Rwanda: Land of rolling hills, no plastic bags, and boda drivers who wear helmets

My seat partner on the night bus to Kigali didn’t know English, and I don’t know French, so beyond “hello” and sharing our names we weren’t able to verbally communicate. But we both had digital cameras and bonded as we snapped photos out the window in the morning. At one point, he held up the camera and pointed at me questioningly and took my picture and then I felt like a needed to take his back. So now a Burundian man named Joey has a picture of me on his camera and I have a picture of him, leaning against his window and holding up his fingers in some mix between gangster and peace.

Rwanda is beautiful! Huge hills and valleys and so much green farmland! One of the first things I noticed about it was how clean it is – especially compared to Uganda and ESPECIALLY compared to Kenya. There are no plastic bags allowed into the country; the authorities even searched our bus for them at the border.

Another of the first things I noticed when we arrived in Kigali was that the boda drivers wear helmets AND have helmets for their passengers. Shocked? I know, I was too.

I took a boda (and wore a helmet!) to meet Zoë and Jenny and we went out for brunch.

We spent all of Sunday afternoon at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. Outside the trees, plants, and fountains all represented something related to Rwandan history and the genocide. At the bottom of the grounds huge mass graves held the bones of countless people, some of whose names were listed on a huge placard nearby. Fresh flowers had been recently laid on the huge slabs of concrete covering the graves and several floral arrangements were wrapped in ribbon that read simply: “Never again.”

Inside we listened to modules that traced back through the history of the genocide and saw dozens of pictures and artifacts from it. It was strange being there right after I was in western Uganda. One of the things that stood out to me most about the genocide history was that at one point the Huto restricted the minority Tutsis to only 15% of leadership positions…a frightening similarity to what Museveni just proposed in Bunyoro region.

At the end of the memorial was a section dedicated to the children who had been killed. A plaque on the wall said, “To our beautiful children who would have been our future.” There were pictures of many of the kids who had died, some blown into large photographs and others hung in rows along the walls. Another plaque said that some of the pictures were the only one family’s even had of their children – given up for the memorial. I cried in this section. A picture of two small sisters, another of a smiling little boy, another of a baby who had been killed by a machete in her mother’s arms.

It was heavy heavy stuff.

Both nights we stayed in a hostel called St. Paul’s. It was clean, safe, and perfectly located in the middle of the city, AND it was $4 a night each, though we only had two single beds…

On Monday morning we decided we should get an early start in order to squeeze in as much sightseeing as possible. We aimed for 7 and were proud of ourselves for leaving St. Paul’s at 7:15.

When we arrived at the bus station about an hour later to catch a bus to Butare, a town in southern Rwanda, they told us the bus left at 7:30 and we were just in time. Turns out Rwanda is an hour behind Uganda in time and we had actually gotten an early start at 6:15! But it worked out really well because we had just the perfect amount of time in the day to pack everything in.

Butare was about 2½ hours away by bus. We visited the National Museum there, had lunch, and then rode the 2½ hours back again. But we did get to see a significant chunk of the country since Rwanda is so small!

When we got back, we caught a taxi to Nyamata church, another genocide memorial created in memory of the people killed there, who were trying to take refuge inside the church. We arrived at dusk and although all of the regular tours were done for the day, the escari still showed us inside.

All of the benches were stacked high with piles of dirty clothing from people who had died. There were just piles and piles of it. In the ceiling there were bullet holes and underground there were little rooms filled with bones and skulls. No glass windows like at the memorial here, just shelves and shelves of bones.

It was too much to see at once and we left trying to process everything.

When we got back to Kigali we caught bodas to Hotel Rwanda just to say we had been there and then went to a little Indian restaurant for dinner where they serve chapattis and call it naan…

Tuesday morning our bus left at 5:45AM and we arrived back in Kampala about 11 hours later, exhausted and dirty.