Monday August 30, 2010 – Driving to Kigali, driving in circles in Kigali, and the Genocide Memorial

Monday August 30, 2010 – Driving to Kigali, driving in circles in Kigali, and the Genocide Memorial


Time to leave MGVP, with regrets all round. As Elizabeth put it, it’s started to feel like home here – comfort, friends, and dogs. Mid-morning we pack up, unsuccessfully try and find all our bits of laundry in stages of being cleaned, dried and pressed, and head through Musenzi on the roughly two hour drive to Kigali. It’s windy and up and down and scenic – a typical Rwandan road as far as I can tell. The rain last night cleared the air somewhat and we get better vistas across the fields and hills than we’ve had so far. They are working on the roads, it seems a constant process, and there are great stretches and really really slow stretched. There is often a person at the beginning of a narrow or one way section with green and red flags, but I have to admit half the time I can’t figure out which one is being waved at me. Sometimes the person just seems to be waving at flies with them, which confuses me no end. Elizabeth seems to figure it out better, in fact she has been giving me advice on a lot of things related to driving and navigation – I think I’m at the stage where as a parent I’m becoming stupid and incapable. I gather I will get smarter again in a few years. It’s hard to describe driving in Africa, especially Rwanda and I know I’ve tried to do it before – it’s simply the number of people and all sorts of wheeled contraptions that one shares the road with, combined with the state of the roads that makes it quite unique. Combined with the dust and the smells and the sounds. We are driving at school turnover time – there aren’t enough schools for everyone to go at one so there are morning and afternoon sessions – and in mid-day both groups are out on the road in their uniforms – tons and tons of kids walking and running and playing with balls made of banana leaves and twirling tires and hoops with sticks. Big kids walking with little kids and little kids walking with little kids and little tiny kids walking on their own. We would have fits in North America about kids out on their own when they can hardly walk, but here it seems pretty normal. At one point we hit a stretch of really nice tar that isn’t too windy and I crank it up to 75 km per hour – living big – and then promptly get flagged down by traffic police who tell me to slow down because of the farms (and people presumably). Got away with that one, and its back to max speed of 6o again. Sarah manages to make it all the way to Kigali without getting sick, which is amazing, and just about lunchtime we wind down the last big hill and enter the noise and bustle and traffic of Kigali.
We are staying at the office/apartment that belongs to the PREDICT group, and have to meet Julius to figure out where it is and get the key. That involves a lot of texts, but eventually he tells us to meet him at the Nakumat - a South African supermarket mall, and with some assistance from locals we manage to find it, find parking, and find an open café on the second floor to settle in and eat lunch while we wait for Julius. Prices here are upscale – and the place is full of expats with various accents and affluent well dressed Rwandans. We are pretty sloppy and scruffy in comparison I have to say! Eventually we meet up with Julius and Eddy, the MGVP vet from Congo who is here to get visas for a trip to the US – and we follow them out of town towards the airport where the flat is located in an odd building which seems to hold a combination of offices and living quarters. The PREDICT flat is no different – obviously originally an apartment, it has a small office tucked in one corner. The main door to the hall is large and glass, with a metal grill welded across it. There is a large living room with a lounge set, an empty dining room, a small kitchen, a huge bedroom with ensuite with a fluorescent pink flower comforter, and a second bedroom and bathroom. Plus about 4 small balconies. We are rattling around in it, and it seems very empty compared to MGVP central and all the comforts of home.
Once located we head off to the genocide memorial for Elizabeth, I have been there previously. It is a well done museum that tells the story of pro-colonial and colonial life in Rwanda and how the seeds of the Hutu Tutsi conflict (s) were sown, and then goes through the actual time line of the genocide. There is also an exhibit on other genocides throughout the world – the holocaust of course but a number of other really significant and horrible happenings, some of which never reached public awareness in a big way. Graphic enough but not in your face, unlike a memorial further north where they have placed preserved bodies as they were found when a church of people were massacred. That is apparently very startling. Here there is a memorial garden, and a series of large concrete slabs under which the remains, intact bodies or pieces of people, of 30,000 people were placed. They continue to add more as new graves or mass graves are still found. Impossible to understand, and even more impossible to believe that most of the people one sees on the street lived through it. I have never had a Hutu talk to me, perhaps harder to have been on that side, but the few Tutsi stories I have heard are just unbelievable nightmares.
Next stop is a major craft market. We’re actually pretty much trinketted out, but decide we need another stop before heading back for the night. Kigali is a nightmare to drive in because it is all hills and valleys, roads travel along them, and one finds oneself going in the opposite direction to where you think you should be, doing a u-bend, and then arriving on the opposite side of a valley from where you started after a half hour. The gps was invaluable – trying to follow our not very detailed maps was horrendous. However, we did get into rather a bind when a road we needed was closed, and Elizabeth programmed the gpd to drive us in circles – which we did for a while – saying “weren’t we here before” until she realized what she had done and we all got a good laugh about it. Eventually we did find the craft market – where we felt a bit like the fresh meat thrown into a tank of piranhas, but we looked at a fee things, I actually bought a Rwandan “poo-painting “ (wooden African designs on wood made with cattle dung for texture and then painted ) and Sarah got promises of having her hair and nails done if we came back the next day. We escaped otherwise unscathed, made our way back to the apartment, and settled in to very dull macaroni and sauce for dinner. At least Sarah and I did. Elizabeth has been caught by some kind of a tummy bug – possibly the same one I had for a few days. I’m calling it the “I shouldn’t have eaten three helpings of Thanksgiving dinner and then dessert” bug because that’s what your stomach feels like – stretched to bursting even with no food in it. Poor girl.