Hotel Rwanda

Phew! After a week long adventure to western Uganda and Rwanda, I am home! I sadly have to say that coming back to Kampala did not make me very happy – I really enjoyed being out of the city where you can breathe fresh air and drive without traffic and not be called Mzungu every 10 seconds. I am happy to be back with my family and sleep in my own bed and not live out of a suitcase, though. So much happened this past week, and we saw so much, so be prepared for this entry to be quite long.

I think out of everything that we did this past week, we spent the most time in our caravan of taxis, driving all over Uganda and Rwanda. Each day we spent anywhere from 4-8 hours in the cars, and let me tell you, those vans do not have very much legroom. It was a great way to bond with other people though, and we spent a lot of time telling relationship stories, playing psychiatrist (I introduced them to it, Kir!), and many other fun things. Other than that, I guess I should start from the beginning of the week and work from there.

The first interesting thing that we saw was a Millennium Village Project in Uganda, which was funded by the UNDP and was started in response to the Millennium Development Goals. Before the UNDP came in, the village was like a typical poor rural village – many diseases, few kids in school, poor water and sanitation, etc. But the UNDP came in and funded the education system, providing computers (?!) for the schools. It also set up a water system so that people could collect clean water in a more efficient way. Among other things, the UNDP helped the people to set up a bank, a clinic and a nursery garden. Seeing these things that have changed these people’s lives SO MUCH made me rethink the way I view the UNDP and the MDGs. While this project may not be sustainable without the UNDP, especially under this current government, it has certainly helped the people in terms of development. The only issue I have with this project is that the attitude of the UNDP workers seemed to be that these people could not have done this on their own, and that the Westerners had to come in and provide all these things or else it never would have happened. I do see though that regardless of the mentality behind it, the project has been very good for the village.

Another cool thing about the trip was going to Orchunga Refugee camp, which holds many people who fled from Rwanda during the genocide. The “tour guide” that we had did not speak very much English, and none of the Ads went with our group, so I actually didn’t learn much while we were in the camp. We spent the time being led around by the little kids in the camp who also did not speak any English, but enjoyed talking to us anyway. I learned from other groups that many of the people in the camps had fled because they were perpetrators of the genocide in 1994, and that some of the refugees are not ready to go back to Rwanda because they “are not ready to avenge yet.” The sentiment in the camps was one of general hostility, and many intellectuals throughout the trip seemed to be quite convinced that genocide will come again in the future.

About Rwanda: it is amazing how a country so close can be so different. The infrastructure in the country is the most shocking difference – the roads have much fewer potholes than in Uganda and there are stop lights (that people actually obey!) which makes traffic pretty much nil. There were even real malls with coffee shops and ice cream stores – it seemed like many things were tailored for Mzungus. However, even having all of this, after hearing what we did from the people in the camps, and having that view repeated in Rwanda, I came to the conclusion that the physical development and infrastructure of a country says nothing about the social relationship between the people.

As soon as we got to Rwanda, we were taken to a genocide memorial at a church that kept Tutsi refugees until the Hutus came and killed everyone there. We weren’t really briefed at all before we went in about what we would see, which made it really difficult. The church was filled with rows and rows of benches, on which were piles and piles of clothes that the victims had been wearing when they were killed. As if that was not hard enough to process, being surrounded completely surrounded by something like that, we were then taken behind the church to a mass grave, which consisted of an underground hallway housing hundreds of coffins that were all full of skulls and bones from the people who had been killed. After seeing all of this (and at this point, I already was crying uncontrollably), the man leading us around told us his story of being at this church during the genocide and how he survived. I can’t remember another time in my life when I have felt so sad.

The next day, we were taken to the Genocide Museum, which gave us a lot more information about the genocide and made processing the events of the day before much easier. Of course, the genocide comes back to colonialism, when the Belgians basically made the genetic distinction of Hutu and Tutsi which had previously been something changeable depending on a person’s class. Just one more reason for me to hate colonialism.

Last thing about Rwanda – we visited the Kigali Prison, where there are between 800 and 1000 people who took part in the genocide. After learning about the prison, we were told that we would have the chance to talk to 2 people who had participated in the violence. Instead, we were lead into a church on the prison grounds, and we found our selves face to face with upwards of 2000 prisoners, all staring back at us. Apparently, since it was Ash Wednesday, there was a huge Pentecostal worship service, and we were treated to a “performance” by the choir. The songs they sang were fun and joyous and everyone in the choir was laughing and having a good time, but it was hard to reconcile my feelings about the songs with the idea that we were surrounded by people who had killed people during the genocide.

The coolest thing about our trip home from Rwanda was that we got to go on a game drive through Queen Elizabeth National Park! The park seriously reminded me of the Lion King, especially because we saw mostly antelope (or Kob) and warthogs! We were lucky enough to also spot some hippos, water buffalo and a strange little lizard/snake thing. It definitely made me positive that I want to do a safari when the program is over.

Okay, sorry that this was so long! I have a million pictures to put up, so watch for those sometime this week!