Getting to and Being in Rwanda

I stopped in Kigali en route to Eastern Congo partly because I wanted to see Rwanda, the Mille Collines (Thousand Hills), and partly because it's one of the only ways to get from one part of Congo to the other without flying a blacklisted airline. Congolese airlines are known for their old, rundown planes, questionable pilots and banishment from European airspace. Goma in particular is known for its frighteningly short landing strip. After a UN plane crashed in Kinshasa last month, killing 32 out of 33 passengers and crew, I was all the more confident in my decision to take the "scenic route" (Kinshasa to Nairobi to Bujumbura to Kigala and back into Congo overland) and a normal airline, figuring my life is worth the extra money and layovers.

Hilariously (or something) enough while our Kenya Airways flight was descending, we encountered massive fog (it happens in Rwanda). Clearly not trained in tactful announcements, the pilot said something to the effect of, "We have no visibility but we are going to attempt to land anyway." With images of the blown apart UN plane ingrained in recent memory my traveling partner contemplated the brace position while I considered removing my seatbelt so as to be ejected in the event of the plane splitting open (unintentional strategy of the one UN survivor). After a few moments of silent panic the pilot came on and said something about as articulate as "never mind." And so we made a u-ie in the sky and went back to Bujumbura to wait for the fog to lift. Only that never happened. So we went all the way back to Nairobi, got on a different plane and flew to Kigali directly. It's 1000 miles from Kinshasa to Kigali and it took about 24 hours. 

Kigali is a lovely city. Granted I stayed and wandered in the nicer areas but they were better paved, greener and cleaner than any of the 14 other African countries I've been to, except maybe, just maybe South Africa. I didn't get harassed, got lost in a lovely bilingual bookstore and drank mutzig on draft. And it really does have a thousand hills or maybe a gazillion. My walks were beautiful and runs even better. 

It was so beautiful and peaceful that it was difficult to imagine that less than 20 years ago this spring hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered here. But they were. So I spent one morning at the genocide memorial center in the city. 

Outside were a string of beautiful gardens planted around the mass graves where remains continue to be buried. Each garden represents a facet in the causes and aftermath of the genocide. My favorite was called something like "Garden of the International Community Who Stood by and Did Nothing" (but more succinct). See garden statue below: monkey on a cell phone.

The museum itself was painful to go through especially in the last exhibit, where murdered children were profiled ("favorite food: mother's milk," "cause of death: smashed against a wall"). 

It was a short and kind of heavy time in Rwanda and the last thing I did there was try to control my car sickness enough to be able to look out of the window and enjoy the landscape on the way to the border. Even the smaller border town of Gisenyi was paved and clean and I got my exit stamp in a bright, modern building. Then the paved road abruptly ended, the smell of raw sewage just as abruptly began, and in a tin roof shack smaller than the pile of garbage beside it, I got my entry stamp back into Congo. Welcome Home.