Tragedy and generosity

January 11

Last night I got in a fight with the mosquito net above my bed.  It is large enough that it goes from above the top bunk all the way to the floor, which means there's a lot of netting.  During the day, the hostel staff takes all of the netting and ties it into a knot.  The only way to untie the knot and distribute the net around the bed is to do it from the top bunk.  Being the graceful and coordinated person that I am, I somehow ended up wrapped up and tangled in the net and could not manage to get it to fall around the bed like it was supposed to. Eventually it was wrapped around my body and several of my limbs, feeling more like a straight-jacket than anything else.  Seeing no mosquitoes in the room, I decided to just give up and threw the entire net on the ground.  Good riddance.

Today was a heavy day.  We spent it touring Kigali, and (for better or for worse), most of Kigali’s tourist sites have to do with the 1994 genocide.  So today was sad in many ways, but I’m glad that I saw the things that I saw.  The events of that time period are nothing short of tragedy.  I simply cant understand how human beings can be so cruel and barbaric to each other.  But at the same time, my experiences here in Kigali have shown me that the Rwandan people are kind and extremely generous.  They love their neighbors and have moved forward from the events of 20 years ago with a renewed sense of community and social responsibility.  It's both sad and moving at the same time.

We started the day on a lighter note by going to an art gallery near to the hostel.  The gallery is the first of its kind in Kigali – it was founded by two brothers who are self-taught (but extremely talented) artists.  They created the studio as a collective to teach other Rwandans how to be artists.  Their pupils range from age 6 to 60, and in teaching them they are giving them an occupation, empowering them to express themselves and earn an income, and promoting the arts.  One of the proprietors – Emmanuel – was there and showed us around the studio.  So many of the paintings were absolutely beautiful.  I wish I could buy one of Emmanuel’s or his brother Innocent’s paintings, but they’re a little out of my student price range.  He didn’t seem to care that we couldn’t buy anything, and spent lots of time with us walking around and explaining the different paintings and styles to us.  I took his card and plan to contact him when I actually have a salary. 

Us posing next to some of the installation art outside the gallery with Cory (our friend from the hostel who accompanied us there)

As an illustration of how wonderful the Rwandan people are, we asked Emmanuel to call us a cab to take us to the genocide museum.  He gladly did so, but when we went outside and the cab hadn’t come yet, he hopped in his car and offered to give us a ride.  How sweet!  He was under no obligation to do so, but he is just a generous soul and did us a favor.  Or perhaps he’s just a very shrewd businessman and knows that I’m that much more likely to follow through on my desire to buy a painting from him later.  Either way, it was a very nice gesture.

The genocide museum was heavy stuff, so get ready for some sad narratives.  We started on the outside of the museum where they have a group of mass graves where over 250,000 people are interred.  That’s right, 250,000 people.  Many of these people are still unidentified, and they are going through a painstaking process of trying to identify all of the remains.  It seems like it will take years and years to accomplish this, sadly.  The mass graves were relatively unadorned – simple stone slabs.  A few had flowers on them with messages like “genocide – never again.”

After visiting the mass graves, we walked around the building to see the series of gardens that are there.  Each garden is chock full of symbolism about the country.  There was a garden dedicated to women everywhere, one dedicated to self-defense, one centered around the 10 provinces of Rwanda.  Most impactful for me was a series of 3 gardens all next to each other.  You start in a garden of unity, representing the time before the civil war.  Water from this garden flows downhill into the garden of division, representing the events in the early nineties.  We sat in that garden for a while, each on our own bench, and reflected in silence.  Finally, the water flows downward into the third garden, bursting forth from a fountain there, representing reconciliation. 

The fountain of reconciliation

Finally we entered the interior of the museum.  I wasn't allowed to take photos there but will do my best to describe to you its contents.  The first portion of the museum contained a detailed history of the genocide - its origins, influencers, perpetrators, victims, and repercussions.  While I vaguely remember hearing about the atrocities during 1994, I really didn't know that much about what had happened, so it was incredibly informative.  I'll do my best to summarize what I gained from this museum:

The origins of the tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis can be traced back to the early- and mid-twentieth century.  I had been under the impression that it went back further than that so was surprised to hear this.  The Germans and the Belgians were the colonial powers here in Rwanda (Germany pre-WWI and Belgium post-WWI).  Hutu and Tutsi weren't even popularly defined terms until the Europeans got here.  The designations were also not initially ethnically defined but rather socio-economically.  Hutus were the farmers, so they were poorer.  Tutsis were cattle herders, and therefore the richer class.  The monarchy had always been Tutsis (obviously because they were rich).  Tutsis were the minority in the country, but they were a dominant minority, having the most plum jobs and leadership positions.  Even if you were born to Hutu parents, you could be designated a Tutsi if you owned 10 or more cattle.  When the Europeans got here, their fascination with eugenics meant that they wanted to categorize and codify the differences between the Hutus and Tutsis.  After creepily measuring skulls and otherwise poking and prodding people, the Europeans declared Tutsis to be a "superior race" to Hutus.  That obviously didn't help engender neighborly love here.

In 1962 the Belgians gave Rwanda its independence, and the new country switched from a ruling Tutsi dominant minority to an elected Hutu president.  Times were a changin'.  This started a movement toward "Hutu Power" where the new government wanted to right the perceived wrongs of colonial times and redistribute wealth to the Hutus.  This led to persecution of the Tutsis, who started leaving the country when violence would break out (on a small scale always).  Over time, there became a Tutsi diaspora in Africa, with many of them living across the border in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).  In 1973, a military dictator seized power and further bolstered the "Hutu Power" movement, eventually building and training a militia under the principles of Hutu Power.  By the early 1990's, the Tutsis who had fled were sick of the persecution, so they pulled together their own army and invaded the country, sparking the civil war.  One mind-boggling fact is the role that the French government played in this war.  They actually backed loans for the Rwandan government to acquire the weaponry required to fight the war.  If the French had stayed out of it, the Tutsis would have beaten the militia quickly, and would have been allowed to come back into the country (which is what they were fighting for).  The genocide could have been avoided.  This is one of many occasions when the west totally effed up the situation here, making things worse rather than better.

The civil war raged for a while, with rising numbers of Tutsis being slaughtered. In the background, the Hutu government was planning the genocide.  They had put together "kill lists" of people who were to be murdered when the genocide started.  They trained the militia and indoctrinated the people with propaganda and things like "The 10 Hutu Commandments" which basically encouraged hatred and dehumanized the Tutsis.  The reason that the Hutus were so efficient at killing so many people in 1994 was because they had been planning it for years behind the scenes.  The UN was even warned of this threat, but did nothing.

In spring of 1994, the Hutu president's plane was shot down upon approach into Kigali, killing everyone on board.  No one has ever claimed credit for this attack, and so it's unclear whether the Tutsis did it as part of the civil war, or whether the extremists orchestrated it to justify the beginning of the genocide.  We'll probably never know.  Either way, within 1 hour of the plane going down, death squads were marching through the streets of Kigali, busting down doors and murdering people on the kill lists.  The violence quickly spread throughout the country.  Neighbors turned against each other - even family members would turn each other in for suspected sympathies with the Tutsis.  People were forced to die in the most humiliating and/or terrifying ways possible.  Some were buried alive.  Others were burned.  Some were forced to watch their family members being brutalized before being killed themselves.  Others were forced to kill their own family members.  Children were ripped from their mother's arms, and women were raped by known HIV-positive men and kept alive to suffer the consequences of the disease.  People who sought refuge in churches were massacred in droves, with even some clergy betraying them to the death squads.  The photos, videos and news articles in the museum were horrifying, with each story seeming more disgusting and brutal than the last.  It made me sick to my stomach, but I read every part of the displays anyway.

The only foreign country to put troops on the ground while this was happening was the French, and they managed to only make things worse.  They tried to create a "safe zone" in one part of the country, but all it did was allow the perpetrators of the violence to escape punishment by slipping away into neighboring countries.  The UN denounced the violence, but in the same meeting voted to decrease its presence there.  Other countries seemed to mean well, but were too slow moving to actually make an impact.  Over the course of just a few months, approximately 1 million people were murdered.  70% of people lost a family member, 80% saw someone killed, and 90% feared that they would be killed.  I can't even imagine what that was like.  The violence finally ended when the Tutsi army beat the Hutus - outside help didn't seem to play much of a factor in the end of the war.

The aftermath of the genocide is, as expected, messy and emotional.  Mass graves are still being discovered to this day.  Many people still don't know what happened to their family members.  Many families were entirely wiped out, leaving no one behind to register their names as victims.  The Hutu extremists didn't quit immediately though.  They tried to regroup and come back to kill the rest of the Tutsis in 1997.  One story broke my heart - they entered a primary school and told the children to separate into Hutu and Tutsi.  The children's response was "We are not Hutus and Tutsis.  We are all Rwandans here."  The  extremists threw grenades into the classroom and killed 6 of the brave children who stood up to them.  

The other exhibits in the museum were a mixture of sad and grotesque.  Part of the museum is dedicated to chronicling other genocides around the world, some formally recognized (e.g. the Holocaust) and others not (e.g. Armenia in 1915).  I learned there that the word "genocide" wasn't even invented until the 1940's with the Holocaust.  Another section of the museum showcased bones of the victims.  There were rows of human skulls and piles of human femur bones in glass cases.  Some of the skulls were victims of obvious traumas - gunshots, cracked skulls, or with large holes from blunt objects.  Another room held photos of victims that had been submitted by family members.  Rows and rows and row and rows of photos of smiling faces, people living their normal lives prior to the violence.  Finally, the last room of the museum was dedicated to the children who lost their lives.  The room showed photos of each child and information about the child, such as their favorite foods and toys, who their best friend was, and their last words. The youngest child in this exhibit was only 15 months old.  By this point, I'm emotionally exhausted and all I can think about are my niece and nephew, Addie and Cooper.  I'm so thankful that they are growing up in a country where they are safe from this type of violence, but am so sad that there are still places in the world where children their age have to live in fear.

We walked out of the museum quietly, not knowing exactly what to say.  I'm glad I went, but at the same time and so sad from what I learned there.  It's hard to believe that this all happened only 20 years ago - during my lifetime!  I've done a lot of research and reading about the Holocaust, but it was always easier to distance myself from the events because they took place in another time, to another generation.  With the Rwandan genocide, it's hard to make those rationalizations. 

Next, Sandra had heard about a church in a suburb of Kigali where some people had sought sanctuary during the genocide but had been murdered en masse.  We decided to take a public bus out there to see it.  At least I think it was a public bus - I'm still not entirely clear on how the system works.  We walk to the nearest bus station to the museum and find one that is headed to the main bus terminal in the city.  The bus terminal is the first place in Kigali where I've felt the chaos and pressure of other African cities.  It is EXTREMELY crowded and disorganized, and once we found the area where the buses we needed to take were located, we were swarmed by different promoters trying to get us to take "their" bus.  This is why I don't think it's entirely public - they must be privately operated or something.  We chose the bus that looked the nicest and least crowded, and asked when it was going to leave because we wanted to go grab food.  They told us it was leaving in 8 minutes, so we start to walk away and then the bus door closes and it pulls away!  Um...does 8 minutes mean something different here than in the states?  So we run after the bus and bang on the door and get in.  The people outside had told us that the fee was 500 per person (less than $1), but when we got inside the woman told us the total fee was 1100 for the two of us.  Given that the difference wasn't that big, and we're talking about pennies, we paid the 1100 but wondered if we got ripped off.  The bus ride was beautiful - taking us through rolling hills beyond the city limits and into villages where people carry large loads of goods on their heads as they walk down the side of the road.  

After over an hour (longer than we had expected), we get to Nyamata, the village where this church is allegedly located. The people at our hostel had told us that the church was easy to find - all you had to do was ask for "church" at the bus station and we would be pointed in the right direction.  Sadly, it wasn't as easy in practice.  We asked for directions from a guy in an official-looking "taxi" vest, and he told us he would show us the way.  But then he took us toward a series of motorbikes and tried to get us to get on.  There is a breed of taxis here that are motorbikes which can take only 1 passenger.  They're cheaper (and more dangerous) than taxis, but we had been told that this church was close enough to walk to so we declined his offer.  Unsurprisingly, he didn't actually give us directions on how to walk there.  We decide to walk around the town a little bit and try to find food, directions to the church or both.  We walk into a few establishments and are met with blank stares when we ask the question in English.  I suppose it makes sense that the people here in the villages wouldn't be as well educated in English as your average Kigali resident.  We were acutely aware that everyone we walked past was talking about us.  We would even occasionally hear the word "mazungu" which means white person.  The restaurants in town all seemed to serve large buffet meals, and we weren't in the mood to sit down and have a heavy meal.  With our blood sugar meter dipping close to the level of “hangry,” we found a supermarket of sorts where we could buy “sambusas” which are basically Rwandan meat samosas.  They were filled with an unidentified meat and delicious spices, prompting me to say that I don't know what I just ate, but I know it was delicious.

Refreshed and refueled, we set out to figure out exactly where this church that we’re trying to find is.  After being met by blank stares by several people (who clearly didn’t understand the question), we decide to concede defeat and pay the moto taxi guys to take us.  We approach a group of them, and once they realize that we are willing customers, they swarm us and are all trying to get us to choose them as our driver.  The frustrating thing is that they’re all quoting the same price to us – 300 francs (about 50 cents).  Knowing that you should never accept the first price you are offered, and recognizing this as a situation where supply was high and demand is low, we take the opportunity to negotiate the price down.  Sandra’s negotiation style is to start out with humor.  She announces the price we are willing to pay (200 francs) loudly and in a joking tone, so that they laugh, but then she keeps saying it until they know she’s serious.  My style is a bit more confrontational.  I start wagging my finger (as the Rwandans do) to their quotes of 300, and firmly state that we are only willing to pay 200.  Out of a group of at least 10 drivers, we finally find 2 who are willing to take us for our stated price.  I make sure to confirm that the price is round-trip, and off we go.  They give us helmets, but mine was way too big for my head, so I have a feeling it would have done more harm than good if we had actually crashed.  Thankfully the bikes don’t actually go that fast, and as it turns out we were only going about 400 meters up the road. It was good that we didn’t walk though, since the church ended up being off a side road, and given my terrible sense of direction, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have found it on our own.

You'll notice I'm holding on to the bike rather than the driver, since I'm pretty sure he hadn't showered in a while.

Unfortunately, after our rather long and meandering journey, the church was closed by the time we got there.  It was around 3 pm but on a Sunday, so I suppose we shouldn’t have been completely surprised, but we were disappointed.  The armed guard allows us to peek in through the windows, and we see a bare concrete room with rows and rows of dusty (and in some cases bloody) clothing stacked in piles.   The church has been turned into a memorial, and I’m guessing we are looking at items that belonged to the victims and were found with their remains.  It’s a somber and sad place, but I have to admit that after our time in the museum earlier today, I’m a little relieved that we didn’t linger there very long.  We found out later from a friend at the hostel that there was a mass grave in the back, which you could actually enter into as a tourist.  Apparently it was filled with rows and rows and rows of skulls and smelled of decay.  I’m kind of glad it was closed so we didn’t have the opportunity to go into a mass grave.

People's belongings, as seen through the window

We notice that there is another (much newer) church right next door, so we figure that we might as well go look inside since we came all the way out here.  There are about 20 people milling about, dressed in their Sunday finest, chatting with each other.  We walk past them and try to enter the church, only to find that all of the doors are locked.  Seriously?  It’s a Sunday afternoon for crying out loud!  One of the people we had just walked past calls out to us in (what Sandra tells me is) perfect French that he’s sorry but someone locked the church and left, and they don’t know how to find him, so we can’t go in.  These people all are church members who want to go inside the building, but they have been locked out due to some oversight or mistake of a church employee.  Silly Rwanda.

We jump on the moto taxis and go back to the bus station.  Once we arrive (a whole 2 minutes later), the taxi drivers (who have clearly been conspiring while we were denied entry to the churches) announce that we owe them 400 francs each.  Then they start asking us to give them 500 each.  They start to claim that the price was 200 francs each way.  Well, after the long day we’ve had, I am in no mood for someone to try to pull a fast one on me.  Yes, I know we’re talking only about pennies, but it’s not the money that I care about – it’s the principle of the matter.  Just because I’m a mazungu does not mean that people should be able to go back on their word and try to overcharge me!  I calmly place 200 francs each on the seats of their taxis, and walk away toward the buses.  I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this, but I accidentally took too much money out of the ATM when I first arrived, so Sandra and I have been both using my francs, and we will settle up later.  Anyway, because Sandra didn’t pay anything, the entire group of taxi drivers swarm her as she follows me, grabbing her arm and asking her to give them more money.  She politely asks them to back off, and by that point we have reached the area where the buses are leaving.  Now we are swarmed yet again by a group of bus promoters (for lack of a better term), who are all trying to convince us to get on their bus.  They promise us that the fee is only 500 francs to get back to Kigali, which makes us chuckle.  We again choose the bus that has the most space and is leaving the soonest, and are thankful to be out of that chaotic herd of people.

Once on the bus, the woman collecting payment eventually comes to us.  We tell her we’d like 2 tickets, and I hand her a 2000 franc note.  She gives us back 1000 francs as change and a receipt.  Hooray!  I’m happy that for the first time, the price we were actually quoted was the one that we were charged!  Funnily enough, she comes back about 5 minutes later and says “I accidentally gave you the wrong change.  Can you give me 100 back?”  We push back and tell her that we were told it would only cost 500 francs, and we show her the receipt that she herself had just given us.  She doesn’t put up much of a fight, and backs away to collect other people’s fees.  Then I realize what had just happened: she had accidentally charged us the regular price and forgotten to mark it up by 100 francs (as is apparently the standard practice for mazungus).  She didn’t push back because the extra charge is bogus and she just made a mistake and forgot to overcharge us.  Hilarious!

Too bad, so sad for her

The ride back goes more quickly than the ride out there.  The views were beautiful, as we drove through rural villages and through idyllic rolling hills.  People would wave at us from the streets as the bus drove past.  We walked past countless merchants carrying baskets of produce on their heads either to or from the market.  I like Rwanda :)

We got back to the hostel around 6 pm and headed out for dinner with 2 friends we had made at the hostel around 8 pm.  We went to a place recommended by Jean – Chez John.  The place turns out to serve Rwandan food with a few French items as well.  Sandra had been raving all day about the salad she had the previous night – it was just half of an avocado (which are double the size, half the price and have 4x the taste of the avocados you get in the US) filled with a vinegarette.  We are happy to see that the same item is on the menu here, so the four of each order one, plus some local entrees and side dishes.  One thing I may not have mentioned about Rwandan restaurants is that they are incredibly slow moving.  They could only be slower moving if the servers walked backward I think.  So, about an hour passes, and while we have gotten our drinks, we still haven’t even gotten our salads yet.  How long does it take to cut an avocado in half and put some dressing into it – 2 minutes?  Maybe 3 if you are one-handed?  Sandra goes into the kitchen to ask where our food is, and she sees the full staff of the kitchen sitting around and chatting. No one is working at all.  That explains it J  Thankfully, that spurs them to action so they come out with our salads 10 or 15 minutes later.  After that, we had to wait over an hour to get our entrees, and so by that point we all were just giggling and how ridiculously slow the service was.  I had ordered a local dish, a chicken brochette (basically a kebab), so I start joking that they must be hatching the chicken from the egg and raising it before they kill it to become my dinner.  Perhaps it would have been more understandable if the restaurant was busy, but there were only 2 other tables in the entire place!  The food, when it finally turns up, is absolutely delicious, so at least I can say that it was (sort of) worth the wait.

The garnishes were done with Jackson Pollack-level precision

The taxi ride home is another negotiation fiasco.  We get into the cab and the guy quotes us a price of 5000 francs.  I turn on my hard-ass negotiating persona and tell him that we paid 3000 francs on the way here, so he should charge us that amount (in actually we paid 4000 to get here, but we all knew we were overpaying).   He changes his offer to 4000 francs, and we keep haggling for a while.  Only then do we realize that we never told him where we were going! 

Me: (gives name of hostel and relevant landmarks to driver)

Driver: (blank stare)

Me: Do you know where that is?

Driver: 4000 francs

Me: But you know where we’re going?

Driver: 4000 francs

Me: But we only want to pay 3000 francs

Driver: 4000 francs

Me: How can you know the price if you don’t know where you’re going?

Driver: (shrugs)

We get out of the cab and Sandra walks into the restaurant to ask them to call us another one.  At that point, I remember that I have the actual address of the hostel in my email account, so I pull that up and show it to the driver.  He looks at it and nods with a glimmer of recognition.  By this point, we all just want to get home, and when I push him and say “so 3000 francs?” he agrees and waves us into the cab.  Hooray!

The night ends with a climax of the tension that had been building in my bunk-bed-ridden room.  The two girls on the bottom bunks were both part of some university program where they are coming to Rwanda to study for 2 weeks.  The entire group in this program is staying at the hostel, and they’re the type of people who like to sit around and talk about how worldly they are and how they’re saving the world by deigning to come to Africa.  Ughhhhhhh.  Anyway, so these girls have been very cliquey and unfriendly the entire time, but that doesn’t bother me because I have no interest in being their friend.  Anyway, when I get into the room, I notice that the mosquito net – my foe from the previous night – has already been draped around the bed, presumably by the girl who is lying in the bottom bed.  The problem is that she didn’t orient the net properly, so there is no opening for the ladder up to the top bunk.  I have to shimmy under the net and try not to step on the net (which is incredibly slippery) as I climb up precariously to the top.  Once up there, I lie down and the net is resting straight on my face.  It’s like a thin piece of gauze covering my entire face, making it itch and would be completely useless from protecting me against any mosquitos.  After last night’s debacle with the net, I’m in no mood to rearrange it so that it’s comfortable, so instead I tell the girl below that I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to take the net down because I can’t sleep with it up.

Her: (stands up out of bed) “But…I think it’s there to protect us against mosquitos.”

Me: “Yes it is, but there aren’t any mosquitos in here.”

Her: “But I could get bitten anyway”

Me: “By non-existent mosquitos?”
Her: “Sometimes you can’t see them but they’re there”

Me: “Well it rests on my face and I can’t sleep that way.  If you'd prefer it to be up, you’re welcome to take the top bunk.”

Her: (grimaces) “Ugh, no”

Her friend in the other bottom bunk: “I have bug spray if you want it”
Her: “Ugh, fine, I’ll just wear bug spray.”

Me: “Ok, well if you change your mind I’m fine with switching.”

Her: (storms out of the room and slams the door)

Seriously?  Who is this girl?  I have to admit I felt a touch of glee from exerting my (ridiculously small) bit of power on someone who’s pissed me off.  Does that make me a bad person?  Eh, either way, I can happily report that I woke up without any mosquito bites.  Katie (1) Annoying Girl (0)