R lost many members of his family during the genocide. He told me his own story some time ago a- I remember that he spent about 3 weeks hiding in the forest before he was able to escape to Congo.
R now does a lot of voluntary work with prisoners. He visits Cyangugu Prison regularly to preach and to give pastoral care and to prepare them for release. Among those there must be those who are responsible for the deaths of his family members.
A is a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman. During the genocide she managed to escape from the country. While he was in Rwanda the Interahamwe came for his motor bike. There was one night of a very close call when he was imprisoned and threatened with death because he had hidden it. Eventually he too escaped to Burundi.
At the end of the genocide they were living in Cyangugu. They have clear memories of being hungry and watching the UNHCR food convoys driving past them and into the Congo where food was given out in the refugee camps. It is well known that many of the camps were full of people responsible for the genocide.
A and his wife braved some dangerous times in Cyangugu after the genocide to bring help to people living here.
Saturday 7th April marks the start of Genocide memorial week. This year is the 13th anniversary of the terrible events. It’s not clear yet exactly what is happening – even a phone call from the bishop to the mayor failed to produce a programme, only a promise that it would be delivered to the office on Friday.
It is clear what will NOT be happening and that is anything which involves celebrations. Churches have cancelled baptisms and confirmations. This is not so much for the events themselves, but more for the parties which would normally follow. Even Easter Sunday will, I think, be different because of this.
It was indeed “one of those days” in the usual sense, but it was also one of those days which contained so many of the things which epitomise life here, that it is worth recording. In later years, when I wonder “what did I do while I was in Rwanda?”, I will re-read this.
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The plan was simple enough – to take Sheena to the farm and then to go to the office. However, the previous evening our electricity suppliers and nemesis Electrogaz arrived without warning or invitation to change our meter to “cashpower”, a pay-as-you-go system they are introducing. We had to hurry round to their offices just before closing time to buy some credit, managing not to get too riled by the cashier asking us why we had come so late.
We arrived home, entered the numbers from the credit card only to be rewarded with an error message. Repeated attempts produced the same result and it was apparent that the 5kWhr Electrogaz had left us would expire some time during the night despite our best efforts at conservation (security lighting is a must).
A visitor staying with us attracted some other visitors at breakfast time, so it was 10am before I arrived at the Electrogaz offices. To their credit, they produced 2 technicians quite quickly, but no vehicle : I was expected to give them a lift to the house. Once there, Some 10 minutes of fiddling only produced the conclusion that we needed to return to the office to see the boss.
Naively, I stayed in the car expecting a quick turn-around, but after 15 minutes decided that the 2 needed some follow-up. I found them in a queue in the boss’ office, which took a further 20 minutes to be dealt with and concluded with us returning to the house, this time with 4 Electrogaz employees. Fortunately by now my sense of the ridiculous was engaged and I had renounced any hope of productive work that morning, feeling grateful once again for my earlier decision to postpone management training from the afternoon. This would have caused me severe stress in the current circumstances.
Our “work party” attracted a group of 5 kids from next door, plus our guard and a young man who sells crafts nearby. Fortunately, we have steps beside the meter, so everyone was able to get a good view, although there was more talk than action.
While the Electrogaz team was failing to repair the meter and then was putting the old one back, Modeste, our guard, approached me with Derek from next door as interpreter, to ask if he could chase the mice from the garden. “Not mice, exactly, they live in the ground and eat the sweet potatoes”. Moles (ifucu, in Kinyarwanda). Having agreed that they could do this, I took the Electrogaz team back to the office with electricity restored but the cashpower machine still broken.
After a morning of meagre achievement, there was a sudden burst of fruitful activity in the afternoon : a meeting at the dispensary to discuss the way forward with our AIDS Project, combined with a progress review on my severely septic finger; a discussion with the bishop on welfare policy; afternoon prayers for Holy Week.
Back home the mole catching was creating much activity and hope : traps, consisting of deep holes, wires and springy sticks were being dug. “Bring back the moles”, I thought, “they made a lot less mess of the garden than these traps”. Sheena was more concerned about being the first to find a dead mole in a trap and made Derek promise to check them early in the morning.
That evening our neighbour called in to check on my finger and also to talk about the UK team he currently has here working with children and using puppets to tell parables and gospel stories. The school holidays mean that the children of the family who are studying in Kigali are home, bringing a couple of friends, so it is 4 to a bed and more mouths to feed than I can easily count. His wife, also studying in Kigali, is coming home for Easter week-end and the 8 from the UK team have also been invited for Sunday lunch after a visit to the prison. This is African hospitality in action.
Yesterday morning we met our friend Richard on the way to a meeting. He explained that he had some urgent business to attend to before he could go. The diocese has a house it has refurbished and some people are being paid to landscape it, to dig over and plant the ground in the garden and also outside the wall.
Richard had had a call from the Executive Secretary, who is responsible for the whole district of Kamembe. Apparently our gardeners had committed the cardinal sin of planting potatoes outside the wall instead of flowers. This had to be undone by 10am that morning, otherwise the “local guards”, a uniformed (and armed) type of local police, would be sent round to dig up the offending potatoes.
Some weeks before coming to Rwanda, we watched “Hotel Rwanda” with friends. I have just watched “Sometimes in April”, an American film with an African director, which predates “Hotel Rwanda”. I don’t know whether it is me that has changed (or got “new eyes”!), but “SiA” seemed to me to give a much better insight into the events of 1994.
It follows a family split by the genocide : 2 Hutu brothers, 1 working for the “hate radio” station, the other an army officer married to a Tutsi woman. By showing real characters on both sides it brings some real illumination of the psychology of the genocide – hate, fear and grief in huge measures. Highly recommended, although of course it’s not easy viewing.
Despite being here for over 6 months, I have not yet got used to seeing machetes everywhere. Children and even prisoners carry them about in public in a way that would get you turned into a prisoner if you did it in the UK. The machete is also a powerful symbol of the genocide : many people were killed with them and the provision of new machetes to the militias is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for pre-planning of the events of 1994 (shown in both “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April”).
We had a couple of men working on the garden recently and they were using a machete to prune trees. The dull thud of the metal on the wood was quite disturbing - even a sharp machete would not bring a quick death. The killings and mutilations of 1994 were described as “work” and with some reason, although it’s a horrible euphemism.
People here witnessed machete attacks, encouraged them, fled from them, survived them and carried them out. It’s hard to understand why they don’t appear to create the same uneasiness in Rwandans as they do in me.
“May the almighty Allah bless Saddam Hussein”. So ran the caption on a laminated wall calendar on sale outside the market today. The calendar was covered with photos of Saddam – at prayer against the Americans, at a birthday party, with his troops, at his capture, with the noose around his neck moments before death and finally of his body thrown in the back of a pick-up. There was quite a pile of these calendars available.
This doesn’t mean that Cyangugu has seen an outbreak of radical Islam, although the very idea of having this on the wall completely boggles my mind. In his very limited selection, the vendor also had Manchester United calendars (unofficial, of course). Nevertheless, it gives pause for thought about how others perceive the world.
There are always more people than you thought (especially when giving lifts)
It always takes longer than you thought
The meeting always starts later than you thought possible
It is always further than you have been told
It was a baking hot morning, so I was glad that the coffee plantation was not too far from where we had left the car, on a narrow path high in the hills above Lake Kivu. This is a major coffee-growing area of Rwanda and we had come to discuss the purchase of a small plot for the Youth Association of the parish. As custom dictates, we sat on the ground in the shade of the trees and discussed the proposal, joined by a small group of children and openly eavesdropped by a few adults who had been working on their own patches of land. The idea of a private discussion in the open air is not understood!
We are developing a scheme whereby Youth Associations are given money to purchase small plots of land which they can work as a cooperative. The deal is that 25% of the first crop is given back, so that we can eventually become independent of the western donors who are currently funding this. As well as providing a small income for the members, the cooperative also encourages working together, enterprise and generosity (10% of the income is given away). It’s been an encouraging start. For just a few hundred pounds the lives of these young adults can be significantly improved and this group seem well able to rise to the challenge.
Even to my untrained eye, the coffee trees were obviously not well cared for and the harvest, due in 2-3 months will be poor. Before we left, we prayed under the coffee trees and there was a real sense that this group will do their best to ensure that the harvest in 2008 is significantly better.
Visitors to churches here have no chance of sneaking in to the back row unobserved, as they might do in the UK. Every service we have been to has a time for welcoming visitors, when they have to stand up so that the whole congregation can see them. Inevitably when we are visiting we have to introduce ourselves as well.
A couple of weeks ago at the cathedral, now our home church, one lady was introduced as being from the very north of Rwanda, several hours’ journey away. It was reported that she had recently lost her husband and was left with 8 children. The congregation was asked to pray for her.
Afterwards, we met our friend Kenneth, the Ugandan head of the local primary school. He introduced us to a 7-year-old boy who was going to be living with him. Kenneth is single and shares his house with a fellow teacher. It turned out that this was one of the sons of the widow we had prayed for earlier. Her husband had been a good friend of Kenneth and had asked him to look after the boy when he died. The reason for her visit to Cyangugu was to bring her son to Kenneth and he has now settled in to living here.
This kind of situation is not uncommon here and it illustrates the very different nature of family life. It also reminds me that sometimes praying is a lot easier than acting.
This may sound like an English pub, but it is in fact the place where I get my hair cut and in so doing provide entertainment for the local passers-by. It’s better now that they have moved to a first-floor building, but my arrival is still an event of some note.
My haircut was long overdue, because of various dressings on my neck, but I went on Saturday. Apart from the small kiosks which sell the common foodstuffs, hairdressers are easily the most common business in Kamembe. The price list is interesting – it starts with “Abagabo” (men) for 300 Frw (less than 30p) and at the bottom is “Umuzungu” (me) – 2000 Frw. However, I have managed to negotiate a special rate of 1000 Frw (“Umushitsi oya – I am not a tourist”), reminding myself that it is 1/6th of what I pay at home and is of better quality. The warm welcome makes it easy to ignore the apparently racist prices, although people I have talked to here genuinely believe that mzungu hair is harder to cut, even though mine only requires a run over the head with a razor.
