Adjusting My Altitude
18:00 in Kigali and the down pour that's been building up all day finally begins. It really could have happened any time of day but it seems I carried my umbrella around in the heat of the day for nothing. Not that its particularly hot in Rwanda. Kigali is at 1500m and this keeps the temperature from going much above 30C even in the summer. The first few weeks were characterised by a constant fatigue but I seem to have produced the hemoglobin necessary to adjust to the altitude.
The rain sheets down outside but I am safely under the shelter of my enormous house in one of the cities posher suburbs. My neighbours are mostly well-to-do Rwandans and the Kacyiru district is where many foreign embassies are located, not to mention that the office of President Kagame being right across the road. It hasn't happened yet but I'm told all our water gets directed to there when he is in office. The heavy rain could spell problems for my personal hygiene - paradoxically enough when there is lots of rain there are difficulties with the water supplies due to the silt from mudslides clogging up the pipes.
I was hoping to have a shower tonight, I have been waiting all day for there to be enough pressure to attempt a wash. I've already tried when there is only a trickle and it took me an hour!! Soon enough the rain will come creeping through the crack underneath my door, luckily there is no wood or carpet just a bare concrete floor, such as you might find in Europe on a garage. I don't mind this, at least you can see its clean and there are no crevices for creepy crawlies to hid in. The previous occupant, another VSO volunteer called French Frank for obvious reasons, assures me there are cockroaches but i haven't seen one yet. Early days I guess. This evening though, for extra excitement it seems a pool is forming under the window under a steady pouring of water from the slated glass, there seems to be no obvious cause for this. I consider washing my feet in the puddle but decide against it. But apart from such minor inconveniences as temporary indoor pools and the almost total lack of plugs, can hardly say that I'm slumming here in central Africa.
The house is a two story semi-detached place with a decent sized garden, two reasonable sized bedrooms, a box room where the houseboy does the ironing, a bathroom and extra toilet downstairs, a large sitting/dining room, a smallish kitchen and of course the houseboys quarters out the back. I inherited Patrick the houseboy, from French Frank as a guard for the house and a general helper for household chores I couldn't be bother doing like filling water cans, cutting the grass (with a pair of clippers on his hands and knees), washing clothes (by hand) etc. The garden is immaculate and i sometimes wonder that he is terminally bored especially when I return to find he has made designs with the cutlery.
To revisit the water situation, it appears that the water and the electricity seem to go off at the same time. I noticed this back at the hotel although I am saved from the ravages of most of the water cut outs here due to having a storage tank attached to the house. I wondered if this dual shutdown is because the same company, Electrogaz, control and charge for both the water and the electricity. Being a poor volunteer I am now watching my water and electricity consumption, water is billed by the gallon. This company is (in)famous both with ex-pats and locals for being inefficient and blatantly wrong in their billing. Almost everyone who lives in Rwanda will have their own favorite Electrogaz "histoire". My favourite is the one where French Frank, two months after arrival, was presented with a bill for 3 million Rwandan francs which dated back to the summer of 1994! (hello?! emm...genocide...i think its safe to say that any foreign nationals left in Kigali weren't using water or electricity, or air for that matter).
Speaking of which the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy is coming up next month. The other volunteers are, rather oddly, talking about their respective plans for the "genocide holiday". Apparently the whole county shuts down for a week or so. It appears that the whole world and his mother are in the capital these days writing articles and shooting documentaries all with variations on the theme "Rwanda 10 years on". Its something that almost all the ex pats here agree on, that the longer you stay in Rwanda the less you have to say about it ie the more and more complex it gets. In the words of a senior western diplomat i met, who has lived here for over 20 years:
" You can come here for three weeks and write a book, people who've been here 30 years could probably write about a paragraph".
I don't, at this point, have a hell of a lot to say on the topic. Apart from vague recollections from 10 years ago about news reports on Rwanda coming in 3rd place after the latest from the world cup and probably some local burglary, the only things i know about the situation are from reading Philip Gurevitchs book "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families". Its an excellent book as much an enquiry into the human condition and the machinery of hate politics as it is about Rwanda's recent past. Gurevitch started by refusing to accept that the genocide as merely Africans killing Africans in that way that they do, and wanted to investigate what really happened and how people continued in its aftermath. Of course his is only one point of view and there is no absolute truth and we in Europe should remember that its not only Africans who can fall victim to the politics of hate and division and the force of a well organised propaganda machine.
As I read the book, and as I arrived in Rwanda one image stayed with me. The author quotes a western journalist who was stuck in the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali for 24 hours on the 13th and 14th April 1994 who watched the militias (or Interahamwe) on the street outside.
"You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes"
I don't know why but these words became a mental image for me along with all the incumbent horror they imply. In those first few days in country as I passed people on the street i wondered which of those around me could have been part of those club wielding bloodthirsty gangs just a few years previous. It did strange things to my head. It wasn't healthy and I hoped it wouldn't last for the coming year. On reflection now, I think that if I could be a tiniest bit traumatized by one line in a book and overactive imagination how many orders of magnitude more must be happening inside the people who were actually here and witnessed it?
And yet life on the surface of it, continues as normal here.
Most of the time.
Someone relayed a story from a recently departed volunteer to me. She was walking in Kigali on a Sunday morning with a Rwandan colleague when a church service ended and a large crowd of people exited the church they were passing. Her Rwandan colleague froze. When the volunteer asked if something was the matter, the colleague replied "its all those people coming at us, it reminds me of the genocide".
About a week after arriving we passed a group of men in some kind of uniform, it could have been a school group, they were dressed in immaculately clean rose pink shirts and shorts, except that they seemed to be digging a ditch. I asked Liez, who had been here longer than me, what it was all about.
"Prisoners" she said "mostly from the genocide, they put them out in work gangs".
Soon after I stopped seeing the people walking around me as potential killers. It was as if the sight of the prisoners had given me a face to put to the vision I had of a hand holding a machete dripping with blood, some where to park the image that had been burned into my psyche.
I recently met an American woman who claimed to have been in Rwanda for 24 years.
"Consistently?" I asked in a surprised tone.
She knew what i meant: what had happened to her in 94? If she had stayed in the county, how the hell did she survive? Unlike many other crises, there was no slow build up, no gradual deterioration of the situation that April. One day its life as usual under a central African president-cum-absolute ruler, next day his plane is shot down and that evening there are bands of people roving around Kigali hacking their neighbours to death and a huge scramble by anyone who could to get out of the country.
She said at that time she wasn't based in Kigali but further south, the killers took longer to mobilise south of the capital, a few extra days which made all the difference if you were in possession of a car and a foreign passport. She and her husband heard about what was happening and were advised to drive to Burundi, from there they were evacuated.
"I saw none of it" she said "but some of our friends were in Kigali".
She then described how another American couple she was close to, had to step over or perhaps drive over dead bodies to get out of their house. Her friends were let though the roadblock when the woman had a fit of crying, they then hid somewhere for a few days and were eventually lifted out on a UN convoy to the airport, where "Anything that could fly was taking people out, my friends went out on an Italian cargo plane". It had taken them several days and a UN convoy to cross the city without getting killed. While in the convoy they were warned not to look out between the cracks in the panels. Of course her friend did. She said the Interahamwe lined the streets, they had a glazed look in their eyes and on their face a sickening grin was fixed. Her friend said they looked as though they were proud of their achievements as they waved the UN convoy past. "Pure evil", said the American woman I was talking to, but then again she was a baptist missionary.
What would you do if your government called on you to kill those that you had been persuaded were your deadly enemies? What would you do if refusing to kill was seen to make you an accomplice to these deadly enemies?
For a while, the entire country was a chaos where traditional morality was turned on its head. How can we sit in judgement, we weren't even there?
The American lady continued "We had a few friends who tried to come back but they just couldn't". At least they had that luxury - the luxury of staying away. The Rwandans didn't and for those who were left behind there is only the slow hand of the Gacaca courts after the hamhanded effort at international justice failed them.
Gacaca (ga-cha-cha) always sounds like more of a ballroom dance to me but it is a traditional form of village justice normally used for minor disputes, brought in to try to deal with the huge number of criminal cases left by the genocide and its perpetrators. The process is somewhat hampered by the fact that the actions of the RPF, the eventual liberating army, cannot be discussed or brought into question. From the accounts i heard they were a well disciplined and focused army, their general is now the countries president and he appears to enjoy popular support. However killing sprees happened. Gourevitch describes the genocide as the "most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", however the genocide was carried out manually, mostly by machetes and clubs. The RPF were gaining ground and advancing in a landscape littered with bodies, some returning to an ancestral homeland to find hacked up relatives. That's enough to test anyones discipline I would guess.
But all this is old news and recycled opinions. I haven't been here long enough to form my own and by all accounts by the time i am here long enough, I'll feel unable to categorically state anything. What I can tell you is that Rwanda is different. You notice immediately on the streets, I mean to say its different from the other African countries I've visited. Liez and Sade, the two other VSO new arrivals both of whom had lived in other African countries previously, remarked upon it too. People are more reserved and much more soft spoken. Sometimes I can't even hear Rwandans and they mistakenly take this up as a a fault with their French or English. Journeys on public transport take place in silence, unlike in other places. People stare at you here like they do in all but the most touristy areas of the continent but they are unlikely to smile or greet you or start a conversation as people did elsewhere. Rwandans appear to have a reputation as being aloof with other nations of the region and having somewhat of a stronger work ethic.
On a day trip to Butare as part of our In country training with the VSO, our driver was stopped at a roadblock on one of Kigali's hill tops. The policeman said he had seen him in the valley below overtaking another car in an incorrect manner. Police here are not looking for bribes, instead our driver got a ticket and a fine. I began to think...reserved, mild mannered people with a reputed strong work ethic and overzealous traffic police, was it possible that I had landed in the Switzerland of Africa??
Notes
On the 7th April the then presidents Habyarimana's plane was struck down by a surface to air missile. The exact circumstances around this are not known but this was to be the catalyst to mobilise bands of militia all over the country who had been training for months, to start the genocide. The killings started that very night.
Return to story
The rain sheets down outside but I am safely under the shelter of my enormous house in one of the cities posher suburbs. My neighbours are mostly well-to-do Rwandans and the Kacyiru district is where many foreign embassies are located, not to mention that the office of President Kagame being right across the road. It hasn't happened yet but I'm told all our water gets directed to there when he is in office. The heavy rain could spell problems for my personal hygiene - paradoxically enough when there is lots of rain there are difficulties with the water supplies due to the silt from mudslides clogging up the pipes.
I was hoping to have a shower tonight, I have been waiting all day for there to be enough pressure to attempt a wash. I've already tried when there is only a trickle and it took me an hour!! Soon enough the rain will come creeping through the crack underneath my door, luckily there is no wood or carpet just a bare concrete floor, such as you might find in Europe on a garage. I don't mind this, at least you can see its clean and there are no crevices for creepy crawlies to hid in. The previous occupant, another VSO volunteer called French Frank for obvious reasons, assures me there are cockroaches but i haven't seen one yet. Early days I guess. This evening though, for extra excitement it seems a pool is forming under the window under a steady pouring of water from the slated glass, there seems to be no obvious cause for this. I consider washing my feet in the puddle but decide against it. But apart from such minor inconveniences as temporary indoor pools and the almost total lack of plugs, can hardly say that I'm slumming here in central Africa.
The house is a two story semi-detached place with a decent sized garden, two reasonable sized bedrooms, a box room where the houseboy does the ironing, a bathroom and extra toilet downstairs, a large sitting/dining room, a smallish kitchen and of course the houseboys quarters out the back. I inherited Patrick the houseboy, from French Frank as a guard for the house and a general helper for household chores I couldn't be bother doing like filling water cans, cutting the grass (with a pair of clippers on his hands and knees), washing clothes (by hand) etc. The garden is immaculate and i sometimes wonder that he is terminally bored especially when I return to find he has made designs with the cutlery.
To revisit the water situation, it appears that the water and the electricity seem to go off at the same time. I noticed this back at the hotel although I am saved from the ravages of most of the water cut outs here due to having a storage tank attached to the house. I wondered if this dual shutdown is because the same company, Electrogaz, control and charge for both the water and the electricity. Being a poor volunteer I am now watching my water and electricity consumption, water is billed by the gallon. This company is (in)famous both with ex-pats and locals for being inefficient and blatantly wrong in their billing. Almost everyone who lives in Rwanda will have their own favorite Electrogaz "histoire". My favourite is the one where French Frank, two months after arrival, was presented with a bill for 3 million Rwandan francs which dated back to the summer of 1994! (hello?! emm...genocide...i think its safe to say that any foreign nationals left in Kigali weren't using water or electricity, or air for that matter).
Speaking of which the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy is coming up next month. The other volunteers are, rather oddly, talking about their respective plans for the "genocide holiday". Apparently the whole county shuts down for a week or so. It appears that the whole world and his mother are in the capital these days writing articles and shooting documentaries all with variations on the theme "Rwanda 10 years on". Its something that almost all the ex pats here agree on, that the longer you stay in Rwanda the less you have to say about it ie the more and more complex it gets. In the words of a senior western diplomat i met, who has lived here for over 20 years:
" You can come here for three weeks and write a book, people who've been here 30 years could probably write about a paragraph".
I don't, at this point, have a hell of a lot to say on the topic. Apart from vague recollections from 10 years ago about news reports on Rwanda coming in 3rd place after the latest from the world cup and probably some local burglary, the only things i know about the situation are from reading Philip Gurevitchs book "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families". Its an excellent book as much an enquiry into the human condition and the machinery of hate politics as it is about Rwanda's recent past. Gurevitch started by refusing to accept that the genocide as merely Africans killing Africans in that way that they do, and wanted to investigate what really happened and how people continued in its aftermath. Of course his is only one point of view and there is no absolute truth and we in Europe should remember that its not only Africans who can fall victim to the politics of hate and division and the force of a well organised propaganda machine.
As I read the book, and as I arrived in Rwanda one image stayed with me. The author quotes a western journalist who was stuck in the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali for 24 hours on the 13th and 14th April 1994 who watched the militias (or Interahamwe) on the street outside.
"You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes"
I don't know why but these words became a mental image for me along with all the incumbent horror they imply. In those first few days in country as I passed people on the street i wondered which of those around me could have been part of those club wielding bloodthirsty gangs just a few years previous. It did strange things to my head. It wasn't healthy and I hoped it wouldn't last for the coming year. On reflection now, I think that if I could be a tiniest bit traumatized by one line in a book and overactive imagination how many orders of magnitude more must be happening inside the people who were actually here and witnessed it?
And yet life on the surface of it, continues as normal here.
Most of the time.
Someone relayed a story from a recently departed volunteer to me. She was walking in Kigali on a Sunday morning with a Rwandan colleague when a church service ended and a large crowd of people exited the church they were passing. Her Rwandan colleague froze. When the volunteer asked if something was the matter, the colleague replied "its all those people coming at us, it reminds me of the genocide".
About a week after arriving we passed a group of men in some kind of uniform, it could have been a school group, they were dressed in immaculately clean rose pink shirts and shorts, except that they seemed to be digging a ditch. I asked Liez, who had been here longer than me, what it was all about.
"Prisoners" she said "mostly from the genocide, they put them out in work gangs".
Soon after I stopped seeing the people walking around me as potential killers. It was as if the sight of the prisoners had given me a face to put to the vision I had of a hand holding a machete dripping with blood, some where to park the image that had been burned into my psyche.
I recently met an American woman who claimed to have been in Rwanda for 24 years.
"Consistently?" I asked in a surprised tone.
She knew what i meant: what had happened to her in 94? If she had stayed in the county, how the hell did she survive? Unlike many other crises, there was no slow build up, no gradual deterioration of the situation that April. One day its life as usual under a central African president-cum-absolute ruler, next day his plane is shot down and that evening there are bands of people roving around Kigali hacking their neighbours to death and a huge scramble by anyone who could to get out of the country.
She said at that time she wasn't based in Kigali but further south, the killers took longer to mobilise south of the capital, a few extra days which made all the difference if you were in possession of a car and a foreign passport. She and her husband heard about what was happening and were advised to drive to Burundi, from there they were evacuated.
"I saw none of it" she said "but some of our friends were in Kigali".
She then described how another American couple she was close to, had to step over or perhaps drive over dead bodies to get out of their house. Her friends were let though the roadblock when the woman had a fit of crying, they then hid somewhere for a few days and were eventually lifted out on a UN convoy to the airport, where "Anything that could fly was taking people out, my friends went out on an Italian cargo plane". It had taken them several days and a UN convoy to cross the city without getting killed. While in the convoy they were warned not to look out between the cracks in the panels. Of course her friend did. She said the Interahamwe lined the streets, they had a glazed look in their eyes and on their face a sickening grin was fixed. Her friend said they looked as though they were proud of their achievements as they waved the UN convoy past. "Pure evil", said the American woman I was talking to, but then again she was a baptist missionary.
What would you do if your government called on you to kill those that you had been persuaded were your deadly enemies? What would you do if refusing to kill was seen to make you an accomplice to these deadly enemies?
For a while, the entire country was a chaos where traditional morality was turned on its head. How can we sit in judgement, we weren't even there?
The American lady continued "We had a few friends who tried to come back but they just couldn't". At least they had that luxury - the luxury of staying away. The Rwandans didn't and for those who were left behind there is only the slow hand of the Gacaca courts after the hamhanded effort at international justice failed them.
Gacaca (ga-cha-cha) always sounds like more of a ballroom dance to me but it is a traditional form of village justice normally used for minor disputes, brought in to try to deal with the huge number of criminal cases left by the genocide and its perpetrators. The process is somewhat hampered by the fact that the actions of the RPF, the eventual liberating army, cannot be discussed or brought into question. From the accounts i heard they were a well disciplined and focused army, their general is now the countries president and he appears to enjoy popular support. However killing sprees happened. Gourevitch describes the genocide as the "most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", however the genocide was carried out manually, mostly by machetes and clubs. The RPF were gaining ground and advancing in a landscape littered with bodies, some returning to an ancestral homeland to find hacked up relatives. That's enough to test anyones discipline I would guess.
But all this is old news and recycled opinions. I haven't been here long enough to form my own and by all accounts by the time i am here long enough, I'll feel unable to categorically state anything. What I can tell you is that Rwanda is different. You notice immediately on the streets, I mean to say its different from the other African countries I've visited. Liez and Sade, the two other VSO new arrivals both of whom had lived in other African countries previously, remarked upon it too. People are more reserved and much more soft spoken. Sometimes I can't even hear Rwandans and they mistakenly take this up as a a fault with their French or English. Journeys on public transport take place in silence, unlike in other places. People stare at you here like they do in all but the most touristy areas of the continent but they are unlikely to smile or greet you or start a conversation as people did elsewhere. Rwandans appear to have a reputation as being aloof with other nations of the region and having somewhat of a stronger work ethic.
On a day trip to Butare as part of our In country training with the VSO, our driver was stopped at a roadblock on one of Kigali's hill tops. The policeman said he had seen him in the valley below overtaking another car in an incorrect manner. Police here are not looking for bribes, instead our driver got a ticket and a fine. I began to think...reserved, mild mannered people with a reputed strong work ethic and overzealous traffic police, was it possible that I had landed in the Switzerland of Africa??
Notes
On the 7th April the then presidents Habyarimana's plane was struck down by a surface to air missile. The exact circumstances around this are not known but this was to be the catalyst to mobilise bands of militia all over the country who had been training for months, to start the genocide. The killings started that very night.
Return to story
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