Our meals cost about half as much as my glass of white wine at Republika last night. Andi & Kate had picked me up from Hotel Iris around 10:30pm, after about 2 hours of chasing each other on phone/email/skype, the intervention of Raymond from the front desk, and directions from Paul Kagame's guard. They'd been in Rwanda for three months, working for sidHARTe, a Columbia program that trains health care professionals in emergency care at low-resource or rural hospitals in Ghana and Rwanda.
Republika, a restaurant in Kagame's own Kiyovu neighborhood, was beautiful: with a wide deck overlooking the Rwandan hills, nearly invisible in the blackness, and sprinkled with lights that were easily mistaken for stars in the night sky. We ate coconut curry fish with grilled banana and ginger rice, and stopped by their place on the way back to my hotel to pick up some mobile phones left by a colleague.
On the way, I asked if Andi or Kate had had any conversations with Rwandans about the genocide. It struck me as soon as I'd landed, looking at the middle-aged female customs official, the older man pushing luggage carts--what had they seen, what did they live through to be here today? And Kigali, such a beautiful, clear, cool city as soon as you enter it--how could one imagine neighbors walking up cobblestone streets and past well-manicured lawns and up bougainvillea-lined driveways to brutally attack and kill their neighbors?
Andi said that those who do mention it say they don't want to talk about it, and that Rwanda maintains a thin veneer of normalcy that foreigners and tourists rarely puncture, below which its people are still scarred and traumatized. "In my hospital, all the attending [phsyicians] are my age, with one grey-haired man that they all follow around like puppies; there are no more experienced, older doctors for them to learn from, because they were all killed or fled." Medicine, like law, is an apprenticeship and with whole generations missing, Rwandans our age are left without mentors and teachers.
The 5-minute drive back to Hotel Iris turned into a 20-minute walk to find a taxi, after we discovered Andi had a flat tire, and I ended a day-and-a-half of travelling by going to sleep at 1:15am. The next day, Bosco came to pick Paul (part of IRC's Health Technical Unit, based in NY) and I up at 8am... an hour earlier than expected. And now we're several hours into the ride and passing through Rushengeri, one of the entrance points to the Parc National des Virunga, home to the famous mountain gorillas. Statues and paintings of gorillas have greeted us in almost every town we've passed through so far, reminding me of the large Czech man I sat next to on the plane, who was "That Guy" flying to Rwanda with a large black t-shirt whose entire front was taken up by a giant gorilla face. Aside from gorillas, Rwanda also has endless terraced hills that reminded me of Ubud on Bali, or a more tropical version of Nepal.
In one town, we passed what I think was a memorial to the genocide: a white arch with yellow, green, and blue stripes, with a message in Kinyarwanda following in English with the words: "Never again." One of the country's larger genocide memorials consist of around 800 bodies, embalmed with lime and laying on pillars, many in the same positions in which they died.
We also passed Chinese foreman directing road crews, and several signs advertising the ease and advantages of doing business in Rwanda (the first Rwandan billboard you see upon crossing the border from Goma says: "Investment yes, Corruption no." I was told that official government documents squarely place blame for the genocide on colonialism, and are clear in their message to the international community: "We got ourselves out of that, we'll set the terms of our development and doing business here."
Speaking of development, Bosco said that he's seen pictures of the U.S. and wants to go there, because our villages are better than Kigali. I told him they're not better, just different.
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