Rwanda

Hi all, hope everyone is well. Happy birthday to Shara, Shani, and Andi. Also, Jodie, you're an absolute angel for the videos you made. Thank you so much for doing it, and thanks to everyone in them as well.

Also, if you notice in the top right of the blog is a link to a google map. I've made a map showing my route so far with a few placemarks for some notable locations. The link stays the same, and I'll update it with each blog post, at least in theory.

So, its late here in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and the nice rececptionist at my hostel is letting me use their internet for free right now. She's currently fascinated watching Fear Factor dubbed in French. I've spent the last week here in Rwanda, and I've had a very good time, but I haven't been blown away as I have been in other places. When you see places like Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi, remote corners of Zambia, its tough to be super impressed with everything you see. Having said that Rwanda is a very pretty country, and its history and its present are very interesting too.

I took a bus from Bujumbura straight to Kigali and planned on staying a few days in teh capital, but decided to leave for Lake Kivu the next day. Before leaving for the lake I went to the Kigali Memorial Center, which is the main memorial center for the Rwandan genocide. Its a very well done memorial and museum and very moving. There's a section on genocides in other parts of the world that was very well done too.

I'm not going to go into any details of the genocide, but there is one thing I found fascinating about the aftermath. There were more than half a million prisoners, its a country of just over 9 million, after the genocide. That's clearly too much for the court systems to handle. An international court was set up in Tanzania and it prosecuted the top people responsible for the genocide. What was set up for the rest is quite interesting. The traditional village court is called a Gacaca, pronounced gachacha. It means grassy area, and its basically a tribal elder sitting in an open grassy area, listening to all sides and making his decision. The government decided to let the Gacaca deal with the vast majority of the cases, and they're still going on today, 14 years after the genocide, although they're mostly done at this point. What happens is the prisoner goes before the Gacaca, any surviving victim tells the elder what happened. The prisoner has a chance to defend himself, but mostly they admit to what they did and repent. The elder than decides a punishment, which can range from building someone a house, a monetary settlement, and jail time. However, since there are just too many prisoners for the Rwandan jail system to take, most people don't go to jail.

The system is considered revolutionary as a way of applying traditional justice systems to a national western system. Prisoners can appeal the gacaca sentence to the main system if they choose. Since the village elder is so well respected, it is a way for the victims, Tutsis, to feel that they can continue to live in that village, and that a form of justice has taken place. Its crucial for any kind of reconciliation in the country, and remarkably, reconciliation in Rwanda is considered a success. The country is rebuilding in an impressive fashion from the disaster the country was in after the genocide. There is construction going on everywhere, although most of it is in the capital, and they have a pretty progressive government that is investing heavily into education.

I learned all of this from the memorial center, and meeting my new Rwandan friend Burt. At the lake, while waiting to use the internet, I met Michelle, an American on her honeymoon with her Rwandan husband, Burt. After talking to them for a while they invited me the next day to one of his friends weddings and afterwards to a coffee plantation, which I told them I was interested in seeing while in Rwanda. They're the nicest people, and the next day we went off to this wedding. I went to what's called a State ceremony, which is the official legal ceremony, and the equivalent of going to city hall in the US. Each Thursday you can go to your village justice center, and a govt. member presides over the ceremony. Both the husband and wife have to have one hand on the flag, one hand in the air, towards God, and recite some official vow. If they screw up they have to start over. A few of the people had to start over several times inciting huge laughs from the crowd. Initially, I felt very uncomfortable being there, but it was clear pretty quickly it was more than ok for me to be there, and it was quite an experience. Most people, after the state ceremony, have a traditional wedding ceremony and if they're christian, which most folks are, they have a church ceremony as well.

Lake Kivu is very pretty, quite forested, and I had a nice few days swimming and enjoying the lake. I spent a few days in a town called Kibuye, where I met Michelle and Burt, and than moved up to the more famous resort town of Gisenyi for a day. Gisenyi is full of huge villas, and is quite a bit more developed than Kibuye. It also borders the Congolese city of Goma, which has suffered quite a bit. It was the scene of a lot of fighting in the Congolese war of the past decade, and a few years ago a volcano exploded covering half the town in lava. That same volcano could easily cover Gisenyi too. Lake Kivu is also interesting in that it has a lot of methane coming out of it. People have died when huge amounts came out, and people basically died of CO2 poisoning while swimming in the lake. Its a risk, but not a big one. There is a methane power plant in the lake, the only kind in the world, which converts the methane in the lake into energy.

Well, I came back to Kigali today and went this evening to the Hotel de Milles Collines for a jazz concert. This hotel is better known as Hotel Rwanda, and it was pretty cool to see it. When I was interning at the Carter Center I met Paul Rusesabagina, the person Hotel Rwanda is based on that Don Cheadle played, and so it was fitting that I would finally see the actual hotel. The concert was quite a dissapointment. It was actually just some cover band playing more blues rock than anything jazz. They did one cover of Take 5, but outside that it was blues rock, and not very good either. The place was pretty empty and most people there were older mzungus(white folks), so not quite what I expected.

Tomorrow I go to Uganda, specifically to Lake Bunyoni. Even in Mozambique I heard from other travellers about this lake, and its supposedly one of the most beautiful anywhere. I could stay there a few days, maybe a few weeks. I'll get there and figure it out, and besides getting to the lake I have no other plans. Its just over the border from Rwanda, so I only have a few hours on a bus.

Hope everyone is doing well, and I'll try to write again soon.

ate mais, B