Land of a thousand hills

So after travelling around for two weeks I’ve been back in Nairobi for a few days and it feels really good to be in a familiar place again. It feels a bit like coming home…but not. Consider this the first instalment since none of you would read the whole thing at once even if you wanted to but mostly because it was a really busy trip and there is a lot to write about. We started in Rwanda, ‘we’ referring to myself, Bridget and Gunhild who came from the office in Norway, landing in Kigali on Sunday afternoon. With Sunday being Gacaca day (I’ll explain that later) and Gunhild having taken the overnight flight from Oslo after sitting in a board meeting all day we spent the rest of the day relaxing at the house we were staying at. The house belongs to a Rwanda pastor and his wife. Rachel, the wife, works with us part time and their family built the house as a transit house for people like Bridget who come and go almost every month to 6 weeks. Rwanda is a tiny country with 9 million people. They say it might be the most densely populated country in Africa and it shows. It is also a country built on hills and instead of being organized into villages, or neighbourhoods, people here organize themselves based on which hill they come from and every hill has people either in the city or with small farming plots all over the countryside. Open space with nothing happening on it is hard to come by.

The next day we went up the hill to Friends Peace House, our partner organization in Rwanda. Gunhild and I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon interviewing project coordinators since we’re both in the process of writing newsletters. For the rest of the afternoon we went into downtown Kigali to buy our plane tickets to Bujumbura later in the week and then we went to the Genocide Memorial Museum. It reminded me of the Apartheid Museum in South Africa but smaller. Still, it is a pretty powerful place. It takes you through the history of Rwanda from colonial times to the events leading up to the genocide and then the genocide and its aftermath. The upstairs has one section dedicated to children who were killed, stolen futures I think it was called. Each room has stories and pictures of children who were killed with small plaques telling you their name and then a combination of different things about them like their favourite food, best friend or last words and also how they died.

Tuesday morning we went west from Kigali to visit one of the peace committees that Friends Peace House supports in the region of Ruhengeri. We went with the program coordinator of FPH, Sizeli, to see what initiatives they’ve been trying to implement and also just to see how they work. Ruhengeri is a district that is about an hours drive from the Congolese border and it’s the area where many say the planners and instigators of the genocide came from. It was really interesting to see. We predictably caused a big disturbance when we arrived since the place we were meeting was right beside a primary school, especially when Gunhild got the video camera out. What was really impressive about this peace committee is that they seem to be taking initiative on their own, not waiting for funding or help from the outside. They’ve begun a couple income generation projects on their own. One is an orchard I guess where they’re growing something called ‘punes de japon’ which literally translated means Japanese prunes, however they aren’t like any prune that I’ve ever seen. They’ve also been distributing sheep in the community. They started out with the members of the peace committee each contributing 500 Rwandan Francs per month for 18 months when they bought 12 sheep. Through raising and breeding these 12 sheep there are now over 60 families in the community to have received sheep. By the time we finished there is was time for lunch so we went into Ruhengeri town. Gunhild and I ordered rice, chips (fries) and chicken. It all came out looking the way it should and the piece of chicken was a decent size. The problem however was that it was truly the toughest piece of chicken, or any other kind of meat for that matter, that I’ve ever tried to each in my whole life. It was as if someone had cook this chicken for a few hours and left it out to dry until the time when two unsuspecting customers ordered chicken and they threw it back on the fire. Trying to eat with a fork and knife was completely impossible and after about 5 minutes Sizeli got our waiter to bring by a bucket of water so we could wash our hands and leave the cutlery behind. It seemed like a good idea but I thought I was going to lose a tooth in the process. The only other conclusion I could come to was that we were the unfortunate recipients of a starved chicken that consisted of bones and tendons with no meat to speak of. The chicken stayed on the plate and we said a small apology to this chicken that lost its life for no good reason. I also think we provided a good deal of entertainment for all the Rwandese in the restaurant watching to white girls try to eat chicken.

Our next journey was an hour on a bus to Goma in Eastern Congo but you’ll have to wait until next time. Besides I’m sure you need a break now too.