rwanda

Our team’s missions statement is to create sustainable differences on the road to self discovery. After interviewing a lot of our volunteers, I’ve found that the end statement, to “discover” more about yourself is a lot of our group’s goal. Many are redefining themselves out here.

I didn’t really put myself into that category with everyone else that I interviewed. I have felt that I’ve had a lot of life changing events or moments in my quarter century life and that a lot of those previous experiences have shaped and molded me. Reflecting back on this past month and a half I’ve realized that I was wrong. I’ve realized that I have been constantly re-defined things I thought I had already figured out. Here are a few examples of what I mean.

Trust. I feel like we have been forced to discern people’s motives a lot lately. I’m much more skeptical of some people after a friend of ours stole from us but then other people here I trust whole heartedly, without reservation, even with my life.
Loyalty. After interviewing five HIV positive women who were all infected by their husbands but felt no anger, I re-evaluated loyalty and what that means. I am not sure how I feel about it. It’s great that they aren’t angry and can let go and focus on living life to the fullest, but at the same time it is not okay if this is a cultural acceptance thing.

How to live my life. I feel like more than anything I’ve been slapped in the face with raw life and what it is like to live with problems that are much more survival based than anything I’ve experienced in my pampered life. Looking at a person with AIDS or someone struggling with malaria, someone who has suffered from deaths in their family and others who don’t know what they are going to eat that day, I have realized that most of my problems are self inflicted or things I’ve conjured up in my head from boredom. Spending a lot of time with people who are in extreme poverty makes me feel like I’m living more richly and it doesn’t have to do with money. I see things in a more vibrant and yet a harsher light.

That’s how I felt in Rwanda this last weekend. On the 13 hour cramped and bumpy bus ride from Kigali to Kampala, I sat reflecting on human nature and trying to decide if and how that definition has changed in my mind. The images of skulls and femur bones piled up on shelves, the room in the back of one of the churches where everyone was set on fire, the blood still left on a wall in the neighboring room, the priests changing room with a bible on a table next to a pile of bones and a huge grenade like hole where the window was, piles and piles of dirty rag clothes taken from the bodies of the victims and stacked on the church benches, thousands and thousands of pieces of clothing. In the piles of clothes, a snoopy childs t-shirt caught my eye.

The first church tour our guide Latifa explained after asking her that when she was 10 she came to this church to hide from the hutu extremists. Her family hoped to find sanctuary from the extremists in the church along with 5,000 others. When she saw the hutus coming for them in a mob like fashion, she ran and was able to escape with some others to a swamp and stayed in hiding for a month. When she came out of hiding she had to face the enormity of the slaughter of many who she cared about and loved. She said that coming to work can be difficult to have to relive the experience day after day. I was completely over-whelmed and with my voice strained said, “I’m sorry you went through that” as I left. I don’t know if I’ve ever understated anything more in my life.

The second church was a perceived sanctuary for 14,000 people. As I descended down the stairs in a mass grave behind the church I saw thousands of broken skulls and my emotions shut down. It was too much to deal with and I just had to sit for a while and try to understand what was in front of me. These uniform skulls and bones were once brothers, sisters, moms and dads and now are just bones. They were murdered in the most barbaric and brutal methods that I don’t need to go into. I factually know that numbers,1 million murdered and 2 million people were displaced, but seeing the clothes, the childrens bones, and talking to another guy my age who was about 12 when it happened and was there to visit his diseased relatives made me question the inherent nature of humans. I used to think we are inherently good.

I was taken back in my trip to Rwanda to when I went to Hiroshima in 7th grade and was speechless again at atrocities that humans can do to each other. The ways that we can desensitize ourselves. Books I read about how the Japanese treated Koreans in China and Nanking during ww2, the holocaust, the genocides in bosnia, turkey, and the native Americans, I was disgusted that 1. we don’t learn from the past and in conjunction with that 2. that it is HAPPENING NOW in Darfur.

I think that sometimes we convolute and make excuses for things that should be black and white. In a situation like Rwanda where the Germans, Belgians, priests, hutu extremists and the international community were all at fault. The international community just sat back when they only needed 5,000 troops to stop the genocide and 5,000 UN troops were in Rwanda at the time but were not allowed to stop anything unless they were directly shot at. It’s ridiculous that we have to sit back again and allow innocent people to die again in Darfur until political will changes. People are dying NOW and I’m just frustrated and feel helpless. At the same time, the helplessness is exactly what de-sensitizes us on the outside. Our cook Mary just went back to sudan last weekend and just knowing that she is waiting for peace to be reunited with her husband is more motivation for me to get involved so it’s stopped.
Anyway, Rwanda as a place is gorgeous, it is so much more developed than Uganda and I felt much more safe there. The streets are manicured, tree-lined, and there is not garbage around. I love it there. Getting there was typical African fashion of definitely struggling. The first bus that Lezlie found was going to take about 16 hours to get to the Rwanda Congo border. We decided that was not the right match for us so frantically at about 6pm found another company and went to buy tickets for that night. We got to the bus ticket office, I clarified the tickets and we bought six tickets for Lezlie, Alexis, me, Kat, Kellyn, and Drew. We got there at 12 for our 1 am bus to find that they booked us for the next day. We sat there frustrated and tired at 1am as we watched our bus drive away in the middle of a dark parking lot and were not wanting to try to find a way home to Lugazi again. The manager figured out a way to squeeze us into a 3am bus and we happily accepted. Sadly, the tranquil bus ride sleeping was not on the agenda. We felt like we were on the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland. I’m not being overdramatic. The third or fourth time we were all air-born about 3 hours into it, I blurted “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” and then Lezlie followed up with “THIS IS RIDICULOUS” and Alexis “I’m going to talk to the driver.” And we all erupted in laughter at the pitiful state we were in, heads bumping all over the place as we pretended to sleep as we rode at about 80mph through fog in pot-holed roads.

Besides almost missing the one bank to get our money out and finding that French, Rwandan Kenyan (I think) and English are spoken pretty equally, one third of the time we were able to effectively communicate. I did NOT communicate effectively with our hotel man when we were talking about prices and ended up paying four times what we had thought, which turned out to be about $18/person/night but when we were expecting $4 it was annoying.

That aside, I once again wish I had more time there. We ate great food and I was soo impressed with the beauty of the country. I could live there. I also had great company so it was a great trip.

Oh lastly guess what? Mzungu is Swahili, so we didn’t escape that phrase.