Killing Time in Uganda and Rwanda

This doesn't have anything to do with anything,
but I like how Ugandan shopkeepers don't feel a
garment is properly advertised until you can see how far
it is capable of going over the hips. And this guy was so happy
thinking I was taking his photo.

I was always taught by my very organized family to plan ahead when buying plane tickets. So far, in the past few months, when I’ve sort of put that advice into action (sort of—they plan several months in advance for plane tickets, and I was only managing weeks, but still—for me, that’s good), it has backfired on me. I don’t think there is one plane ticket that I have bought recently that I haven’t had to change, sometimes more than once. For my tickets to the US tomorrow night, I’m on “third time’s a charm!” change.  Naturally, this has added up in airline fees, but fortunately, my wonderful company is taking on those charges since the changes are a direct result of me working for them in an environment that hasn’t yet reached the stage of development when one can begin to make educated guesses about the future.  Another result of that result is that I’m going to help my poor pregnant little (age-wise) sister who just got put on bed-rest last week (she’s having twins) and is maybe needing a tiny bit of help, seeing as she also has an almost-four year old and an almost-two year old and her husband is deployed. Some people don’t plan well, and these are the US military and my sister. Though, my sister is actually usually a genius planner, but some things are (mostly) beyond her control. And even though I didn't make it on her blog list of things she’s happy about in spite of the stress of being on bed rest (yellow flowers and helpful friends and such), I’m giving her a shout-out here (I don’t hold grudges because I’m so much more mature than she is—2.5 years will do that to you), and you should read her blog for deep and insightful posts (which you will NOT find here) and cute pictures of her babies. And for me, I think bed rest could be super-fun, especially since I discovered Amazon.com’s return policy allows you to return a book for a full refund in less than 7 days. And since it never takes me that long to read a book, if I have decent internet connections, Amazon is like my personal library.  But before you get all huffy at me for finding loopholes in systems (Yes, I'm talking to you--my stuffy, rule-following sisters whom I love and adore), I spend PLENTY of money on Amazon that I don’t get back, and they are still making quite a bit of profit off me.

You can see why I
got tired of this, right?

Anyway, circumstances being what they were, I was in Uganda for a week+ with no definite plans.  So, after a few days of hanging out, getting sunburnt by Lake Victoria and spending way too much Neverthirst money in expensive hotels, I decided I would save the organization some dough and instead use my own hard-earned money, which I have diligently saved thanks to Amazon.com and the fact that there is mostly nothing to buy in South Sudan, to go to Rwanda. Why? Because I could. So I did. Why not?

First day in Kigali! Note the flesh-colored band-aids
that don't match my flesh. I'm clearly a freak here.
Also, those band-aids were as terrible as American ones.
Hansaplast are the only goodband-aids!

I landed in Rwanda without much of a plan, but I had found a hotel on Trip Advisor, which gave free airport pick-up, and that is the main kind of planning that I do.  Some day if I ever write about my solo-backpacking trip through SEAsia, you can see that planning a hotel ahead of time is a really big deal for me (OK, let’s be honest, that’s probably not going to happen, so just go ahead and believe that I deserve a pat on the back for planning ahead that much). At said hotel, I posted on Facebook about being in Rwanda and waited for suggestions to come in. They did. Especially one very useful one from a friend of my other currently non-pregnant sister (yes, she’s also my friend too) who hooked me up with one of her friends in Kigali. In spite of being sick, Julie picked me up and brought me to her house for tea and planning my Rwanda tourism strategy. She gave me advice and information about Kigali and convinced a friend in Musanze (town up in the mountains outside of Kigali) to take me in for a night up there. Then her lovely roommate, Jamie, took me to the doctor to look at some weird festering sores on my leg that they agreed looked creepy. I’m pretty sure they started in South Sudan, got worse in Uganda, and apparently they would have gotten even worse if I hadn’t gone to the doctor, so thank those ladies that I am still alive. And that’s how I spent my first hours in Kigali. Adventist (I can’t get away from these guys! Good thing I like them) Doc said, “You have a bacterial staph infection. If it gets more into your bloodstream, you could get very sick.” Or he said something like that, I wasn’t really paying attention to the details. He then got one lucky nurse to clean out all the sores. I’m pretty sure she loved it because she was very diligent and thorough and used much hydrogen peroxide with great force. Then he added another pound to my baggage weight by prescribing two kinds of pills and an antibiotic cream. I’m like a grandma with all the medication I’m taking. I need to get one of those SMTWTFS pill boxes for all my meds. I’m really not good at remembering to take them at the right time. Hopefully that is not crucial to my complete recovery. I took Jamie out to lunch afterwards to thank her for her graciousness in coming with me (making me go) to the doctor. I mean, how many people that you’ve never met in your life would you take to the doctor to get their weird skin disease treated? But that is what you do for fellow expats in need of medical attention. Then you spend a good part of your lunchtime conversation talking of other health issues you’ve had that most people wouldn’t consider proper for mealtime discussion, but these are ways you bond with others here.

Kigali

                                 

On the road to Musanze

                                 

The next day I went up to Musanze, a beautiful town up in a ring of several dormant volcanoes, where rich tourists will pay $750/day to see famous silver-back gorillas. I’m not that rich, and while Neverthirst has been more than generous with me, I didn’t feel that was something I could charge to the company anyway. So I hung out with a lovely family there who took me up one of the volcanoes and sat in a little restaurant while I went for a rainy hike up to the gorilla fence. I didn’t see any gorillas, but I did see some beautiful scenery and a eucalyptus tree that a gorilla had been gnawing on. It was a nice excursion, and a good excuse to see a different part of the country.

Musanze volcanos

Even their farms are beautiful--these red flowers are beans.

TCKs are cool! So are fake gorillas.

                                   

                                         

This is me sucking beauty
in through my giant eyeballs

This country is really extremely beautiful—yes, I say that about everywhere from rolling green tea gardens of Indonesia to endless sandy deserts of Yemen, but I really mean it. Riding the bus up to Musanze, I noticed I was opening my eyes as wide as possible as if I could suck all the beauty into my soul through my eyeballs. I realized I did this years ago while on that solo backpacking trip through SEAsia. It’s weird, and I look like one of those strange monkey-things with huge staring eyes. One thing that really stands out is the lack of trash anywhere. This is amazing to me, having grown up in Indonesia and spent time in India and other places where the road=acceptable place to throw trash. I remarked on this, but the ladies taking me around the country sighed about it as almost symbolic of a nation that is keeping up appearances with a pristine environment, while behind that beauty is a country still struggling to deal with the after-effects of the genocide of 1994.

Musanze rainy volcano day

In 1994, I was in sixth grade. I remember Ben Lawson standing up in front of the class to give a report on the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. His junior-high monotone-presentation voice jumped a little with a boy’s inevitable thrill over saying the words “chopping with machetes.” Still, I remember his horror and my own at the thought of something like that happening. To me, it seemed fantastic—not fantastic/wonderful, but fantastic/impossible/unreal. I never thought that almost 20 years later I would be visiting the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. But I never forgot his presentation either. And I have no idea what current event I spoke about for my presentation.

Kigali

I remembered sixth grade-me as I walked around that museum. I didn’t want to go, but I never considered not going. It feels disrespectful to enjoy a country without remembering the reality of its history. I went to the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia when I was there for the same reason. It is not pleasant to see displays of skulls and leg bones—big and small and clean and whitened. It wrecks you in a way you can’t prepare for even though you felt like you should have tried. Seeing photos of children who were shot or bludgeoned or slashed or burned to death is not easy. Under cherished family photos of beautiful little children who would later be brutally murdered, the families shared details of their lives: their favorite foods, best friends, favorite activities. One 15 month-old’s favorite words was “auntie,” she was burned to death. Another 9 month old child was slashed by a machete while in his mother’s arms. You can’t get over these stories. Even as I loved wandering a new country, enjoying the scenery, I couldn’t get images of streets filled with bodies or mass graves out of my mind.  Seeing these things reminds me of the incredible evil that we as humans are capable of. Anyone who thinks he or she could never do something like that is arrogant or naïve.  We all hope we would be one of the few that stood up for the victims, but it’s probably more likely that we wouldn’t be. The fact that this kind of evil exists in our world in many places, not just Rwanda, shows our desperate need for a Savior. We call behavior like this animalistic, but I don’t think animals generally kill each other for fun or from deep hatred. We do. And it’s not religion or church that we need—in fact, many good church-goers participated in the massacres, including priests and parishioners. When people went to a church, believing that others who claimed to follow the God who loves the world would help them, they were murdered instead.

Coming back down the mountain

As I walked around the city and I could remember back to my sixth grade year, and I knew that people my age or older and even many younger cannot have forgotten what happened.  But walking around the picture-perfect streets of Kigali it is hard to imagine that once the streets were filled with bodies and the smell of death filled the air. It was hard for me not to wonder when looking at people on the bus, in the markets, walking around the mall what they experienced. What side were they on? Do they still think about what happened or do they push away those memories?  I was told that it is actually illegal to ask people their tribal background.  I don’t necessarily think that it’s illegal to talk about what happened, but aside from the memorial, it felt like the events of 1994 never happened. A short video clip on Rwandan Air talked about the new government and the developing nation—a land of a thousand hills and a million smiles. "The government is tough on corruption. Rwanda is developing as an example to neighboring countries." While all that is true, I don’t think it is ultimately beneficial for anyone—Rwanda or the rest of the world—to pretend that the only obstacle the Rwandan people have overcome is inefficient governance. The way to get beyond the horror of those days isn’t to refuse to talk about it. I can only see one way to true healing, both for the victims and the perpetrators, and it is not something that would come naturally to us. We need to know all the time, deep in our souls, not just when sitting in our pews at church, the God of Stephen. The one who gave him the ability to say, “Father forgive them” as he was being stoned to death by his own people.  It may seem easy for me to say that, not having watched my family members murdered, not having had to run for my life or suffer from horrible injuries inflicted on me by people I trusted. But it’s not me saying this. It’s the Man who was betrayed by His friends, condemned by people whose lives He saved, and murdered by an immoral religious establishment in collusion with a corrupt dictatorship. I think He has the right to tell humanity the way to find healing from the violence we wreak on each other. The Genocide Memorial had quotes from survivors of other genocides (the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, massacre in Bosnia), and one quote on one of the boards said, “We don’t want revenge because then they will take revenge again on our children and our children on their grandchildren and so on and it will never stop.”  Being able to restrain oneself from taking revenge is admirable, but being able to recognize the pain and agony that someone caused you and to forgive them, that is life-changing.

Kigali, mass grave, memorial flowers

May God bless the beautiful people of Rwanda in their beautiful country and bring them true peace and healing and hope for a better future. I hope I get to go back someday.