Rwanda 2010 - Day 8

“The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.” — Dian Fossey

We woke up around 6 am and went up to breakfast at 6:30. We were on our own this morning, as everyone else had different times they were departing. As we sat down my friend Grison came in with a concerned look on his face. I knew what it meant immediately: Arsenal didn’t win last night. “An okay result for Arsenal last night”, he said as he wrung his hands together. “Arsenal 2, Wigan 2. A draw. Not terrible.” (Sage made a mention after breakfast, “I can’t believe this…the only news I’ve heard all week are the Arsenal scores!”) We thanked him immensely for all the wonderful service and warm hospitality from everyone on the staff since we’d been at Virunga Lodge, and told him we couldn’t wait to return (which we can’t!). The last thing Grison asked before we left breakfast was what time we’d be leaving. We told him Theogene would be picking us up around 7, and he assured us that someone would be to our room at that time to get our bags. We finished our breakfast, checked under the beds and the bureau drawers, and right at 7 two staff members showed up for our bags. We headed down to Theogene and his car, thanked several members of the staff who were there to see us off, and headed off to Kigali.

Theogene said the drive would take about 3 hours (30 minutes longer than Francis, which shows you how much slower Theogene drives), and said we could stop at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali, and then the Craft Market afterwards. Our plane was scheduled to depart at 1:55 pm, and we wanted to get to the airport by Noon, so we thought it would be tight. On the way to Kigali the skies were very clear and I was able to get some good photographs of locals on the roads, something I hadn’t been able to do much of earlier in the trip.

Local women on their way from the fields

Women carrying firewood was a frequent sight on the side of the roads

We stopped once for a bathroom break halfway through the trip, and shortly thereafter were stopped by two policemen who were standing by the side of the road. It didn’t appear to be too unusual, and they were some sort of random check, but Theogene and one of the police officers seemed to get into a heated discussion for about 2 minutes. (They spoke Kinyarwandan, so we have no idea what they were saying.) At one point one of the policemen looked into the backseat, where Sage was sitting, and appeared to want to open the door and search the car! After a couple more seconds, however, Theogene rolled up his window and we drove away. I’d love to know what they were talking about, but I didn’t ask Theogene too many questions about it.

We pulled into Kigali around 9:30 am and made our way to the Genocide Memorial at around 10 am. It was part memorial, part museum, and it was a very good museum. (Even Sage, who can’t STAND museums, said she thought it was one of the better museum’s she’s been in.) The tour was self-guided, and they supplied wireless handsets to get a monologue of the tour. The first part was outside, where they showed several beautifully apportioned gardens, all with symbolic meanings. They also had several mass graves of Genocide victims. They said that over 250,000 bodies are buried at the memorial alone – about a quarter of all Genocide related deaths. The inside of the museum took the visitor through the entire events leading up to the Genocide (going all the way back to the early 20th Century when Germany first settled Rwanda); the appalling acts during the 3-month genocide, including many first person accounts from video and audio; and the aftermath and reconciliation the country took to build Rwanda back up. There were also exhibits on other genocides that have occurred in the world, including the Holocaust from the 1930’s and 40’s; the Armenian genocide during and after World War I; the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970’s; among others. The museum ended with a haunting portrait of children killed during the Rwandan Genocide: Photos of the children, their favorite subjects in school, favorite sports, their age, and their manner of death. This was a very powerful representation of the generations lost, and that really brought the scope of the tragedy home. (And I couldn’t help but think of Pablo Neruda’s “I’m Explaining a Few Things”, and its haunting words: “And the blood of the children ran through the streets / without fuss, like children’s blood.”)

I thought that I should give some background to the Rwanda Genocide, as it is the most significant event (obviously) that’s happened in the country, probably ever. Throughout our trip we saw several smaller genocide memorials around the towns we drove through, and there were signs on every road that talked about the genocide and to remind the public to never forget, and to never let it happen again. So how could a country as seemingly well-managed and stable as it is today have gone through such a tragedy less than 2 decades ago? This is probably not able to be explained in 25 words or less, but I’ll give a rough outline of what we learned. If you'd rather skip this history lesson, feel free to page down past my Rwandan history essay.

Rwanda has been settled for thousands of years, and it’s been thought that the first inhabitants of the country were the Twa, an aboriginal pygmy group. Through years of immigration from neighboring areas, two other groups called the area now known as Rwanda home: The Hutus, who were mostly agrarian farmers, and the Tutsis, who were generally livestock farmers. At that time Rwanda was a monarchy separated into several different small states. In the 19th Century the Tutsi’s formed a hierarchy that was led by a Mwami, or King. Even though the Tutsi’s were the minority in the population, most tribal chiefs were Tutsis. Most history, however, shows that there really wasn’t a lot of friction between the Hutus or Tutsis during this time, and the line between Hutus, Tutsis and Twa was often blurred. It wasn’t until the German colonialism in the early 1900’s that the differentiation between the 2 groups came to the forefront. The Germans, many who were obsessed with race, believed that the Tutsis were a superior race to the Hutus. They turned Rwanda into a feudal state, with the Tutsis (only about 15% of the population) in charge of municipalities and put in charge of the Hutu’s farming. (Hutus were the majority, at about 80% of the population, with the Twa at around 5%.)

After World War I and the ouster of Germany from most of Africa, Belgium took over rule of Rwanda by mandate from the League of Nations. They continued to rely on the Tutsi power structure to rule Rwanda, but they took the process of differentiating between Tutsis and Hutus to a new level. Belgium brought in scientists to, among other things, measure the Rwandan’s skulls – believing that a larger skull means more brain power – and they determined that the Tutsi’s skulls were bigger, their general height was taller, and their skin was lighter. As a result, they believed that Tutsis had Caucasian ancestry, and therefore were superior to Hutus. They also used property to determine whether one was a Hutu or Tutsi. For example, they decreed that anyone who owned 10 or more head of cattle were automatically Tutsi; any less and you were Hutu. Therefore one’s ethnicity could change based on social status.

But the Belgians went even farther with their definitions of race, and issued identification cards to every citizen, defining everyone as either a Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. Along with the ID cards, they gave the political control to the Tutsis. These changes, more than anything else, brought about the belief to the Tutsis that they were superior to the Hutus; and also led the Hutus to feel persecuted at the hands of the Tutsis. It was this perceived persecution that led to a Hutu revolution in the late 1950’s against the Tutsis, and when Rwanda finally received its independence from Rwanda in 1962, the Hutus were in power. Several massacres happened during this time between the Tutsis and Hutus, which only led to more resentment between the races.

The hatred continued for decades, and in 1990 exiled Tutsis invaded Rwanda from Uganda in an effort to democratize Rwanda, and to resolve the problem of Tutsi exiles around the world. The Hutus took this invasion as an attempt to take back control of the government, and this led to the Rwandan Civil War. A tenuous cease-fire was signed in 1993, but tensions remained high into April 1994. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down while landing at the Kigali airport, killing him and the president of Burundi who was also on board. Within the hour, military and militia groups began rounding up Tutsis and killing them en masse. The genocide had begun.

The mass killings were obviously planned out ahead of time, as Hutu extremists were armed with machetes, guns and grenades in every corner of Rwanda. Reports said that within 25 minutes of the plane being shot down, roadblocks were already erected all over Kigali, and Tutsi houses were being invaded. In the killing, no one was spared. Women and children were killed, often by neighbors or people they thought were their friends. Media propaganda urged the killing on, telling the population that if they didn’t participate in the killings, they themselves would be killed. During this time the United Nations decided that the events in Rwanda were “an internal conflict”, and instead of sending more troops to help stop the killing, they withdrew their aid and support. With no one to stop the killing, the Hutus killed approximately 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus over a period of about 100 days.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was primarily the Tutsi group that launched the invasion in 1990, renewed its civil war against the Hutu government to try to stop the killings. The civil war raged during the genocide, and after a little more than 2 months the RPF advanced to Kigali, the capital, and gradually took control of the country. This led to 2 million Hutu refugees to flee the country, as they feared retribution from the new Tutsi led government. Paul Kagame, the head of RPF at the time and current President, formed a government of national unity that was headed by a Hutu president. Over the next few years most of the Rwandan refugees – both Hutu and Tutsi – returned to Rwanda. Rwanda established a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission to try to help the country heal, and they oversaw the criminal tribunals against the Genocide leaders. What was interesting is that, while the main leaders from the Hutu government were mostly sentenced to jail, the justice that was meted out to the lower level participants in the genocide was done on a local level. While prison was often a sentence, the offenders were also given other punishments, such as to work in the fields of families of victims. And most importantly, all were required to apologize to their neighbors for their crimes.

Today, ethnicity is formerly outlawed in Rwanda. The atmosphere is all about healing and unity, and not about distinctions between races or ethnicities. In fact, one can actually be arrested and forced to stand trial for discussing different ethnic groups in Rwanda. And while Rwanda isn’t a perfect country by any means, and there are signs that several Hutu extremist groups are still trying to gather strength in the DRC, it is amazing the progress the country has achieved in the past 16 years. This graph scarily shows the impact on the genocide on the Rwandan population – and also shows the rapid growth since the genocide.

Okay, enough of the history lesson, and I hope I didn’t bore anyone too much. We finished up the museum around 11:20 am, and Theogene carefully tells us that he doesn’t think there’s time to go to the Craft Market. We said that’s fine, it wasn’t that important for us anyway, and then he said, “It’s 11:20 now. You need to be at the airport by 12. So lunch…” Ah, now I see what’s bothering him – he knows we don’t have enough time for lunch! Again, we were fine with skipping lunch, and said let's go straight to the airport, but I could tell it bothered him that we missed lunch again. On the way to the airport he drove us by some of the government buildings and what-not, and dropped us off a little before Noon at the airport. We bid him goodbye, thanked him for his hard work, and wished him well. He may not have been the best driver in the world, and I think he only understood about 25% of anything I every said, but he was a good man.

We went through security and immediately see one of the West kids from our time at the Virunga Lodge. She didn’t look happy, and she told us that their flight to Johannesburg was cancelled. Right after that I met up with Robin, the patriarch, and he told me what happened. They had reservations on RwandAir (uh-oh) for a flight at 2:30 pm that day from Kigali to Jo’burg. When they got to the airport they found out that RwandAir changed the flight time…to 9:00 am! And of course, they never contacted them to let them know. Thankful for our Kenya Air reservation, we checked in and went up to our gate. Before getting to the gate we had to go through Immigration Control again, where the Rwanda officials (once again) showed that they are the friendliest of any the whole world over. He asked how our trip was, and we told him how much we loved it and loved the country. Sage said to him, “We can’t wait to come back”, and he replied, “You will be welcomed when you do.” When he handed back our passports he included a small card that wished us Happy New Year, and on it he had written our names! From start to finish, Rwanda showed that they really are the friendliest people in the world.

When we got up to our gate we ran into Bryce and Julia, the couple from Cambridge, MA and our Susa trek. They were on our flight to Nairobi as well, on their way to Kilimanjaro. And finally the West clan of 7 ended up being on our flight to Nairobi, as I guess they were connecting to another flight to Jo’burg from there. Unfortunately they were going to miss their connection to New York City, and one of the daughter’s groused, “I’m going to spend New Year’s Eve on an airplane!” Now that’s a party.

Even though Kenya Air is much more reliable than RwandAir, it still had its quirks. Our flight was supposed to depart at 1:55 pm, but at 1:00 pm they began to board us. The airplane isn’t huge, only about 70 seats or so, and I thought almost an hour early was a lot of time to sit on the plane. So we all got seated by 1:15, and then the pilot said, “Okay, we’re taking off”. I guess everyone who was booked to be on the flight was on it, but who knows. Either way, we ended up landing in Nairobi about 45 minutes early. Normally this would be welcome, but on this day it wasn’t really necessary, as we already had a long layover in Nairobi, and now it was even longer. Kenyan customs was the complete opposite of our first entry on Christmas Eve, and we got through it in no time. Our bags were already waiting for us on the carousel, and we went out into the airport arrivals area to find our driver.

When we originally booked our trip we knew we had this 7 hour layover in Nairobi. The fine folks at Baobab told us that the Nairobi airport isn’t really conducive to killing long periods of time (truer words were never spoken), so they suggested that we go out to dinner during our layover. We said sure, they set it up, and it seemed like the best idea instead of waiting around the departure gate for a bat to bite my neck. Because of our early arrival our driver wasn’t there yet, so we had to wait about 15 minutes for him to show up. He introduced himself as Justice, and immediately he didn’t come across as a charmer. First, he didn’t offer to carry either of our bags. Now, that’s not a huge deal to me, but everywhere else our drivers have immediately grabbed Sage’s bag. This just seemed weird. Second, he started complaining immediately that we were so early. He said we now had 2 hours to kill before our dinner reservation at 6:30 pm, and did we have any ideas on what to do. Um, why the hell would we have any idea of how to kill 2 hours in Nairobi? You’re the guide, guide us! He told us that we could go on a city tour, but that traffic could be very bad. I said let’s do the city tour, and if traffic is bad, we can head to the restaurant early and have a drink before dinner. So he said that’s fine, we get into his car and head out of the airport. About 20 minutes later, he pulls into the restaurant! He never gave us any indication that the city tour was off, I guess he just decided to call it off and not tell us. So we get out of the car (thankfully he had another person with him to watch our bags while we went into the restaurant), and immediately Sage and I looked at each other with dread: it was an Indian restaurant. Now, we like Indian food. In fact, it’s fast becoming one of our favorite meals when we go out. However, every once in a while, we (okay, me) will have stomach issues after eating Indian. It’s the type of thing where it’s always best to be close to home base, if possible, after the meal. Pretty much exactly NOT what we’d want to eat before getting on an 8 ½ hour plane ride. But Baobab had already booked the meal, we had already paid in advance, and we decided we didn’t want to start a big ado with Justice anyway. So Indian it was going to be!

Justice led us into the restaurant, and it was quiet. Too quiet. As in, they’re not even open! Justice talked to one of the workers, and told him they don’t open until 6 usually, and they don’t have a bar at the restaurant anyway. However, there was a bar around the corner we could go to get a drink, so Justice led us that way. We went into an area known as “The Arcade”, which was some sort of mall, and we went upstairs to a bar called Zebra Bar. It had some seats overlooking the mall’s food court, including Mister Wok and Wimpy’s, “Home of the Hamburger”. (Yes, we were definitely getting the “true Kenyan experience”.) We sat down, and Justice said he would come back to get us around 6 pm. I asked Justice if I could pay with US Dollars, as we had no other currency, and Justice looked worried and asked the server. He said no, they don’t, but that we could go to the Casino on the other side of the food court (!!) and we could exchange money there. Well, somehow during the discussion Justice decided that he would join us for a drink, I could pay him in US dollars, and he would take care of the bill. So that’s what we did, sitting with Justice for about 90 minutes. It wasn’t too bad, as I had 2 Tusker beers, which are quite good, Sage found wireless on her iPod Touch so we could check in, and I found out Justice was a Man United fan (of course), so we had some long talks about English football. During our talk over drinks Justice asked us if we were from the UK or America. That surprised us, although it wasn’t the first time someone couldn’t place our accent. One day at the lodge a German woman showed up just to look around. We started talking to her and she asked where we were from, and we said Boston/United States. She said, “Oh my, you talk very well…you don’t sound like an American”. So we decided that both her and Justice must have thought that all Americans must talk like either George Bush or John Wayne. Way to go, America! So that was how we spent 90 minutes killing time, and while I really thought it would be more interesting to kill the hour and a half in a Kenyan casino instead of the Zebra Bar, it was still better than the airport.

So around 6 we made our way down to the restaurant, Haveli’s, and sat down for dinner. Justice said he would come back around 8 to see how we were doing, and left us to our own. The meal was okay, nothing special but pretty good, and to end the suspense now, neither of us had the need to rush to the bathroom afterwards. Since we knew we had time to kill, we took our time over the food, went through a lot of the photos on our camera, and talked about how we never felt the need to ever come back to Nairobi. Around 8 the server came over with our bill (we had to pay for the drinks ourselves), and then asked when our driver would be back to take care of the rest of the check. We weren’t sure, but when I got up to look for him he walked in. After taking care of the bill, we piled back into our car for the drive back to the airport. We arrived around 8:30 pm, went back through security and check-in, and went up to our gate. We were early still, and the departure areas this night were really crowded, as it seemed that a lot of flights were heading out later in the evening. Also, the airport was REALLY hot. I usually don’t mind the heat, but it was killing me on that night. If we hadn’t already hated the Nairobi airport 100% already, this last night pushed it over the top. In fact, the last thing I wrote in my journal on this day was, “I HATE THIS AIRPORT”.

Our flight from Nairobi to London was scheduled to leave at 11:30 pm local time, and we began to board at about 10:45 pm. We found our seats, the aisle and middle on the side of the plane, and a gentleman was already sitting in the window seat. He was very friendly, and we started to chat. He was from Calgary, had been traveling in Africa for a couple of weeks, and now was on his way home. But before long he noticed a problem with his seatbelt. As most of you know, the airplane seatbelt has 2 ends: a “male” end, and a “female” end. Please review the photo below, where the “male” end is a the top of the image, and the “female” end is at the bottom.

Note the "male" part of the seatbelt at the top, and "female" part on the bottom

But my Calgary friend had only a “female” end – the end that should have had the “male” metal attachment was simply the strap with nothing there. I immediately thought only good thoughts: They can’t let him sit there with a belt that doesn’t work, so they’ll have to move him to another seat – and we’ll have a whole row to ourselves! So he called the flight attendant, they looked at it puzzling, called another flight attendant over, and then told him to come with her. Hooray! So he got upgraded to World Traveller Plus and we got an extra seat to use on the trip. WIN-WIN. After takeoff and the seatbelt sign came off, and I moved over to the window seat to try to sleep on the flight. As I was lying there, I started thinking about the seatbelt, and wondering what the heck was going on. I realized that something was fishy, as the end that should have the “male” piece wasn’t ripped, and didn’t show any signs of abuse. It was just a flat end of a strap. And then it hit me: I wasn’t looking at the “male” end, I was looking at the “female” end, but without the “female” buckle! I took off my sleep mask, grabbed the “female” end, and lifted up. Sure enough, there was the “male” end! What the previous person must have done was, instead of unbuckling their seatbelt, they removed the strap from the “female” buckle end. I thought, “This is genius! I should do this to every seatbelt in my seats on flights, and I’ll always have a good chance of being upgraded!”

With my seat against the window and my travel pillow, I was able to sleep for almost 5 hours on the flight. Sage, unfortunately, has trouble sleeping on planes and didn’t get hardly any shuteye. She did, however, watch Toy Story 3 and Monsters, Inc., so you can’t say she was unhappy. This British Air plane had movies on demand, which was a very nice benefit. (The 2 planes on the way to Africa didn’t have digital, so the choices of movie were few, and you had to watch them on their schedule.) We landed just about on time at Heathrow at around 5:25 am. The snow in London looked to be almost all melted, and all of their delay problems seemed to be in the past. We got through security and flight transfer easily enough, and that coughed us out into Terminal 5 at Heathrow. The first thing we did was find somewhere for breakfast, which we decided on a pub that offered a full English Breakfast. Sage hated hers, but I liked mine, and they were showing reruns of Fawlty Towers, so how bad could that be? After breaky we walked all over Terminal 5, taking in all the shops, eating options, places to sit and relax, stores with Arsenal gear, Harrods, etc. It was heaven! In fact, the last thing I wrote in my journal that morning was, “I LOVE THIS AIRPORT”.

Heathrow is one of those airports that charge for wi-fi, and we didn’t want to pay for it, so we ended up walking around a lot. During the flight from Nairobi both of our legs and feet got swollen, almost like there was hardly any blood flowing to our feet, so it felt good to walk around and stretch the legs. We boarded our flight around 10:15 am, and the flight left on time at 11 am, London time. This plane was a wide body 747, and there were a lot of empty seats – including the window seat next to us! Sage took the window seat to try to sleep, but when she tried to recline the seat wouldn’t move back. She thinks the person behind her used one of those seat blockers that prevent the seat from reclining. It could have been, and she wasn’t too happy considering she hadn’t slept in about 30 hours by this time. She moved to the middle seat and reclined, but couldn’t sleep that well there as the kid in the seat behind her kept kicking the seat, and there was a crying baby in a nearby row as well. Meanwhile I watched Goodfellas with the Movies on Demand, one of my all-time favorites. The Godfather was also available, and I thought about doing a Mafia double-feature, but decided to read on the 2nd part of the flight instead.

We landed around 12:30 pm Boston time, which was half an hour early. Immigration took over 20 minutes to get through, but the US Homeland Security folks seemed a lot nicer than they have in the past. I think they’re trying to upgrade their image. We got our bags but were stopped in Customs, who asked what food we brought back (coffee, chocolate and tea), and also asked if we had any wooden handicrafts. We did have a couple of small, carved gorillas, but since they were polished and finished wood, I guess they were okay. Once they scanned our luggage we were through the doors and officially back into the US of A. We got the shuttle to our car, and when it dropped us off at the outdoor lot we parked at, there was no snow on top of the car, but about 1 ½ feet of snow piled behind it. Thankfully we remembered to bring a snow shovel in our car, so we were able to dig out in no time. We got home around 2 pm. The entire journey, from the time we woke up in Rwanda to the time we got home was almost exactly 39 hours. Sage was barely into the house before she climbed into bed and said, “Wake me in 2 hours”, and she was out like a light. But even with the long journey home and lack of sleep, we couldn’t have asked for a greater trip or experience. And by the next day, we were already talking about when we’d go back to Rwanda.