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.
