Don't Turn Away

Some people who have read my blog have said they couldn’t read every post because some of the posts were too sad, or the photos were too graphic, and they couldn’t bear it.

This is true: Rwanda’s story is a desperately sad one, and the photos that illustrate it are very graphic and shocking. That is perhaps the most compelling reason why we should not turn away. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans struggled to survive this horror, and ultimately, very few Tutsis escaped with their lives. Over eight hundred thousand didn't survive.

It is to these people, both the survivors and the victims, that we owe the duty of looking at the photos and reading the stories. We ignored them while the genocide was happening. The least we can do is look at the aftermath.

Call Me Red

In Rwanda, the dry season is really, really dry. Everything is utterly dried out, and parched. The only plants that survive without being regularly watered are hardy species that can withstand months of not receiving any water at all. Purple hearts like we have in the greenhouse at school grow everywhere. I know from experience just how stubbornly they cling to life in the face of neglect and prolonged drought.

During the dry season soil on the ground dries up too, and then gets picked up on the slightest breeze and coats everything in a reddish dusty coating.

There was never such a thing as a clear day in Kigali: the air pollution is quite pronounced. Some of this air pollution is caused by smoke from cooking fires, some from cars (with 007-like smoke screens pouring out of their exhausts) and quite a bit of it is from the soil blowing through the air.

Even the simple action of walking, or driving, created enough of an air current to lift the dust from the ground into the air, where it would be breathed in, where it would cling to your skin, your hair and your clothes.

I noticed on the morning of the second day in Kigali, as I was making my bed, that my pillow had a reddish, suspiciously head-sized mark right in the middle of it. Hmm I thought. The next morning, the mark was more pronounced. I realized that my hair must have had enough dust in it to leave a mark on my pillow. When I washed my face in the evening, my facecloth came away all orangey-red. When I was washing my shirts (ok, Linda did the washing) the water turned reddish-orange after just one shirt. One of my white Lands’ End polo shirts still has a definite orange-y tinge to it.

Arial photographs of Kigali (the capital city) on Google reveal very little variation in colour: everything in the city is covered with this dust. As we were driving along in the country-side, past banana plantations I remarked to Linda that I did not see how the trees closest to the road could survive, coated, as they were, with a significant blanket of red dust.

My socks were covered in the red dust by the end of each day, my hat had red dust stains around the sweat band, and my shoes still have red dust stains on them. You step outside for five minutes, and you have red dust on your clothes.

The lucky thing was that the country was so dry and cat-free, I had zero symptoms of asthma the whole time I was there.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World - Redux

We spent July 20, 21 and 22 (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) driving around Kigali. The roads were good, and even though we were up and down the mountains, we were still clearly in a city. On Friday, July 23, we left Kigali to drive east to the Akagera Lodge for two days. I hate being a passenger in any motorized vehicle that I am not driving, and that includes cars, TTC buses, trains, airplanes and tour buses.

I especially hate being a passenger when the roads are clinging to the sides of mountains. Our driver, Olivier, skillfully guided us up and down the roads, whether they were paved or just dirt tracks. I began to be seized with the horror that our bus would careen right over the edge of the mountain. It didn’t help that one of the women on our trip had been in a very bad bus accident in Guatemala: her bus had gone off a mountain road, so my fears actually were rooted in some semblance of probability.  If it happened to her bus, it could happen to my bus!

Suddenly the memory of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World flew, unbidden, into my head. All I could think of was the scene when Jimmy Durante’s car flies off the cliff, and everyone keeps repeating “It just flew right out there!” while making a motion of one hand slapping the other and imitating a car flying off a cliff. I believe I started to laugh. Linda asked me what was so funny and I told her, and then she was laughing as well. I could barely speak for laughing so hard. I texted Leslie because I couldn’t remember the exact words about going over the cliff. She texted back saying she really didn’t want to know why I was wondering about flying off a cliff. She knew Rwanda was mountainous.

We made it to Akagera in one piece, thanks to Olivier. And he safely conveyed us to all of our other locations as well. I was thinking about Olivier the other day. I miss him and his quiet good humour.

Once, They Had Names

In the mass memorial graves we visited - the crypts at Nyamata and Ntarama, the cloisters at Nyarubuye, the corrugated steel shed at Bisesero, the classrooms in the former school at Murambi, I saw thousands and thousands and thousands of skulls and many, many more leg bones and arm bones. There were so many more dead people than names on the memorial walls at each site.  I suspect that this is because many of the people who might have been able to identify the dead people were dead themselves.  At Nyarubuye there were two mass graves: on one side of the cemetery were individuals whose identity was known, on the other side of the cemetery, the much larger side, were individuals whose identity was unknown.  At some memorials there were only partial lists of names, at others, no names at all. In some places people were listed simply as "boy" or "girl" or "Family".

They are anonymous, these bones. These stark displays of human remains are a touch macabre, and are made more so by the curious separation of the skulls from the long bones. Perhaps this is less a local style of arranging remains than it is an exigency caused by the manner of death, and the length of time between the death of the victim, and the placement of the victim in the memorial. Perhaps it was necessitated by the sheer numbers of the dead.

These were people: mothers, fathers, children, siblings, friends, neighbours. Once upon a time they probably thought their lives were unremarkable, and it would never have dawned on them that the world would be more interested in them when they were dead than when they were alive. That is the sad way of it, though.

Once, they were alive, they had dreams, passions, plans, a future.

Once, they had names.

A Terrible Beauty

In his poem “Easter, 1916” W.B. Yeats uses the words "a terrible beauty" not to describe Ireland, but  to describe the sacrifice that some people were about to make to earn independence for Ireland.

I think that would also be an appropriate description of Rwanda: the country is beautiful beyond description, but what happened there is terrible beyond imagining.

Out of Nowhere, It Just Happens

At the beginning of each semester, I ask my students to tell me what they know about genocide. Most of my students' knowledge of genocide is pretty limited.  If pressed, they will mention the Holocaust and the gas chambers.

Most students believe that genocides happen out of nowhere, that people are going about minding their own business and then suddenly, the genocide starts and everyone is taken by surprise by the killing.  I am not saying this to point out their naiveté, rather I think this is just plain human nature.  People are resistant to the idea that a genocide is meticulously planned, even one that seemed as chaotic as the one in Rwanda.   My students are understandably uneasy with the idea that a group of people had a meeting, or series of meetings, and decided that the only way forward was to attempt to kill off every individual of a certain group, to eliminate them in their entirety.

Come to think of it, that is hard to get your head around.

Sadly, it is also the truth.

A Further Reflection on Forgiveness

I am really struggling with this issue. Unlike Rwandans, however, I have the luxury of discussing this issue from a distance which is both geographical and personal.

One of the very real difficulties that Rwanda faces, is that survivors and perpetrators can be, and often are, next door neighbours.  Perpetrators and survivors can happen upon each other in the street, in the marketplace, at school, at work, in social situations, and at church.

How does a person live next door to a person who participated in the murder of members of the person’s family? It can’t be easy, as you can well imagine.

In Rwanda, discussions of the genocide frequently end up as discussions about forgiveness and exactly what that word means. Perpetrators ask for forgiveness, and some survivors say they forgive, even though their losses are unfathomable to us. So how does this work? How do you forgive the people who killed your family members, your children, your parents, your sibs, your spouse, your friends. How do you forgive the people who might have disabled you by chopping off one of your arms or legs, your ears, your private parts? How do you forgive the men that raped you? How do you live next door to these people? How do you face them in the workplace and in the market? How do the children of survivors and perpetrators manage at school?

Rwandans are a remarkable people. That they have not shriveled up and withdrawn into themselves is evidence of their resiliency, but the cost that they pay for this is high. When we visited the National Centre for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG is the official name : Le Centre National pour la Lutte contre la Genocide), which is where our friends Charles and Ismaël work, one of the people who spoke to us said a minimum of 30% and maybe as high as 60% of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, but that the country does not have enough money to make sure all of them get psychological counselling.

I think what has happened is that the word “forgiveness” has developed a new meaning. Of course people don’t forgive someone for murdering their family members. But what they can say is this: if rebuilding this country means I have to get along with you in peace, for the good of everyone, then I can do it. They need each other so that the nation can move forward. Hopefully, that is enough to build a solid future for this beautiful country.

If nothing else, this speaks to the incredible bravery of the Rwandan people.

A Home-made soccer ball

This is what some Rwandan children use to play soccer. They fashion a ball out of plastic, and tie it tight with twine.

Feeding the Cat

I mentioned in an earlier post that I noticed a cat while Linda, Kate, Heather and I were having a delightful dinner outside at the Mille Collines on that Saturday that we spent together. Until that moment, I had only seen one other cat in the whole time we were in Rwanda. The other one was glimpsed as it dashed across a road at night by the Cactus Restaurant. A number of the people on our trip had noticed the shortage of cats. People don’t keep cats as pets in Rwanda, as I was to discover.

When I saw the cat at the hotel, I asked a waiter about it. He said yes the cat lived at the hotel, but no, no-one fed him. At that moment I resolved that I would feed him for as long as I was there.

The next day, when Linda and I were at the Nakumat, which is a chain of grocery stores in Kenya and Rwanda, we looked for cat food. I asked a clerk in the store where I could find cat food. This is a play by play of our conversation translated into English:
Me: Can you tell me, please, where I might find cat food?
Clerk: Cat food?
Me: Yes, cat food.
Clerk: What is cat food?
Me: It is food for cats.
Clerk: Food for cats?
Me: Yes, food for cats. Food for cats that live in your house as companions.
Clerk -horrified, apparently: Cats live in your house?
Me: Yes, I have four cats living in my house.
Clerk: Four cats live in your house?
Me: Yes. In Canada. But there is a cat at my hotel that I would like to feed.
Clerk: There is no cat food here. No one has a cat. No one feeds cats.
Me: I do. Do you have dog food?
Clerk: Yes, of course we have dog food, I will show you. (and here he sets out at a dead run with Linda and me hurrying along in his wake. The dog food is outside the main food area, past the rugs and luggage , past the sporting goods (they have everything in the Nakumat!) and past the lighting section. When we finally get to the dog food, we see a sad selection of three bags of one kind of food, no canned dog food)
Me: Thank you, I will have to buy some tuna.
Clerk: Tuna?
Me: Yes tuna. For the cat.
Clerk: Tuna for the cat?
Me: Yes. Thank you for your time.

So I bought a can of tuna packed in water/brine, and the next night I opened it (lucky we brought a can opener) and jumbled it up with a fork, and then took it downstairs and outside to the garden, and placed it in a flower bed near where I had seen the cat. We kind of had to sneak around the security guard, and I think he might have seen me putting the tuna in the garden. I put out more tuna the next day.

Faith, God, and this whole damn thing

A Rwandan adage says “God roams the world during the day, but returns to Rwanda at night to sleep” suggesting that Rwanda is His favourite place, and He goes home to Rwanda at night.  Considering that many of the huge massacres took place in churches(and many of the small ones too, if there can be such a thing as a small massacre),  I think He was away, night and day, for four months in 1994.

I am a person of faith.   I was Confirmed in my faith on June 21, less than a month before I went to Rwanda.

I am also a church lady, that strangest of creatures, and I am fairly active in my congregation.  I am on the Altar Guild and I arrange flowers in the sanctuary on the fifth Sunday of any month (if there is one), I am a member of the Sunshine Group, which is a fantastic group of women whom I have come to love, and I participate in a regular Sunday coffee hour, and I am currently the Rector’s Warden, but the jury is out on how I am doing there.

Rwanda has changed things for me a bit.  I tend to look for God in my day to day life, and generally I can find Him, but I have to ask myself where God was in April, May, June and July of 1994.

Luckily for God, Rwandans have not lost their faith since the genocide, and church attendance is not down too much.  Had I lived there, I might not have been so generous with Him.

I have seen the evidence of genocide in Rwanda, the extent of the killing.  When I think of what I saw, I am consumed by rage.

At My Cottage

Today is Saturday, August 28, 2010. I have been at my family cottage since Tuesday. I was remarking to myself that except for the absence of palm trees, banana trees and calla lilies along the roadside, this forest looks very much like the Rwandan countryside we drove through every day. Even the soil here in the Kawarthas is red, like the soil in Rwanda. And it's hilly here, too. As I sit on my verandah and look outside, the view I have is not unlike the view at the top of mountain at Bisesero. It was woodsy there, with pine trees similar to the ones here. When we walked down the other side of the hill to where Olivier had taken the bus, I noticed that the ground was covered in pine needles, just like it is here.

That makes the genocide seem all that more hideous, that it could happen in a place of such extraordinary beauty.

The Hills

Of course we knew about the hills before we left for Rwanda, that is why my morning training walks included a dandy hill. I walked up Brimley from Bluffer’s Park to Kingston Road once. I should have done that walk every day. There was a 200 foot difference between the St. Paul and the Nakumat over a distance of about a half a mile, and the Milles Collines was even higher still. That is a greater difference than the hill from Ellesmere and Morningside to Ellesmere and Neilson, over about the same distance.

What really killed me is that I would be trudging up the hill, setting what I considered to be a blistering uphill pace by Toronto standards, and people would stroll past me as if I were standing still.

It was discouraging. I would arrive at the Nakumat huffing and puffing.  Next time I visit Rwanda, I will have to do more hill climbing before I get there.

More Dead People Than They Know What To Do With

The following blog entry is a transcript of an audio memo I made with my ipod, in the absence of a computer. I don’t know how to post audio memos to the blog. The transcript differs from the audio memo in one place only: in the audio memo I could not remember the name of the church where we had been. In the transcript I have included the name of the church. I made this audio memo while sitting on the verandah outside our room at the Centre Bethanie while Linda and the gang went to Napoleon Island. I was reflecting on my trip to Bisesero earlier that day, and the 55,000 people who had been killed there, and their bravery at holding off the killers for so long, and the complicity of the French. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and I was trying to make sense of what I had seen. I should also point out that there is a difference between spoken speech and written speech, so if this entry does not seem like it has my usual finesse, it is because it is a transcript of a spoken word entry. The first two photos above were taken at Bisesero. These are the extra bodies that still need to have space made for them. The bottom two photos were taken inside the church at Nyamata. There was no room for these bodies in the mass memorial graves, so here they sit, in plastic bags in the back of the church, waiting for space in the mass memorial grave. The possibility exists that these remains could be moved to the genocide memorial in Kigali.


One of the more remarkable things that I have noticed about this genocide is that at a couple of the memorials we’ve been to, maybe three of them I guess, there have been more bodies than the memorial basically knows what to do with. So at that first church we went to, Nyamata, the one where they tossed the grenade in and there was blood on the altar cloth, at that one at the very back of the church, there were these huge plastic bags, opaque so you couldn’t see through them, but huge plastic bags of bodies, like bones and skulls and stuff, and the guide says, well we don’t have room yet, we still have to build more space to put these bones in, but of course, they can’t get rid of them, it’s proof of genocide. And by getting rid of them I meant, there were mass memorial graves there but they just didn’t have enough room for all of these bags of people. And today at Bisesero in a corrugated steel warehouse were all the skulls and leg bones, thousands of them, of skulls, I’ve got the pictures, of people that they didn’t have room for in the mass graves that they dug, and for me, I’m going to hold that as one of the more remarkable parts of this trip – that there were more dead than the mass graves, memorial graves could hold. And yet, they have to be dealt with in a dignified manner, but here we have these bags of bodies in the back of a church getting ready to make more memorials for them. And I found that pretty sad.

The Concept of Forgiveness

I can’t forgive yet, if ever.

I have heard it said that if you don’t forgive, you can be consumed by your rage, or that it takes a lot of effort to remain angry. Well, I have been to the memorials at Nyarubuye, Bisesero, Murambi, Nyamata, and Ntarama, and I can tell you that it will take a lot more than “I’ve confessed and I’m sorry” to move me into a forgiving mood. How much more, I don’t know. But it will take more.

I should mention that no one has asked us to forgive Nazis.

The photo attached to this post is of a lady we met at Ntarama. She lost her entire family, her husband, children, siblings and parents. Look her in the eye, and see if you can forgive the people who did this to her.

We Visited a Prison

We had two trips to the local federal prison to visit and speak to genocidaires. The first trip ended unsatisfactorily when it became obvious that, even though the CLNG had told the prison we were coming, the Warden clearly had no idea we going to be there, and he was not ready for us. Nonetheless, in true Rwandan style, wanting to be friendly, he offered to answer some questions for us. Our time there was interesting, but I felt that the Warden was not comfortable. On hearing we were English, he insisted on speaking English to us, when it would have been better for him to speak French and then have Shyrna translate for the non-french speakers.

We learned one interesting fact about Rwanda jurisprudence: people who perform abortions go to jail in Rwanda, and so do women who get abortions, and so do people who help women get abortions. We made arrangements to come back another day.

On the bus on our way back to the St Paul from the prison, which was literally around the corner from us, down one of the arms off the traffic circle, we spent a long time talking about the abortion/jail issue. We also discussed the fact that sex workers are imprisoned in Rwanda, if they get caught. (Lucky for our neighbour at the St. Paul that his “date” was free to see him one night. That’s another reason I wanted to leave the St. Paul: one night with my neighbour and his “date” was enough for me. I thought he had a girlfriend, but several of our group saw her arrive, and said she was clearly a working girl. They said she was pretty. I didn’t see her. I just heard her. At 3:00 in the morning. ) Tall Tina said that sometimes women who are trafficked into the sex trade are doubly victimized: once when they get sold into the sex trade, and the second time if they get arrested for being a prostitute.

Rich and Shyrna made a special side trip to the CLNG to arrange another visit to the prison.  I wasn’t really keen on going back, and neither were most of the people I talked to, but we did go back, and now I am glad we did.  In fact, I am sorry that we didn’t have more time to spend with the genocidaires. I wanted to ask how they could do what they did.

When we arrived at the prison the second time, the rules were the same as they were the first time: no photos, no cell phones etc. We walked from the parking where we left the bus to the Warden’s office area, but instead of meeting in his office like we did the last time, we went to a large meeting room. In the room were set up about forty or so chairs. Chairs for us on one side, chairs for the genocidaires set up at right angles to us.

After waiting about an hour, which cheesed me off, the genocidaires came into the room. There was a mix of men and women and a mix of pink and orange prison uniforms. Orange uniforms are for prisoners who have been through the court system and are serving their sentences. Pink uniforms are for those people whose cases are still before the courts. The uniforms were neat and clean. They were all nicely ironed: the pants had front creases in them. If you are wondering why there are genocidaires whose cases are still before the courts sixteen years after the fact, it could be because some of them have only just been indicted, but it could also be that because there were over 100,000 genocidaires indicted, that it has taken this long to get some of them to trial. It has been estimated that about 1 in 7 adult Hutus were involved in the killings in one way or another. That’s a lot of killers. Many of them have left the country. Some are arrested when they try to return. Rwanda is actively involved in trying to extradite some of the killers who fled to Europe.

I am not sure what I was expecting when the genocidaires arrived. They seemed to be a mix of utterly regular-looking people. No one had “Genocidal Killer” written on their forehead. If I had bumped into any one of them on the street, there would have been nothing to indicate what they did in 1994. But their Tutsi neighbours had bumped into them on the street in 1994, had been killed by them, and that is how these people found themselves in prison.

First, the genocidaires introduced themselves. Again, there was a wide range of occupations and roles that they played. One man was a leader of a local prefecture. One or two men were from the Interahamwe. I was interested to hear what the Interahamwe people had to say, but sadly, we never got to hear them. Some of the people in my group were a little put out that only three people talked. They felt that these three hijacked the meeting to tell their own stories. I didn’t see it like that. There was no way we were going to hear twenty people speak in the hour which we were allotted. As it turns out, we were in the room with them for about three hours.

The first woman who spoke could have been anyone’s neighbour. She was a Hutu woman.  She said she had been married to a Tutsi man and the man and her children were visiting relatives elsewhere in the country when the genocide started. Luckily they survived the genocide. I am not sure if the irony of that was lost on her. She claimed that she did what she did for survial. She said she did not kill anyone, although she did participate in harassing a woman at a roadblock until the woman could prove that she was Hutu. What would have happened had the woman not been able to prove she was a Hutu? She would have been killed of course. I can’t believe that there was only ever one woman who appeared at this roadblock. It is likely that many people were killed there, and that she was present. I did not believe her for a second. At the end of her talk, she asked for our forgiveness.

The second speaker was also a woman. She was petite, but robust. She said had been a journalist during the genocide and that she had worked at Radio Milles Collines (not to be confused with the Hotel des Milles Collines – many businesses in Rwanda make reference to the hills, which is understandable, considering they inform almost every aspect of life in Rwanda). I think the official name of the radio station was RTLN but it was called Radio Libre des Milles Collines. This is the radio station that exhorted Hutu to kill “inyenzi” which is Kinyarwanda for cockroaches, which was what the Hutu called the Tutsi in an effort to dehumanize them. She ended her talk by saying if there is a message that we could take away from this visit, it is that “we” (and who she means by “we” was not clear – was it the people in the room, the genocidaires in prisons all over the country, people who confessed at the gacaca (pronounced ga cha cha) courts, people who fled to Congo and refugee camps in Burundi and Tanzania and who have not been charged for their crimes, people who fled and are living in luxury in France, or just who the hell “we” is) are sorry for what we did, we have confessed our crimes, and we are asking for your forgiveness, the forgiveness of our victims and their families, and the forgiveness of people in the world. If she was speaking to me, she was speaking to the wrong person. By the time I visited the prison, I had already visited the Belgian Memorial, the Don Bosco school, I had spoken with the widows in the Nelson Mandella Village of Hope, I had been to Nyamata where thousands were killed, I had been to Ntarama where thousands were killed, I had been to Nyarubuye were tens of thousands were killed, I had been to Murambi where tens of thousands were killed and I had been to Bisesero, the site of the largest massacre of the genocide. I had spoken to widows at AVEGA in Kigali. I was in no mood for forgiveness. I’m still not in a forgiving mood.

The third speaker was a man who had been the head of a prefecture in Kigali, sort of like a city counselor.

After the three of them had spoken we were given a chance to ask some questions. The understanding was that all of them would have a chance to participate. As it was, only the three people who told their stories answered questions and everyone else was silent. I wanted to hear what the Interahamwe people had to say for themselves. I felt the answers that the three people who spoke gave were fairly self-serving. The journalist never said what she had done to end up in the jail. I found out purely by accident.

The journalist’s name was Valerie. I found this out while sitting in the departure lounge in Nairobi on our way back to England. Kate English, one of our friends on the trip, had purchased two books at the airport in Kigali. Had I known books were available at the airport, I would have purchased them. I was given an award last year that came with money to buy books. I could have spent some of it in Rwanda. One of the books she bought was called Hotel Rwanda: The Tutsi Genocide as Seen by Hollywood. The book debunks the myth of the movie “Hotel Rwanda” which paints Paul Rusesibagina as a hero, when in reality he was anything but a hero. I see him as a genocidaire, frankly. At any rate, Valerie is in this book. She gave a deputation to the author from prison. She claims she has first-hand knowledge of Paul Rusesibagina personally handing people over to the Interahamwe or giving names and locations to the Interahamwe. The book says that Valerie worked at RTLN during the genocide. I knew that, she said as much. The book also says that what she did at RTLN during the genocide was read the names and locations of Tutsis over the air so that they could be killed. That’s a far cry from being just a journalist who worked at the radio station. She claims she did not personally kill anyone but she absolutely belongs in jail: who knows how many people were killed because she gave directions about where to find them?

When our time was up, we thanked them for their time, they thanked us for coming to listen to their stories and then we all filed out and went our separate ways. It was all very jolly. When we left the room, we milled about outside for a few minutes. We watched prisoners coming and going. Some were playing checkers, some were working. When we came the week before, when the Warden wasn’t expecting us, it was visitor’s day, and we did see people, mostly women and children, coming to spend time with their relatives in prison.

The prison did not seem to be overly worried about security. They made a bigger deal about not taking photos or using cell phones than anything else. There was only one guard, unarmed, in the room with us during this time, and at one point his cell phone rang, and he got up and left us alone in the room with the genocidaires. Maybe we were supposed to see that they were just regular people seized with a frenzy after being built up to the genocide by Habiyarimana’s government, and that they were no longer a danger to us. Either way, I would have liked a little more security.

National Service Day

We had arranged to spend Saturday with Kate and Heather. Kate is from Massachusetts and I met her last summer at the Belfer Conference in Washington, and Heather is from Calgary. They are both teachers. They are the people who brought us the two gorilla walking sticks when they came back from their gorilla trek. Darla also participated in that trek and she, too, was part of the gorilla stick gifts. Heather had had a rough go of it on the gorilla trek. Her feet were very badly blistered and she was hobbling around a bit. We invited her to come over and have a shower and soak her feet in clean surroundings and she took us up on it.

Kate and Heather said that they would be at our room at 8:30 a.m. They showed up at the stroke of 8:30, laughing and having a great time. It seems that they took motorcycle taxis to get to the hotel from the St. Paul because there were no taxis to be had. It was National Service Day. On the last Saturday of each month, all the shops and businesses are closed, and everyone performs some sort of service to their country, usually cleaning up, but there are other things that people can do, too.

We noticed that there was no traffic at all around the building. Heather had her shower, and she was just in heaven that it was so clean. After her skin was dry we dressed up her blisters with polysporin and proper band-aids and went upstairs for brekkie. What can you say about breakfast at the Milles Collines after you have had breakfast at the St. Paul? What can you say about a shower at the Milles Collines after you have had a shower at the St Paul, for that matter. It is like comparing apples and streetcars.

We had to wait until 1:00 pm to go out because all of the shops were closed. We stayed in the hotel and just chatted. It was a nice relaxing antidote to the busy-ness we had had since the moment we arrived at Pearson airport to leave for Rwanda on July 18th. We decided that we wanted to go and look for textiles, and we knew where the fabric district was so at 1:00 p.m. we set out. It was pretty hot out. At any rate after a few false starts at shops down alleyways etc. we finally found a place that had some nice material. We bought a few pieces (we all did) and then we found an even better place across the street. I bought 6 kangas. What I really wanted were kikoys, which are from Kenya, but I didn’t see any. Linda tells me now that she saw some at the airport in Nairobi but didn’t mention it to me until we got home.

We exhausted ourselves shopping. We also stopped by a sporting goods shop and purchased a few Rwanda soccer shirts as souvenirs. Then we went to the craft market across from the Nakumat and picked up a few things. By then I was shopped out.

We went back to the Milles Collines with Kate and Heather and we had dinner, which was really nice, but kind of expensive. I noticed that there was a cat roaming the grounds of the hotel at night. I mentioned it to the waiter but he didn’t seem to care about the cat at all. I resolved to find some cat food and feed it.

Kate and Heather went back to the St. Paul at about nine o’clock. Heather said her blisters were feeling a lot better for the clean water and good band-aids. We had a great, if exhausting, day.

We bumped into Rich at lunch at the Bourbon Café. He asked if we had had a power failure at the Milles Collines. We did in the morning, but it only lasted about 2 minutes until the hotel’s generator kicked in. The power was out at the St. Paul all day.

Comparing Showers

The first photo is of the shower at the Milles Collines, the second is of a stall at the St. Paul. The third photo is of our shower and sink at the Akagera Lodge.

The Hotel des Milles Collines

We moved into the Milles Collines on Thursday, July 29. I was of a mixed mind about this. On the one hand, I couldn’t stand our room at the St. Paul. Perhaps if it had been clean, perhaps if the showers had worked, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps….

From the moment we arrived at the St. Paul, I was asking the Sister (not Linda, the nun who was in charge) if there was a room with an ensuite washroom available. She kept saying no. Originally I had asked her and she said if one came available, I could have it for the difference between the cost of our current room and the cost of the new room. That gave me reason to believe that a space would open up, but one never did. I will tell you this: if I ever went back to Rwanda, I would consider staying at the St. Paul, but only if I could have a room with a washroom in it. Then I would go to the Nakumat, buy a bucket and a pile of cleaning supplies, and I would clean that room to within an inch of its life. If I went with a friend, I would let the friend use my bathroom. The St. Paul is very inexpensive. The room that Linda and I had cost 8,000 Rwandan francs/night, which is about $15 per night. The room with the washroom was 20,000 rf, which is about $40/night. I think the Milles Collines is too expensive, almost $200 per night, and I have discussed this rate elsewhere in my blog.

We arrived back in Kigali from our stay at Butare and the waterless Centre Bethanie in Kibuye at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon on the 29th. We were originally going to go to the St. Paul and then get our stuff and go up to the Milles Collines, but luckily some people needed money and asked to be let off at the Nakumat so they could go to a foreign exchange so we got out there and strolled over to the Milles Collines.

It was a hot day (no surprise, being July in Africa, just three degrees south of the equator), and we were quite bushed after walking up the hill to get there. Even though the Milles Collines touches on the back of the property that the Nakumat and the Union Trade Centre sits on, you still have to go uphill to get to it. First you have to go downhill from the Nakumat to the traffic circle, then go right at the first arm (after the arm that the Nakumat is on) of the traffic circle and then go up the hill to the Milles Collines, and then it is still uphill through the Milles Collines parking lot to get to the hotel. Linda and I approached the desk and were happy to discover that the people who were working on the desk spoke English, even though we addressed them in French. It made the check-in so much easier. Linda explained that we had corresponded with them by email (actually it was Leslie, as I mentioned in a previous post), they gave us our room, and then we went upstairs to check it out.

Well. What a difference between the St. Paul and the Milles Collines. I nearly wept with joy. The room was clean, we had a balcony that overlooked a lovely pool and green gardens. It had air conditioning that could be adjusted to suit. We could see the traffic circle. We were not too far from our friends at the St. Paul.  The bed was comfy (sadly, we had to share a bed, and there was lots of space in the closets, but the piece de resistance was the bathroom: it was large and clean, it had a tub and shower, a sink in a large counter and a toilet. And it was just for us.

We went back down to head over to the St. Paul to get our stuff. As we were walking through the parking, one of the taxi drivers there asked if we needed a cab. We asked how much it would cost to go to the St. Paul, wait while we picked up our stuff, and then come back to the Milles Collines. He said 2000. We said ok. So off we went. I put my timer on as soon as we arrived at the St. Paul. We told the driver we would be ten minutes. In the ten minutes that we were there, we were able to throw all of our stuff into our large suitcases and get out. Luckily we had organized our stuff when we came back from the safari weekend. Even though we were leaving to go away for three days the very day after we returned, we took some time to organize, partly because we were considering going to the Milles Collines on the day we came back from the safari. We left our soccer equipment and school supplies behind because we knew we would be back at the St. Paul every day to meet the bus to go places.

Once we got back to the Milles Collines we put our clothes in the closet, and our toiletries in the bathroom, and we relaxed in the cool air conditioning. A little voice inside my head was giving me a bit of a hard time about it, but I managed to enjoy myself nonetheless.

Did I mention that breakfast was included? Because we are early risers, and because we had to be at the St. Paul in time to go off in the bus at 8:30 a.m,. we were at breakfast as soon as it opened for business at 6:30 a.m. And what a breakfast it was! I won’t go into detail about the breakfast at the St. Paul, except to say that I only ever ate one piece of pineapple in the four mornings I was there, and I was very much grateful for having had the foresight to bring a jar of peanut butter and a box of ryvita crackers because that makes a great breakfast. We also had good sized container of dried apricots and a similar container of roasted almonds to munch on. The St. Paul breakfast consisted of hot dog buns, coffee (or as one person from the trip last year called it on facebook “or whatever the hell that was”) hot water, tea bags, fresh fruit such as pineapple, and an omelet from time to time. I don’t eat omelets, so breakfast was kind of limited for me.

Let me tell you about the breakfast buffet at the Milles Collines. For starters it was in a gorgeous room that was open to the elements along one side, so it was like eating on a balcony. It had a great view of Kigali and all of its hills. For seconders, the décor was quite nice. Finally, the food was fantastic, plentiful, and organized in a logical way. The first station that you would encounter as you came in the door had fresh croissants, chocolate croissants (from the French and Belgian influences), honey buns, plain buns, scones, little meat pies (I didn’t eat the meat pies), grilled pineapple spears and other fresh fruits. There was also a selection of fresh breads and cheeses and cold cuts at this station. Farther along you would come to the omelet station. Here you could have an omelet made to your own specifications: there were all sorts of ingredients that you could have added to your omelet, from cheese to onions to different kinds of veggies to meat.

Then there was the hot table, and under different covers you could find roast potatoes, cooked veggies (including that Rwandan favourite, spinach), waffles, pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, cooked ham, etc.

Farther along still, there was the cereal and juice station. Here you could find any number of little boxes of cereal – the same cereal that you would get at home, but with different names: Frosted Flakes, for example, were called Frosties. There was granola here, and yogurt and four different types of fresh squeezed juices – mango juice, tangerine juice, pineapple and another juice that I was never able to identify.

We had attentive servers who brought us our tea and coffee every morning. There was a selection of jams, butter (not for me!) and marg on the table, and also some nutella. Linda snagged the jams and nutella on the first day and put them in her purse. We took them to the St. Paul with us and put them on the table for our chums to use, if they liked. People were grateful for the jams, and again, I felt a little guilty.

I was feeling a little awkward about leaving the St. Paul and I was hoping that no one would notice that we had left. That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. We could have been at the bus every morning, and we could have wandered off in the evenings, as many people did, and no one would have been any the wiser. No one was marking us present or absent in the evenings, and as long as we were at the bus on time everything would have been fine. Linda, however, told all sorts of people that we were moving, so most people knew. On the third morning we were there, the Sunday morning, I woke up feeling colossally guilty about it, so it was lucky that we were going to church that morning, and I was able to unload a little of that guilt during the service. I was looking at the breakfast buffet, and as I forked a few spears of grilled pineapple onto my plate, and set them aside my fresh croissant, I actually felt pretty dreadful. I contemplated my guilt as I was pouring my tea out of a lovely china tea pot. But by then I had had a shower with warm water in a really clean bathroom, so I determined that my feelings were more of a kind of sorrow for my group mates. Lucky it didn’t last overly long, as I would have hated to become too maudlin at such a nice hotel. 

At any rate, because the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, people were asking us about the hotel. Rich suggested that he might go to the Milles Collines for one night or over to the Chez Lando, which is a nice hotel, but on the other side of town. Some people actually did make the move. Graham and Jeff, who roomed together at the St. Paul came over on Monday and got separate rooms, and Colleen and Daniel, a married couple on the trip came over to the Milles Collines also came on Monday. They spent two nights at the hotel. Apart from the fact that Colleen and Daniel had a mosquito in their room, everyone enjoyed it very much. On the last night, the Tuesday night, Tina Ford and Darla came to the Milles Collines. Graham managed to finagle a great room rate for all of the newcomers, but despite his best efforts, the hotel refused to budge on the price that they gave Linda and I, which was about 50 Euros/night more than the others paid, which cheesed me off. For the last two mornings that we were at the Mille Collines we had a big group (six of us on Tuesday morning and eight on Wednesday morning) for brekkie, and it was really quite pleasant.

Rwandan Rivers during the Genocide

One of the ways that the genocidaires killed their victims was by throwing them into rivers and lakes to drown them. While many people were killed or gravely injured before they were thrown into the rivers and lakes of Rwanda, a good number were tied up, or tied to other people before they were thrown into the rivers to drown. Throwing children into the rivers was a favourite way of killing young Tutsis. Sometimes mothers and their children would be tied up and thrown in together. Some lucky individuals who could swim, and who were either not too badly injured, or whose bindings came undone, were able to swim to safety. It goes without saying however, that a sizeable number of people who were thrown into the rivers died, and their bodies were left to float along on the currents in the rivers or lakes.

The notable rivers in Rwanda that lead into other countries are the Akagera River, the Muvumba River, and the Rusizi River which flows into Lake Tanganyika and into Tanzania, and the Nyabarongo River. Other countries that received the dead as they drifted along were Uganda, Burundi, and depending on which size of the Rusizi river that the bodies washed up on, Congo. The Hutu, who convinced themselves that the Tutsi were newcomers to the country, and therefore had no business being there, would joke that they were sending the Tutsi back to wherever they came from. Of course this is not funny at all.

In Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi, local people who lived along the river banks found themselves enmeshed in the genocide by virtue of the dead that arrived on their shorelines. These kind souls removed the dead from the water and placed them, with respect, in carefully-marked mass graves that then became memorial sites for the genocide. In recent years, many of those memorial sites have had the remains of the dead removed to the genocide memorial in Kigali. Rwanda is grateful for the respect shown to the dead people who washed up on the shores and into the lives of ordinary Ugandans, Tanzanians and Burundians who had nothing to do with the genocide, but who found themselves dealing with the aftermath of the slaughter.

Landing in Nairobi

I discovered the wonderful Gamemanship books in 1969. I have waited forty one (yes, 41) years to have an occasion to use this image in one of my journeys. I have saved this picture in anticipation of such an occassion, so imagine my delight to find out that at some point on our journey to and from Rwanda, I would have the great joy of landing in Nairobi. You will have to click on it to make it a little larger.

True to the spirit of Clothesmanship, I was dressed as the example on the right (above) which is clearly the proper outfit to wear when Landing in Nairobi.

The sad thing is, despite my joyful anticipation of a very brief stay in Nairobi (one hour on the way to Rwanda, eight hours on the way home) conditions in the airport in Nairobi are primitive to say the least. On our way to Rwanda we didn’t have time on the short layover to worry about the airport amenities (or lack thereof) but on the way home we paid (Graham negotiated a deal) to spend eight hours in lounge with comfy chesterfields and free unlimited food, soft drinks and booze.

I Swear I Thought She Was Dead

On Sunday August 1, Linda and I got up early to go to church. We had missed church the week before, because we had been at Nyarubuye, visiting the genocide memorial. (On a technicality, Nyarubuye is a church, but we were not there for a service, even though we did spend a few moments of reflection in the sanctuary. I was reflecting. Linda was taking photos of the Stations of the Cross).

We went to a church near the Milles Collines, and we walked there, as it was a pleasant day, and still early enough that we would not bake to death on our way, or be overheated once we got there – we knew there would not be air conditioning at the church. We made only one slight wrong turn, but we found a security guard who spoke French and he was able to direct us to the Eglise Saint Michel so off we went, and we made it there before the service started. Like good Anglicans, we found a great seat at the back of the church, kind of near an exit, so we could make a hasty retreat should the need arise.

At 9:00 a.m. the choir started singing. The service began about 10 minutes later, and finished at about 10:30 a.m. The service was mostly music, and actually was in English, which was lucky for Linda. There were a few unusual things about it, the most striking of which was that the collection boxes were held by children who fanned out into the aisles around the church and people had to get up to put their envelopes in the box. There were also two collections in the service.

Linda and I made a donation, but we were very short of cash. We were planning on going to a Foreign Exchange the next day. I also had a pile of change in my pockets, so we were also able to make a donation at the second collection. There were not many people of European background at the service.  Children shyly stared at us.

On our stroll back to the hotel we encountered many, many people begging for money.  Perhaps they were drawn to the church thinking that people would be more likely to be filled with the milk of Christian kindness after a good sermon. I gave money to a woman with a baby before we had even left the parking lot. Later on, I gave money to a man with just one leg (I don’t want to contemplate how he lost the other one) and another woman with some children. That was the end of my readily available change.

We went back to the hotel to freshen up after church and then headed over to the St. Paul to meet our friends. (I should make a brief side trip here: after we moved to the Milles Collines, we noticed that the taxi drivers who waited for fares in the Milles Collines’ parking lot were not disposed to offer reasonable fares to local places. I guess they thought if we could afford to stay at that hotel, we could afford to pay unreasonable fares. A typical negotiation went like this – Me: How much to the Centre St. Paul?   Driver: Two thousand francs. Me: That’s too much. It’s less than one kilometer. Driver: Shrug Me: I’ll walk. Driver: Suit yourself. ) After a typically unsatisfactory exchange with a taxi driver, we decided to walk. It was only a fifteen minute walk, and all of it downhill when heading towards the St. Paul (walking back was uphill all the way and at a 30 degree angle). One side of the road taking us to the traffic circle where we would have to turn right to go the St. Paul had no sidewalk and one side had a sidewalk. Linda and I crossed to the sidewalk and started down the hill.

Part way down we saw three men standing in a group looking at something on the ground. As we came closer, they walked away. I couldn’t make out what they were looking at and asked Linda what it was on the ground. We thought it was garbage, and we were surprised because Saturday had just been Umuganda Day, a national day of service, which happens once a month and I was not expecting to see any garbage laying around, indeed, I had not seen any garbage laying anywhere in Rwanda up until that point. As we got closer I saw that it was not garbage on the sidewalk, but rather it was a person. I was more than a little apprehensive. Finally, we could see it was a woman. She had her back to us, and was half on the sidewalk, and half on the grass beside the sidewalk. We walked around to the front of her. I swear I thought she was dead because I could not see her chest rising and falling.  I reached down and grabbed her arm and gave her a little shake. She opened her eyes and I was flooded with relief. Speaking to her in French, I asked her if she was ok, which was really a stupid thing to say, all things considered. She didn’t speak French. She didn’t speak English. My Kinyarwanda was really limited, but my lessons did give me the vocab to deal with an emergency! I asked her if she needed help. She said no. I asked if she was thirsty. She said yes. Linda gave her our water. I asked if she was hungry. She said yes. We didn’t have any Larabars on us, and practically zero money because we were headed to the Foreign Exchange. We went through our pockets and managed to come up with about 1000 francs, which was enough for her to buy some food. She was as thin as a reed, and I guess she had passed out on the sidewalk as she was walking. The men that had been standing looking at her had retreated a bit up the street and they were watching our exchange. She got up on very shaky legs and crossed the street clutching the water bottle, with our coins in her hand. Another woman, possibly a beggar, approached her and she turned away from her. 

Linda and I then resumed our journey to the St. Paul

Farewell Dinner

This is a photo of Linda, myself, and Olivier, our fearless bus driver, at our farewell dinner, the night before leaving Kigali. If you look closely, you can see that Olivier is wearing a Scarborough Blizzard
t-shirt.

Scarborough Blizzard Spreads Some Joy

Linda and I gave two of the adult-sized tshirts from the Scarborough Blizzard to the two gentlemen who cleaned our room at the Hotel des Milles Collines. We were packing up to go, and we called them in and gave them the t-shirts and we said thanks, and then they left. About a minute later there was a knock on our door and they came back again to say thanks again. They spoke neither English nor French, just Kinyarwanda, as I recall, but a smile speaks volumes. They were clearly thrilled with their shirts.

Thank you Michelle for your generosity.

Scarborough Blizzard

I donated the soccer supplies that were so very kindly given to me by Michelle Cole Kennedy of the Scarborough Blizzard Soccer Club, to the Reverend Father Emmanuel Gatera, a local priest in Kigali, to give to an orphanage. I gave one of the adult-size tshirts that Michelle included in the soccer equipment to the Reverend himself.  The picture above is of me with Father Emmanuel.

Father Emmanuel’s family left Rwanda due to the anti-Tutsi massacres that took place in 1962. His father was tortured and killed at that time. His immediate family moved to Burundi. During the genocide in 1994, Father Emmanuel lost 200 members of his extended family. Still, he exuded a sense of grace and hope. He believes his country can move forward. He is a braver man than I am.

The Generosity of my friends at St. Peter's

In response to a request by my dear friend Gail Thompson and the Reverend Erin Martin, the very generous congregation of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Scarborough, donated over fifty pounds of school supplies for me to take on my trip. Included in the supplies were calculators, math sets, work books, pens, pencils, erasers, chalk and just about anything else a student or teacher could use in the classroom.

In addition to all of the school supplies, several people donated gifts of cash, including the Reverend Erin Martin, Dave and Marlene White, Joe Turner, Beverly Dulall, Margaret Nelson and many others. Also, my former V.P. Lucille Cross Dagg donated to the cause. Because I had already reached my weight limit on two bags and because I also had soccer equipment to distribute, I asked Erin if it was ok with her if I purchased mosquito nets with the money and she said yes.

On Wednesday, July 21 we were planning on visiting a school in the afternoon. I asked if I should bring my school supplies, but was told we already had enough school supplies to take to this school, so my supplies would have to wait for another day.

We visited the George Fox School on Monday, August 2. I brought half of the school supplies with me and I gave them to the headmaster and teachers at the school.

On Tuesday, August 3, Linda and I took a taxi to the Gisimba Orphanage in Kigali and brought them the rest of the school supplies, and two soccer balls that had been donated by the Scarborough Blizzard Soccer Club. The director of the orphanage was extremely grateful to receive our school supplies. The children at the orphanage are very disadvantaged. The school supplies will go a long way towards helping them at school.

When I was handing over the school supplies at the school and at the orphanage, I was thinking of the people at St. Peter’s and their wonderful generosity. They gave me these school supplies so that I could take them to people who really were in need. Their kindness was truly overwhelming. I hope they understand exactly how many lives they changed for the better, and exactly how their generosity has touched others.

I investigated a number of charities to which I could donate the cash that people had so kindly given. I looked into mosquito nets for an orphanage, but because it was the dry season, there was not a big call for nets. Finally, I made the donation to the Tumerare Foundation, which helps poor Rwanda children to go to school, at all levels of school, from primary to university.

The two pictures below show me giving these supplies to the Geo. Fox school (lower picture) and to the Gisimba Orphanage.

Giving Donated School Supplies to the Gisembi Orphanage

We took half of our school supplies to the Gisimba Orphanage. During the genocide, Carl Wilkens saved the children and workers here from certain death at the hands of the local militia.

Giving Donated School Supplies to the Geo. Fox School

Visit to a School

This is a very belated entry. On Wednesday, July 21, on the day we went to Nyamata and Ntarama, we visited a school in the late afternoon. It was a very interesting trip. It was the second last day of school in the year for the students and teachers and they were really very warm and welcoming. We gathered in a large classroom with the teachers and some students from the school. We introduced ourselves (all of us - our group and the Rwandan teachers as well) and talked a little about the school and what it does. It is a public school, open to all students, and it has an ambitious plan of supplying one computer for each student. The headmaster took us to his office to sign the guest book and he showed us the computers. They are quite nice, I have seen them in magazines, and you probably have too: they are white and green laptops with two stubby antenae). Darla gave the school a set of soccer uniforms and promised to return later with another set so they could have two teams play each other, and another member of our group also gave some school supplies. I was wishing fervently that I had brought some of the school supplies donated by my church, but I would have other chances later in the trip. As we were talking in the classroom, a group of children from the school came in and performed a dance. It was marvelous. First a group of children came in singing, accompanied by a young fellow with a drum, and then the dancers came in. I was blown away. I hope to be able to include a video of the children, but right now the clip I have is too long. If I can make it a little shorter, perhaps I will be able to upload it.  In the meantime I have posted a still photo of the children dancing, and a picture of me and two of the teachers at the school.

A Boat Trip to Napoleon Island

When we returned home from Bisesero, seven members of our group left us to head to Volcano National Park to go on the gorilla trek. As Linda and I had given up our two spaces for the gorilla trek, two people who wanted to go, who had not previously had spots on the trek, were able to go.

The following few paragraphs have been contributed by Linda.

After our return from Bisesero, we had a free afternoon. Earlier that day, Graham had started some negotiations with Andrew, one of the boat captains on Lake Kivu, to take us on a short cruise out to Napoleon Island and then to Peace Island – there is a bar/restaurant there – as a relaxing break. The original plan was to go right after lunch – but since lunch would take a few hours at least (an earlier post has tackled this interesting approach to restaurant meals!), and then because a trip to town (Kibuye) to find internet access and supplies was also planned, we didn’t actually board the boat until around 5pm! As the sun goes down shortly after 6, I was starting to get a little apprehensive about this journey. And Napoleon Island is actually a lot further away than it appeared from shore.

Lisa opted out of this cruise as she was feeling unwell earlier in the day and she didn’t want to get out in the lake and then start to feel unwell again. And then of course there was her worry that the lake would release its carbon dioxide and we would all be killed.  She was no safer on shore, but I digress.

The gorilla trekkers had all departed and Rich, Shyrna, Charles and Olivier also all stayed behind. This left a small crew of 10 (plus Andrew our captain) as we set off on a rather slow cruise in our leaky craft out into Lake Kivu. As we arrived 40 minutes later (it should be noted that Andrew charges by the hour!), the sun was about a foot above the horizon. I honestly wasn’t sure what the purpose of stopping here would be, but there was some discussion about a colony of fruit bats on the island – and it turned out that arriving there at dusk was the best time to see them.

Once we had all scrambled out of the mini-African Queen, Andrew led us up a trail to where we could see the bats. Up is the important part of this journey. There was a small trail that had been marked out by some intrepid hikers before us – but it was very rough and quite a steep climb. Some of the group were in flip-flops and shorts so there were a few scrapes and mosquito bites to be had. Andrew and most of the group were well ahead and out of eye-sight very early into this trek. Colleen, Tina and myself were bringing up the rear, and again I have to say my caution-mode was starting to kick in. The last place I wanted to get lost was this island in the middle of Lake Kivu. But we followed their voices and eventually caught up. The sound of all our voices (and possibly Andrew rattling some branches) awakened the bats and here is where the fun began. I couldn’t say exactly how many bats there were, but in the 100s of thousands is probably not far off the mark.  As they took flight out of the trees, they flew right over our heads. Remember Hitchcock’s The Birds and that sound? It was a combination of creepy and pure excitement to witness this flight – most of us got pictures and video – it really has to be seen to be believed. And the size of these bats would be comparable to a large crow or even bigger.

After almost 10 minutes of bat-watching, we all agreed it was time to head back to the boat. . The sun was now officially below the horizon, yet there was still some minimal light in the sky. However, as Andrew’s small vessel had no running lights and an apparent slow leak, and we were at least 40 minutes away from the Centre Bethanie, we agreed to not stop at the bar on Peace Island, but just head straight back. So we did – although this time Andrew went much slower than the cruise out. Now I thought that this was due to the lack of running lights and that any faster speed might force that slow leak into a much larger hole, but my fellow ship-mates reminded me that Andrew was charging by the hour. So, about an hour after we left the island, we were back on shore at Centre Bethanie – Andrew likely using the lights on shore to guide us to our destination. Although my nerves were starting to get the better of me, it was an experience of a lifetime to witness the bats in this untouched habitat. It was a good day!

Photos from Bisesero

These are just some of the photos I took at Bisesero. The skulls are from the shed at the foot of the hill. The mass memorial grave is found at the very top of the hill.

A Memorial to the Tutsi who died at Bisesero

This is a memorial to the people who died at Bisesero. The pointed rock in the middle represents the hills and the nine traditional spears that stick out from the gravel represent the nine communities in Kibuye.

Bisesero

On Wednesday, July 28, we departed from the Centre Bethanie to visit the genocide memorial at Bisesero, also known as the Hill of Resistance.

The Bisesero story is a sad one, as tragic as the other massacres in the genocide. The Bisesero massacre has two extraordinary features: over 55,000 individuals were murdered at Bisesero, making it the largest single massacre in the genocide, and these brave Tutsis managed to hold off the Interahamwe and the Rwandan Army from April to July, when the killing was eventually over. This area had been, in the days before the genocide, predominately Tutsi, but a sizeable number of Hutu also lived in the area. Out of fear of their Hutu neighbours, the Tutsi from this prefecture gathered together for strength and to resist their killers. They gathered on a series of hills, one of those hills being the hill where the memorial now stands. The Tutsi people hid in holes and other secret spots during the day when the Hutu were more likely to attack, and that way the casualties were not so severe at the beginning, although they were bad enough.

The Tutsis held off their killers for a while using traditional weapons and rocks, which they threw down the hills at their attackers. Unable to make quick work of the Tutsis gathered on the hills, the Hutu made appeals to other Hutu living in the area, and a huge number of Hutu came from towns far and wide in the prefecture and made their way to Bisesero to participate in the killing of these people. The Hutu came with modern weapons, and the stones and traditional weapons of the Tutsi were no match for these.

The French were mixed up in this too. As we now know, Operation Turquoise, ostensibly an effort to help the embattled Tutsis, was really just a ruse to help the Hutu kill, and in July, to help them escape the country into neighbouring Congo. At one point, when there were only a few thousand Tutsis left alive on the hill, the French army came to the mountain. Thinking they were saved, the Tutsis came out of their hiding spots and came down to meet the French. The French said they would be back in three days. Who comes to help vicitims in a genocide and then disappears for three days? The remaining Tutsis were now in dire straits, having come out of hiding: now the Hutu knew where they were. There is evidence to suggest that this was the goal of the French, that they knew exactly what would happen to the Tutsis. The Hutu made short work of the people who were left. The French, of course, claim they did not know the Tutsi would be killed. I can’t quite believe that. There had to be thousands of dead people on those hills by the time the French arrived. Unburied dead people make themselves known very quickly.

Afterwards, after the genocide was over, a group of survivors gathered up the bones of the dead from the surrounding hills and made a memorial at Bisesero.

We arrived at the memorial a few hours after leaving the Centre Bethanie. Although the drive was a short one, no more than 30 kilometers, it was almost entirely on dirt roads once we were out of Kibuye, which is only about two kilometers from the Centre Bethanie. The trip took almost two hours. I don’t think we went at a normal speed at any point on the trip. The last five to ten kilometers were covered at a speed not much faster than a very brisk walk, because the road was so steep and rutted. My guide book says the prudent traveler would take a four-wheel drive or all-terrain vehicle up the mountain. We went in a bus with the intrepid Olivier at the wheel.

We arrived at the memorial, and two guides came out to meet us. Before we started up the hill, we were directed to go into a corrugated metal shed which was about as long as my house and about 15 feet wide. Inside this building, on slatted shelves were thousands of skulls, and below them, many more thousands of leg bones and arm bones. The guide told us that there were more remains than could be fit into the mass memorial graves and that these individuals would be kept here until more space was made available.

Back outside at the bottom of the path that went up the hill, the guides told us that the memorial itself tells the story of the struggle. The memorial consists of nine buildings, representing the nine districts or communes, as they called them, in the area. The path that connects the buildings starts off as a smooth wide path, but gets narrower, steeper and harder to negotiate (in some places there are huge stones cemented into the pathways and steps, meaning you practically have to climb over them) until you get to the very top of the hill, where there is a large memorial mass grave. The increasing difficulty of the climb up the hill represents the struggle of the Tutsis as they fended off the Hutu. It was quite windy at the top of the hill, giving us an idea of the type of weather conditions these brave people had to struggle with. In a number of buildings, there are semi-circular rooms which will eventually house some of the remains that we saw in the shed at the bottom of the hill, so that they can be seen and remembered by visitors.

At the top of the hill we were listening to our guides explain a few things to us. They were both survivors of the genocide and the attack at Bisesero. I felt extremely grateful and humbled that they would tell us their stories of survival. The younger chap, who was only 15 at the time of the genocide, had a huge machete scar on his leg. I noticed that there were many memorial wreaths hanging in the trees below the mass memorial grave. I mistakenly assumed that people had placed them there in memory of loved ones who had died on the hill. In actual fact, these wreathes had been placed on the mass memorial graves, but the wind is so strong on the hill that it blew the wreathes and flowers into the trees. Still, it was a poignant sight.

At some point during their talk I suddenly began to feel unwell, and had to walk over to a low stone wall and lean back against the fence. Graham, one of the fellows on the trip, came over and asked me if I felt ok. I said no (normally I don’t admit when I don’t feel well, but I have to say, I felt dreadful) I asked him if he had any water on him, because I didn’t and he said yes, and he gave it to me, and I found myself drinking someone else’s water. I took a gravol out of my purse and swallowed it down, and then hoped and prayed that it would have a chance to work because I was really afraid that I was going to pass out or something. I felt tingly all over, in a really scary way, but I do not believe I was having a heart attack. Graham said he thought it might be something like altitude sickness, and I agreed with him. As most people who know me know, I am a thorough hypochondriac, but I was pretty certain that I was not having a heart attack. After about 15 minutes, I was feeling better, Graham said I was pinker, and we headed back down the mountain, but down the other side. Olivier had driven the bus around to the other side to meet us. The trip down was easier than the trip up. I was initially a little apprehensive about going down because there was one more set of stairs to go up to get to the top to begin the descent, but there were not a lot of stairs and so I was ok.

On the way down, I was lost in my own thoughts about how terrible it must have been and how terrified the people on the hill must have been when two of the people on the trip asked if I would translate the words of one of the guides for them. We were all sort of spread out on our way down, and I found myself with my sister Linda, Colleen and Daniel, Heather, and the younger of the two guides. (The guides only spoke French and Kinyarwanda, and Shyrna had been translating on the hill.) Of course I said I would be happy to, and then the guide started telling his story. He said they would make new hiding places every day, and that they didn’t use the same place twice, that they could never be sure that everyone would make it through the day. He said he frequently dug holes and literally buried himself in the ground. I could barely believe my ears, and I thought, again, of the horror he must have faced. Finally, towards the end of the siege, he suffered a terrible machete slash wound on his leg. By this time, the French had returned from their “three day” absence. They wanted to cut his leg off right there and then, but he said no, and a lucky thing too, because he seemed to be walking just fine. He said that the French gave them a choice after it was all over, and the Hutu had left. They said that the survivors could stay with the French, or go with the RPF when they arrived. The French would not give food aid to the Tutsis who said they wanted to go with the RPF.

The French have a lot to answer for, I can tell you that.

At this point we said our goodbyes. I shook hands with that young man, and climbed back on the bus. We were kind of quiet as we drove back to the Centre Bethanie, but it didn’t seem to take as long to go back as it did to go up.

Graham had organized a boat tour of the lake (Lake Kivu, you will recall, the explosive lake). I still was feeling slightly wonky (but very much improved) by the time we got back, so I declined to go on the boat tour, which I have to say, I slightly regret. But given the fact that I had trouble on the hill at Bisesero, and that when the happy boaters returned they said they had had a huge hill to climb, I am satisfied with my decision to stay home. I sat on my lovely little verandah at the bottom of all the stairs and worked on my audio memos while things were still fresh in my mind. I am glad I did that.

By the way, when I was sitting on that low stone wall with my back to the fence, I knew for sure that I would not be able to go on the gorilla trek.