Den Haag

The abrupt change in lifestyle, pace, way of life going immediately from Kigali Airport to Schipol in Amsterdam was probably more drastic than it would have been to go immediately back to Chapel Hill or Carmel. I'm thankful at least that we spent our time in The Hague, rather than in Amsterdam (which I'll talk more about later), because of its slower pace, and more navigable arrangement. It was easy to get used to consistent warm showers and the European cafe culture, but nonetheless we all had pause when we noticed that only 4 people sit in SUV cabs and sodas cost nearly three dollars, let alone the few designer clothing shops one sees around. Needless to say, as one would imagine, life is different in The Hague than it was in Rwanda. Surprise.

We spent the majority of the week attending court sessions at the International Criminal Court for its first accused - Thomas Lubanga, a rebel leader in the DRC charged with illegally and forcefully conscripting children under the age of fifteen to fight in his war. And again, but to even stronger degree, I was impressed by the speakers who we talked to at the court. Among them were Gregory Townsend, a former legal advisor to the ICTR, and Jack Smith, investigations director for the ICC, but the most deeply affecting conversation we had occurred with Fatou Bensouda, the deputy chief prosecutor of the ICC.

Note: the old, beautiful building above is the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice, and the new, modern-looking one is the ICC.

Prosecutor Bensouda was one of the wisest, most humble, soft-spoken "sages" I've ever spoken to. She's from The Gambia, in West Africa, but has two sons studying at university in the United States. Someone from my program described her as "otherworldly;" I thought that captured her fairly well. One of the issues that we've been discussing this entire trip - a debate that I hadn't ever really been able to make sense of - had to do with the indictment by the ICC of Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan. Once indicted, President al-Bashir expelled all of the NGOs from Darfur - effectively bringing an end to the only lifeline of support still provided to the Fur and Masaalt tribes that have been victimized by the Janjaweed. We posed the question to Prosecutor Bensouda: do you regret the indictment of President al-Bashir? She answered with another question, "If not now, when? After they've all been killed and all the women raped? The expulsion of the NGOs is a result of a decision made by no one other than al-Bashir, and it is another crime - the crime against humanity of extermination.

We asked her then if she thought that al-Bashir would eventually appear before the court, and she responded without flinching. "He will be here. His destiny is here." I realized then - thanks to her confidence, and the look in here eye that said not only that Bashir would be there one day, but that he would be there and would eventually answer her questions - that the possibilities for international criminal law from here are the manifestations of so much of the idealism I hold on to as a naive poltical science student. Over 108 nations have codified a system of laws that make illegal and punishable the crimes that have led to such bloodshed in our history; the deaths of 20 million people in the 20th century have come at the hands of their own governments. The political pandering and roadblocks that prevented intervention from the international community are not considered by a court interpreting the law. Yes, Bashir is a head of state, but he is culpable to the rest of the world.

We have a long way to go until the United Nations has the ability to go after these people; but the court is a start. The indictments and trials put on by the courts in The Hague make more distant the possibility of expulsion to an Italian villa to a head of state who ravaged his or her people. These people become answerable to international law, they can be deterred or brought to justice, and most importantly, a record of these crimes is kept by the entire world.

One week later, in Amsterdam, I walked through the back annex that Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazi deportation and death for nearly two years before being betrayed and shipped to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne eventually died of typhus. I realized again in her makeshift bedroom, under her magazine clippings of ancient Greeks to 40's moviestars, the power of a voice or face of someone who has seen a victim. Genocide is not one act of the murder of 800,000 people. Genocide is 800,000 individual acts of murder, committed one by one: an entire universe destroyed each time a person is killed. When Otto Frank returned to the annex in 1950, and he made the decision to publish Anne's manuscripts, he did exactly what we are to do in response to such darkness. We force our eyes to look at the very darkest of humanity, and we acknowledge that it exists; we find the voices of the victims, and we listen

Kigali, Butare, Kibuye and Kivu

It’s quite hard for me to believe a number of things right now. The first of these is that this program ends in about one week thus beginning my short travels around Europe. The second is that I’m sitting in The Hague, Netherlands, and what seems simultaneously like a moment and a month ago, I was on Lake Kivu in Kibuye, Rwanda.

The last three weeks or so have each been different in their own way; the first I spent staying with my host Jean de Dieu in Gikondo – another ‘burough’ of Kigali that Thomas and I called our home for a week. We had a lot to learn from Jean de Dieu, about Rwandan culture and politics, as well as his perspective on the West, its role in influencing power struggles and conflicts in Africa. Each night after class typically consisted of plopping down in Jean de Dieu’s sitting room, watching BBC World (which if possible, I’d like to subscribe to at home) and talking until Thomas and I would retire to do reading for class and go to sleep.

Though via a slightly longer bus-ride back to town center, then back to Kisimenti, classes continued at the Commission Fighting Against Genocide; they started to get into more of the core of the study of international law, by which I’ve been pretty fascinated. I hadn’t realized how new the whole thing is – the first arrest taking place in only 2006, and the trial of that first arrest taking place at the beginning of this year.

Wednesday night of our last week in Kigali, the staff of College Doctrina Vitae invited all of us to what we thought would be something of an impromptu, casual ‘talent show’ (the drama club had been preparing things, and a few of the students on the trip with us had been known for dances they’d been teaching or performing, like the electric slide for example). It was more of a convocation with the entire school – some of our favorite students and teachers all had a chance to speak, the drama club performed dances, and a few of us even managed to throw together an acapella routine that broke down eventually into dancing. It was a great night, as would be anything that ends with a roomful of Carolina students and Rwandese secondary school students dancing to Akon’s “Freedom.”

From Kigali, we took a pretty unfathomably uncomfortable bus ride (twelve-ish people per van/bus) two and a half hours south to Butare – Rwanda’s Chapel Hill. It’s a deceptively large city; it doesn’t look like it has its population of 200,000. There are a few roads lined with craft markets, banks, and a Lebanese market at which we all became ‘regulars’ since we were such big fans of their sambussas, and vegetable quesadillas. The change of pace provided by Butare – more of a college town than a city – was certainly welcomed. Kigali isn’t huge, but there’s a lot of noise and activity to contend with – minibuses, cabs, airtime salespeople, loud vehicles, and so on. When we first arrived at the National University of Rwanda, it was funny to be brought back to college tour days. You know, “This building houses Political Science, this is the center quad, this is the residential building,” etc. We enjoyed being back in an actual classroom at NUR, as well as the fact that in Butare, one can experience the clear, starry night you expect in sub-Saharan Africa.

Our last two days left some of the most lasting images on me from the trip. Murambi memorial site rests atop one of Rwanda’s hills – a former technical school under construction where 50,000 Tutsis fled for protection from the killers, and only seven survived. The area where it rests is breathtakingly beautiful, but it’s the site of hell on earth 15 years ago. All my efforts to describe Murambi end up just with me staring at a cursor on the screen; all I can say is that the images there won’t ever leave me, and also it was the place where everything on the trip sort of connected in my mind.

Our last day in Rwanda we spent in Kibuye, a small town on Lake Kivu, the western border of Rwanda with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We took a boat ride out to Peace Island, explored, some swam – I climbed a tree, then fell out of it – then watched the sunset on our way back to the guesthouse. Lake Kivu is probably the most beautiful place in the world I’ve ever been.

Arrived in The Hague yesterday. Talk about an abrupt change – and a small world. Still adjusting, but loving the warm showers, fast food service, and being able to eat fresh vegetables.

More exploring

One definite downside to the length of this summer program is that just as one starts to settle in to one location, it's time to move again.

I spent two more days at the secondary school this week, which has quickly become probably my favorite pasttime in Kigali. This week I taught the difference between active and passive voice in English, which the kids were really on top of, so I tried (pretty unsuccessfully) to make a jeopardy-esque game for them, and realized how difficult it must have been for all my middle school and high school teachers to keep things fresh. But yeah, fun to be back and hoping we keep a partnership going with the school when we get back home.

This week, along with the two classes, we had some time to explore the city some more - particularly Tuesday, because class was cancelled. That day, to make something of the afternoon, and try to map out areas of Kigali where we hadn't visited, the group divided up different parts of the city, and I went in a group of three to Kicukiro, another sector of the city. We had the mission of just finding a few points of interest, one of which was a college of technology which had just re-opened in 2008. The Dean of Students showed us many of the features of the campus, one of them being a FIFA quality soccer pitch with field turf, but no stands. For the most part it was a typical campus, with the occasional signs of damage from the 1994 genocide, like metal parts stripped from the some of the machines used in manufacturing. It wasn't until after we left (looking out the window, seeing one of the purple government signs up the road from the entrance we used) that we discovered that the school was one memorial site as well. I thought it was a serious testament to the resilience of this place that we couldn't tell. Granted, the political tensions aren't palpable that you can see, and a lot of the serious poverty here is far from the well-paved, heavily-trafficked areas. There are still problems that need solving, but the people - many of whom remember 1994 - live right in the midst of where everything happened. They have to. Sometimes, as a student/observer/tourist/outsider I forget.

Friday, we went to visit Rwanda's 'Millennium Village' called Mayange - a place which, with the help of international aid and the United Nations, has enacted all sorts of development strategies derived from the UN's millenium development goals (MDGs). Our visit to Mayange was organized through a tour company in Kigali, and this slowly became more evident to me as the nature of each of our 'stops' became stranger and stranger. Some of them were okay - farmers showing us proudly what their crops are yielding, with our tour guide reminding us of the ways that international aid workers and donors have assisted in training the farmers. Others made me uncomfortable, and some made me very, very uncomfortable. I didn't like the idea of 'touring' a primary school when classes were in session, and I couldn't even stomach the idea of doing the same with a community health clinic. I, and a few of others had step outside and wait until we left, while many from the rest of the group - to be polite to the tour company mostly, endured some of the more invasive parts of the tour until being relieved to move on to the next site. It would have worked much better if we were a smaller group, but nonetheless, the way the tour company handled showing Westerners all of the improvements from implementation of MDGs made my stomach turn. The day ended with a "community meeting" where members of the community essentially stopped their daily lives to (for lack of a better word) entertain the group with testimonies about effects of the genocide on the community, Intore dancing* and food. The way it felt like 'entertainment' organized by the tour company again made me tremendously uncomfortable, but opened up questions for me about the strange symbiosis between exposure, tourism from the West, international aid, and the Rwandan economy. The tourism industry is a central part of the economy insofar as it influences aid from the West. It's a structural part of globalization and international economics. Nonetheless, the day made me severely uncomfortable (especially to be an American), and downright sick at the idea of "tourism" in a place like Mayange. 

The way this was orchestrated was the responsibility of the tour group, and has nothing to do with the abroad program as a whole (which has been great), nor Millenium Village Project. I'm planning to read up more on MVP - because a lot of the program enacts strategies that have tremendously improved the quality of life of many people in the community of Mayange: microloans, a larger staff and better facilities at the health clinics, internet access in the schools, and so on. I'm not very well versed in differing models of developing rural areas of 'developing' countries, but this trip at least put lots of questions in my head about the subject, mainly regarding what works, and more importantly about how much international aid workers and planners allow community members agency and a sufficient role in directing how they want to improve their communities.

Saturday was very different, and lots of fun. Doug, Kate, Sarah and I left the guesthouse in the morning with the plan to get on a random minibus (Volkswagen vans which drive all over Kigali and the rest of the country) and just see where it ended up. Our method was asking a minibus operator which buses went to Eastern province (one-fourth of the country). This was too vague, so we corrected our request by asking how we could get close to Akagera National Park. One two hour cramped busride later, we ended up in Kabarondo, a small village about 30 minutes by motorcycle taxi to Akagera. We ate lunch (goat brochettes and "chips" of course) and then were approached by an Irish man teaching in Rwandan schools out there (also helping with the English change) who told us we should head to Lake Muhazi, which was about 20 minutes by another minibus. We took his advice, enjoyed a relaxing day on the shores of the lake, as well as a boat ride on some of the most peaceful water I've ever seen. I realized as we left that the water seemed so blue not because the water itself had that color at all, but because it was so peaceful that the blue sky was more vividly reflected in it. Though it was cramped, the ride there and back made up what was probably the most beautiful drive I've ever taken. The whole day - ending up somewhere at random, the drive, the lake - was just right. 

If you've seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and/or know how ridicuous we are, it explains the above picture.

Now today I'm preparing for a week of homestay, which is mainly why I've written such a long blog post. It's likely that my next update will be from Butare (university town in the South) or perhaps The Hague, Netherlands! It's going by pretty quickly.

*Intore dancing is a traditional form of dance that's specifically Rwandan, made popular by the Twa people, a small ethnic minority which was traditionally composed of artisans. Though the rest of the tour was pretty orchestrated and uncomfortable (and borderline offensive), it was nice to get a chance to see Intore performed. A few others from the group got a chance to see this from friends that they've met in the area, but I hadn't yet.