We stayed in Kigali another day and night, visiting one of the rural genocide memorials — a Catholic church in nearby Nyamata. There, about 5,000 people had been killed while hiding in the church, believing it to be their only safe haven. Serena, Dani and I hired a taxi driver and drove out of the city, into the gently undulating hills, about 45 minutes south. It was close to dusk and the caretakers were closing up when we pulled in. They agreed to give us a quick tour, and really that’s all we needed.
In the main sanctuary the screeching of bats punctuated the stillness. A statue of the Virgin Mary, mounted just under the bullet-hole-pockmarked ceiling, presided over wooden pews covered in mounds of moldering clothing … that of all the victims murdered there. Downstairs is a white-lit room with glass shelves containing skulls and bones, the former lined up row by row and the latter piled up neatly, femurs and tibias carefully stacked.
To see all these remains on display is, of course, disturbing, and one wonders why the memorial planners chose to lay the victims to rest in such a public manner. But this is one way to really understand the scale of the carnage that took place here, the sheer numbers of people all killed at once. Lots of the skulls show how their owners succumbed … small round holes meant bullet wounds, while jagged holes in a spiderweb of cracks and fissures meant death by bludgeoning.
Outside the quiet still church, we could hear the rhythmic calls of large birds swooping through the trees and the distant singing of another, very much alive, church congregation nearby, punctuating the quiet and deepening dusk. Two more mass graves are outside, sunken cement pits with steep staircases leading to barracks-like corridors. These are lined with shelves three deep of skulls and bones, arranged in the same neat symmetry. Row after row, skull after skull, one set of empty eye sockets after another that seem to stare back at you.
We left a donation to the memorial and tips for the two caretakers who had stayed late to tour us around, and got back into the car for the journey home. Night was falling fast and we realized no one around here had electricity, so it had became eerily black. Only the bright full moon, and our headlights falling on the winding mountain roads, lit our drive back.
The next day we got on a bus and bounced about three hours west to Lake Kivu, which spans the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was really a spectacular drive — Rwanda has been called the “Land of a Thousand Hills” and “Africa’s Switzerland,” and all the picturesque towering green hills and valleys do live up to the nicknames. We passed other genocide memorials … these are evidenced by purple bunting and signs in the local language which contain the words “Jenocide” and, in English, “Never Again.” I remembered what our friend Adollphe had told us a couple of nights earlier: that in the capital city of Kigali, the victims had mainly been dispatched quickly and neatly, by shooting — but out in the provinces is where the real sick stuff took place. Slow, torturous butchery by machete or club or knives or rocks. I had to shake this knowledge away and try to appreciate the haunting and endless beauty of the landscape. It wasn’t possible, though; both the sweeping majesty of Rwanda and its tragic history have become inexorably intertwined.
By the time the undulating hills had given way to craggy mountains spiking up through the clouds, we rolled into the lakeside border town of Gisenyi. Because we’ve utterly failed at planning anything on this trip — which is both exciting and stupid, depending on how you look at it — we got to Gisenyi after dark with no room booked and only a few vague ideas of the local accommodations. After a few inquiries, we found a rather pricey but gorgeous place right on the lake called Hotel Paradis, which would do for one night until we could find more reasonable lodging in town in the morning. It turned out to be some great fortune that we did this, as our next-door “neighbor” was an absolutely fabulous, interesting and fun woman named Sharon who came to Africa as a retirement gift to herself after years of teaching English as a Second Language at UC-Berkeley. It also turns out she knew my cousin Sue Conley and her Cowgirl Creamery business partner, Peggy (is there anyone in the Bay Area who doesn’t know Peggy and Sue?). We had nice tilapia dinner in the hotel’s rustically lush open-air common room, drank Primus beer, and watched Ghana beat the USA in the World Cup match before Sharon went to bed early, as she was getting up before dawn to go gorilla trekking.
The next day the three of us spent the morning outside the hotel being thoroughly charmed by some local kids, playing with a blow-up beach ball and plastic kite we’d brought along for just such an occasion. We moved to a less luxe but serviceable guesthouse in town and went exploring through Gisenyi. At first glance, we really didn’t like the town much … the streets too rocky and dirty and rutted, the buildings too ramshackle and depressing, the people eyeing us suspiciously. We trudged along a hot dirt road looking for the lake beach until a local guy came out, took pity on us, and corralled two boys walking by to guide us to the lakefront. Twenty minutes later we crested a hill and saw the vast Lake Kivu rolling out before us, its sandy beaches alive with people sunning and swimming and playing in the water.
Along the lake was some sort of public expo, sort of like a fair without rides, just a lot of booths with crafts and food and a DJ on a stage blasting dance music. Our attitude toward Gisenyi brightened considerably as we sat by the water and feasted on grilled corn on the cob and goat kebabs and fried potatoes, washing it down with lemon Fanta. Then we walked over to the nearby Hotel Serena to watch the World Cup game, England vs. Germany.
While at the hotel we met another very cool person, an English guy named David who has been living/working in Rwanda and the next-door border town in the Congo, called Goma, for years. After lamenting England’s loss to Germany, David ended up convincing Serena and Dani and I of two things: that we should check out the Congo, because Goma really kinda/sorta does not apply to all the travel advisories warning us otherwise; and that we should go gorilla trekking come hell or high water, because that would be one of the most unforgettable experiences of our lives. We made plans to cross the border the next day and see what Goma is like, and figure out how to get ourselves signed up for a last-minute gorilla trek.
