Lies, damn lies and alcohol

The evening was coming back in bits and pieces, shards of memory that didn't quite fit together. My wallet had business cards and a telephone number in my own handwriting that I didn't remember having anything do to with. Why couldn't I find the ambassadors card? That one at least I remember receiving. I also remembered arguing about the nature of axioms with someone who claimed they should be proved, but who? the Zimbabwean born Gordie? the young priest from Connecticut? had I won?
Did I really ask the Papal Nuncio if he had the Popes number in his mobile phone? I could only hope that he had misunderstood the question, why else would I have his business card? What had I been saying that the woman from the Irish catholic aid agency had taken exception to? She left the table in the end, it wasn't because of me but because of something the Gordie guy had said, but what was it? And then there was that ghastly journalist women. All that wine on a empty stomach may have gone to my head but she didn't need to sit there telling me that I was too drunk to be spoken to - I told her she should either disengage the conversation if she thought I was too drunk or continue it and shut up about me being drunk. It was the height of condescension for her to sit there speaking to me telling me I was too far gone to bother with. It wasn't like she was glued to the bloody chair or that I was anyone she had to suffer talking to! It had all gone very wrong after she made some comment about me wearing an African style dress. I'm sure that put me in some "desperately trying to fit in and be authentic" class in her over simplifying mind. I did try and explain it said nothing about me other than the fact that I liked the material, I welcomed the opportunity to be colorful in a way people aren't in Europe but mostly that I was desperately short of clothes having had only 25kgs luggage allowance. I'm not sure I was able to articulate that at the time however. I have vague recollections of droning about about the 25kgs without tieing it to any reference. In any case I was sensitive about clothing especially after the women at work at taken pains to point out that the African style dress I'd had made, resulted me look like a prossie. So I made the mistake of allowing the journo-witch to upset me. After telling Fay my companion that I was "just too drunk" while I was standing right behind her she finished by saying ours "was the most immature conversation" she'd had in a long time. Well it takes two to tango baby and at least I had drunkenness on my side.

My head was pounding, I wanted crawl into bed, get under the covers and make the day go away. However I needed to recover sufficiently for the afternoons trials - I had a possibly important meeting with the country's IT authority. Ten o'clock already - Dear God, please let me survive till four o'clock and I promise not to go drinking on a school night even if the Irish ministry of foreign affairs is paying for it.

Well so much for my attempts to alcohol poison myself, I live to drink again another day. However I am getting rapidly tired of the beverage offer here which consists of:
Primus, a local beer which comes in a 750ml bottle and gives one of the worse hangovers known to man after the consumption of three or more
Amstel which for some reason is quite horrible here
Mutzig, a Swiss beer apparently brewed under license - comes in big (650ml) bottles and small (300ml) ones, tastes better than primus but gives similar nasty after effects
Fanta lemon, fanta orange, coke, soda water and tonic : none of which give hangovers but have been known to cause tooth decay with excessive consumption.

Any wine available is generally expensive and nasty, except in the Intercontinental when the Irish government is paying.

I spent the Easter at Kibuye by Lake Kivu which forms part of the border with Congo, running the whole length of Rwanda from Goma to Burundi. The little town houses a sizeable ex-pat community, including Quang a Vietnamese born Canadian, also working with VSO. My attempts to get exercise were somewhat hampered by eating a dodgy fish on Friday and consequently being sick most of Saturday. I had recovered sufficiently by the evening to swing by Stefano's house for a bit of a party. Stefano is an Italian-Swiss who somehow managed to do his civil service in Rwanda with the Swiss Cooperation Development Agency, being a conscientious objector to the military service which is compulsory in Switzerland. He occupied a large house by the lake from where we could sit on the front porch and watch the lightning over the lake in Congo.

The next day a chance meeting in a church had secured us a lift back to Kigali in a 4x4 with Guy and Pol, two students from the newly formed University of Luxembourg. This was infinitely more comfortable than the minivan-with-20-passengers which was our only other option. By we, I mean me and Fay from Lisburn who was in Rwanda for a few months as part of her Masters in Post Conflict Recovery. She had a placement with a Rwandan NGO where Veronica, a VSO from the Philippines was also working. Quite apart from her being Irish, I was always likely to get on well with someone who'd met their partner while backpacking in Honduras. Our two Luxembourgers were civil engineers doing a semester project on designing some roads in Rwanda and had in their spare time installed a wireless hot spot in one of the local Mzungo bars.

Later that week we decided to duck off work to visit the pristine newly opened genocide museum in Kigali. It had a detailed anatomy of the Rwandan genocide as well as dissections of genocides and probable genocides from all over the world. Its a very well laid out museum and best of all its free. While at the museum Fay told me she read an article on how Rwandan army forces are "overseeing" the extraction of a metal needed for mobile phones from Congo and how the British journalist writing the article was getting all hot under the collar about this soi-disant pillaging. This made me angry, western countries have been pillaging the Congo's natural resources for decades and worse, bankrolling civil wars and armed factions in order to get their grubby little hands on the mineral wealth since before my father was in the region in '59 and very little is said. Suddenly an African leader looks like he might be doing a bit of profiteering and its newsworthy. The media really have their heads up their arses.

As I sit here at work in Kigali listening to the Voice of America on the radio and it is brought back to me how very one sided news and communications in general are in the world. A lot of talk is done about bridging the digital divide by which it is often meant or implied the lack of access to information for people in developing countries. Much less attention is given to the flip side of this which is that people here have no voice to get their story out. We joked here about how New York had a power outage and the whole world knew about it, here we have them most nights. So who cares about nightly candle lighting but what if, say a thousand people started getting killed every 20 mins and it took months for the real picture to emerge?

It occurs to me that maybe theres a wider issue here: we should not be simply taught to read newspapers or listen to the radio but to criticise. Much rot is talked about the freedom of the press in western countries and the lack of it other (less enlightened) places. But what freedom do we have really? Freedom to read papers in our own language written from the viewpoint of people in our own culture usually from our own countries and so even when we do get reports from other parts of the world which are uncensored by foreign governments, they are essentially filtered through the perceptions and prejudices of the journalist. There is no such thing as objectivity which is why it is so crucial to get different points of view and different angles. Newspapers are printed in black and white but the truth only comes in shades of grey.

It occurred to me the other day that Rwanda makes journalists of us all. I'm tempted to go all cynical and say that journalism is essentially peddling in human misery - good news is no news - and that Rwanda has misery by the bucketload. But I'll try and curb my cynical leanings and say that journalism is or should be about the search for truth, the somewhat futile but seemingly necessary pursuit of a non existent absolute truth. And in Rwanda there are so many truths, so many conflicting truths. Sometimes i feel like my head will explode if I think about it too much. Its easy to see why people need to simplify things into who is right and who is wrong and who was right and wrong. No doubt there has been volumes written in the Western media for the 10th anniversary.

Of course I'm making the possibly naive assumption here that if the truth were known that people would actually care. I think its too hard to continue to try anything while if you don't at least have the hope that a disinterested third party might care about someone else's rotten lot in life. And then I was reminded of a story from Jonathan, another volunteer in Rwanda who was previously a volunteer in the Nepal and is quite active on global education. While back home he was once asked by a long time colleague in England to explain to her why she shouldn't buy Nestle products. He gave her detailed explanation on the advertisement campaigns designed to get new mothers to feed powered milk to their babies rather than breastfeed even though the power would be mixed with unsafe water and the milk was not affordable to many. The firm even distributed free milk to all the hospitals to get the babies on powder milk after which babies could not be breastfeed. He described the misery and mortality this caused.
"We are talking about human babies here, right?", his colleague asked
When Jonathan confirmed that they were, she replied
"Oh...hmm...I don't know I might be more motivated if it was affecting gorilla babies or something"

Fitting in or dropping out? Caught between two worlds...

Fitting in or dropping out?

One month in Rwanda already, 5 weeks since I left Europe. I was swinging between feeling like i was fitting and at home, and feeling terrible lonely. The pining for home came in fits and starts, something as simple as entering a friends name in my mobile and seeing there name attached to a text took on great significance : it was the same name, the same phone, I could have been back at home but i wasn't and what's worse I might never again be. This wasn't true homesickness, I think if I could have been assured that I could go back to my life in Switzerland after my year here then I might not have had such pangs but the mere hint that THAT life could be lost forever or was going on without me was really painful. And more sadness hit, aggravated by the very limited contact I'd had from people back home. I fact in the first two weeks a high percentage of emails I received were total strangers, fan mail from an article I had published on a travel website. Was is the case that I'd moved so much I had nothing to go back to anywhere?

And yet it was only a few days since I'd been swanning around at the First Rwandan Conference on Information Technology like I owned the place. No one I met at the apres conference drinks really believed that I had only been working here for two weeks. Certainly not when i won a printer and definitely not when I was asked to chair the conferences closing session. The enormity and high likelihood of failure of the project I was working on hit during the conference. So many "IT for the masses" initiates like it had been a failure in a whole host of African countries, not to mention back home in Ireland. It was going to take something special to make it work and I was determined to make it work. No failures here, no siree, not on my watch.

Yet i was aware there were forces all around me that were not much indifferent to the project failing, it was very much wanted to succeed but shall we say, possibly indifferent to its impact.

In Ireland I had a part time job through out my five years at university. I worked with Travellers as an assistant teacher doing remedial style work. What I took away from that experience is that often governments/local authorities/donors want simply to be able to say, "We have spent X amount on travellers welfare". Cleansing their conscious by throwing money around without having the motivation to spend $5 on ensuring that $5,000 is spent effectively, working to the letter of the law rather than its spirit so to speak. However as I was in an advisory type role here, all I can do is point out the potential pitfalls of IT projects, if the powers that be chose to walk right into them, what could I do? Still the thought of being part of a failed project was a galling one. I hoped I was being too negative, I have that tendency.

Its always darkest before the dawn, so they say and I was certainly hoping so. Things were looking pretty dark for me in Rwanda. Work was a mess, so much to do and I hadn't an idea where to start and my boss kept putting off meeting with me. I know that its Africa and the speed of change here is (to paraphrase a compiler guru) "slower than continental drift", but upper management here recently spent two days in a meeting to discuss why targets aren't being met. I'd have suggested that maybe they weren't being met because management were spending days in meetings to discuss why progress was too slow.

Hmm...maybe its not so different to Europe here after all.

Life here was also getting me down. I have taken to not wearing my glasses when walking on the street in daylight. I'm not very short sighted and the slight blurriness means I can't make out facial expressions and the overall effect is to make the constant burn of 100's of pairs of eyes more bearable. It also helps that I have a theatrical nature that likes the spotlight, mais il y a quand meme des limites!.

Plus I was starting to have homicidal thoughts about the "Cent francs manger" brigade. This roughly translates as "Oh rich fat foreigner I wish to prey upon your post colonial guilt so that you will give me money which I am claiming I will use for the purchase of food". I don't mind beggars but I'm starting to really take exception to racist ones. Without exception they will only beg from Mzungos (white people). If they ever asked a Rwandan I might be inclined to give them something. The fact that I am paid at a similar level to Rwandans gives me scope for this moral outrage, but perhaps it would piss me off however much I was earning, I just might feel more guilty about it.

One evening I had a kid so young he could barely walk and probably couldn't yet speak Kinyarwanda, I think he didn't even reach as far as my knee. He followed us for about 10 mins repeating his "cent francs manger" mantra. When I got sick of it and made stabbing motions at the urchin with my umbrella, Gary nearly collapsed laughing. I told him I had visions of collecting a row of little creatures on my umbrella in a similar fashion, like on a brochette.

Gary is a lifeline, he is another volunteer and lives quite near me. He is a Canadian teacher and has spent over 20 years volunteering in various places in Africa, mostly during the 70's. He works as an Education Advisor, has been here about 18 months and shares the same evil and most certainly un-PC sense of humour as I do. Its a breath of fresh air in a world of pukily well intentioned, oh-so-sensitive development workers who are under the collective delusion that they are on the whole doing some good rather than serving whatever regime happens to be in power. Or even worse serving whatever is in the interest of the donor countries with the chequebooks. He who pays the piper calls the tune...as the saying goes.

I bumped into an ex-VSO while with Gary one day. The guy has in Rwanda for about three years I would guess and has probably used his end of service grant to finance to create a centre for street children in a rural town. As he stood there telling me with an earnest look and tone of voice about his centre, I couldn't help thinking " Ok, what you're doing is good, pouring your own money into it is very commendable, three years in Rwanda is tough by anyones standard and you are prepared to stay longer but COME ON, do you have to take yourself so seriously?"

I do wonder whether I'm just being cynical, being cynical is a path of least resistance it is en quelque sort the easy way out. For sure I have elements of the cynic but I don't think that's the whole picture, theres something in the earnestness that screams "Look how good I am, look how concerned I am, it's just oozing out of every pore". It's only a few steps away from "Look at all I'm doing for these people". And probably even less far from the kind of superior attitude I saw from returned volunteers on some of my training courses.

Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck between well intentioned development workers and well paid, usually cynical ex patriot types and both seem equally clique-ish and closed to me. My efforts to get a social life have been hampered by the cliquey nature of people here and by my salary. I can't afford regular outings to Mzungo hang outs and weekends away. Someone told me recently VSO were development workers of the fourth tier. The first tier being UN people with their western salaries and UN provided accommodation, jeeps and drivers. The German development agency here apparently also belongs to this tier. Between the 2nd and 3rd tier I didn't quite get the difference but they would be other aid agencies where people had only a much better lifestyle then they would have at home, as opposed to a drastically better one. And then there's us, who live like the well-off locals but still suffer the same electricity, water and public transport shortages as everyone else.

Other VSO volunteers have remarked that they can't understand how western development workers cope with their lifestyles as we already feel guilty enough about our 4th tier level of privilege when compared to what we see around us. Traditionally it was assumed that western workers would not come to developing countries without a lifestyle far above what most could hope for in Europe. But VSO and the likes have proved that wrong for decades. Nevertheless considering the problems I already face I can well see how people wouldn't stay in country for years on end without the means to insulate themselves in an ex-pat cocoon. Another argument is that with their enormous wealth they are not thrown up against this great disparity in lifestyles, not as much as those of us who have to walk though the streets of Kigali rather than be driven.

People who know me may wonder why I am putting so much emphasis on ex-pat/development worker circles in the hunt for a social life. Part of it is the "stranger in a strange land" phenomenon which happens all over the world. After two and a half years at a university in Switzerland, I knew half the faculty but among these I had only a handful of Swiss friends. And they were almost always the ones who had spent significant time abroad. However the larger part is due to race attitudes around here. On the whole, people do not want to know you for who you are so much as what you are (a white person). I guess this is what it is like to be super-rich and/or famous. And how do the super-rich and famous cope with this? Well, by hanging out almost exclusively with other rich and famous, at least among peers if people spend time with you its because they like you, as a person rather than as a status symbol or social accessory.

So far I have found the ex-pat scene less than friendly. As I arrived in Rwanda with only two other VSO volunteers, I haven't met many other of the 50 or so VSO people in the country. Consequently I am not in the loop for their group outings and holiday plans. Most are teachers which means they get longer holidays and plan around the school holidays rather than the meager office holidays. For instance in the upcoming Easter hols: the teachers have two weeks, I have two days. I don't appear to have a horrendous amount in common with many of the other volunteers I have met either. I can't put my finger on it but there seems to be a lot of self-satisfaction and political-correctness around not to mention what looks like the existence of well established groups of which I am not part. Of course, I may be wrong - I certainly hope so.

Notes
Travellers are a minority gypsy-like community.
Many do not travel very much these days but are housed in Traveller Settlements on the outskirts of towns or even, as in the case of Galway, poor areas which become prime real estate as the city grows. The houses are built and furnished by the local councils causing much bad feeling with the surrounding populations which are often not better off then the Travellers. During my time working in the community I heard several stories of Traveller families selling all the furniture in their house only to move on to another (furnished) settlement house in another area.

Questions...and Answers?

O430 am Kigali, I wake up in the middle of a nightmare involving being evacuated from war-torn Rwanda. Damned Mefloquinine!

0530 am I can no longer sleep due to the f%#$ing bird outside my window. I seem to have the loudest bird species in the history of nature decamped in my garden. I don't know what it is, I've had alarm clocks that were less effective than that bird. I wish I could shoot it!

2100 I arrive home and the water pressure still isn't back on, this means after 4 days we are still running off the reservoir tank out in the back garden and its rapidly emptying. Its been almost a week since my last proper shower and I'm getting desperate. I ask the houseboy to lend my his clothes washing bucket, which I half fill with water from the outside tap, the only one in the house giving water faster than trickle rate. I then take the largest cooking pan I can find and fill that with water in order to "cook" my shower. Altogether I have about 10 litres of hand hot water, its not much but hopefully its enough, I won't even attempt to wash my hair. By the time I've done all that and got the basin upstairs to the bathroom I am exhausted.

Water in a large open container must be the nastiest thing to try to carry anywhere, much less up a stairs with uneven steps - but boy did it feel good to be clean! I even managed to have some water left for washing my face and hands the following morning.

Our water problems are no doubt aggravated by the fact that there are four people in our house instead of the usual two. French Frank is still around, although he is leaving Rwanda soon, Patrick the houseboy had his water needs, as did I, but finally there was the sad case of Frances, our "refugee". Frances is a VSO volunteer from Uganda working with AIDS awareness in one of the other ministries and lives on the same group of houses as me and Frank. He was away for three weeks on paternity leave, his wife had given birth to their first babies (twins). He got back to Kigali recently to find that his houseboy had run off with everything in his house, all his stuff and every single piece of furniture, even the bed!
We've had a mattress put in the ironing room for him until Frank leaves, when he may well become a permanent fixture in the house. I wouldn't mind this at all as I've never relished the prospect of living alone, plus Frances can teach me how to play my drums - we've already had a couple of jamming sessions :)

Just after my first week at work I heard tell of a bomb in Madrid. ETA disclaimed responsibility and quickly Al Qaida were blamed. Spain had been a strong supporter of US I was told. If the Americans had decided that anyone who wasn't with them was against them, then it seemed so had Al Qaida. I imagined most governments in the West were going to go all paranoid and I was somehow happy to be "safe" in central Africa. Had we merely traded the old Communist/Capitalist divide for a new world order where you were either with the US or with Al Qaida? In which case, good luck to all of us trying to remain neutral ! I wondered if the USA had learned anything from the history of warfare in the 20th century which showed over and over again that superior cash reserves and firepower was little guarantee of success against a motivated and dedicated guerilla force who are not afraid to die for their beliefs. If violence is the last resort of the powerless, how powerless do you need to feel to kill? How powerless do you need to feel to kill yourself? Or in the very least be prepared for almost certain death?

And again I am left posing these questions in the context of Rwanda. Years ago I visited Germany and I remember having a conversation with someone who asked me what I was looking for there. The question was surprising to me, he reckoned most people who went to Germany were looking for some sort of explanation as to what happened their during world war two. i was just visiting friends and taking the opportunity to see some of the country. It seems many people have been coming to Rwanda for answers, I just came here to work but find myself posing questions nonetheless. It always seemed quite amazing that the likes of Paul Kagame who had grown up somewhere else and who had perhaps a decent standard of living, relatively speaking, would give up their way of life and endanger themselves of the sake of a country they had never known.

There is somehow a fundamentally different dynamic between the residual emotions when you decide to leave a place and those when you are forced to leave a place. Perhaps this would explain why the homesickness I felt in coming here was for Switzerland and not Ireland. This still didn't explain why your children might be emotionally attached to a place you were forced to leave.

I know a woman who teaches English in a secondary school in Kigali and she asked her students to write an essay entitled "My magic moment", the many were about escaping the militias during the genocide but many more were about the time when the teenagers family finally moved back to Rwanda. This was usually described in terms of returning to a kind of promised land. I was familiar with the ways immigrants describe their homeland but I had not expected such romanticism from their children or grandchildren. I found a partial explanation recently while talking to a man who had grown up in Burundi and subsequently joined the RFP. He told me that as a young child he'd thought he was Burundian but as he got older and the school system discriminated against him for being Rwandan he learned otherwise. With such systematic alienation there was really no way he could feel attached to his native Burundi when the time came for him, as it comes for us all, to search for an identity.

And my thoughts returned to the many marginalised immigrant communities in Europe and how many within them identity with the homeland of their parent and grandparents rather then their own country .And my thoughts continued to Ireland, my homeland that I had seen very little of in the last five years. The Ireland I grew up in was culturally homogenous, being Protestant or perhaps having a parent from England was about as exotic as you got in my home town, although I do remember a family from India or Pakistan moving into our parish when I was a teenager. I remember the one or two African guys who attended my local university, I remember the staff in the Chinese restaurants in town, who were definitly Chinese but whom you never seemed to see outside their restaurants.

The Ireland I left in 1999 was a fast paced monied economy riding on the back of the dot com boom and in desperate need of computer literate labour. The Ireland i returned to in 2001 was a markedly different place with entire communities of Eastern European skilled and semi skilled workers, bar staff and construction workers speaking Cantonese and Mandarin and African asylum seekers handing you towels for tips in the bathrooms of Dublin's fancier bars. It seemed that the eastern Europeans were treated somewhat as Gastarbiten, the Chinese it was hoped were only here to learn English and service the temporary overflow of catering jobs. And the asylum seekers? Well everyone knew they were just blugers using a loophole in the system and the inefficiency in the Irish processing of refugees to hang around and get everything free from the state. Ireland had a long history of peoples coming to invade the country and ending up indistinguishable from the local population with in three generations. But that was back in the middle ages, before the English arrived. How Irish would the children and grandchildren of these new immigrants feel? When living abroad in more multicultural societies the Irish communities were not known for their tolerance and all I could see for the future was Ireland making the same mistakes as Britain and France had done from the 1950s onwards.


Notes
Mefloquinine, widely sold under the brand name Larium, is a powerful anti-malarial which is known to be psychoactive and cause potentially serious side effects. One of the milder possible side effects is vivid and/or disturbing dreams.
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Adjusting My Altitude

18:00 in Kigali and the down pour that's been building up all day finally begins. It really could have happened any time of day but it seems I carried my umbrella around in the heat of the day for nothing. Not that its particularly hot in Rwanda. Kigali is at 1500m and this keeps the temperature from going much above 30C even in the summer. The first few weeks were characterised by a constant fatigue but I seem to have produced the hemoglobin necessary to adjust to the altitude.

The rain sheets down outside but I am safely under the shelter of my enormous house in one of the cities posher suburbs. My neighbours are mostly well-to-do Rwandans and the Kacyiru district is where many foreign embassies are located, not to mention that the office of President Kagame being right across the road. It hasn't happened yet but I'm told all our water gets directed to there when he is in office. The heavy rain could spell problems for my personal hygiene - paradoxically enough when there is lots of rain there are difficulties with the water supplies due to the silt from mudslides clogging up the pipes.

I was hoping to have a shower tonight, I have been waiting all day for there to be enough pressure to attempt a wash. I've already tried when there is only a trickle and it took me an hour!! Soon enough the rain will come creeping through the crack underneath my door, luckily there is no wood or carpet just a bare concrete floor, such as you might find in Europe on a garage. I don't mind this, at least you can see its clean and there are no crevices for creepy crawlies to hid in. The previous occupant, another VSO volunteer called French Frank for obvious reasons, assures me there are cockroaches but i haven't seen one yet. Early days I guess. This evening though, for extra excitement it seems a pool is forming under the window under a steady pouring of water from the slated glass, there seems to be no obvious cause for this. I consider washing my feet in the puddle but decide against it. But apart from such minor inconveniences as temporary indoor pools and the almost total lack of plugs, can hardly say that I'm slumming here in central Africa.

The house is a two story semi-detached place with a decent sized garden, two reasonable sized bedrooms, a box room where the houseboy does the ironing, a bathroom and extra toilet downstairs, a large sitting/dining room, a smallish kitchen and of course the houseboys quarters out the back. I inherited Patrick the houseboy, from French Frank as a guard for the house and a general helper for household chores I couldn't be bother doing like filling water cans, cutting the grass (with a pair of clippers on his hands and knees), washing clothes (by hand) etc. The garden is immaculate and i sometimes wonder that he is terminally bored especially when I return to find he has made designs with the cutlery.

To revisit the water situation, it appears that the water and the electricity seem to go off at the same time. I noticed this back at the hotel although I am saved from the ravages of most of the water cut outs here due to having a storage tank attached to the house. I wondered if this dual shutdown is because the same company, Electrogaz, control and charge for both the water and the electricity. Being a poor volunteer I am now watching my water and electricity consumption, water is billed by the gallon. This company is (in)famous both with ex-pats and locals for being inefficient and blatantly wrong in their billing. Almost everyone who lives in Rwanda will have their own favorite Electrogaz "histoire". My favourite is the one where French Frank, two months after arrival, was presented with a bill for 3 million Rwandan francs which dated back to the summer of 1994! (hello?! emm...genocide...i think its safe to say that any foreign nationals left in Kigali weren't using water or electricity, or air for that matter).

Speaking of which the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy is coming up next month. The other volunteers are, rather oddly, talking about their respective plans for the "genocide holiday". Apparently the whole county shuts down for a week or so. It appears that the whole world and his mother are in the capital these days writing articles and shooting documentaries all with variations on the theme "Rwanda 10 years on". Its something that almost all the ex pats here agree on, that the longer you stay in Rwanda the less you have to say about it ie the more and more complex it gets. In the words of a senior western diplomat i met, who has lived here for over 20 years:
" You can come here for three weeks and write a book, people who've been here 30 years could probably write about a paragraph".

I don't, at this point, have a hell of a lot to say on the topic. Apart from vague recollections from 10 years ago about news reports on Rwanda coming in 3rd place after the latest from the world cup and probably some local burglary, the only things i know about the situation are from reading Philip Gurevitchs book "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families". Its an excellent book as much an enquiry into the human condition and the machinery of hate politics as it is about Rwanda's recent past. Gurevitch started by refusing to accept that the genocide as merely Africans killing Africans in that way that they do, and wanted to investigate what really happened and how people continued in its aftermath. Of course his is only one point of view and there is no absolute truth and we in Europe should remember that its not only Africans who can fall victim to the politics of hate and division and the force of a well organised propaganda machine.

As I read the book, and as I arrived in Rwanda one image stayed with me. The author quotes a western journalist who was stuck in the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali for 24 hours on the 13th and 14th April 1994 who watched the militias (or Interahamwe) on the street outside.
"You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes"
I don't know why but these words became a mental image for me along with all the incumbent horror they imply. In those first few days in country as I passed people on the street i wondered which of those around me could have been part of those club wielding bloodthirsty gangs just a few years previous. It did strange things to my head. It wasn't healthy and I hoped it wouldn't last for the coming year. On reflection now, I think that if I could be a tiniest bit traumatized by one line in a book and overactive imagination how many orders of magnitude more must be happening inside the people who were actually here and witnessed it?

And yet life on the surface of it, continues as normal here.
Most of the time.

Someone relayed a story from a recently departed volunteer to me. She was walking in Kigali on a Sunday morning with a Rwandan colleague when a church service ended and a large crowd of people exited the church they were passing. Her Rwandan colleague froze. When the volunteer asked if something was the matter, the colleague replied "its all those people coming at us, it reminds me of the genocide".

About a week after arriving we passed a group of men in some kind of uniform, it could have been a school group, they were dressed in immaculately clean rose pink shirts and shorts, except that they seemed to be digging a ditch. I asked Liez, who had been here longer than me, what it was all about.
"Prisoners" she said "mostly from the genocide, they put them out in work gangs".
Soon after I stopped seeing the people walking around me as potential killers. It was as if the sight of the prisoners had given me a face to put to the vision I had of a hand holding a machete dripping with blood, some where to park the image that had been burned into my psyche.

I recently met an American woman who claimed to have been in Rwanda for 24 years.
"Consistently?" I asked in a surprised tone.
She knew what i meant: what had happened to her in 94? If she had stayed in the county, how the hell did she survive? Unlike many other crises, there was no slow build up, no gradual deterioration of the situation that April. One day its life as usual under a central African president-cum-absolute ruler, next day his plane is shot down and that evening there are bands of people roving around Kigali hacking their neighbours to death and a huge scramble by anyone who could to get out of the country.

She said at that time she wasn't based in Kigali but further south, the killers took longer to mobilise south of the capital, a few extra days which made all the difference if you were in possession of a car and a foreign passport. She and her husband heard about what was happening and were advised to drive to Burundi, from there they were evacuated.
"I saw none of it" she said "but some of our friends were in Kigali".
She then described how another American couple she was close to, had to step over or perhaps drive over dead bodies to get out of their house. Her friends were let though the roadblock when the woman had a fit of crying, they then hid somewhere for a few days and were eventually lifted out on a UN convoy to the airport, where "Anything that could fly was taking people out, my friends went out on an Italian cargo plane". It had taken them several days and a UN convoy to cross the city without getting killed. While in the convoy they were warned not to look out between the cracks in the panels. Of course her friend did. She said the Interahamwe lined the streets, they had a glazed look in their eyes and on their face a sickening grin was fixed. Her friend said they looked as though they were proud of their achievements as they waved the UN convoy past. "Pure evil", said the American woman I was talking to, but then again she was a baptist missionary.

What would you do if your government called on you to kill those that you had been persuaded were your deadly enemies? What would you do if refusing to kill was seen to make you an accomplice to these deadly enemies?

For a while, the entire country was a chaos where traditional morality was turned on its head. How can we sit in judgement, we weren't even there?
The American lady continued "We had a few friends who tried to come back but they just couldn't". At least they had that luxury - the luxury of staying away. The Rwandans didn't and for those who were left behind there is only the slow hand of the Gacaca courts after the hamhanded effort at international justice failed them.

Gacaca (ga-cha-cha) always sounds like more of a ballroom dance to me but it is a traditional form of village justice normally used for minor disputes, brought in to try to deal with the huge number of criminal cases left by the genocide and its perpetrators. The process is somewhat hampered by the fact that the actions of the RPF, the eventual liberating army, cannot be discussed or brought into question. From the accounts i heard they were a well disciplined and focused army, their general is now the countries president and he appears to enjoy popular support. However killing sprees happened. Gourevitch describes the genocide as the "most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", however the genocide was carried out manually, mostly by machetes and clubs. The RPF were gaining ground and advancing in a landscape littered with bodies, some returning to an ancestral homeland to find hacked up relatives. That's enough to test anyones discipline I would guess.

But all this is old news and recycled opinions. I haven't been here long enough to form my own and by all accounts by the time i am here long enough, I'll feel unable to categorically state anything. What I can tell you is that Rwanda is different. You notice immediately on the streets, I mean to say its different from the other African countries I've visited. Liez and Sade, the two other VSO new arrivals both of whom had lived in other African countries previously, remarked upon it too. People are more reserved and much more soft spoken. Sometimes I can't even hear Rwandans and they mistakenly take this up as a a fault with their French or English. Journeys on public transport take place in silence, unlike in other places. People stare at you here like they do in all but the most touristy areas of the continent but they are unlikely to smile or greet you or start a conversation as people did elsewhere. Rwandans appear to have a reputation as being aloof with other nations of the region and having somewhat of a stronger work ethic.

On a day trip to Butare as part of our In country training with the VSO, our driver was stopped at a roadblock on one of Kigali's hill tops. The policeman said he had seen him in the valley below overtaking another car in an incorrect manner. Police here are not looking for bribes, instead our driver got a ticket and a fine. I began to think...reserved, mild mannered people with a reputed strong work ethic and overzealous traffic police, was it possible that I had landed in the Switzerland of Africa??

Notes
On the 7th April the then presidents Habyarimana's plane was struck down by a surface to air missile. The exact circumstances around this are not known but this was to be the catalyst to mobilise bands of militia all over the country who had been training for months, to start the genocide. The killings started that very night.
Return to story

A brief history of post colonial Rwanda

Somewhere in the middle ages Rwanda developed a sort of class system, whereby the Tutsi cattle herders became more wealthy than the Hutu farmers. The division widened with time, the kings of Rwanda were all from Tutsi clans but intermarriage was common and in some areas Tutsi peasants were not better off than their Hutu counterparts. The people had a common language, common traditions and were not visibly different from each other.

Somewhere in the middle of the 20's the Belgians took over from the Germans, who had hardly made a visible impact in their time as colonisers. Full of wrongheaded notions of racial superiority which were doing the rounds in Europe at the time, the Belgians pronounced that the ruling Tutsis were naturally a superior "race", with (naturally) more Europeans traits. They proceeded to issue ethnic identity cards which divided the Rwandans in Hutu (85%), Tutsi(12%) and Twa(1%), the aboriginal people of the country. The Belgians favoured the Tutsis, which caused much resentment and metered out all sorts of injustices on Hutus (like forced labour), which caused even more resentment.

Rwanda gained independence in the mid 1950's and after 3 decades of Belgian supported Tutsi domination, divisionist politics had taken root in the country. Kaiyabinda was one of the first post-independence leaders and a Hutu advocate, to put it mildly. Its worth noting that on the eve of independence the Belgians "switched sides" and started to support Hutu domination in political circles. After Independence there was widespread violence against Tutsis, culminating a massacre in 1959, after which many Tutsis fled to neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania.

Kaiyabinda was deposed and killed in a Military coup in 1976 and was replaced by the Habayirama regime. During the 80s Habayirama was very skilled at attracting foreign aid to Rwanda(1) which left the country with a pretty good infrastructure amongst other things.Also during this regime particularly in the early 90's there was a rise to power of Hutu extremists, who were calling for the expulsion of Tutsis and anyone who opposed their views as Tutsi sympathisers. A propaganda machine, including newspapers and radio, was set up to spread their message. Also in the early 90's the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), a group of mostly Ugandan military men, all sons of Tutsi refugees from the massacres in the late 50's, begin to launch a campaign for control in the north of the country and were gaining considerable ground - until the French sent military assistance to Habayirama and his FAR (Forces Armee Rwandaise). Rumours of Hutu extremists militia groups in training for a war were abound and purchases of arms and machetes were increasing at a rate not justified by agriculture or defense. An explosive situation in need of a spark...

Then on 7th April 1994 an airplane carrying Rwanda's president Habayirama, the then president of Burundi and some other officials, along with a few french military was shot down by anti aircraftweapons (2). All on board were killed and in Rwanda the genocide started. It continued for months while the world watched on, until the RPF launched an offensive and took control of most of the country in the summer of 94. By then there was an estimated 1 million dead, and a further 1 million in refugee camps in Congo and Tanzania. Many of these were the planners and perpetrators of the genocide fleeing the RPF. These armed militias administered a general reign of terror within the camps and continued attacks on Tutsi populations on border areas, particularly in the Congo north of Lake Kivu until as late as 1996-7. It was at this time the RPF cleared the remaining refugee camps in Congo by force.

DISCLAIMER: This is compiled from my own interpretation of articles I've read, things I've heard and one visit to the Rwandan national museum. There is no absolute truth and you may hear alternative accounts.

Notes
1. The Swiss in particular sent bucketloads of aid to Rwanda in the 80's and early 90's, more than to another country anywhere. Its also documented that foreign aid from most donor countries to Rwanda increased dramatically in the period 1990-1994 even as the human rights violations mounted. Much of this aid went directly to or was controlled by those in power, those spreading genocidal messages. Return to brief history

2. Recently a French judge investigating the crash on behalf of the families of the French soldiers killed, issued a warrant for the current Rwandan President Kagame in relation to this incident. We can expect that the already strained relations between Paris and Kigali will worsen. Return to brief history