Being in Rwanda

Besides the gorillas, I also went to Rwanda to learn more about its history and the genocide of 1994. An excellent book on the genocide is “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed by our families” by Philip Gourevitch. During the entire week there, the events of 1994 did not escape my mind. Only 13 years ago, 800,000 Rwandans (or, as some estimate, 1 million) out of a population of 7.5 million, mostly of Tutsis minority, were killed in only 100 days. Most were hacked to death by machete-wielding interahamwe, gangs of young Hutu men who killed with the joy of being in a carnival romp. But also, priests killed their flock; mayors killed their constituents; colleagues killed colleagues; neighbors killed neighbors. With every Rwandan with whom I spoke, every man and woman whom I watched till their fields, every child to whom I waved, I could not help but wonder if they were Hutu or Tutsis? What had they seen or done? How many deaths did they witness or effect? I had heard estimates that 4 out of 5 children had witnessed some brutality during 1994. What must that do to the psyche of an entire generation? I was incapable of finding these answers.

In between my two gorilla treks, I drove through the spectacular, terraced landscape of tea and banana plantations to Gisenyi, on the shores of Lake Kivu, right at the border with Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Along the way, girls in bright blue dresses and boys in khaki shorts and shirts, the national school uniform, stopped walking to wave as I passed. There seems to be more children in Rwanda than in most African countries in which I had driven through, I thought – scores of them lined the roadside.

While in Gisenyi, I stayed at the Lake Kivu Serena, which the Hutu Power government had used as its headquarters before fleeing into the DRC after the rebel Tutsis army, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (led by current President Paul Kagame), captured Kigali in the summer of 1994, just a few months after the start of the genocide. Lake Kivu is a beautiful lake – it looks like the sea – surrounded by volcanoes. One afternoon there, I went out for a walk along the lake shore, on a tree-lined avenue where homes of wealthy Rwandans sat. As usually happens when a white foreigner is out walking, children started following me. On this day, I was not really in the mood for company and wanted simply to walk on my own, but one young boy, aptly named Patience, stuck with me, talking and questioning me with great persistence.

Patience is 18 years old, articulate and bright. He is an orphan. He lost his entire family – mother, father and two sisters – in 1994, right before his eyes, he saw them killed by what he believes were Hutu neighbors. He wondered out loud to me why he had survived. They had just left him there alone in the house, he said, surrounded by his family’s blood. It brought tears to my eyes, which I tried to hide behind my sunglasses, but he sensed my crying. Don’t worry, he said to me, I feel lucky that I did survive. You should not feel sad for me, he said.

Then, he asked me if I had every heard of Harvard? Yes, I told him. And Oxford? Yes. That is where I want to study, he said. Although he had fallen behind in school by a few years due, naturally, to all that had happened in his life, he is working hard to do well in secondary school, then go to Harvard or Oxford, and become a lawyer. He did not know anything about me at that point, so I told him that I am a lawyer. He wanted to know what I was doing in Africa. I told him, and I also told him I was trying to decide whether to go back to the US and to the practice of law. This just astonished him, stopping him dead in his tracks to turn and stare at me for what seemed like 5 minutes. He could not believe that I would give up the opportunity to be in the US and to continue as a lawyer – his dreams. But, I said, I love Africa and want to help people here. As if I was talking to a wise 60-year old man, Patience then said to me, but you can, and I think you will be able to do more for people, and for orphans like me, by being there, not here. Point-blank he said, you should go back to the US.

After hitting the border with the DRC, we turned around and walked back, with Patience then playing tour guide to show me around the town of Gisenyi. At this point, we had also picked up another follower, a young beautiful girl, wearing a bright red thread-bare dress with a white lace collar. She walked behind us, never saying a word. When we stopped, she stopped. When I turned to look back at her and say hello, she smiled at me with wide-eyes and bright teeth, but said nothing. She walked with a pile of fire wood secured gingerly on top of her head with one hand. We turned off the lakeshore avenue into town. She continued to follow. Life for children in the US is easy, isn’t it, Patience asked me? Yes, it is, I said. Finally, we must have made one too many turns away from her path of destination, because she stopped and ceased following as we turned to walk up another street. When we got to the top, I turned back and she still stood there watching after us, with gleaming red dress, bright eyes, firewood. Did she want me to give her anything, I asked Patience? No, he said, she simply wanted to walk with you too. These two children, Patience and the girl with the red dress and firewood, touched my heart.

Then after Lake Kivu and my second day of gorilla trekking, I went back to Kigali for two days before flying back to Nairobi. There, I stayed at the Hotel des Milles Collines – the famous Hotel Rwanda from the movie. It was in this hotel that the manager, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu, sheltered hundreds of Tutsis from the Hutu Power and the roaming interahamwe. Again, being in the hotel, looking out from my balcony to the swimming pool that had been used for drinking and bathing, down to the streets below where in 1994 I would have witnessed a blood-bath, gave me an eery feeling. In Kigali I visited the Genocide Memorial sight and museum. Although informative and well-done, it was a heavy experience – with many Rwandans openly crying. There is a room filled entirely with skulls, all of which had suffered some blunt trauma. There is a room devoted only to the children that had died, brutally. I cried there as well, and it made me sick to my stomach. Although being in Rwanda was an amazing experience, I could not grasp it all and know I will never fully understand how something the genocide took place and how, most amazingly, a country and its people are able to pick up and move on from it.

(Pictured: Lake Kivu; Avenue along Lake Kivu shore; Genocide Memorial with Kigali in the background)