rwandan holiday

Life in Madrid is remarkably pleasant. Spain does, however, lack a bit of the third world charm that I associate with living overseas. If you're living outside of the US, the water should burn your skin, the toilet paper should itch, the road should end for no reason, the waiter should explain that the restaurant doesn't actually have any of the things listed on the menu, right? I don't mean every day, but at least sometimes. So to get away from it all, I went to Rwanda for a couple of weeks. My friends Julie and Ryan and their kids live there. Staci and Erin, friends from DC, were passing through on an east Africa tour. Plus I wanted to finally cross the equator. And Africa's not that far away from Spain, just across the Straits of Gibraltar . . .

It was a great trip. I'd consider working in Kigali. The weather is great (tropically lush, but with enough altitude to make the sweat and bug factors manageable), the politics are interesting, and the needs are compelling. [I was there for only 10 days, so don't take anything I say too seriously.] Rwanda is small, green, and hilly. It is also full of people. Kigali's hills disguise the city's sprawl and it doesn't feel overcrowded or unsafe, though it is growing fast. But out in the countryside, you just never reach a point where there aren't people. The population is still mostly rural, and people's crops run up every inch of steep hillside.

First thing, we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The museum is impressive: modern, thoughtful, and, as far as I could tell, fair. Surrounding gardens take a little of the sting out of the fact that the memorial is the site of mass graves for thousands of victims. Standing there where the genocide happened, knowing that the people who work in the museum - like everyone else in Rwanda - lived through it ... is baffling and upsetting. The only thing more astonishing than the murder of a million people in 100 days is the genocide's combination of cold calculation with repeated hideous physical brutality. The Memorial was a punch in the gut, but a necessary one.

The line that I heard repeatedly, starting at the Memorial, is that people don't think of themselves as Tutsis and Hutus anymore. They are all Rwandans now. I'm in no position to judge how much Rwandans have internalized this message, but clearly the government is promoting it heavily. Meanwhile, an international tribunal is trying top genocide planners while traditional community-based courts are trying to sort out the other 85,000 people accused of participating in the violence.

After a couple of days in Kigali, we spent a weekend in Gisenyi, a vacation and border town a few hours northwest of Kigali. Gisenyi is at the north end of Lake Kivu, which makes up much of Rwanda's western border. The area is pretty enough. Unfortunately, the lake covers a big methane deposit that occasionally sends up bubbles big enough to suffocate people who are swimming or boating nearby. [The methane also fuels the national beer plant that is just outside of town.] As if that weren't enough, there's a steaming volcano on the Congo side of the border. A few years ago, it erupted and poured lava down onto the town.

The highlight of the Gisenyi trip was touring a coffee washing station that processes a local cooperative's coffee beans. USAID funded the project, so Ryan knew the cooperative's president. He took us through the washing process. The coffee cherries are sorted according to whether they sink or float in swimming pool-sized tanks, depulped, re-sorted, and ultimately dried in the sun on long tables. It wasn't the right season to see the project in action, but we learned all about the coffee business that day. The cooperative is able to pay local farmers a higher price for their coffee both by cutting middlemen out of the initial cherry purchase and by selling the dried (but not roasted) beans to companies who market it as specialty blends rather than as a commodity.

Then it was gorilla time. We showed up at Volcanoes National Park before 7 am with our long-reserved $375 mountain gorilla viewing permits in hand. The park staff split us into groups of eight, briefed us on the gorilla families, and explained that trackers were already with the gorillas. The guides, talking via radio to the trackers, would lead us right to the gorillas. We hiked for an hour or so through thick damp jungle. And there they were.

The gorillas were having their mid-morning siesta, just sitting around. We looked at the silverback (alpha male) first, then walked a few meters to where a mother and baby were hanging out. Over the course of our hour, we saw the entire family: the silverback, a 'deputy' silverback, four breeding age females, and four young ones. Obviously, the gorillas are used to people, seeing eight tourists and their cameras every morning, not to mention the trackers who are with them all the time for research and protection from poachers, and they really didn't react to us. The guides and trackers constantly reminded the gorillas of our presence with a sort of throat-clearing noise. Though the rule is to stay seven meters from the gorillas, the gorillas go where they want, and sometimes we were briefly only an arm's length apart.

The gorillas watched us watching them. They were clearly thinking about us in a way that I've never seen in other animals, even pets. Unlike some of the other tourists in my group, seeing the gorillas was not something that I had been yearning to do since childhood. I didn't feel the need to go back for a second look the next morning, as everyone else in the group intended to do. But it was a very cool experience to be with the gorillas on their turf. The only downside was that, unlike my friends who went to see a different family, I didn't get to see gorilla sex.

Then we went back to Kigali, where I spent a couple of days wandering around the city, reading “Sundays by the Pool in Kigali”, playing with Ryan and Julie's kids, and otherwise enjoying the good life. One day I drove down to southern Rwanda to visit the national museum, see the former king's palace (the pretender to the throne lives in Virginia, but may return), and cruise through Rwanda's second city, Butare.

There was time for one last adventure, so we drove to eastern Rwanda, near the border with Tanzania, for a safari. They say that Rwanda is not Class A safari, but I was darn pleased. We got to see giraffes, hippos, baboons, warthogs, crocodiles, several flavors of monkeys, impalas and all their antelope relatives, and all sorts of big birds.

Rwanda is fun. Everyone should go!

wish you were here,
Rob

Go here to see Rwob's pictures.