of mountains. It makes me feel very at home considering I am from the Wyoming Valley in northeast Pennsylvania and I also attend school at Lehigh University. If I am not walking up or down an extreme slope something feels slightly off since Lehigh is on the side of a mountain. Kigali stretches across a few of these mountains. The city is rapidly developing. We have been told many of the poor are pushed out of their homes in order to restructure the city. Most of their homes are built quite irregularly. While much of Kigali seems to be keeping up with the pace, I struggle to believe that everyone is managing well with the development. Outside of Kigali the country is extremely rural. Massive fields of tea lined the road on our way in. Countries here growing cash crops like tea and coffee are just another form of colonialism. They are slaves to producing these high paying crops when perhaps the country would benefit more from growing food. Instead, the most fertile land is dedicated to cash crops.
On a lighter note, (there won't be many since the main topic of study for SIT in Rwanda is the genocide) I was put into my new homestay family last evening. The group dynamic was beginning to bother me a bit so I am happy to be a bit more independent again. Living in a hotel out of a suitcase also gets stale. With a group of 26 it just takes so long to do anything. My father picked me up from the hotel. His name is Charles Kabagambe.
My homestay father manages the largest mall in Kigali. If you google MTN mall Kigali you should get some good images. Last night he picked me up from the hotel. We took another SIT student with us because she was staying with a friend of his who works at the British Embassy. We went in to drop her off, but found ourselves in the middle of a thirsty Thusday party. Apparently every Thursday the British Embassy employees get together and invite a few friends for drinks and bbq in the courtyard area. My father's friend continued to fill my glass. I finally found some good gin in Africa, but of course it was at the British Embassy. Not too surprising. After this party we returned home. My mother is a student studying finance and business at a local university.
My parents met in Kampala in Uganda. Many Tutsis fled Rwanda in 1959 when the Hutus took power, including my grandparents. The children and younger Tutsis from these refugees made up the RPF which overthrew the Hutu government at the end of the genocide in 1994. My family only returned to Rwanda about 12 years ago. It must be odd to return to a home you have never known. Yet, he says it feels like home. People here actually practice his culture. Identity in Uganda is based heavily on ethnic membership. He probably felt very lost in Kampala. Not being able to identify with an ethnic group in Uganda seems as though it would leave someone struggling to find their identity without a community to reify it like so many Ugandans depend on. Now ethnic identity (Hutu or Tutsi) is not even discussed publicly in Rwanda. It is a taboo subject considering the attrocities caused by manipulating ethnicity, not the ethnicities themselves.
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Bruce Whitehouse
non-member comment
Language
Hey Bob, sounds like things are going well in Rwanda for you. Are most of the Rwandans you meet speaking English? All the former exiles in Uganda (including President Paul Kagame) learned English rather than French, which had been Rwanda's sole official language until after the genocide. So I was wondering if there is now a linguistic divide in Kigali society between English- and French-speakers.