Rwanda continued

After a few days pretending to be a loaded ex-pat in kigali (which, incidently, all the ex-pats hate - well they seem to think Rwanda in general is the most disfunctional of places (clearly they havn't seen tz!) and are all kind of depressed to be there..bizarre as i thought it was brilliant!), i headed off to Gyiseni, in the northern most part of lake kivu. Pretty panoramic setting and at dusk you can see across the lake over to the hills of Congo..very nearly added that stamp to my passport as reports of Goma and the surrounding area were pretty positive, but luckily i didn't, seeing as last week 4 Gorrillas were killed by rebels pretty close to the volcano i was going to climb. Anway, managed to pull an AMAZING deal at the Kivu Sun 5* hotel,staying there for just $20!! Partied hard until dawn with my kigali pals and lots of Rwandans, after most incredible buffet in the world (sticky toffee pudding in rwanda?!). After that i found my way to Ruhengeri national park where Gorrillas play amongst the 7 volcanos. Seeing as gap year = uuuber budget i couldn't afford the $500 to spend an hour with those beasts, but instead did some volcano trekking - the top of Bisoke volcano is home to a vast crator lake with incredible views out across Rwanda. My legs are still ruined though, even 4 days later!

And of course then there was the Genocide Memorial back in Kigali..an incredibly fair and informative documentation of history. Throughout the exhibition are a series of short interviews on video with survivors who lost close family members which is pretty horrific - but for me by far the most harrowing part came at the very end : First of all you enter a dark circular space with 3 rooms coming off it each with a different Rwandese voice-over; the first room contains maybe 500 photographs hanging from strings of faces of people who were killed; the second, has preserved clothes that were found on disintegrating bodies; and the final room contains bones and skulls that have been unearthed. After that you go on into the children's room..asided from the many photos of young people all over the place, there are maybe 12 bill-board-things,each with an enlarged photo of a child and underneath, their name, age, favourite activity, favourite food and how they were killed ('beat around the head with a club', 'machette through the chest' etc). Absolutely horrendous. There is another large memorial in the city of Butare which apparently holds preserved bodies in the room they were killed in - really didn't think i could handle that one.

But it really seems to me that Rwanda is looking to the future in a big way - very firmly, the people maintain that 'The past is the past and the future is now'. It is unheard of to ask whether one is Hutu or Tutsi and 'PK' is doing lots (by the sounds of it) to try and being people together as far as possilbe - for example, whilst i was there, and on the last weekend of every month, 'Umuganda' takes place..a day when nobody works and everyone does some form of community serivce (most commonly cleaning up the streets).
A huge emphasis is put on understanding and learning from the tragic history of Rwanda, in the high hopes of creating a secure and stable environment fo rhte next generation.