Land of a Thousand Hills

I went to Rwanda earlier last week. My surrogate father Dale is the unit leader for the team here in Mbarara and the team in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. He needed to pay the Rwandan team a visit, so Laura, Josh, Jason (another short termer who arrived recently) and I decided to come along.

We started our trip on Monday, left about an hour later than we had planned on, our van overheated about 2 hours in, and I used someone's pit latrine on the side of the road (I'm getting much better at that than when I first got here...I can almost get it all in the hole). We ate lunch in Kabale, a town at the bottom of Uganda, crossed the border and drove to Kigali. The drive was stunning. Beautifully cultivated hills spanned the country side. The contrast from Uganda to Rwanda was almost immediate. The roads are nicely paved and litter free. In fact, it's illegal to bring plastic bags into the country. I'm a fan of that.

We checked in at our hostel and went to a missionary couple's house for dinner. They're from New Zealand and the husband looks just like Mr. Bean (in fact, he often gets shouts and inquisitive looks from strangers and passerbys). After dinner and an amazing cup of tea, we watched a film entitled "As We Forgive". It's about the reconciliation after the genocide 16 years ago. This was a good preface for our activities the following day.

We started out our morning visiting the genocide museum. This provided us with a great deal of information and context through to view the culture. Prior to my visit, I knew little of of the conflict and what I did know was very general knowledge or came from the movie Hotel Rwanda. The museum was nicely laid out and did a great job explaining the events that led up the '94 genocide. We spent a total of 3 hours there, reading the info., watching shorts, hearing stories, etc. There was one room that had clothes of some of the victims hung up behind glass. I was shocked at how modern these clothes were (ie-GAP) and it struck me that this was so recent-in my lifetime even. It was powerful to say the least.

Certainly even more powerful was the church we went to visit next. The priest of the church had told his congregation that they could seek refuge there. 5,000 Tutsis crowded into the building, only to have the priest betray them. Grenades came in through windows and cracks and eventually the doors were broken down. Children were beaten against the walls and families were brutally attacked with pangas. The church is now a memorial-heaping piles of the victims' clothes cover the pews and outside are mass graves that you can walk down into. There you find rows and rows of skulls and piles of bones, often cracked or shattered-the remains of the victims. My heart was wrenched out. There's a visual that isn't likely to leave my mind any time soon.

Driving back into town, eyes filled with tears, I listened to Sigur Ros thinking of the overwhelming weight of sin in this world. I felt burdened by the lack of attention/aid from the international community and couldn't help but think of the situation in central Africa right now with the LRA. When all is said and done will we regret our lack of interest in this conflict? I'm praying not and the passage of the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act is a step in a positive direction.

Pray for Rwanda and those affected by the genocide. With a population of only 8 million in which 1 million had died, I'd be surprised if it were even possible to find a single person not affected in some way.

On a more cheerful note, the rest of our trip was nice and relaxing. Minus the fact that we ran out of gas on our way home and stopped by yet ANOTHER backyard pit latrine.