Butare

The last week in Rwanda we spent in Butare, a small town near the southern border of the country. The town is the provincial capital and is the academic center for the country; the National University of Rwanda is located there. We stayed at Shalom Guest House, half of which was really basic and half of which were really nice rooms. A few of us decided to put in the extra $30 to stay in the nicer place and it was well worth it.

On Saturday we went to a cofee plantation. Rwanda was a huge coffee exporter in the years before the genocide. Now coffee production is struggling to reach pre war levels, but Rwanda is trying to cultivate specialized coffees that are sold to coffee shops like Starbucks.

Sunday we went to the Rwandan National Museum with Sarah, Thomas and Briggite. The museum was interesting and well put together. It was weird though because there was not a single mention of the genocide or the labels Hutu and Tutsi, which are for me an integral part of Rwandese history. We never really figured out why that was.

We spent most of our time preparing for the two exams we had to take on Tuesday. It was not too stressful because all of us had been over the material so many times, so it was just a matter of learning individual names and details. The exams went fine. The rest of the classtime we spent at the university (NUR), where guest lecturers talked to us about the economy and agriculture. I think there was some major miscommunication sometimes because the economics professor talked to us about the definitions of exports and imports, so that lecture was something of a joke. It was still interesting to meet professors from NUR and students as well.

For lunch and at night we had two favorite places: the Matar supermarket and restaurant, which was run by a couple of Lebanese guys. It was fast and cheap. The second option was full of umuzungus (aka white people) and served pasta and pizza. Both were good, but by the end of the week we were sick of eating at the same places over and over again. The worst was the waiting. Often we'd order a ham and cheese sandwich an french fries and it would take over an hour and up to two hours to get our food. It was ridiculous. It seemed like the cooks would get our order and purposefully wait 45 minutes before starting to cook. We all knew that this was just a cultural thing, but it was exasperating all the same and made us miss American and European efficiency.

While we were in Butare we also went to the memorial at Murambi. It was probably the most moving and disturbing memorial that we went to while in Rwanda. 50,000 Tutsi gathered at a secondary school about an hour outside of Butare. There they were slaughtered in two days. As we walked towards the memorial, an old man walked next to Ben and I and told us that he was a survivor. We found out later that only seven people survived the massacre. The man had a bullet hole in his head and seemed distraught, but still he guided me and a few others through the different rooms of the schools. What made this memorial different is that the bodies were calcified. The year after the genocide, the government exhumed their bodies and sprayed some of them with lime to preserve them and thus show the rest of the world the horrors that that the genocide had wrought on Rwanda. The result was horrifying - bodies - people - had turned white, their faces still frozen in the expression in which they died.. Only holes remained where their eyes were, but you could still identify their nose, mouth, teeth and ears. On many you could see tufts of hair or clothes. Others look like they had been emasciated and were tiny. Many were babies or children. The survivor who stood by me pointed at some of their skulls where there were large gashes and only said "machetes". It was horrifying but even more eye opening than the churches that I'd been to before.

We also went to the Genocide Memorial at NUR. This was horrifying for us because hundreds of stuents were killed by their own professors, some of whom had been integral parts in the planning of the genocide. It was sad looking at the pictures of students who were just like us but who by accident of birth were murdered in cold blood by those charged with teaching and protecting them.

We left Butare on Thursday and went to Kibuye for our last night. The ride was beautiful and the hotel we stayed at was amazing. Kibuye is right on the eastern edge of Lake Kivu. The hotel looked out over the water at the Kibuye peninsula and in the distance at the DRC. We had an unbearably long lunch (2 hours for goat kebabs) and then rented a boat and went out to a small island called Amahoro Island (peace island). It was somewhat of a scam since we had to pay for going there and then pay for setting foot on the island, but it was worth it. We walked around the island and then went swimming. We had a good time and it was a good way to spend our last night in Rwanda.

Doug is terrified of the water...

not really..

The next day was long. To sum it up quickly, we had a three hour bus ride to Kigali, a three hour layover at the airport, an hour flight to Arusha, then another three hour layover there until we boarded our KLM flight for an hour flight to Dar es Salaam, an hour wait on the tarmac, then an eight hour flight to Amsterdam, an hour train ride to The Hague and finally a ten minute taxi ride to the hostel. It was exhausting but fun.

On the flight from Kigali to Arusha

Homestay weekend and the last days in Kigali

The last couple of days have been pretty amazing.999p9999999999999977777777777777755555552222222222222222222222222222211111111199999999999999999999kyyyyyyy8888888uuulu99999 (that was one of the kids taking over the computer). We are on the final leg of our trip in Kigali - today (Friday) we head to Butare, in the south of the country, to take classes at the National University of Rwanda. This week we had our homestays. Every one in the group was put in pairs and then assigned to a family. Our contact, Simon, picked us up at a hotel last Sunday and had his driver take us to his house. There, we met his wife, Safi, his sister-in-law, Clemence, and his three children, Dylan (6), Dnervi (3) and Elsa (2). The family was absolutely great - Simon was a bit gruff, but Madam (as we call her) was very nice and funny; Doug (who I was staying with) and I loved playing with the kids and we did that most of our time in the homestay.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we went the National Commission on the Prevention of Genocide where we had lectures by different ministers and NGO officers. It was interesting for the most part, but the classes did get kind of long in the afternoon because we had just eaten lunch and the room we were in was hot. After class, we went to the UTC - Union Trade Center - a small shopping mall of sorts that has a Starbucks-like coffee shop with fast internet. We stayed there for a couple of hours before getting picked by Simon and his driver, Feza.

Evenings at the homestay typically consisted of playing with the children for a couple of hours. Elsa is one of the cutest girls I’ve ever seen, despite the fact that she peed on me twice. After playing with the kids, we would have tea with Simon or Safi, followed by dinner at around 9:30. Simon and Safi had left the country in the genocide of 1959 with a few hundred thousand other Tutsis who established themselves in neighboring Zaire, Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi. After the genocide, the peaceful government invited (and in some cases forced) all refugees to return to Rwanda. As a result, nearly one million “returnees” came back to Rwanda in the years following 1994.

Our family lived in Goma, right on the border with Rwanda and right across from Gisenyi. Even though the family was Rwandan, it was amazing to see how much of Congolese culture they assimilated. Every night we had Congolese dishes and the family frequently discussed how to say words in Kinyarwanda, since they had grown up speaking Kiswahili (one of DRC’s many languages). Even Elsa, who was born in Rwanda, only knew Kiswahili. For dinner, we would have umugali, a sticky, doughy green blob made from casava leaves that we ate with our hands and used it to scoop other food. We also had different plates like beef stew, potatoes, green beans, casava leaf veggies, French fries, rice and beans. The food was really good except for the second night, when we were given some kind of Congolese fish that tasted like it had been dried, salted and recooked.

At dinner we talked to Patrick, Safi’s brother, who knew very good English and helped us communicate with the rest of the table. The rest of the family knew some broken English so they could generally pick up what we were trying to tell them. One of the running jokes at the table combined Kiswahili and English - one of the kids said that the food was “Good nya good”, which means “good, very good” in Kiswahili. From then on, every time we said good we would say “It’s good nya good”. They loved it.

The family:

A view of downtown Kigali from our homestay house:

On Wednesday night, a group of us went to the secondary school where we had been teaching because they told us they had prepared a “talent show” for us. We arrived and some students showed us around the school. A guy named Jamali talked to me the whole way about sports and music and America. After, they took us to the teachers lounge where we were served cooked bananas and goat kebabs that were good. After, they showed us the cafeteria/auditorium where hundreds of students had assembled. They showed us to the front of the auditorium and made speeches about us and mutual friendship. They also did some traditional dances for us and some of our group replied by singing “Killing Me Softly” a capella. It was pretty awful but hilarious at the same time, and everyone enjoyed it. At the end, the principal and director of the school gave us “Certificate of Friendship” which were written in broken English but seemed very sincere. It was a nice gesture.

Jamali and I:

Dancing the Electric Slide in front of the kids:

The next day a few of us went back to the school to teach for the last time. I taught a history class that transformed from a history of the Ghanaian empire to a discussion about the solution to Africa’s many problems. The students were clearly very smart and knew about the issue, so it was interesting talking to them about it.

The class I taught:

After history, I went to teach “computer science” again like last week. This time I had a really intense conversation via Microsoft Word with some of the students. What started out as most of my other conversations with high school students here - music and family - and shifted when one of the kids asked me about John F Kennedy and who shot him. The conversation then moved to Martin Luther King Jr., racism, 9/11, George W Bush and Iraq, and more. One of the boys asked me what the term “nigger” meant - he had heard it in American rap songs. I was at a loss to explain and eventually told him about how it had come from America’s racist past and how black people use it and whites don’t. It was really intense.

Friday afternoon we spent walking around Kigali doing some last minute gift shopping and enjoying our last afternoon in Kigali. Sarah and I walked to the Hotel Des Milles Collines and talked about our time here and the genocide, and then we met up with some others to go to some craft markets.

At night, Doug and I went back to the house and gave our presents to the family. We gave the kids crayons and a soccer ball, and the parents a picture frame with a picture we had taken with the family. The family was kind enough to get us presents as well - wooden carvings of a Rwandan woman and a map. We then had dinner like usual and went to bed. Overall, it was a great experience and was very happy with our family.

Elsa and a umuzungu:

Roadtrip to Gisenyi

Gisenyi

Over the weekend, five of us - Brigitte, Sarah, Caitlin, Thomas and I, decided to go to Gisenyi, a town on the coast of Lake Kivu bordering Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although we planned to leave Friday night after the Millennium Village, we got held up and as a result decided to leave early the next morning. We got our trusty cab driver Abed to buy us tickets and then we boarded the bus at seven a.m. The drive was absolutely gorgeous - probably the prettiest I’ve ever done in my life. At one point, we were on the crest of one hill and could look out in either direction. Valleys, hills, mountains and volcanoes stretched out for miles. Then we came down from the hill and rode in between the hills, looking at the different towns and farms. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and so people have to use every piece of land available to grow crops. We saw stuff growing on hills as steep as 70 to 75 degrees all the way up the mountain. It was incredible.

On the ride there:

Land of a thousand hills for a reason:

When we finally got to Lake Kivu, we had trouble figuring out our hotel situation. We had reserved an 8 bunk room at the Presbyterian Guesthouse, adjacent to the local Presbyterian Church. We asked about our reservation and the receptionist said they had it,; then we asked if we could go to our room and he said it was not available. Typical Rwanda. After trying to talk him into giving us a room (he wouldn‘t because there were girls and guys), we ended up going to another sketchy hotel which had rooms for $12. We also had issues trying to convince them to rent us two rooms, but they refused because they said it was not good for women to sleep in the same room. We ended up getting three rooms and I slept in the extra room.

After that, we went down to the lake, about a 10 minute ride away. We walked into the Serena Hotel - the premier resort in Rwanda - and walked out after realizing how expensive it was for lunch ($22). We walked to another beach down the road called Tam Tam where there were far less umuzungus (white people/foreign people), but the food was cheaper. It was beautiful and we sat in a cabana on the beach looking over the lake. Huge mountains on the DRC side of the border loomed on the other side.

At the Serena Hotel:

At Tam Tam:

After eating and playing Frisbee for a while, we decided to go to the border between Rwanda and the DRC. The program had strictly prohibited crossing the border into another country, which made it all the more tempting to cross. A lot of the people we had met at the beaches were also from Goma and had come to Gisenyi to enjoy the beach, and they all said we could go visit them on the other side. That, and the desire to get a stamp and visa from the Congo, really made me want to go, but my fear of failing my classes prevailed. The border itself was very lax - I had imagined something like the Mexican-American border in San Diego or the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea (considering these two countries had been at war with each other as little as 6 years ago), but instead it was very informal. We walked up to the border and argued with the guard to let us into no mans’ land for a while. Thomas and I told him we really wanted to see the border and the guard replied that we had already crossed it. Not entirely satisfied with that, we left and walked back to Gisenyi.

Serena Hotel - you can see the DRC mountains in the background

After our border experience, we tried to go swimming at one of the public beaches but found it really awkward. Because we are white and therefore an oddity, crowds tend to gather around us and stare at us. They are never unfriendly, but it’s still really uncomfortable. On top of that, there were only men and boys on the beach - it seemed like no girls went swimming here, and that understandably made the girls even more apprehensive about swimming. We decided to go to the private beach at the Serena Hotel where we would feel more comfortable to swim and luckily avoided having to pay the fee required for non guests to swim there.

Some pics:

We swam and played Frisbee for a while before heading back to the auberge and showering. Luckily, there was no hot water, so we had to shower in frigid water instead. We dressed and got ready to go eat. After considerable difficulty with our taxi driver who spoke only Kinyarwanda and Swahili (no French, unlike most people here), we ended up at another hotel which was completely deserted. Not a single person was staying there or eating there. It was kind of sad, because we had noticed that other hotels (except the Serena) where like that too - Gisenyi used to be a huge tourist area in the years before the genocide, but after the genocide and the wars with the Congo that followed, Gisenyi was practically abandoned by tourists. The hotel we ate at, which looked to be brand new, was probably not going to last more than another few months at most.

Our sketchy hotel room:

Bathroom is even worse

After dinner, we took a cab back to the hotel because we were to tired to go clubbing like we had originally planned. We caught the 9:30 bus the next morning and went back to Kigali. It was a really fun time and worth the many hours on the bus. Later that day, we met up with our host families for our homestays. More on that later.

On the way back - you can see the crops all over the mountain

Millenium Village

Last Friday we took our weekly field trip, this time to a village near Nyamata (southeast of Kigali) which the Millenium Village Project chose as one of its test sites. The Millenium Village Project (MVP) is a group formed by the United Nations Development Program, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the Millenium Promise organization which seeks to eliminate poverty in a new way. Essentially, the MVP tries to get rid of the poverty trap - in which people are too poor to send their kids to work, so they don't get educated' so they can't get jobs and end up in the same position as their parents - by researching intensely on the particular area (looking at what crops grow best, how best to use the land), focusing money on investment for infrastructure, agriculture and education, and doing all of that in a relatively short amount of time (15 years). The idea is to teach people about how to effectively use their land so they can grow more and get out of the poverty trap.

The village itself was interesting. We didn't really learn much about the town or the project and were instead basically were shooed around to different places - schools, hospitals, farms. The hospital was really uncomfortable and we felt like the guide was showing it to us as if it were a zoo. At one point she opened the door to the maternity ward and told us to go in; we refused. It was highly inappropriate.

Some pictures of the visit: (Dad, the banana picture is for you - figure out what variety they are)

Crazy variety of beans:

Towards the end of the day, we went to a coop where women made baskets for tourists like us to buy, and then we went to a courtyard where a perpetrator during the genocide explained how he killed six people but confessed and was now living with the survivors of the genocide in the same village. It was uncomfortable because at several points people would start laughing at what he said and we would have no idea what was going on or why what he was talking about was so funny. It was also shocking to hear from someone who actually committed the crimes talk about it, but it was clearly all staged and the man was paid for his words. After he spoke, a survivor of the family whom the previous man had killed (she was the only one left, her parents and siblings had been killed) spoke about her own issues dealing with living next door to the man who killed her family. It was an intense moment. I don't know if I could ever do that.

After that, we were given banana beer (very sweet fermented rotten banana juice - not good) and goat kebabs. They did a traditional Rwandan dance called Ntore and pull us out to dance. That was the highlight of the day.

Some more pics:

I don't know what this dance was called:

Basket weaving:

Ntore dancing:

Service Day

Today some of us woke up late and went to Simba Cafe. Simba (which means lion in Swahili) is a grocery store that we love here. The food at their cafe is excellent and today I had a bacon and avocado sandwich. I've never seen avocados as big as they are here - one of them was the size of a football.

After lunch we went to our service placement. Most people in our group last week went to a secondary school called College Doctrina Vitae just outside of Kigali. It's a boarding school that is meant mostly for orphans and survivors of the genocide. What we saw was inspiring but also somewhat depressing. The school itself is in a beautiful location, on a hill overlooking a valley. There are about 520 students.

The school overlooking the valley:

When we arrived the director of the school, a short stocky man named Samson came up to us and directed us where to go. I told him I knew some history so he interrupted the teacher and pushed me into a classroom with about 30 students who were learning about the history of Ghana. Naturally, as an American student, I had no idea about anything that had happened in Ghana, so I refused the teacher's offer to give me the chalk and just sat and watched for a while. The class was lecture based and it seemed all they did was copy what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. This was kind of a problem, because both the teachers and the students were trying to teach/learn history in a completely new language.

As a result of the detioration of French relations with Rwanda, the government passed a law proclaiming English as the second language of Rwanda, and that all teachers and students must learn it. This was a problem because all the teachers had learned French, not English, in school. Suddenly, teachers who knew little English were put in classrooms with students who knew no English. And they're supposed to learn about the history of Ghana? It's an absurd situation, kind of like the US government deciding to switch the national language to Spanish and immediately requiring all teachers to teach their classes using it.

Nevertheless, the teachers and students were making a valiant effort to use English in their classroom. I finally had a chance to contribute to the history class when the topic of the slave trade came up. It was kind of weird explaining the basics of the transAtlantic slave trade to a class of African students in Africa, but it was definitely unique and rewarding. I felt like the students understood what I was saying so it worked out.

Some of the classroom buildings

Afterward, I taught "computer science", which consisted of teaching how to type, use copy-and-paste, and other basic Word tools on the school's antiquated 5 computers. It was fun though because many of the kids asked me lots of questions by typing them. As with everyone else in the group, I got asked if I was married. I told them I had a girlfriend and they all started giggling when I showed them a picture of Laura. It was a good time.

After that, I played basketball with a few of the kids:

Then went to teach English to some of the teachers. These teachers volunteered to come every night and learn more English from us (who decided to come every night to teach given the dire circumstances this school was in). Since the only English books we had were the guide books for Rwanda, we ended up reading aloud and asking if anybody had questions about the reading. It was fun but difficult to explain some words. We ended up using a mix of Spanish and French and drawings to try to explain certain things.

Sarah with two of the women we taught (the one on the left is the school disciplinarian - can you tell? hah jk):

On the way back from the school, the group of us in the taxi talked about the school. Thomas figured out that the annual budget for it was probably around $60,000 - a tiny amount, considering it's a boarding school for 500 kids. The teachers were paid around $50 a month - less than $2 a day -and they worked all day, some of them hundreds of miles from their families. The school has a policy of not rejecting any student for lack of funds, so although the fees for it are around $200, some students only pay $4. The result is overcrowding and a severe lack of materials in all of the classes. Still, it was inspiring to see students and teachers so motivated to work hard and learn.

This weekend we are going to Gisenyi, on the northern border of Rwanda next to Lake Kivu. The entire trip (3 hours there, 2 nights, 3 hours back) should cost about $16. I love cheap countries. Anyway, I doubt I will have internet, but don't be concerned. See you soon!

The last four days have been pretty crazy and a lot of fun.

On Sunday we decided to go walk around Nyamirambo, which is the commercial part of the city which "never sleeps" (not true). We had a typical buffet lunch for 2 bucks and then walked around a bit. Here are some pictures:

Waiting for the minibus (costs about 25 cents to ride it)

View from Nyamirambo

Looking at some of the slums

On one of the minibuses

Looking up at downtown Kigali

On Monday I got called 8 times by a man named Fontaine, who I met while doing community service on Saturday. I finally answered him after class and he asked me to come with him to what he called his Youth Forum on Development and Mind View. Naturally, I had no idea what he was talking about and was kind of sketched out. I envisioned some kind of hypnosis program or something along those lines. I got Thomas and Sarah to go with me and Fontaine met us outside the gate of our guest house. The walk only took a few minutes and he showed us into a small room with a desk and a few chairs. Fontaine asked us about ideas about mind view, and we told him that we had no idea what he was talking about. He ended up explaining that he had just created the program to teach people life skills and "strengthening the mind" and that he wanted ideas for it, so we talked to him about building respect and trust in small groups and how that was an effective way of teaching. I think he liked it.

Yesterday we had class in the morning and then had the afternoon off because one of the professors who was supposed to talk to us backed out. I ended up going with Sarah, Briggitte and Caitlin to a part of the city of Kicukiro and met up with the director of the National Union for the Deaf in Rwanda. He took us to his office where we met some workers and two deaf Rwandan students. Sarah knew some American Sign Language and amazingly she was able to communicate with them using it despite having no other common language. It was one of the craziest and most amazing things I've seen. One of the deaf students actually wrote on a piece of paper in English and we were able to have a conversation with him. He lost his hearing during the war because of gunfire close to his ears when he was 6, but he could apparently write English perfectly and we had a conversation on paper. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

After that, we decided to walk up to the gates of the World Food Programe Headquarters in Rwanda and persuaded the guard to let us in. A couple of information officers led us to their office and gave us brochures about the program, which is part of the United Nations. It was really cool and the two ladies were very nice and mentioned that they might try to take us out to one of the camps where food is distributed.

Today we had class in the morning and yet another professor backed out of the afternoon class (notice a trend here? Donna, our professor, was really upset that all the planning she's done for this trip is going down the tubes because some people here aren't reliable). Anyway, we had a sort of scavenger hunt in the afternoon where we were paired off and told to go to different parts of the city where we hadn't been. Our neighborhood wasn't very exciting but we did get to see a different part of the city. I took a few pictures:

UN Headquarters in Kigali:

Amahoro (Peace) Stadium - the national stadium, is not very big

A picture with the guards that we persuaded to let us in:

Some kid that wanted me to take a picture of him:

Like in Ecuador, people use broken bottles as an improvised barbed wire on top of their fences: