Make sure you look at the older posts icon, there are pics and writing on the next page too....

Where were we? I was getting onto a bus at 6 in the morning for Rwanda. Ok, bumpy ride and red dust paved the path. It is rumored that the zebras are red and black here, genetics or dirt source, is currently unknown by me.

I arrived in the capital city of Kigali, Rwanda on the 27th of June. I was shocked to see order and cleanliness abound. This city blew Kampala and Nairobi out of the water in those regards. Unbelievable, eery, order here. Needless to say, I find the most charm in the bustling streets of Kampala. I have thus decided this place is a mix between A Wrinkle in Time (you know that part where they go to the other planet and all the kids bounce the balls at the same time) with a dash of 1984 thrown into the mix. So those are descriptions of my impressions.....

But moving on, I met the members of the youth delegation I would be doing the human rights training with and we spent a week with other Rwandese youth studying human rights and making a site visit to a rural area where land disputes are mediated through the organization I am volunteering with, The Center for Information and Social Mobilization. Land allocation is a huge issue here, and all over the world, in part due to subsistence living being the main mode of survival for many people.

During our course we had the opportunity to meet with various human rights organizations from the grass roots NGO level to the governmental department of the Commission of Human Rights. While meeting there I found out that their organization, being affiliated with the government, has certain judicial powers other human rights organizations can only dream of. Like entering places of investigation for abuses unnanounced, and requesting interviews with suspected offenders. Interesting stuff. Although to note, there is a marked difference between a human rights organization funded by the government and one that is not. I will let you decipher that one.

Warning: I am going to talk about the genocide a little and the memorial center in Kigali and it is heavy stuff.....

So one of our first visits was to the Gizozi Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali. Where I will be returning to to do some extensive reseach assistant work for my professor from Kenya. The memorial center has a flame lit from April to June to mark the three months that the genocide took place. Part of their project is to rebury victims of the genocide in collective burial sites at the grounds of the memorial. So bones from all over the country are exhumed from the sites where they were literally dumped during the genocide, and given a proper burial at the memorial site. Some bodies on the bottom of these massive dumping sites where so compacted that they still have skin intact 15 years after the genocide.

The reburial sites are so long I could really contextualize the massive extent of the atrocity but currently about 250,000 people have been reburied there. Barely 1/4 of the casualities which occured in 1994.

Actual clothes and graphic pictures line the walls inside of the memorial. There is also an extensive history from colonial times until the present mapping the roots of divisionism in the country. For those that don't know, one theory about the tensions in Rwandese societyis that the colonial powers issued 'identity cards' distinguishing the Hutu and Tutsi and allocating different levels of priviledge within the society. The original colonizers beleived the Tutsi were superior the the Hutu, thinking they were decendants from a white figure from the bible, you could look up more about this it is called the Hamitic Hypothesis.

Anyway, the memorial dedicated an entire room to the thousands of children who were murdered in the genocide and in those moments I started to believe that the devil exists. You leave with a sick feeling in your stomach at the magnitude of the unimaginable. How do you make sense out of the unbelievable, how do you organize your conscience around a reality of massive violence extremely beyond your frame of reference? That is where the sick stomach feeling comes from.

Our guest house is near the oldest church in Kigali where hundreds of people tried to seek shelter during the genocide and it is thought that the priests would pick certain people out of the crowd, Tutsi, claiming they had safe hiding places for them only to send them outside the church to be hacked to death by machetes; the main weapon used in the genocide. I will be visiting the infamous Hotel Rwanda soon to see the pool, where people swim today, where the survivors survived by drinking the water from.

Many of the Rwandese delegates in our human rights program lost all or some of their family members. Pictures on their cells phones include their current boyfriends maybe followed by a picture of the bones of their parents.

I don't bring it up with them, if it comes into a conversation naturally I will engage in a discussion with them about it. I don't want to treat them like objects of study. Fascination of the abomination, as my teacher at Columbia would put it. I a minterested in being human beings with them.

So this place and time of my travels has been the most challenging, for more reasons than the collective trauma that blankets this beautiful country.

Be Well,
Chelsea