In Rwanda, every road has a story.

Before I came on this volunteering trip to Rwanda (and it’s hard to believe I am on week four already) I had read some basic travel guide information about Rwanda’s turbulent history and the earlier days of colonialism which probably sowed the seeds for much of the subsequent tragedy.

I had also read a book called Shake Hands with the Devil – subtitled ‘the failure of humanity in Rwanda’ by Colonel Dallaire who was the head of the Unamir force in Rwanda in 1994 when everything fell apart. It was a good book, but really more about day to day events and how he felt his hands were tied by ineptitude and vacillation at the UN and by international bodies. It was written from the heart and a good introduction to the topic and the country.

Fast forward to two weeks ago and in Kigali Public Library where my team is based I stumbled across a rare book in English – the library being a mix of the local Kinyarwanda language, the heritage language of French and more recently English (now the official language of Rwanda in a bid to become part of the East Africa trading bloc. The book had the lengthy title of ‘We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families’ and the author was someone called Philip Gourevich. I decided that rather than try to download it onto my Kindle I’d join the library temporarily and borrow the actual book. That was interesting in itself (joining) but the book turned out to be an essential read.

Somehow this young man had ended up in Kigali, Rwanda around 1996 and – improbably – had seemed to gain almost unlimited access to the then vice president Paul Kagame. So he seemed to have been able to bounce ideas off the man who had effectively liberated the country in the wake of the 1994 genocide, and this led to some very interesting dialogue, chronicled verbatim in the book.

But in fact what was even more fascinating was the interviews he had managed to get with articulate and – obviously traumatised – victims of the genocide. Because of our project in Rwanda we have been lucky enough to travel for official reasons to visit co-ops in many of the rural parts of the country. So by mid-August we had been in Butare – 30 minutes from the Burundi border in the South, to Kayonza and Akagera on the Tanzanian border and also over due west from Kigali to Kibuye on Lake Kivu. And in the process we had seen lots of genocide memorials and a lot of the names of the towns and villages we had passed through began to appear in the testimonies of these survivors in 1996. We had also visited the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali, and that contextualised a lot of what we saw in our travels. But the book intrigued me.

Fast forward again to four days ago. I’m standing holding a rented bike in the dirt road main street of a small one horse village called Kinunu that overlooks Lake Kivu. Its way up high, with banana trees and coffee bushes visible in every direction. It’s located about 50k south of Gisenyi, where the border crossing to the DRC (Congo) is situated on a natural route skirting the North of this vast lake. Gisenyi is the extreme Northwest of Rwanda and unlike a lot of the country, it seems to get a reasonably high rainfall. Queues for water are rare. I have cycled down here on the Congo-Nile trail, (which is a subject in itself) and the plan is to stay the night at the coffee drying station on Lake Kivu shoreline which is 2km straight down a terrible dirt track. I have managed to drag myself to this spot across a selection of the hills that Rwanda is famous for. More walking than cycling at times. My guide Bosco thinks I’m a wimp (he’s right) but we have no language in common so he can’t tell me this. His looks are telling however. But I digress.

Suddenly I realise that Kinunu, this very insignificant nothing of a collection of mud huts in Northwest Rwanda, is where Odette, one of the prime interviewees in the book I’m reading, was born. She became a doctor against odds that redefine the word ‘incredible’. She and her husband adopted ten kids after the Genocide. Her mother’s brothers – her uncles – were all carted off to their death from this very crossroads I was standing at. That was – I think – in 1963 in one of the earliest pogroms against the Tutsi. Later on, she and her father hid in the bushes on the side of this mountain for months, again before the final events of 1994. The area was probably no better or worse than others in 1994, but its remoteness and the utter lack of anonymity was different from ‘the big city’. The dirt roads became the killing grounds. I then remembered something else.

About an hour back down the road we had stopped (I had slumped) in another small village to buy warm Fanta (no electricity) and gulp down some sugar. Everyone was very polite, albeit staring at the ‘Muzungu’ (me) was the order of the day. As I had tried to convince myself to continue I had realised that EVERYONE in that village – kids included – was carrying a machete, a small sickle or a large knife. It made sense – you work from dawn to dusk and those are the tools of the trade. You peel manioc roots. You chop down big hanks of plantains. You cut grass where you can find it and haul it back to your scrawny cow. And evidently, once in a while, you use that sharp blade for a more sinister purpose. To be honest I didn’t feel at all threatened, I had a guide and I was too knackered to worry about it. But in the light of the book, it was a real jolt.

I survived (just about) the legend that is the Congo-Nile trail. I saw the border crossing into the DRC. I managed to find out from Bosco that he was #8 out of 14 kids, was 23 and had a Congolese mother, so the whole family fled to the DRC when he was 2 in 1994. He never really had proper schooling and worked as a cycle taxi – giving people lifts on the back of his bike around Gisenyi. No wonder he was so fit.

Back in Kigali on Sunday night and licking my wounds I finished the last forty pages of that remarkable book. The author might – just might – be too influenced by his interviews with the president elect, but still a huge amount of what he said made sense. Like – why, after the genocide, when Rwanda was on its knees, did virtually all of the humanitarian aid go to the refugee camps outside Rwanda where the killers (genocidaires) had fled and were effectively holding a million people as hostages? And in the process hijacking much of the aid, swapping it for arms and heading back into Rwanda to ‘finish the job’? And why did no-one protest when those same people started killing Tutsis in North Kivu (who had been there for hundreds of years) and sending them swarming back into what was left of Rwanda. I know I don’t know all the facts around what I’m outlining, and I won’t pretend to. I do know that generally whoever wins the war gets to write the history. But I will just suggest that you read a remarkable book, even if your interest in Rwanda is minimal. You won’t regret it.

Fabien never saw the 1994 World Cup

In 1994, Fabien was nine years old. His favourite sport was football and his favourite food was egg and chips. But sadly when the world cup happened in the US that year, Fabien was dead. He was a Tutsi and after April 6^th that year, the madness descended. He had some family left, because they gave his profile details to the Kigali Genocide Memorial museum, and that’s where I read them recently.

In 1994 my youngest son was born on April 11^th. In July Roberto Baggio missed the penalty in the California sun that gave Brazil the 1994 World Cup. Baggio was ‘the divine ponytail’ but in the end, he choked. Irish hopes had been high after the euphoria of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. But we faded in the heat and humidity of Florida, despite a famous win against Italy. So a nation sighed. But in central Africa, they had a lot worse to deal with.

If I’m really honest, I was probably more interested in 1994 in the World Cup than I was in Rwanda. I saw the insane scenes on TV and I suspect I thought ‘It’s a long way away, somewhere in Africa’. Terrible but a long way away. But in the middle of it all, a kid called Fabien died in an ugly and orchestrated genocide.

I did my historical homework before coming to Rwanda on this volunteering stint. And while I expected the genocide museum to be a tough visit, I feared it could be worse than it was. But I hope Fabien sticks in my mind. Even if I can’t really comprehend what happened in that year of highs and lows. Fabien would have been 30 this year, he might have been playing centre-half for his local team.   

But traveling along the roads of rural Rwanda this week, I can still see kids playing football in their bare feet on dusty roadside patches. Somehow, life goes on for those who remain. I still can’t really understand what happened in ’94, but I hope I remember Fabien when this trip to Africa ends.

Shaken, not stirred in Kigali

It was the blizzard of Whatsapps that woke me up rather than the actual earthquake. (As an aside, I’m inordinately proud of that line – sort of casual but threatening…). So here’s the deal. I’m in Rwanda working on a volunteering project – of which more anon – but on last Thursday night the country had a fairly major ‘quake at 3.30am. I, unsurprisingly, was dead to the world, but I recall through my dreams that someone seemed to be banging a lot on the pipes on the balcony and for some reason the wardrobe doors were vibrating roundly. Cue the aforementioned tsunami of Whatsapps from my (more alert) colleagues in the hotel. So I got up, wandered round for a bit, decided ‘It’s all over’ and lay down again. But when the next mild tremors arrived, I actually got dressed and no – I did NOT go outside – being Irish I went back to bed. We discovered the next day that pretty much all of the ‘under-reactors’ like me did this (sleep in our clothes), rather than heading down to reception to ask the staff ‘What should we do’? An interesting added element to what’s turning out to be an amazing trip.

The problem is that events and meetings and experiences are coming so thick and fast it’s next to impossible to process them. Then throw in the odd earthquake and it gets even more complicated. So I have decided that this and future posts will have to feature more images than usual, but if a picture tells a thousand words, then this should help. As a matter of interest, when I see the word ‘thousand’ it occurs to me that this is the ‘land of a thousand hills’. It’s actually true. Having now travelled East, South and West from the central capital city Kigali, they are absolutely everywhere. It’s one of the most memorable landscapes I have ever seen.

So last week (starting August 3^rd) we launched into a series of interviews with stakeholders in the drive to assist female economic empowerment/employment in Rwanda. And on top of that we hit the road to meet the members of the female co-ops who form a tomato-growing initiative called Imali. Lovely people, main problem being all our dialogue with each of the four co-ops we met had to be translated as these women really only speak Kinyarwanda (local language) and a dialect version of French. So this was a pain but we had to put up with it and kept using the phrase ‘what did she say’ a lot. It’s a bit perplexing when the woman talks for 7 minutes and the translator goes ‘she said that they harvest the crop three times a year’. Something’s missing. But it’s been fascinating and hopefully will continue to be so as we try to knit what we have learned into a coherent proposal.

Most amazing of all – the Rwandan roads. Where people walk goats like dogs. Where women balance crazy, huge bundles of firewood on their heads while talking on a mobile. Where men (typically) cycle sturdy machines with ANYTHING on them. Things like a rolled tin roof for a house. Like another bicycle. Like multiple jerrycans of water. Like a trussed live goat. Like a giant hank of green bananas. Like two more people on the bike. Look at the snatched pictures, you’ll get the picture.

Other recent highlights? Definitely visiting the ‘women for women’ initiative in East Rwanda. Getting to Lake Kivu at Kibuye and managing to take a boat trip. Visiting Butare, about 30k from the Burundi border. Establishing that Karaoke is the new passion of the volunteering crew (and the cheesier the song, the better the fun. The Lionel Ritchie revival continues here). Discovering that Rwandans share my passion for football (soccer) and Arsenal are huge here – even if they were beaten by West Ham on the opening day of the premiership to local’s disgust. Seeing barefoot games of soccer in dusty roadside patches of dirt at dusk. Hearing some great jazz at the Hotel des Mille Collines (Hotel Rwanda). I even joined Kigali Public Library this week, because we’re working in an office there and I saw a book I really wanted to read. So I’m now ‘on the local files’…if not actually a ‘local’.

The downs? Mosquito bites. But the creams help. It’s also amazing how Apps like Whatsapp make it so easy to talk with home – literally. They really make it easier to be away and to try to stay connected both here and there.

Week three beckons – hope it’s as stimulating as the last two were (and that the vibrating hotel room was a one-off!). #ibmcsc rwanda

Red dirt roads in Rwanda

  

I think most people who have any kind of real traveling under their belt will tell you that you don’t truly find out how a country really works until you leave the cities and see what the hinterland looks like. Now a full week into my volunteering spell in Kigali, my fellow volunteers and I decided to absent ourselves from city life for two days and see what the countryside would do to inform us about Rwandan life.

We had also decided to do something positive for Rwanda’s emerging tourist market by going down and staying overnight in Akagera national Park, which effectively forms a large part of the border with Tanzania. So at 7.15am on Saturday morning we loaded ourselves into two 4X4s, threw ourselves at the mercy of our drivers Fabrice and Emmanuel, and headed East out of Kigali proper.

I still have not managed to find a map of the city, but my perception is that it lacks a discernible ‘centre’ per se. In any case, about 30 minutes after we left the hotel, we could see that ‘the city’ was ebbing fast and the country was taking over. The roads were pretty good as we went up and down the hills that the country is famous for. But what was evident from the roadside villages and looking down the valleys was that there is still a lot of poverty in Rwanda. There are red dirt tracks leading back from the two-lane main roads, but the majority of houses on those main roads are basic mud-block houses and my impression was that people live outside as much as possible, and probably only go in to sleep. At least during the current dry season. Instinctively I feel that the houses that are out of sight are likely to be even more basic than those on the roadside.

Children were to be seen in great numbers, and it occurred to me that in a subsistence agricultural economy every pair of hands helps, even if another mouth to feed goes with them. We certainly saw lots of kids working, minding goats, and fetching water – of which more later. And lots of very young kids apparently unsupervised, though in rural communities I know that ‘everyone looks out for everybody else’ I already knew that walking in Africa is not a pastime, it’s a way of life. But the numbers of people walking the sides of the roads still always makes an impact. Cycles were also in evidence, and we’re not talking about slim, carbon-fibre models here. Rural Africa runs on steel frames, every bike has a carrier, and most that we met or passed had at least one person on that carrier. They are often decorated with colourful mud-flaps, ribbons etc. But more than that, mostly people – kids included – were hauling water on their bikes. The pictures illustrate this quite vividly.

I started to form a link in my head back to rural Ireland in the 40s and 50s when houses didn’t have running water, but every so often there was a parish pump that would deliver drinking water (and gave rise to the parish pump politics phrase). Now if you see them, they’re painted up tourist relics or ensconced in a theme pub somewhere. In Rwanda however, they are alive and well and every few km along the road you could see a group of people waiting their turn to fill up at the local ‘pump’. I’m hoping that the water is free, given the poverty of much of the audience, but what impressed most was the sheer numbers of people hauling it on their bikes. Up those ever present hills.

I think the images posted with this blog probably tell more than words can about where rural Rwanda is, and what keeps it afloat. Small banana patches are very common, people dig small plots with those kind of spade-hoe that never seemed to get to Western Europe, but works very effectively here. Goats are common, so are Ankole cattle, with big horns. The soil is lava-red, people (mainly women) balance loads with practised ease on their heads, and mobile phone operators seem to be everywhere, as simple phones are affordable and – we’re told – used for many ingenious purposes. Oddly, there were no dogs in evidence, which I found strange as I have seen them in the poorest of places previously. Something to investigate.

So after roaming the roads of Eastern Rwanda we finally came to Akagera game park, which proved to be a very beautiful spot. It’s large, with a range of habitats, from bush in the south to savannah in the north, and with a string of hippo-filled lakes on the extreme east and bordering Tanzania. These are effectively fed by the Akagera river, which is one of the source rivers which eventually combine to form the Nile. Stanley (yes, THE Stanley) was here in 1876, we were told, and Lake Ihema was apparently thus called because it was the nearest sound in local dialect to what Stanley kept saying, which was ‘thanks’. Thus are legends born, and I’m in no position to argue. We enjoyed a varied game drive on Sunday, and then headed back onto the red dirt roads, which soon became tarmac, and took us back to Kigali around dusk.

 

And yes, they were still carrying water along the roads of Rwanda on Sunday evenings. More a way of life than a luxury, and I don’t think in this context there is any real ‘day of rest’. Every day’s a working day in rural Rwanda. #ibmcsc rwanda

I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road, And I asked him “Where are you going”? and this he told me…