Rwanda is the land of a thousand hills but also the land of a tragic genocide 24 years ago.
In June 2000, Gen. Romeo Dallaire was found passed out, intoxicated, on a park bench in Ottawa.
Dallaire had been the Canadian general in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda when, on April 6, 1994, an atrocious couple of months of killing broke out in the country. Over 800,000 Tutsis were massacred, mainly by means of machetes, by their fellow countrypeople, Hutus.
One might say, “Oh, tribal warfare again,” but the curious truth is that the Hutu/Tutsi delineations were created by the Belgians earlier on in order to classify the population and simplify their colonial rule.
General Dallaire had seen this massacre coming and warned the United Nations. In Rwanda, the ruling Hutus, about 85 per cent of the population, had been building up to genocide with media rhetoric among other things. But the UN would not listen to Dallaire’s requests for troops to deal with the mounting tension.
The trauma of the Rwandan genocide left Dallaire with post-traumatic stress disorder. It culminated in the park bench incident in 2000. It once again focused Canadians’ attention on the horrors of 1994.
By 2008, when my husband Robin and I first visited the country, life in Rwanda was calm but tense. President Paul Kagame, to all notions a Tutsi dictator who had been the leader of the ‘rebel army’ that eventually brought an end to the killings, was in charge of a traumatised population. Our taxi drivers and Rwandan acquaintances assured us very firmly that the words Tutsi and Hutu were banned and that everyone was a Rwandan. There was evidence of an army, but it wasn’t very visible. An iron fist controlled the country and any opposition to Kagame’s rule was being firmly eradicated. But hey, anything was better than the horrors many of the people we met had gone through a decade previously. Thanks to a mutual acquaintance on Bowen Island, we met a Rwandan psychiatrist who was involved in the Gacaca process. This was a peace and reconciliation movement, which provided mediation among the Rwandan people.
We attended one of his sessions in a hot and stuffy building and were amazed by the willingness of various groups to collaborate. We heard about families responsible for having killed their neighbours rebuilding their gutted houses and being forgiven, superficially anyway, by the victims’ families. We visited churches filled with bones and skulls of murdered people and we saw the Genocide Centre, then recently built, in the capital, Kigali. We saw evidence of rebuilding of the country by international aid groups, but oh my goodness, so much more to be done!
So why would we choose to visit a country gutted by tragedy? Well, a few reasons. This country is a tiny jewel, set amongst much larger and more influential neighbours. There are probably even more than a thousand hills, each covered with tiny plots of land, beautiful greenery and dotted with picturesque little houses. The majority of the population lives hand-to-mouth on the crops they till and sell at the local markets and the roads are filled with bicycles carrying impossible loads of bananas, plantains and other produce. Cheerful children are everywhere, on their way to school or carrying huge water carriers that they fill at local pumps. Rwandans are some of the friendliest people we have ever met.
Our main reason for visiting, however, was to see our daughter who was spending a year working in a very isolated village where Partners in Health had set up a state-of-the-art hospital. There she had made the decision to initiate a girls-only run for all the schools in the area and start a small scholarship fund for girls who didn’t have the money to attend high school.
Jump to 2015, seven years later, when I was able to join our daughter, now executive director of her organization, Komera (now sponsoring over 100 girls at high school and their families’ local businesses) at the annual Komera Fun Run in the same village. This is a run that is mind-boggling! There are over 300 girls, many of who are barefoot or in flip-flops, tearing along a red gravel road. They return to a stadium where there’s music, dancing in colourful garb, speeches – endless speeches – and lots of shouting and cheering. The day ends with a lunch and more speeches and lots of hugs from the girls sponsored by Komera.
The Komera team in Rwanda is thrilled to talk about their work, take us to visit some of the families of the girls (mud floors, no kitchen or bathroom and no furniture in their huts), let us teach a session or two at their Post-Secondary Training Program and entertain us with games and more speeches.
Was there a difference in Rwanda seven years later? Yes, a palpable difference. The Rwandans seem more relaxed, many of the young people have no memory of the genocide (but are coping with other problems such as AIDS, malaria and difficult family dynamics). Kigali is a thriving city: this is a safe country for visitors and investors, tourism is on the up-and-up, and word is getting out that this is an African country that is leading others in community service. Once a month everyone does community cleaning for a whole morning – schools are closed, businesses are closed and traffic is at a standstill. Bonus: plastic bags are banned in the country. Arriving at the airport, unsuspecting tourists are stripped of their duty-free plastic bags and given a dressing-down.
Robin and my next date with Rwanda is in 2019. It will be great to see old friends and perhaps introduce new ones to the Rwandan experience. In the meantime, we are hosting our eighth annual Rotary Run for Rwanda on Bowen Island on August 25. Komera Canada, which is an offshoot of the U.S. Komera, (Komera means ‘Courage’ in the Kinyarwanda language) presently sponsors 12 girls at senior secondary school in rural Rwanda and three girls at university. In fact, most of the Canadian sponsors are from Bowen Island. Join us for a fun run or walk just before our Bowfest parade! Registration is $20 for adults and $10 for nine and under. Register at rotaryrunforrwanda.com.
