I met a man. He was very composed, very peaceful in disposition. He told a tragedy about one April in which he lost many of his countrymen to a sunder opened by simple racial hatred. He was then and still is one of the most accomplished gorrilla trackers in Northern Rwanda.
Francois, then a Hutu and now a Rwandese, was on the agressor's side without ever wanting to be. When he heard of the ensuing violence, he fled with his wife and son to the mountains that were his second home. He hid his family there and went back for his brother and Father which were also 'sympathetic' Hutus with no intentions of partaking in the inexcusable mindless violence against the Tutsis. Upon his return to the city, he was sought out by the genocide soldiers and expected to act with them. Again, he fled to his mountains, this time without a brother and Father he would never see again.
I traveled through Kenya and Uganda on bus, as you all know and I very much enjoyed the scenery, the bizarre assortment of people that I encountered and the education that I received regarding Africa; what poverty actually is. I saw filth, I saw desperation. I saw miles and miles of endless need. I saw babies carrying babies covered in only rags and dust. I saw immense masses of human flesh packed together in markets yelling and bartering, trading and begging, hot outside and empty in. I smelled the stench of onions sitting in the sun for days mixed with sweat, sewage, rotting meat and garbage. I redefined words like need, hunger, desperate and poor for myself; words that I can no longer claim to personally know. All that time, alone and relatively vulnerable in a hot and bumpy bus, I never felt in danger, maybe due to ignorance more than anything else but as soon as I crossed the border into Rwanda, an entirely different sense came over me.
I saw huts of mud and straw with happy and healthy looking denizens, children playing outside with their fathers (or older brothers), mothers that had food to nourish their families even if it was cooked over a fire outside the humble hut. Rolling green hills, farms and people cultivating lush looking crops. People were on bicycles everywhere and there was a generally better looking infrastructure all over, including the roads. Of course there were places like this scattered across Kenya and Uganda as there were packed markets and desperation in parts of Rwanda. It was just the overall look of Rwanda that was "better" in my eyes. The oddest thing was that I felt much more uneasy in Rwanda.
Have you ever gone into someone's house and 'had a bad feeling'? Thats what I got when I crossed into Rwanda, especially as I entered Kigali. Maybe it was because I knew the history but I tend to think that humans have a bit of a collective energy. You can paint that statement as something that its not but there is plenty of evidence that we are affected by one another on levels like hormones, facial expressions and even group mentality (like that illustrated by mobs). I felt the massive trauma here like it still stained everyone and hung thickly in the air. You can see the genocidaires dressed in pink jumpsuits working in chain gangs on the side of the road. You can see more severity in peoples faces. Again, I am the first to admit that I may have had an unconscious prejudice from knowing the history but there were many instances that I saw and felt the strange, unsure and untrusting interactions between a people betrayed. I will illustrate this with stories later but I think I have posted enough to keep you all busy pondering for at least a few days. Think about the repercussions of colonialism and then contrast that with the fallout of humanitarian aid projects. How are the two similar and different? I encourage your comments on that especially and I will respond to them in a couple of days.
