Posts Tagged ‘Rwanda’

“And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world.” — Talmud

November 21st, 2012

Hello Peeps …

I don’t normally do this, but during this week of Thanksgiving I am personally reaching out to all y’all on behalf of my dear friend, Innocent Twagirumukiza from Gisenyi, Rwanda.

Innocent has a remarkable story too long to tell here, but in a nutshell, he and his immediate family survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994 while the rest of their extended family was killed.

As a result, Innocent has devoted his life to building and promoting eco-tourism in that region of the world. In this way he can help to develop a sustainable economic engine in an area that is otherwise ravaged by corrupt and destructive industries. (Through Green Hills Eco-Tours, Innocent took me and my friends Dani and Serena gorilla trekking in the DR Congo in 2010 … an unforgettable experience.)

Innocent with Serena, me, and Danielle in happier times — Gisenyi, Rwanda, 2010

Currently, that part of the Congo-Rwandan border is on the verge of war as a rebel group (most likely backed by government agencies) is escalating violence in a ploy for control over the area’s mineral riches. No one is spared, including women and children, and a humanitarian crisis is brewing.

Innocent’s livelihood has been put on hold as he and his family are trying to survive in this environment. I am sending money directly to Innocent’s bank account in Rwanda so that he can support his family and attempt to keep them safe during the conflict. If anyone would like to contribute, even just a few dollars – $5? $10? – it goes a very long way in that part of the world — trust me. It will help immeasurably.

All donations can be sent via Paypal to my account, loharrist@yahoo.com, and I will provide receipt of your payment plus confirmation that the funds were sent to Innocent’s personal account with Bank of Kigali.

Innocent has not asked me to do this, but I can tell you that he is eternally grateful for any support he and his family receives from far-away friends in more stable parts of the world.

If you cannot make a contribution, please consider sharing this request on your social networks — and please also give personal thanks this week that you and your family are in a place of safety and peace.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Love,
Eileen

No comments »

Posted in Travels

Tags:

A Little Theft, A Whole Lotta Bumpy Road

July 10th, 2010

After our grueling jungle trek, Dani and Serena and I decided we deserved a day at the Hotel Serena for poolside piñas, and we’d begin the journey to Kenya refreshed and rejuvenated that night. Our sense of relaxation came to an abrupt end not long after we left the hotel, when Dani had her backpack stolen from the bed of the pickup truck in which we’d been riding. Dani wisely had all her valuables in the daypack she kept on her, so there was nothing of worth to the street kids who had run alongside the truck and lifted her bag. Size zero female clothing, miniature high heels and Caucasian-complexion makeup didn’t interest them, so with the help of a friendly local businessman, Dani miraculously got her bag back the next morning. Just about everything was intact (albeit smelly and dirty). We chalked it up to a valuable travel lesson we needed; we’d been too complacent, had ignored the gut instincts that told us putting our bags in back wasn’t a good idea.

And now we had to double-time it to Kenya, busing it from Gisenyi to Kigali to Kampala to Kisumu. More than 24 hours and two border crossings later we arrived at the guesthouse in Kisumu where our friend Casey, and other volunteers with the medical project he’d organized, had gathered.

Casey, a med student at Tulane, was there with fellow project planners and volunteers from the U.S. They’d been organizing this free clinic for about a year, and had brought thousands of dollars’ worth of donated medications and supplies to set up in a local hospital in rural Port Victoria, on the Ugandan border. It was the home town of one of the organizers, Rennatus, a public health officer now living in Atlanta. Of the three of us latecomers, Dani was the only one with health skills to lend to the project (she’s a nutritionist). But as we’d learned in previous volunteer stints abroad, anyone willing to help can and will be put to work.

We took much-needed showers and met up with the other volunteers at a small lakeside restaurant for dinner (grilled tilapia eaten, per custom, without utensils) and Tusker beers. Then it was on to the Hotel Imperial bar to watch Ghana vs. Uruguay in the World Cup. Ghana, the only African team left in the tournament, had the rabid support of everyone in town and so we all cheered for them too: me and Serena and Dani and Casey, and the others: Megan, Stephanie, Laura (all Americans) and Rennatus, Mike, and Merugi (Kenyan-Americans). Ghana lost in a heartbreak ending just as both Casey and Laura started feeling the first rumblings of travel illness (blamed on some street-vendor samosas eaten that morning). The day was definitely over.

By 3 o’clock the next afternoon, when we met at the bus station for our trip west to Port Victoria, the worst of Casey and Laura’s puking was over, though they still felt pretty lousy. I felt bad for them, first on a jostling and hot 2-hour bus ride, then crammed into a matatu (mini-bus) for another two hours. It was definitely a Developing Country Travel Experience, with 22 passengers packed into 10 designated seats, more people clinging to the outside of the vehicle, and all the associated smells and sights and sounds that come with it. My iPod kept me sane as I pressed against the window and thanked the travel gods that at least this road was (by Kenyan standards) relatively smooth. A million stars and a big meal greeted us when we arrived in Port Victoria, and then we distributed ourselves into the three resident houses where we’d be spending the next five days.

1 comment »

Posted in Kenya, Rwanda, Travels

Tags:

Rwanda: Kigali and Lake Kivu

July 3rd, 2010

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.

No comments »

Posted in Rwanda, Travels

Tags:

Rwanda: Kigali and Genocide Memorial Centre

June 25th, 2010

Serena, Dani and I paddled out of Lake Bunyonyi in the morning sunshine, in a deep dugout canoe crafted out of a single log. Our taxi-driver friend Jackson met us at the dock and drove us about 45 minutes south to the Ugandan/Rwandan border. We got our Uganda exit stamps and trudged down the red-dusty road to the Rwandan side, trailed by a pack of money-changers vying to buy our Ugandan shillings. “Sister, Sister, change money!” No one, not even the Forex currency exchange office at the border, offered better than a lousy 2.5 percent exchange rate. We kept our shillings, got our passports stamped and ran over to a bus to Kigali that idled on the road waiting for us to jog up, panting, and get on.

The hour-and-a-half drive southeast to Kigali, in the center of the small country, passed jutting green hills and mountains terraced with crops, and deep valleys that dropped into villages, rivers and farms. There is a peaceful, almost idyllic feeling in the countryside that belies everything that happened here in the not-so-distant past.

Reading up on Rwanda’s history, its long civil war that culminated in a horrifying 100 days of genocide in 1994, I had expected the emotional toll to have scarred the land and the people, the unsettled ghosts of the slaughtered million to continue haunting the country and everyone in it. So I was surprised to see people smiling, laughing, going about their everyday business as if unburdened by the momentous cruelty that had happened here just 16 years ago. I had read that Rwanda has healed remarkably, the tribal lines of the warring Hutu and Tutsis dissolved, everyone simply Rwandans now. This is impressive and a wonderful example of the difficult human capacity to forgive, and yet … Maybe it’s because I’m an outsider, because my immediate association with Rwanda is that of genocide, but I looked at everyone over a certain age and I wondered: Which side were you on? What role did you play? Did you do any of the killing? What memories rise up when you close your eyes?

I can’t be the only one who thinks like this; indeed, Serena and Dani confirmed that they harbored the same ideas. Maybe the more time we spend in Rwanda the less we’ll be consumed by the atrocities that happened to it and in it. Maybe we’ll be able to move beyond all that and appreciate what — at first blush anyway — is a beautiful and vibrant place, with a capital city that comes alive at night in a million little lights scattered along the hills.

The day we arrived in Rwanda was Dani’s birthday, and we didn’t want to spoil it by focusing too much on the genocide. We skipped the memorial museum and opted for a bar that showed the World Cup games on two screens — coincidentally, the England (vs. Slovakia) match on one, the U.S. (vs. Albania) on the other. Both our countries won their respective matches and advanced to the next round, putting us all in a good mood that extended to a really delicious Indian dinner at the Khana Khazana restaurant. Expats abounded in both places, making it hard to believe at times that we were really in Africa.

Today we will visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre. It’s important and valuable that we do this, but here in our room, typing this under another in a series of mosquito bed nets, my guts tense up just thinking about it.

The next day …

We spent four hours at the Memorial Centre, and while there I heard and saw images and details about the Rwandan genocide that will stay with me for a long, long time. The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre is impressive in its roles as a source of education, of healing, and as a dignified resting place for some 300,000 victims (and growing, as remains are still being found). I know so much more now about what happened in Rwanda than I did when I walked in (not to mention the histories of other genocides … Armenians, Jews, Serbs, Cambodians and more) and yet there are some things I will never understand. Why did the killers have to be so barbaric, why did they have to cause as much suffering as possible, why did they have to torture even babies and children? What turns an ordinary person into a savage killer who enjoys inflicting agony on others, including people they had known, liked, lived with? How was it that not even the churches were a safe haven, priests betraying their own congregants?

On display was some of the anti-Tutsi propaganda circulated by the extremist Hutus before the genocide, and it struck me as remarkably similar to the hate rants spewed by the likes of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Arguments built on lies, designed to foster distrust and fear, to divide, to demonize those who don’t share your politics or your race or your religion or your sexual orientation or your nationality. What I saw at the Memorial Centre was “us vs. them” carried out to its most extreme conclusion, hate and fear turning average people into crazed killers. It happened here in Rwanda; it could happen anywhere, and even now in my own country the seeds of this insane mob mentality are being planted and cultivated and nurtured, all under the guise of a pleasant, civilized name … Tea Party. How lovely that sounds.

That evening we went to the Hotel des Milles Collines, depicted in the film “Hotel Rwanda.” Its manager, Paul Ruesesabagina, sheltered thousands of people there during the 100 days of madness, saving them from the slaughter. We read other accounts of such heroism in the Memorial Centre, people risking their own lives to save others, and it was a good thing to remember after all that graphic, disturbing evidence of human cruelty and weakness. At the hotel I met a man named Adollphe who was a Tutsi, who was 16 in 1994 and whose father, a community leader, had been among the first to die. Adollphe was saved, along with the rest of his family, hiding in a church. He felt lucky; his father had been shot and not tortured, the rest of his family spared. He and his mother and siblings have good jobs, good lives now. But he assured us that, despite outward appearances, despite how much the country has moved forward and the people have gotten on with their lives, the ghosts are still there, always there. How could they not be?

Out in the street we saw a beggar whose four limbs had obviously been hacked off, and we knew exactly what had happened to him. He’s probably the only surviving member of his family, and no one else gives a damn about him now, because everyone’s got a story like that. Despite my “food only, not money” policy with beggars, which Serena and Dani share, we gave him both food and money. It won’t help the guy in the long run, this man whose past and present and future was ripped away in his youth by someone to whom he had done nothing. It probably only helped to make us feel a little less guilty about our own good luck of the draw, to have been born and raised in safe places, never knowing horror like this.

No comments »

Posted in Rwanda, Travels

Tags: