Rwanda Rising

Welcome to the Unexpected

"It’s so clean here. The streets are so nice. The air so fresh.” I gushed constantly the first three days to Chiba, my Ugandan cousin and travel companion; I think she was starting to get annoyed.

I felt a world away from Uganda. Rwandan roads are neatly paved unlike the pot-holed abominations of their northern neighbors. There are actually sidewalks lining most streets, a piece of trash can’t be seen for kilometers, cars and lorries don’t choke the air with exhaust, uncountable loitering people don’t fill the walkways and clearings; I didn’t feel like I was in Africa.

Rwanda is patient, organized, disciplined, somewhat boring; even Kigali shuts down by nine. Vehicles behave well; driving in their well-marked lanes, not speeding and overtaking; the bodas all have helmets. The land without trash has banned caveras, plastic bags, and the law’s actually enforced. When we crossed the border, Rwandan authorities checked our baggage and politely took the cavera Chiba had tucked behind a pair of shoes. We don’t have these here.

I could sense right away that what I had heard of Rwanda was true: they don’t tolerate corruption. I could actually see foreign aid and domestic investment going to work: paving roads, stocking clinics, building schools, not lining fraudulent pockets. The discipline and honesty inspires and gives hope to the continent. And it makes the corruption in Uganda even more blatant, elucidating its negative effects. I would look around Rwanda and think, Look at what Uganda could have if the government served its people like this.

Mass grave at Kigali Memorial; 250,000 buried below

Traveling through Rwanda today, it’s difficult to believe the genocide occurred here. The people are as soothing as their air; only a couple of children’s calls: Mzungu! Mzungu! In Uganda nearly every child tries to greet me and oftentimes boisterous young men do the same; occasionally harassing, usually friendly, but always loud. Rwandans are as gentle and reserved as their traditional dance, a series of gliding gestures, soft and friendly, the woman moving with arms spread to their sides bowing and sliding, nodding and smiling like swans in flight.

“They are a humble people,” Chiba had assured me when we arrived in the capital.

The capital, Kigali, rests nearly in the country’s dead-center. It spreads itself over a series of steep hills; fresh streets, shiny structures and pretty parkways climb and descend the sleepy city. The atmosphere reminded me at moments of a Southern California mountain town; the dryness, terrain, flora and calmness not what I expected. I anticipated the densely tropical, thickly hot and African chaotic. Instead, a mountainous breeze swept past my skin and through the peaceful valleys, gently rustling the lazy eucalyptus and pines overhead; soothing equatorial heat.

The current political wind pacifies the land too, attempting to blow away the country’s infamous tribal tensions. Decades of hatred between the Tutsis and Hutus coalesced in an apocalyptical slaughter fifteen years ago, leaving a stain on the country, the region, and the world’s conscious. It lingers, but has become an impetus for change.

“There are two tribes here, right? But you speak one language?” Chiba had asked a Rwandan, trying to grasp the region’s unusual historical sharing of a single language between tribes.

“No. There is one tribe,” the woman said firmly, holding up a single finger. Chiba and I exchanged a glance; we understood what the woman was telling us.

As explained to me by a Rwandan close with the Balazas whom I met in Kigali, tribal differences remain, but are conducted secretively as they are acknowledged to be amoral and are even illegal. Tutsi parent’s may not want their children marrying Hutus and vice versa, but preferences are not always enforced, and if they are, are generally done covertly. One tribe may have a bar that is a hang-out, an area that is known to be theirs, but boundaries are mostly unsaid and the society is working hard to erase their divisions and nightmarish past. Hutus and Tutsis work and live side-by-side, they sometimes inter-marry; they are fighting for justice and forgiveness despite decades of animosity percolating below the surface unseen by visitors, but divulged in cover of darkness, in the confines of friendship.

Beyond Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Des Mille Collines. Hotel Rwanda. The famous hotel. The famous movie.

It is still an operating hotel in the center of Kigali and is actually larger than it seemed in the film. The movie communicated to the world a story very much deserving to be told, the actions of a courageous Hutu who risked death hiding over a thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the hotel. Larger than art, the film has metamorphosed into more than cinema; it is now how the world understands the Rwandan genocide, how the public seems to relate to all of Rwanda. But Hotel Rwanda, despite its paramount artistic integrity, is not the complete picture of the holocaust, and certainly not all that is Rwanda past and present.

As historical background to the genocide, the Belgians colonized Rwanda and exacerbated the differences between the Hutus and Tutsis by issuing identity cards and favoring the minority Tutsis, offering them better educational and employment opportunities. Upon the country’s independence in 1962, the Hutus assumed power and enacted revenge against their brother tribe through subjugation and smaller, lesser known genocides. Many Tutsis fled their home during these decades to neighboring countries, including Uganda. These Tutsi refugees as well as some moderate Hutus came together to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which grew in power in the early 1990s and sought to overthrow then Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana.

Then, on April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down over Kigali airport. It is still unclear who shot it: the RPF, or extremist Hutus who wanted to blame the RPF as an excuse to begin the slaughter, most believe it the latter. Regardless of who killed the President, it was an impetus for mass death.

Beginning the night the plane was shot down until mid-July of 1994, nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered while the world largely stood and watched; nearly 20% of the nation’s population; 10,000 murdered every day, 400 every hour, 7 every minute. It is estimated that about 300,000 Tutsis survived the genocide, including thousands of HIV-positive widows, many of whom were subjected to genocidal rape by men known to have the virus. The genocide also left about 400,000 orphans with nearly 85,000 of them becoming heads of households.

Visiting the genocide memorials and speaking to Rwandans creates a vivid picture of those horrifying weeks. My previous impression of the genocide, namely through the movie, was that innocents were murdered quickly by machete and bricks, but in reality the killings were much more ruthless; they were horrifyingly gruesome. Killers would torture victims, entering neighbors’ homes to maim the parents, cutting off legs and arms in front of the children, leaving them to suffer and returning a few days later to finish off the adults and kill the young. They would even crucify and impale, bury people alive, dump victims into pit latrines stacking them until they died under the weight of falling bodies or the thrown rocks, only stopping when the cries ceased.

Wreath and flowers at mass graves at Kigali Memorial

The Kigali Memorial is a museum dedicated to the country’s dark past. The bottom rooms describe the historical context, and contain some footage of the massacre as well as interviews with survivors. The upstairs contains countless pictures of the deceased, photographs donated by their living relatives. A section is dedicated to the children. Larger than life photos of children line the walls with a placard describing them underneath: their names, their likes, their last words, how they died: an infant burned to death in a church, a four-year old liking spaghetti, a two-year old murdered by being thrown against a wall, a seven-year old last heard saying “UNAMIR will save us,” a ten-year old tortured to death.

The survivors will say they have no idea how they endured; it was mere luck, an act of God. Few were blessed with a courageous Hutu that hid them, chancing his or her own life to save another, but most fled. Families would part and run for cover, generally unable to hide together as the roadblocks strategically placed around Kigali and the entire country prevented it. As such, the youngest were destined to die, unable to run through the bush by themselves. My Rwandan friend tells me the youngest survivor running alone that he heard of was seven.

I close my eyes and imagine April 1994. Cries fill the night around you. Your neighbors are being slain by other neighbors gone mad, carrying machetes and stones and bricks. You sit in your dark home surrounded by frightened sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins gripping each other awaiting death. You hear the murderers closing in and you flee, but you must go in separate directions. You don’t know where you are headed, you have to move undetected through the bush that night and for many thereafter, dodging killers, avoiding roads, eating and drinking whatever you find. If you survive vigilant, murderous eyes, and starvation, dehydration and disease in the bush, you may stumble upon another country or the army’s advancing line and end up in a refugee camp to languish there not knowing the fate of loved ones. The situation would soon be made worse when your killers arrived as they ran from the army they feared would enact revenge, or when cholera swept through the population, attacking the poorly-managed, deathly destitute camps.

The killers were virtually everyone and anyone. Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. Children even killed. My friend told me of a survivor in the Mille Collines watching children raping and killing a woman from his room. Placards at the memorial describe a child attempting to murder a neighbor, one he played with every day, one like a brother to him. Families would kill their own, especially in mixed clans. The two Tutsi-looking children of a mixed marriage were slaughtered by aunts and uncles, while the Hutu-looking kids might be lucky enough to survive; fortunate enough to grow up with the guilt of outliving their siblings slaughtered by their own caretakers.

skulls at Murambi Memorial


As I walked the streets of Kigali and drove through the villages, I would look at people and wonder where they were during the killing. Were they here in Rwanda? Or were they already seeking refuge in a neighboring country? The people my age would have been about 15 or 16 years old during the genocide. What did I do at that age? School dances, soccer games, getting a driver’s license, going to parties, sleeping in class. While I danced, played, drove, partied and slept, the Rwandans my age whom I saw in cafes and the fields, at market and the bus stop, might have murdered or been hunted, watched their family members kill or be killed, walked around bodies littering the ground or buried the dead. What had I done with my life since my mid-teens? University, jobs, love, friends, birthdays, Christmases. I think of the thousands of lives lost before they could experience this, before they really lived.

I considered this too at the Murambi Memorial in Gikongoro, a former technical college resting alone on a hill just outside the nondescript town. Chiba and I reached Gikongoro via bus from Kigali in the late morning, and asked a boda to take us the memorial; a creeping eeriness descending upon us as we fell down the dirt road and peered through the eucalyptus at the striking countryside, not knowing where we headed, unsure of what we would see. A white jeep passed us with a mzungu in the back, staring out the window, a memorable expression on her face: regret, forlorn, shock, hurt.

A brick building lay before us. In front of it a small sign and a large clearing. The scene was empty and alone, save the white fence on the far sides where dozens of children hung and watched. Were they looking to see our expressions as we left? An enormous military helicopter was parked in front.

The memorial was off the path traveled by most tourists making it a somewhat obscure destination. It lacked the sense of a formal remembrance center besides the entrance sign and reception desk; it felt like an abandoned set of buildings lying to waste on the hillside forgotten.

As we approached the entrance, a woman spoke in hushed tones to Chiba, joining her by hand as we wound around to the back side towards a series of smaller brick buildings, beyond us the flowing, terraced mountains of Rwanda; austere beauty.

The woman walked us to the first block, stood back and raised her hand slowly for us to look into the room. It was maybe fifteen feet square with wooden grated tables about three feet high occupying almost the entire room save a small walkway in the middle. On the tables lay dozens of white decomposed corpses partially preserved in lime. The bodies resembled the work of a macabre artist, moldings of paper mache, twisted frames of powdery pale cake; some were big, some were babies; some still sprouted brittle hair, some still swaddled in decaying cloth; some recoiled in hopeless defense, others memorialized in grotesque torment; legs were hatched off at the knee, heads blown wide open, torsos missing appendages.

We moved silently from room to room, the unique bitter odor filling my nostrils, the sight and smell forever seared into my mind. We came upon the only other group of visitors, distinctly British. The older woman’s eyes and lips pulled downwards vaguely, her hands and eyes fluttered; the stoic’s attempt at hiding sorrow and regret. An older man snapped photos with a click-and-shoot; I glanced back at the guide to ensure taking photos was permitted, wanting to respect the dead and grieving. She nodded and swept her arm encouraging me.

Room after room we took in the dead on display. Approximately 50,000 people died at Gikongoro’s technical school, only a small fraction, about two hundred are preserved in the memorial, most buried beneath the ground forever. All of the children and staff at the school perished as well as the nearby villagers who ran to the blocks for safety.

We entered the old dormitory block, a huge empty space save a wall filled with the dead’s crumpled possessions: mattresses, blankets, clothes, shoes, bowls, cutlery. I believe it was here that our guide whispered to Chiba. Two of my children died here.

She walked us down the slope towards the far side of the property, about 50 yards away the first set of houses lay below us, two children ran up to me from them and asked for money. I looked at another placard before me, The French played volley here. I didn’t fully grasp the purpose.

They walked us down another 15 yards then I saw a series of other placards: Mass Graves of Victims. I now understood the placards.

On June 22, 1994, with no end of the blood-shed in sight, the UN green-lighted the deployment of a French peacekeeping troop to secure areas in southwestern Rwanda as safe zones for fleeing Tutsis. The operation is now generally regarded, except for by the French, as a move to provide haven not for hunted Tutsis, but instead for the murderous Hutus escaping retribution from the advancing RFP; the French were giving protection to the Hutu militia groups they had been covertly siding with and arming all along.

There are assertions that the French were actually at the technical school in Gikongoro watching as Hutus slaughtered 50,000 of their fellow countrymen. Whether the French were there as it happened, or arrived immediately afterwards remains difficut to determine, but regardless, the extent of French culpability in the genocide was eye-opening: arming the militias that roamed the country killing hundreds of thousands, harboring those same murderers in Operation Turquoise under the guise of peacekeeping, and denying their involvement to this very day.

Chiba and I filled out the visitor’s guide solemnly. Dark children still lined the bright fences outside. We joined them in watching the Brits board the military helicopter parked in the clearing, staff and members from the House of Parliament flying back to their lives in London; returning to a place far from the hills of Rwanda where death rots in the soil. I looked at their notes in visitor’s book. I am sorry we didn’t do more.

To Clementine

Clementine is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. She is married with three children. Like many rural Africans, she is very poor, can’t read or write, lives in a hut without water or electricity, and barely farms enough to feed her family. I have known Clementine for almost one year. She is my sister through Women for Women International.

Women for Women International is a fantastic organization based out of D.C. that offers holistic services to women in war torn countries. For one year the woman receive lessons twice a month on issues such as health, sanitation, women’s right and domestic violence. They also group the women regionally into co-ops, which produce goods sold for profit, such as a piggery or craft-making. Through their co-op the women learn marketable skills and how to manage money, some funds going back to the group and a portion lining each woman’s pockets every month. When I signed up to sponsor a woman last year, I requested to sponsor a woman in Rwanda. Clementine and I had written each other once; she didn’t know I was in Africa.

The day I arrived in Kigali I was determined to find the WWI offices. I researched the internet, it wasn’t listed, but I found a photo. It was a picture of the Rwandan office’s sign, and it had a phone number. I called and called, my cell phone not connecting to Rwandan landlines. The next day I finally got through.

“I am a sponsor from America and I was hoping to meet my sister,” I told the receptionist.

“Berra, the country director is not here now, but let me get you her phone number.”

I called Berra. I wasn’t sure how she would react to a stranger calling her cell phone asking spur of the moment to find her sister somewhere in the country. She was more than welcoming. Can you be at my office in thirty minutes?

Chiba and I arrived at the office and I was immediately impressed. It was a gated compound filled with groups of women dressed in bright African clothes sitting in circles along the lawn. I peered through the cool garage, ladies sitting happily behind buzzing sewing machines. We walked around to the office. The staff were exceptionally friendly, extremely inviting; on a shelf near them lay decorated cloths, baskets, table napkins, African kurios; on a wall next to them hung beautiful African jewelry; all made by WWI participants; I filled my arms with gifts.

Berra entered the room, a source of light, the woman exuding compassion and inspiration. We took photos with the staff and went up to Berra’s office for a long chat about the program, the import of building nations through assisting women, the significance of ethical leadership, Rwanda’s battle for justice and growth, and the burning passion and drive within to serve others. Berra spoke of herself as a young girl trying to help an old woman and the refugees and destitute around her, coming home and crying to her mom about them. She laughed looking back on it. She didn’t’ even see how poor her own family was.

Chiba and I left her office rejuvenated and inspired. We were invited to return in a few days time to travel with the staff doing a workshop with Clementine’s group.

That Friday we met at WWI’s office and boarded a van, which drove about two hours south of Kigali. We stopped just off the main road near the top of a mountain. Above us a large group of women, a few hundred, standing, pacing, looking eagerly into our vehicle.

“They are excited you are here. They never get to see their sponsors. This is very rare," one of the trainers explained to me as I watched them watching me.

I sat in the vehicle for some moments. I got out. I stood and waited a few more minutes unsure of what was happening.

Then a trainer to my side smiled broadly, gestured behind me and said, “Here she is.”

I turned around and recognized Clementine from her picture. I opened my arms to embrace her and she pulled me flat against her, beating her arms against my back, resting her head on my shoulder. She held me for several moments muttering excitedly in Kinyarwanda.

“She says she is so happy to meet you,” the trainer translated beaming.

Clementine let go to look at me then held me again. She introduced me to her husband shyly standing next to her wearing a huge grin. He hugged me timidly and happily, thanking me in his language.

We walked to a shaded area away from hundreds of prying eyes and whispering lips. We spoke through an interpreter for some time, talking about each other’s families, our general lives. She apologized her children could not come; it was a two and a half hour walk and they were young. No, she hadn’t received my letter yet. I was a bit irritated; I had sent it last November.

Then Clementine offered a gift. In her hands lay a small green and white beaded box and a pink and black beaded necklace. I thanked her profusely. Her husband and she tied the jewelry around my neck. I wore a half smile, touched by the gesture, but anguished with guilt. She had sacrificed several dollars, probably as much as she makes in as many months to give me a present and in my haste I had brought her nothing. Others later assured me. It was a gift you coming to see her. It inspires.

She also offered to me two pictures of her family. I looked at them guessing they were the only ones she owned. I can’t take this.

“She wants you to remember her always,” the interpreter said. I put them in my purse appreciatively.

We embraced again and said goodbye. She asked if I could come for dinner. I said I couldn’t today, but maybe another. It was possible I would be in Rwanda again.

Clementine walked back towards the others as they broke off into the groups for the day’s lesson on nutrition. The women around us draped in bright colors, some shielded from the sun under rainbowed umbrellas continued to talk.

"Do you know what they are saying?” the trainer asked me.

“I have no idea.”

“They say it is a miracle. You coming. Her meeting her sister. They are very happy for her.”

I was humbled.

WWI participants and landscape


After the exercise the trainer boarded the van and smiled at me.

“I delivered your letter to Clementine today.”

We sat in silence.

Then Chiba muttered under her breath, “It is a miracle.”

I remained quiet; stared out the window; reflecting on an unforgettable day.

See all Rwanda pictures here.