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  Kigali, Rwanda
Monday, July 30, 2007

Bonjour du pays de mille collines. I have somehow found myself in Rwanda. I never quite know how these things happen.

I think that the last time I wrote I was sitting in a hot and dusty internet café somewhere in Eastern Uganda. We were about to go and visit Sipi falls, which is basically right next to the border of Kenya. Sipi was very beautiful, very rural. On the bus journey there we went past miles of banana plantations, practically naked dusty looking kids with herds of cows or goats, coffee drying in the sun, outside these tiny round thatched huts. We have been camping since arriving in Uganda in our tiny little tent that bought we for 8 quid off Ebay, to save money. It is so small that after we put all our bags in there, there's barely enough room for us!

Anyway, Sipi was nice, and we did some trekking. Our guide was a really nice Ugandan guy called Alex, who was about 19. The poor guy was 2 years into high school 2 years ago when his house burned down and he lost everything, so he's been working in the meantime, and is planning to go back to high school in September. He was very interesting, and very well informed about politics, religion, all sorts of things that are very interesting for anyone visiting a country like Uganda. He talked a lot about his dissatisfaction with the president, Museveni, and told us a lot about just, well, the way the country works. This is great for us as what we both love about traveling is being about to get an insight into another culture, to find out the way it works. The problem with traveling in the way that we're doing is now is that, as you're moving around so much, you can only really get a superficial impression - I mean we will have visited 4 countries in 2 months - that's basically 2 weeks per country! It seems sometimes that the only people we ever talk to are people who are trying to sell us something, or rip us off. It makes you very untrusting and jaded - anyone who now does try to talk to us we immediately write off as having some ulterior motive. This is why, I guess, when you're already paying someone, they have no incentive to rip you off further, and actually begin to talk to us, and see us as actually people rather than wallets on legs.

One example of this actually happened whilst in Sipi. We decided to talk a nice evening stroll through the village. As usual, there was a bit of staring, some manic children screaming at us in excitement...nothing out of the ordinary. Then this guy comes up to us, and introduces himself as Godfrey, Geoffrey, something like that. He starts chatting away, telling us all sorts of random stuff, like about the villages annual female and male circumcision rituals, which generally happen from the ages of 16-20. We're fairly bemused by this but still, all in a days work, so we humour him. He seems like a decent enough guy. Anyway, he stopped walking outside a tiny room, mud walls, thatched roof, and starts telling us how much the villagers love it when foreigners come, and they really want to greet us. Normally we would pretty much dismiss this immediately, but I don't know, I think we wanted to believe. It's tiring being so jaded all the time. So we go in and there are loads of people just sitting around, doing not very much. Godfrey/Geoffrey sits us down and tells us the local greeting, introduces us to everyone, at which point all the villagers start kneeling infront of us to shake our hands, godfrey telling us that this is a great show of respect. He then started telling us that they've prepared a dance for us, and will bring in wreathes to lay on us. Of course, at this point, alarm bells are going off. Wreathes? Kneeling in respect? Dancing? Bollocks. We ask the guy.... So, are we expected to pay for any of this honour? He mumbles something about a donation, a contribution. We feel its probably best not to go down this road. Plus I bloody hate it when people throw stuff as you without asking if you want it then expect you to pay. So we say..I think we're gonna take off. He starts getting a bit worked up, saying that, well, all the villagers are there now, they're expecting something. And we're getting edgy, stuck in this room with loads of them. So geoffry says, well, why don't you buy a bottle of waragi, the local firewater (basically petrol. I'm not exaggerating) which everyone is sitting round drinking. And we think...hmm, well we would like to try it, and they don't sell it in bars, as it's a homebrew (and drinking too much will almost certainly send you blind) so we eventually agree. The bottle gets brought in and is distributed around the villagers (who have mysteriously multiplied in number upon hearing that we were going to buy a bottle). It gets round about half the villagers (and not us, either!) when it runs out and godfrey announces to us that we have to buy another bottle, as not all the villagers have had some. Sod that, methinks. So we leave, pissed off that we have been scammed into feeding these peoples booze habit. We later find out as well, that we were charged nearly 6 times the price.
So now you see, why we are untrusting. It gets tiring.

Anyway, enough of that. We headed back to Kampala, where we get to see the new Simpsons film (very funny actually) and go for a jaunt aroud the Botanic Gardens (where we are attacked by a swarm of giant prehistoric mayfly, before the next day, getting on a bus to Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, where I am currently sitting. Kigali is actually a very pretty city: greenery, trees, bustling but not overwhelming. It is, like Kampala, set on the hills, so it is really very pretty, with some great views. We spent our first day just wandering around, practicing my French, which is shaky to say the least. It keeps coming out as Spanish, which is embarrassing. Today, however, we went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial center. I am sure I don't need to tell you about what happened here in 1994, but being here, knowing the history, it seems to much to comprehend. Here? Only 13 years ago? No. Surely not. Everywhere we go, the descriptions that we have read about haunts us. Bodies littering the streets. Dogs shot en masse because they have developed a taste for human flesh. Not just genocide, but a genocide that was deliberately intended to be as degrading and brutal as possible. Kigali itself shows little outward scars of that time, but...how can people have got over it? Only 1 in every 7 tutsi survived. Now, it seems to be a forward looking city, where people are 'Rwandan', not hutu or tutsi. Anyway, its impossible to see this memorial, which has footage of the killings, pictures, survivors testimonials, and is the final resting place of nearly half a million unidentified bodies, and remain impassioned. For some reason the bit I found that I was most emotional at, was reading about all the people that sheltered tutsis, seeing them with the people they rescued, who would have, without a shadow of a doubt, been dead without them. A Rwandan intellectual said "When they said 'Never again' after the Holocaust, was that meant for some people and not for others?" This memorial ensures that we will never forget.

Tonight we are going for a drink at the famous "Hotel des Milles Collines", which is the hotel from the film Hotel Rwanda, which sheltered hundreds and hundreds of tutsis, to celebrate life over death. It is difficult not to be cheesy, being here.

We have also managed to secure some gorilla permits. How we managed I don't know. More about that next time.

Hope you're all well - Dad its been a long time since I've heard from you. Hows everything going? Take care all.
Love, Leila xxxxxxxxxxxx

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