Kigali trip

From Thursday to Sunday we were in Kigali, Rwanda.

The border crossing of Rwanda and Burundi

I didn’t take any pictures of the downtown portion of Kigali because the whole time I was thinking, “Wow, this place is really developed.”

You can’t tell from my photos but Kigali is pushing to become a major city. There are nice roads and sidewalks, stoplights and streetlights, and they are in the process of building two additional sky scrapers (all of these are in sharp contrast to Bujumbura).

It is also a very clean city. Plastic bags, like grocery bags, are outlawed and they even check for them at the border crossing, but I happened to smuggled two in.

This is the hotel Milles Collines, the hotel that the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on.

Once we got a little outside the main downtown area things changed a little.

One of the things we did while in town was visit a coffee shop called Bourbon, but I would have sworn we were in Starbucks. It was a very surreal feeling especially because it was decorated for the Christmas holiday. It hasn’t really felt like Christmas yet, probably because there are not a lot of decorations around town (bjumbura) and commercialism hasn’t infused itself into the holiday yet. Also, it’s hot!

On our way back to Bujumbura we stopped at a genocide memorial. The memorial is located in a church, which has remained relatively untouched, where one of the massacres happened.

When you walk into the church you see piles and piles of clothes on benches and on the floor, holes from grenade blasts, and a blood stained alter. Our tour guide told us the horrific story of what happened. In summery, people fled to the church to seek refuge, the church property was surrounded by solders, the solders then proceeded to killed people in every way imaginable, and unimaginable, and over two days thousands of people lost their lives.

this photo is from bbc, but similar to what was at the memorial
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8412014.stm

check out the story

Shockingly, our guide was one of the 10 survivors of this massacre, so this gave so much more weight to his words when he described the killings because he saw them with his own eyes.

Out back there was a crypt that we walked down into. Inside there are some coffins but there are mostly just bones on shelves. The skulls are in neat rows and other bones just in piles.

The whole time we were on the tour all I could think was: I can’t believe this happened…how could this happen…how could people do this?

It was kind of a depressing way to leave Rewanda but it was good that we saw the memorial and heard this man's story.