We started the morning with a trip to the CNLG (National Centre for the Fight Against Genocide).
We listened to two chaps from CNLG as they talked about the work that this organization does. They talked about reconciliation efforts and how the government was helping perpetrators and victims live and work in close proximity. They also explained about plans for new projects to itemize and catalogue items left behind by victims at some of the massacre sites. Listening to these two fellow was at times fascinating, sad, and enraging, but ultimately, I felt a sense of hope for Rwanda..
We left CNLG and went to the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali. There a buffet lunch was waiting for us. As you know, Linda and I are vegans, and sometimes it's hard to find food that we care to eat. Luckily the buffet had a mix of beans and veg and we had that on rice, so everything was grand.
Our room-mate Heather fosters a child (the girl is an orphan -both of her parents are dead) in Kigali and had arranged to meet up with the child, her house mother and the priest who directs the foster child program in the country. They came to the museum. Heather was very happy to meet them. I offered my services as a translator. Heather had brought along some gifts for her child, as well as 1,000 dehydrated dinners donated by the farmers of Alberta. These dinners were in the form of a mix of dehydrated veggies, beans, lentils etc. The family would just have to take a scoop of the mix, put it in water over night, and then next day they would mix it with rice and there you go, a dinner high in protein and fibre. Also, Heather's students put together packages of colouring books, pencils, pencils sharpeners, toys etc for the other 50 children that this program serves in Rwanda.
The priest, Father Faustin, said they had arrived by taxi, and we told him we would pay for him to take a taxi back to the village where the girl (Latifa was her name) lived. Plus Linda and I had donated a soccer ball. When Linda went to tell our program leader that we would be leaving in a taxi, he suggested that we take the team bus, considering that Father Faustin insisted that Latifa lived in Kigali, and that her house was very close by.
Well! I was becoming increasingly worried as we got farther and farther from town, since we had to have the bus back by a certain time. We were on rutted dirt roads, and kept going farther and farther up the hills - so far in fact, that my ears were popping with the pressure changes. Finally we came to the girl's home - a mud hut on the top of a hill in a grove of banana trees. No electricity, no running water, no nothing. They cook, eat and socialize outside. People tend to stay outside all day except for sleeping, except, of course during the two rainy seasons of the year.
Despite the little that they had, these kind people, who spoke no English, welcomed us to their home and offered us food and banana beer. My Kinyarwanda lessons took me no farther than greetings and food that I did and didn't like, but was adequate for the purposes of this visit. A baby was given to me to hold, a tradition apparently
, to make a person feel like part of a family.
The gift of one thousand meals was met with wonder and wide smiles all around. Father Faustin explained how the dried meals worked and the mother of the house ventured the opinion that the food would last for much longer than one thousand meals. That's more than a year and a half of nutritious, high protein meals. By the time we left, some of the children were playing with soccer ball among the banana trees.
I felt a little weepy as we were leaving - sad for Latifa who had no parents, and sad for this family who lived in a hut made of mud and cow manure and sad for this nation that is trying so hard to move forward.
We made it back to the museum by 3:20, in time to pick up the gang and then wait for two hours for our Liberation day credentials.
On Wednesday we had an early start to the day, and we were happy that we had taken the time to get ready the night before.
We left the hotel and drove through Kigali to pick up a gentleman who was a survivor of the massacre at the Ecole Polytechniqe. He told us his story, which was desperately sad, and several times he had to stop talking because he was overwhelmed. He survived, and so did his wife and daughter and son, but they were all injured: he had an arm hacked off, his son was was shot in the head, and his daughter was clubbed in the head with a nail-studded club. She has residual brain damage. His oldest child was killed - he had sent her to stay with his mother, thinking they would both be safe, but they were both killed by being thrown into a latrine. Stories like this fill me with an unspeakable sadness, but also a barely controllable rage. Seeing this man tell his story, reduced to tears, was very, very moving.
Our second stop of the day was the church at Nyamata. At this church there were approximately 10,000 people killed in the first week of the genocide. The church has shrapnel damage in the ceiling, and dried blood on the walls and altar cloth. People's belongings are piled on the pews. Our guide, who is himself a genocide survivor, and who had sought, and received sanctuary at this same church during the mini-genocide in 1992, says that the clothes will be catalogued and preserved shortly, that the group that deals with these things was just waiting to have enough money to do this.
At the back of the church there are two huge mass memorial graves in the form of fairly deep crypts, and visitors can go down to pay their respects. In these graves are thousands of skulls and bones. and hundreds of coffins.
Our guide told us that approximately 72,000 people were killed in the area, but 10,000 were killed in and around the church.
Our next stop was the church at Ntarama. Again, this was a place were thousands of people gathered to find safety, as they had done in 1992. This time, there was no refuge. The church was blasted with grenades to get at the people inside, and then the people inside were killed, ruthlessly. There were children in the church school - they were killed by being smashed against the back wall of the room where the church school was held. The wall where this was done is stained black with the blood of these children. How does this happen? Who sees the murder of children as right and necessary? These are questions that are very difficult to answer, but answer them we must if we are to prevent such a thing from happening again.
I'm going to put a number of days' activities together in one blog entry.
I will start with the flights: in a word - terrible! The captain announced that there would be some turbulence, and there was, but "some" suggests a little. In effect he should have said there would be some periods of relative smooth flying. I have never been on a rougher flight in my life. There was turbulence from beginning to end, so much so that on several occasions, food service had to be interrupted and the flight attendants were directed to sit down and put their seat belts on. One member of our group, a young man from Fanshaw college, had never flown before and I was thinking of him from time to time as we bounced across the Atlantic Ocean. I was also thinking of myself and how much I'm not a fan of flying.
We landed at Heathrow, surprisingly after such a rough flight, the landing was the smoothest ever, and made our way over to the Yotel where we spent a quiet and refreshing 5 and a half hours. We had a nap, were able to stretch out on comfy beds and get our feet back down to size, and also have a shower.
We met up with another of our travel-mates, Heather (she was on the previous trip) and we made our way over to the security area and had really only just arrived through the check when we were called to board the plane. Unfortunately I had a middle seat, and although the person beside me was nice, it still feels awkward to ask a person to move every time I needed to use the washroom. Impossible to sleep.
The flight from Nairobi was rough but thankfully short. We spent about thirty minutes on the ground at Bujumbura picking up some people and Linda and I spent a moment or two standing on the landing outside the rear door of the plane looking around. We asked one of our seat mates to take a picture of us with the Bujumbura airport in the background.
When we arrived at Kigali we were met by our bus driver (Olivier again - we were very happy to see him again!) and our official guide from CNLG, Martin. We ditched our stuff in our hotel, and we were off and running. Our hotel, by the way, is fantastic and so far removed from the St. Paul - not in distance but in every other manner. We are sharing a room with Heather - it has three beds and a really nice ensuite washroom. It's a really nice refuge at the end of the day. The hotel has a terraced eating/sitting area, and it's where I am sitting as I write this blog. I have a lovely view down a valley and up the other side of the valley to one of Kigali's many huge hills.
After we stowed our stuff, we set off to the site of the memorial for the Belgian soldiers who were killed by the Presidential Guard on April 7, 1994. The men were guarding the Prime Minister, along with some Ghanian peace-keepers when the Presidential Guard arrived. They sent the Ghanaian peacekeepers away and captured the Belgians, took them to the school where the memorial is, where the Belgians made an attempt for freedom. There are bullet holes and grenade marks on the walls. The Belgians were eventually tortured and killed.
We walked from there to the Nakumat mall and found a foreign exchange office that was open. I exchanged $300US for 230,000 rwandan francs.
Later we had dinner at the New Cactus restaurant, which is a western style resto in Kigali and didn't make it back to our hotel until about eleven o'clock. We were totally exhausted and we had to get our stuff ready for the next day before we went to bed.
Eventually, we made it to bed. I fell asleep immediately.
We are currently have a brief relax at the Yotel in Heathrow Airport. The room is pleasant and cool and very quiet. We have bunk beds, a double bed on the bottom for me, and a single on top for Linda. The bathroom is nice and modern-looking.
I have never had a flight so bumpy in my life, and it wasn't slightly bumpy, it was dreadfully bumpy. A Fanshaw student who is travelling with us had never flown before in his life - not a very good intro to flying. It was so bad at a number of times that the flight attendants had to stop serving dinner - and these were prepackaged dinners, not something that could spill.
I didn't sleep well on the trip at all. What I can say was that the landing was the smoothest landing I have ever had, no bump, no jarring brakes, just a nice glide to a stop.
I sat beside some nice people - a couple from Sarnia going to London for a vacation.
