Last weekend, fourteen of the sixteen members of the ENGAGE Uganda team bussed to Rwanda for a weekend of pure “fun” and vacation. My only previous perception of Rwanda was what I knew from the movie Hotel Rwanda. I quickly found that the film misrepresented the country on many levels. First of all, the real Rwanda is far more beautiful than the film shows; maybe this is because the film was shot in South Africa, and not really among the “thousand hills” of Rwanda.

But, as I mentioned, Rwanda confused me. At first, I could not get enough of Kigali; compared to Kampala, the city is clean and polite. On our first full day, however, we went to the genocide memorials and museum. This was the second way in which Hotel Rwanda misrepresented the country, as the movie toned down the horror and violence of the genocide. Never before have I felt so suffocated by something I’m observing as an outsider; never before have I felt such a lack of faith in mankind. I literally felt as if I could not breathe, as if the weight of this genocide was sitting on my chest and crushing my lungs, when a survivor showed us where she had hidden under a pile of bloody corpses for three days, until the perpetrators moved onto a new site of bloodshed.

So I left the two churches, between which a total of 7,000 victims had been massacred, and the genocide memorial, feeling sick to my stomach. I could not wrap my mind around what had happened; I could not for the life of me understand how someone could look their friend or neighbor in the eye while he hacked him to pieces with a machete. I could not comprehend, no matter how many soldiers might be lost in the conflict, how the UN and the international community could sit by and watch a massacre of innocent civilians for one hundred days. It’s estimated that a million people were killed in the three month period; does the UN and the West consider the lives of their soldiers to be so much more important than the lives of Rwandans that they could not sacrifice some soldiers, money, and supplies to end the genocide within weeks, or even days?

The next day, I think our entire group felt claustrophobic in Kigali, so we went to hike in the breathtakingly beautiful mountainous area where Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC meet. It was more than a hike and more than we’d bargained for; our experience consisted of trekking up and down muddy, slippery hills for hours. Yet, we had a blast; Mount Bisoke was pure with little taint of human interference. We saw mountain gorillas, sitting in their natural habitat quietly and peacefully. I felt better than I had the day before, but humanity still disgusted me. If we did not exist, would the entire world be so blissfully ignorant and happy as these gorillas?

Half of the group had to return to Gulu the following day, leaving our group with seven people. We had arranged a meeting with a man named Bishop John, a bishop in the Anglican church of Rwanda. I did not know what to expect from this meeting, but was immediately impressed and inspired by him. Bishop John has been working since the genocide on reconciliation; his solution to the bitterness and the bloody memories was forgiveness. If the perpetrators could genuinely apologize for their crimes, and the victims could whole-heartedly forgive them, the chain of hate would break, and Rwanda would be freed from its past. Bishop John is one of the most incredible and inspirational people I have ever met in my life, and made my Rwandan experience come full circle. He made me believe that, however terrible the genocide was, it bred the goodness and creativity in people.

So this was my experience in Rwanda. Hopefully you will not struggle with the concepts as much as I have, but take the post for what it’s worth and further spread the goodness of humanity yourself.

 

 

--Ann