Hey everybody!
So I’ve been really bad about updating this, but hopefully
this long post will give a good update of some things I’ve been up to. Last
night we returned from our week-long excursion to Western Uganda and Rwanda,
and it was SUCH an amazing experience. I’ll start by going through all the
places we visited and things we did last week…sorry if this post is long.
On Monday of last week, we visited the Millennium Village
Project in Ruhira, Western Uganda. The project is based on achieving the UN’s
Millennium Development Goals which are really ambitious goals aimed at
alleviating the world’s largest poverty issues drastically by 2015 (they
include free universal primary education, reducing HIV/AIDS, reducing poverty
levels of those who live on less than $1/day, etc). It was a really cool
project to see in action, as its taking the holistic plan of action to reduce
poverty in all aspects. They’ve installed solar panels, clean water sanitation
and drainage systems, created better schooling and business opportunities and
more. Personally, I really like this approach to development because it teaches
the poorest of the poor or the most remote rural villages to grow and develop
on their own, without complete reliance on foreign aid. The project is aimed at
pulling out of the village in 2015, so by this point the village should be
self-sustainable and the experiment will hopefully be a lesson on how to
achieve the Millennium Development Goals in other impoverished areas around the
world.
On Tuesday we went to Uganda’s largest refugee settlement in
Nakivaale. It has 60,000 refugees of 12 different nationalities, and it was an
incredibly difficult but rewarding experience. When we first got off the bus,
we were swarmed by refugees wanting to talk to us and inquire why we were
there. Right off the bat the experience became overwhelming because many of the
people expressed their distrust in whites as outsiders constantly arrive in the
settlement and don’t ever bring truly beneficial change or hope. One guy who was
extremely intoxicated (and as we learned later, was also mentally unstable)
approached my friend Aimee and I and started scolding us about how we were full
while he was dying of hunger. Then he pointed at my pink fingernails and made
me feel awful about how I have money and time to paint my nails while he’s
dying. This initial experience was really tough, but the day got better as we
talked to more sane people. We got split up into groups to explore the
different nationalities of the camp, and I got put in the Horn of Africa group
so I got to speak to Somalis, Ethiopians and Eritreans. The experience was
especially cool because I felt like I was in the Horn of Africa for the
afternoon because these people in general look different from East Africans. Their
mainly taller, lighter-skinned, and have different facial features, so it was
really cool to spend time with a different group of people than I’m used to. We
had two awesome Somali women guides, one named Halima who was elderly and such
a strong woman. She was really educated and had even studied in Italy, but lost
everything 15 years ago with the political conflict and instability in Somalia,
and has lived in the settlement ever since. The majority of the people we
talked to came to Uganda because it’s the most stable of the neighboring
countries, but still had a lot of complaints about how the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees is running the camp and providing aid. It was all
really interesting to hear on a first-hand basis, and a topic I’d really like
to explore more at some point. The majority of the refugees are Congolese, and
then there are Rwandans, Burundians, Kenyans, Somalis, Ethiopians, and
Eritreans. All of them feel unsafe returning home and some even said they felt
like they had no nationality or home when asked if they ever wanted to return.
Wednesday was the drive to Rwanda, and the bus ride was
awesome because we passed through the most gorgeous hillside and rural areas
I’ve ever seen. There was nonstop hills and miles and miles of green farms and
land. When we arrived in Rwanda at night, we first went to the Rwandan
Governance Board for a lecture. I did a lot of research/papers on Rwanda and
the current government led by Paul Kagame so I was really curious to hear what
they had to say. They had a largely positive and optimistic view on the
government, and they went on and on about how low their corruption levels are
and how far they’ve come since the genocide. I agree they have made tremendous
strides since the devastation of the 1994 genocide, but Kagame has been in
power for almost two decades and is far from democratic. We found out later on
that we had spies following us the entire time we were there to keep tabs on us
and figure out what we were doing. At our hotel our passports were even taken so
they could record our information. This was really, really fascinating to me
because it became evident quickly how much military power and control Kagame
has over the entire country. On another note, we all enjoyed Kigali (the
capital of Rwanda) a lot though because it is SO much cleaner and organized
than Kampala. In Kampala walking through or riding in traffic is literally a
fight for survival, but in Kigali it was pretty much like being in America.
Thursday was Genocide Memorial Day, and the whole experience
of that is really hard to put into words. No matter how much you read or hear
about the genocide, nothing can really prepare you for being there and
experiencing the sites where so many people died. We first went to the Nyamata site,
which is a Catholic Church where 10,000 people were killed in a single day:
April 15, 1994. The church is now filled with the infinite bundles of clothes
of those who died there, and the lot behind it is a mass grave for them. Being
in there was so eerie, and it made the horror of the genocide very real. The
second church in Ntarama was a site where
5,000 people, mostly women and children, were killed between April 15th
and 16th, 1994. It was mostly women and children killed because the
men were on the hill nearby launching a counterattack to try and fight the
interhamwe, or perpetrators of the genocide. In the main church building, there
are bundles of clothes of the victims and various coffins as bodies are even
STILL being found in the surrounding area. The guide pointed to the newest one,
saying that that body had been found just the week prior. He then showed us the
machetes, clubs, and axes recovered from the site which made it horrifyingly
real how personal and atrocious the genocide had been. The killers didn’t
usually use guns, but instead killed with the most rudimentary weapons that
required them to be right next to their victims, inflicting the most painful, prolonged
deaths possible.
Don’t read this paragraph if you don’t want graphic details.
We then went into the Sunday School room, where I was the most overwhelmed and
completely lost it. This room during the killings was reserved for “smashing”
babies on the wall and raping the women. There is still a huge black stain on
the wall where babies were “held by the foot” and smashed against the wall, so
the stain is a mixture of “blood and brains”. The image of the stain on the
wall will forever be burned into my memory. Then the guide picked up a large
wooden stick that had been sharpened at the point and told us that that’s what
the killers used to kill the women by shoving it through them after raping them
repeatedly. At this point I almost fainted from being so disgusted and upset,
and was immediately overcome by tears and a rush of emotions. I don’t think
those feelings or memories will ever leave me, and it will be a constant
reminder of how blessed and lucky I am because I can’t even come close to
imagine experiencing such terror.
We finished the day up with the Kigali Genocide Memorial,
which is a museum and also mass grave for more than 250,000 corpses recovered
after the genocide. It was a really great museum, and I’m glad the country has
constructed something that can help future generations learn from this horrible
failure in humanity. On Friday, we went to the Kigali Free Trade Zone, which
was interesting because it has the potential to greatly expand Rwanda’s
economic and trade potential. The afternoon was then free to explore, which was
a nice release from such a heavy few days. We ate lunch at a very “mzungu” café
(meaning it was targeted at white people with its coffee and American dishes)
and then went had a drink at the Hotel des Milles Collines. This hotel is the
one that the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on, because the manager of the hotel
was able to save 2,000 people during the genocide here by hiding them in rooms.
It was kind of eerie being somewhere where that had happened but was now a
functioning, very nice hotel, but we really enjoyed the experience of having a
great view of the city and having a margarita by the pool.
Saturday was the return to Uganda, and when we made it to
Queen Elizabeth National Park in the evening we got to do a safari boat ride on
Lake Edward. It was AWESOME, and I’m so happy because I got to see the animals
that I didn’t see on my safari in Kenya. The area has the largest concentration
of hippos in the world, and so they were literally everywhere. We also got to
see crocodiles, many elephants, tons of birds, warthogs, colobus monkeys, and
cape buffalo. It was so gorgeous being on the water, and I really loved seeing
the elephants and hippos. We then slept in a safari lodge for the night, where
there were warthogs, bats and other things stirring around us. Sunday morning
we did a game drive in the bus, and we saw more of those same things, AND a
lion! We were all so pumped to see the male lion, because that can be rare
especially since the park is in its dry season.
Then we headed back to Kampala yesterday morning, and we’re
all back to “normal” life here which means constant dust, absurd traffic jams,
and a faster pace of life. We got back close to dark last night (around 7:30)
which freaked me out because I have a 15 minute walk from where I get off the
taxi (public transport mini-buses) to my homestay. It was taking longer than
expected to get home so I called my mom on the taxi to see she would meet me at
the stop to walk with me, as I was going to be a huge target being a white girl
with a huge hiking backpack with me. She said she would but we have a very
difficult time understanding each other on the phone (and in person but that’s
another story) so I was getting nervous about waiting on her in the dark. I
walked a little up the road from where I get off because I didn’t want to stand
in a huge crowd of people as it got to be really dark and sketchy, so I stopped
at a shop with a light on outside with a few people. My mom said she’d leave to
find me around 7:20 and we didn’t find one another until 8:00 so needless to
say I had a little panic during these long 40 minutes. Thank God there were two
super nice, helpful 23-year old guys who talked to me while I waited and even
talked to my mom on the phone when she couldn’t find me and gave her
directions. Without them, I probably would have freaked out completely because
I was short on airtime (prepaid minutes on my Ugandan phone) and Ugandan
schillings, so I was completely unsure of how I was going to get home safely in
the dark if my mom couldn’t find me. While I waited the guys were super nice
and asked me questions about America and taught me more Luganda (the language
here). Once my mom finally found me, I was relieved to be back “home” and I got
the warmest welcome from my whole family.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I hope that’s a good
update for now mukwano! Siiba bulungi!
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