Goodbye Rwanda, Hello Northern Uganda!

Hello!

I am currently in Gulu, Uganda at the Elephant Graceland hotel. I can't tell whether it is an homage to Elvis' home in Memphis or just a really spectacular name, either way it a pretty great hotel minus the lack of anything but cold water.

 My time in Rwanda has unfortunately come to an end. It is a truly fascinating country and I really hope that I will be back at some point in my life. If you get the chance you really should visit.

I apologize if this post seems not as substantial as other ones, I had a lot to talk about and not much time to do so!

TIG

On Thursday my group and I visited a TIG camp. A TIG camp is basically a work camp for those who were tried and found guilty of genocidal crimes in the Rwandan Gacaca court system. Only those who have confessed and apologized for their crimes are eligible for this program. If they are accepted into the program, half of their jail time is spent working for the community. In some cases this means living in their home and going to work each day, obviously for no pay. Our first stop was at a village that the genocidaires were constructing. It was uninhabited as of yet but there were a total of forty-seven houses being built for the families, both victims and perpetrators, deemed most at risk by the local community. In umudugudus (village in Kinyarwanda, also the smallest political division in Rwanda) across the country, similar projects are being undertaken.

After stopping by the village we visited the quarry where some of the TIGists were working. The work done by these people brings in billions of Rwandan Francs each year The stones they mine sell for about 120 Rwf each, so if you do the math these people are doing a heck of a lot of stonecutting. At the quarry we saw the mountains of neatly cut stone that were the final product of the camp. I had seen roads in Kigali paved with similar stones and found out later that the TIGists lay the stones as well as mine them. Free labor and materials for Rwanda to rebuild itself, sounds like a good deal to me.

To actually get the stones the workers lit fires against the stone hillside that caused it to crack. Then they chiseled and wedged sections of the rock of and put it aside to be broken down into the paving stones and into gravel. Both men and women worked at the camp, the women seemed to be more heavily involved in the creation of the gravel.

The camp itself was a sea of orange. I am not sure if this was a conscious choice or if it was just the materials they had at their disposal but literally the entire camp, housing, meeting hall/ dining hall, greenhouses, was made of sticks, rope, and orange tarp. They had gardens all over the place that seemed to provide a good portion of their food. The sleeping quarters seemed horribly cramped but what can you expect from a prison camp.

We were able to talk to some of the workers, which for us was the first time to actually be able to talk to accused and convicted genocidaires. One man was very vocal about how great he though the camps were in that they made him see what he had done wrong and allowed him to right his mistakes. They all seemed convinced that they deserved to be forgiven for what they had done, something that I found interesting as I would personally find it almost impossible to forgive someone for killing my entire family. But as I have said before, the process of forgiveness in Rwanda is nearly unbelievable. What the country has been able to achieve in merely sixteen years is truly remarkable and they are well on the road to being rebuilt and already have plans to become an Information Technology powerhouse in the African community.

GOODBYE RWANDA!

The Friday following our TIG camp visit we said goodbye to our Rwanda university buddies. I don’t know if I have mentioned Djuma before but I was paired with him as part of our program. He is part of a group of students supported by SURF, a British fund that helps pay for the schooling of genocide survivors. We met with our buddies each Friday at the SIT building and I met Djuma a number of other times on the weekends to just hang out. We came to be really good friends and it was really unfortunate that we left Rwanda when we did. It’s hard to form strong relationships when you have such a short time to do so. But Djuma is someone whom I am sure I will keep in frequent contact with.

On Friday we had our final home stay dinner at a hotel in Kigali. It was a pretty low-key affair with all the families and a small buffet. Music was played but the party broke up pretty early on, fortunately because I was had quite the fever and what I will simply call an “upset stomach,” my first of my stint in Africa but which was all good and well by Saturday.

Saturday was my last full day with my home stay family and what a day it was. I slept in, awesome, good start. Then my home stay mother, Jeanine, taught me how to make amandazi. Amandazi are basically sweetened balls of dough that are extremely common in Rwanda. As simple as they sound they are amazing and my group and I eat them almost everyday, so needless to say, I was really excited to learn how to make them. A little flour, milk, sugar, baking soda, 10 small eggs, vanilla sugar and some water later we had a huge ball of dough that we took small chunks of and rolled out on a table. After cutting it into small squared we dropped them in cooking oil over a charcoal stove for a few minutes and voilá, amandazi. I have to say, could have used a little more sugar, but for a first attempt, I was pretty ok with myself.

After finishing off the batch my host brother, Ashiraf, and my host cousin, Ally, took me to a soccer game, Rwanda vs. Benin. I love to watch soccer so I was thrilled to get to see Rwanda play and the stadium, Amahoro stadium, is where President Kagame recently was sworn in, so to see this little piece of Rwanda society was pretty cool as well. The tickets were a whopping $1.75 and we had open seating available to us for 80% of the stadium. President Kagame was actually at the game, political/cultural bonus points. Rwanda ended up losing 3-0, which was pretty disappointing as they played relatively well. At American sporting events, if your team is getting thwacked, you can just leave the stadium. But at this game, because the president was in attendance, no one was allowed to leave the stadium until the President had left the building. Interesting system there.

After the game we retuned to Nyamirambo and got brochette. Brochette is one of the greatest things on this magnificent earth. All over Kigali there are eating establishments that serve meat on a stick, a shish kabob called brochette. The meat of choice here is goat. After a long day at a soccer match, the meal is perfect. Because it was my last night, my family basically force-fed me brochette and chapatti, something I was hugely ok with. The problem though it that upon returning home they also expected me to eat dinner, not gonna happen. Something I may not have mentioned, Rwandans eat a lot.

To wrap up my day, I finished off a research paper and then my family came into my room and gave me some parting gifts. They were unbelievably generous and I’ll just say my real family has a great Christmas ahead of them.

I am really going to miss my Rwandan family, they were beyond hospitable and I never once felt like an outsider in their home. I just hope one day that I can repay their kindness! On Sunday they dropped me off at SIT with all of my stuff and we said goodbye. Time to go to Uganda.

MBARARA

After a six-hour trek, plus an hour at the border, we reached the Ugandan town of Mbarara. Here we met the other group who was coming from Gulu. The original plan was to visit the Naki Valley Refugee Settlement about three hours away but we were denied permission to visit. Apparently we did not apply the required three weeks ahead of time. Instead, the governmental head of the settlement came and spoke to us followed by three people who live in the camp. Interestingly enough, there is a large Rwandan population in the camp, largely Hutu Diaspora, who won’t return to Rwanda for fear of retaliation and misguided justice. Many of these people have had their refugee status revoked because their country is no longer in an unsafe condition to them but their fears lead them to be people basically without a nation to call their own.

It was incredibly interesting to hear the official tell about how he perceive the camp and how well it was set up and run, and then hear how life is actually like for those who live there. I am strongly considering doing my research project at the Settlement and see it as a great way to combine the refugee camps of Uganda and the geopolitics associated with Rwanda into one incredibly interesting topic. Who knows where this will take me!

After our brief stay in Mbarara, my group made the ten-hour trek up to Gulu! Phew. Some highlights: leaving at 5:30 a.m., seeing our first African Baboons, crossing the Nile River, and finally reaching Gulu.

GULU

I have only been in Gulu a few hours but I can already tell it is a whole other world compared to Kigali. Gulu is the economic hub of Northern Uganda but it is much less developed than Kigali. It is the base for a lot of NGOs and Aid organizations in the area as well and we saw lots of signs for the UN, World Food Program, GTZ, Invisible Children, etc. I’m interested to see how they affect the culture here in Northern Uganda. Our home stays here are apparently a lot more rugged, power outages being highly common for days at a time and warm showers and our own rooms being a thing of the past.

But Gulu itself will be interesting because only about three years ago the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was active in and around the town with assaults and kidnappings as part of its resistance against the Ugandan government. They have since been driven in to the DRC and Sudan but the wounds are still fresh. Apparently many of the other groups home stay families consisted of ex-child soldiers, ex-LRA wives, and the families of those who resisted them. The conflict is much more fresh here compared to Rwanda and the comparisons between the two post-conflict societies will certainly be fascinating.

Well, that does it for me this evening. I hope all is well in whatever fine country you are reading this from, and again… feedback, please!!

Muzungu currently in Gulu, Uganda