Finally, a substantial update!

Ok, long time no update! I’m settling into life here in Rwanda. Last week we went to a ton of memorials. After the Murambi genocide site, we stayed in Butare for some classes and went to the National University of Rwanda. The library there is tiny (like, the size of the library in Sherborn, or maybe, maybe one floor of the Barnard library). I mean, I knew it was kind of a bad sign when the academic director told us that SIT had worked out a deal where we were supplying them with books, given that our “library” consists of about fifteen books… It was still so nice to be in a real library – we were all geeking out about all the books. They were mostly in French, and I found a bunch of the books we read in the French literature class I took last semester – and the geekiness continued…

We spent the weekend back in Kigali. On Saturday I spent most of the day in town doing homework. There’s a really great café here called Bourbon café, which feels kind of like a nicer version of Starbucks. It’s supposed to have internet, but I can never get it to work. Oh! Question for my tech-savvy friends: whenever I try to connect to a wireless network (or this morning, an Ethernet cord) my computer says that it’s getting a full signal, but then it won’t load any web pages. The “Network” part of System Preferences tells me “AirPort does not have an IP address and cannot connect to the Internet,” or that it has a “self-assigned IP address and may not connect to the Internet.” How do I fix this??? Anyways, we spend a lot of time at Bourbon, and I try not to spend absurd amounts of money on familiar muzungu food (what I wouldn’t give for a burger…)

On Monday we went to Gisozi memorial, which is the memorial for all victims from the Kigali area. The outside has a really beautiful garden and fifteen mass graves, and the inside is like a museum. This is the only memorial in Rwanda that has information the way most Western memorials would. There’s a large exhibit explaining the history of the genocide, including a few videos of survivors’ stories, and a smaller exhibit that tells the stories of other genocides around the world. There’s a room full of photographs of those who died, and the most moving genocide memorial I’ve seen yet: a tribute to some of the children who died. The people who designed the memorial (including our program assistant!) chose a handful of children and displayed their photos, along with their age, their favorite food, their usual behavior, their favorite toy, and how they died (usually “hacked to death with a machete”). If Murambi felt too depersonalized, Gisozi was a conscious effort to put faces and personalities into the bodies, and therefore was much easier for me to relate to.

On Tuesday, we saw a few mass graves at an organization whose role is to help genocide survivors and orphans, and other post-genocide recovery initiatives. Then we went to a church where Tutsis had sought shelter shortly after the genocide began. There had been two survivors, children who hid under the bodies of others. Inside the church, all of the clothes of the dead had been piled up on the benches, which really gave a sense of scale. I kept imagining how small my clothes would be piled up – and then imagining that small pile multiplied so many times to fill the whole church. Behind the church were two mass graves, whose dark, steep corridors we could walk through and see the many coffins, skulls and bones heaped up. Religion is one of the things I cannot understand about Rwanda. People were very religious before the genocide, and many Tutsi fled to churches as a place of refuge, not realizing that the fear of God did not restrain their Hutu killers in the least, and that the very church leaders to whom they went for guidance and protection were actually often collaborating with the genocidaires. The church has been deeply implicated in the Rwandan genocide since the colonial era, a fact which, you would think, would instill in the Rwandans a great sense of betrayal and mistrust in the church or God. On the contrary, the Rwandans are just as religious as ever – my “parents” go to mass every morning. Seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary over the heaps of dead people’s clothes just made me wonder how Rwandans could go back to an institution that was so complicit in their suffering.

Some other tidbits of Rwandan life:

TV: My family has their TV on all the time. Most of the time, it’s playing the news, which it gives in Kinyarwanda, then French, then English. What’s interesting is that the news is slightly different in each language. Even though I don’t understand the Kinyarwanda, it’s still clear that they emphasize different things in the different languages. The vast majority of the news is centered on the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and government events/policies. There is a bit of international news, but usually the only American news is that which relates to Rwanda or the region. It’s so different from Uganda, where the majority of what we heard on the radio was either very local or related to Obama. Museveni was rarely mentioned, except during the riots in Kampala.

When the tv isn’t playing news, it shows traditional dance. It feels very strange to be in a place that doesn’t have famous works of art or amazing architecture, or any of the sort of “culture” we expect to find when we visit a Western capital. That’s not because the Rwandans aren’t interested in art, it’s just that they channel their artistic capacity into their dances. It makes sense, too, given that our conception of art is so individualistic, whereas dance can be a really inclusive, communal activity. Dance is a really essential part of what it means to be Rwandan, and the Rwandese are masters. There’s a Rwandan pop group, Alpha, that recently won a competition, and the clip of the lead’s dance plays on the tv at least once a day. My three-year-old brother is learning their moves, and I am positive that he is a better dancer now than I ever have been or will be.

Food: The meals they serve here are really different from how we eat in the US, and food here is really different from Uganda. Breakfast is tiny, a few pieces of bread with butter or honey, and this liquid porridge stuff (which I really like). However, my family doesn’t eat lunch on the weekends until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, by which point I am starving! When we’re on “excursions” with SIT, they sometimes give us “packed lunches,” which usually consist of bread, a boiled egg, and a samosa – which is never enough. For dinner, we get this carb buffet of rice, pasta, potatoes or French fries (Sarah, you would love it here; I eat fries at least once a day), beans, mushed spinach-greens, and chunks of meat floating in a soup. I eat a huge plate (it all tastes pretty good if you mix it all together), and my family gets so offended when I don’t take seconds or thirds. My “mother” eats almost a whole plate of each of those things. I’ve tried so many times to explain to them that even one of these plates is more than I would eat for a normal meal in the US, but they still don’t get it. Now I’m the last person to care about nutritional value, but the amount of carbs I’m eating here is really starting to get to me…

All of that memorial visiting, plus a bit of homesickness, was really draining, and it was with much relief that I packed to go to Kibuye, which I had heard was beautiful. Oh my god. I wanted to stay forever. Lake Kivu is a stunningly turquoise color, there are brilliant flowers everywhere and the hotel we were staying at was like this Mediterranean resort nestled in the mountains. I went swimming every day, and the rest of the time was spent doing homework, going to class, or reading for pleasure. On Thursday, our second day there, we met another muzungu who was touring the region and who gave us a copy of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’d read most of the book once, but never really got into it, and I figured that given it’s status as Sarah’s favorite book of all time, I should give it another try. Sitting out on the patio overlooking the lake with the sun shining down and a warm breeze blowing through, reading a good novel just for fun was one of the most exquisitely wonderful pleasures. I never wanted it to end.

So, on Friday when the program assistant told us that if we wanted to stay through the weekend, it would be $24 for a four-person room, I didn’t hesitate for a second. Fifteen out of the 28-person group stayed at least one night, and people left bit by bit until only three of us were left. We left on the last bus out on Sunday, and even that parting was painful. I got so much work done, had so much fun, got to know people so much better – it was worth every penny.

Hope this picture makes you all jealous: