Rwanda – land of a thousand hills

Flew to Rwanda for the weekend in a little Dash 8 – 100 plane. Extravagant, I know – but the alternative is a 10-12 hour bus journey and flight didn’t cost as much as my malaria tablets for the two months. Rwanda is a lovely country with beautiful scenery and clean streets. In 2005, the country banned plastic bags, so unlike Uganda which is littered with the ubiquitous black bag in various stages of disintegration, there is no rubbish anywhere. Most roads are tar with NO potholes. As Rwanda was colonised by the Belgian they drive on the right side of the road, but the traffic is controlled by traffic lights and zebra crossings and there are road signs and roundabouts planted with shrubs and flowers and even fountains!

I chose Hotel Okapi as it has views over the city and is near the minibus-taxi (not matatus as in Uganda) park and the genocide memorial. However little did I realise that I would have to climb quite a few of those thousand hills to reach the hotel! It was worth it – the views were stunning! After lunch and a ‘small rains’ delay I set off for the genocide memorial Halfway down the hill I’d just climbed, along a bit and then up a few more hills on the other side of the valley.

There are no words to describe the feelings you get when you visit the memorial. The display is in a small building, which also houses an education centre and a research library and which is surrounded by memorial gardens. The rose garden is especially dedicated to the children who were slaughtered. A quarter of a million men, women and children were killed in Kigali and they are now buried in eight concrete crypts. The coffins do not necessarily contain whole people or even parts of the same person, as identification was often impossible, but are a symbol of the dignity afforded them. Bodies continue to be found in shallow graves around Kigali; they are exhumed and reburied at the genocide memorial.

Sunday I headed for the town centre and especially the book shops. Unfortunately not many places were open – Kampala is heaving on a Sunday and I expected Kigali to be the same. Maybe it’s because it is a predominantly Catholic country that shops are closed. However the bookshop was open, altho’ the VISA machine wasn’t working due to lack of computer links and the bank ATMs weren’t working for the same reason. I finally found a Forex that was open and changed my ‘emergency’ 20 euros in order to buy a book on the genocide memorial – strangely there were no books or leaflets at the memorial itself. On my way back I saw Hotel des Mille Collines, which is know as Hotel Rwanda in the film of the same name and St Famille Church where people sheltered from the interhamwe; in most cases unsuccessfully. In total about one million people in the whole country were killed in just a hundred days.

On a lighter note – I had goat skewer on Sunday night. I always imagined goat would taste something like lamb, but it is more like beef. It was a bit tough, but then it was ‘goat’ and not ‘kid’! The tilapia (fish) skewer I had the previous night was delicious!

I returned to Uganda on Monday and was glad to be back! Rwandans deserve our respect and admiration for the way they have survived, are dealing with the aftermath of the genocide and have turned their country around, but I can’t say I felt as relaxed as I do in Uganda and the people overall aren’t as friendly and welcoming. Altho’ maybe that’s to be expected.

We are in the short rainy season and twice last week I was caught in torrential rain with thunder and lightning over the lunchtime. The first time I was in a container – more later – and the second time Melissa and I were making our way up from the school to the office for lunch. We took shelter under the corrugated roof of a shop, but the wind was blowing so we still got pretty wet. Everything stops when it rains! So the chap we were meeting to talk about containers stayed in his office and so then we had to waste even more time waiting for him to arrive on a boda-boda (motor-bike – so you can see why he didn’t come in the rain!). When Melissa and I finally got to the office we found that the person who was waiting for us to order lunch had fallen asleep! Mind you I got my ‘meat’, altho’ it was tilapia the local fish. I’ve always had either whole fish or fillets before – this was a steak and the bones are like darning needles! Also had cassava for the first time – it looks like parsnips but isn’t sweet and tastes more starchy. However there was so much rain in half an hour that the way back to the school was impassable, so reading lessons didn’t really happen.

Our first proper reading session was on Friday and it went really well. Some children are good readers and others don’t even know the letter sounds. So we have a dual task - keeping the readers challenged and the non-readers interested!

Hope you are all well!