Motel du Mont Huye Butare

C est pas tres gai a voir. Mais il faut les faire. Je parle des sites du genocide du rwanda. Ce qui ma surpris c est la difficulte d avoir le visa rwandais. C etait quasi impossible et cela parce que j etais francais. <br>D abord, je me suis fait refouler a la frontiere ou ils font les visas sur le champ pour tout le monde excepte pour les francais. Donc, retour a bujumbura faire mon visa a l embassade qui a rigole ...

Oh Butare, you are a *****, but at least not a very expensive one, eh? It was not a long journey, only about two hours, and it was not the road less traveled, since the quite nicely paved national highway that we travelled on was choked with minibuses going from city to city, town to town, and village to village. In fact, the only thing unusual about going to the southern Rwandan city of Butare, was that I was traveling with 19 other mezungus (i.e., white people ...

We wanted to see a little more of Rwanda so we took an overnight trip to Kibuye at Lake Kivu. We took a bus, which cost1,700 Rwandan Franks (£1.70), and took about 3 hours (because of the fab roads). The views on the trip are so beautiful - the mountain views, the little villages, roof tiled homes and the terraces.. well worth the journey!

Was a little bit of a mixed day We caught a bus to Gikongoro, about 1 hour from butare and then took a boda boda the 2km(motorbike taxi) to the Munamar memorial. This is a very raw, disturbing memorial, quite unlike the clean memorial in Kigali... let me explain... this is a site where thousands of people were hiding in a technical college and were massacred in 1994. Their bodies were put in mass graves, which ...

... insecticide. Surprisingly, everywhere you look, seemingly order and organization rule the day. The villages' huts and buildings are simple mud or clay brick structures--but all seem well cared for. Could it be that as a means to heal the disorder and chaos of the genocide that order and structure are looked at as bandaids for the nation's psyche? The outward signs of redemption and reconstruction are everywhere. The ...

Monday we are going to visit Edouard, he's working now at the CHK in Kigali. Till 1994 he was the head of the nursing staff in the military hospital of Kanombe. It's there that Stefaan worked also, as tropicalist, from July 1991 until April 1994. Edouard is very pleased to see us after 13 years! We have a lot to tell to each other, and we promise him that one of these days we'll invite him to go and eat at a restaurant. In ...

... The amount of holes and gashes in the skulls is a bleak foreshadow of a pattern seen over and over again at other memorials around the country. A third room has clothing and personal effects taken from victims and massacre sites. Two items truly stood out for me. One was a t-shirt. On it was the following - "Ottawa - Heart (shown by a heart symbol) of Canada." Someone was brutally murdered while wearing a shirt praising the capital of my own country. A country that did as ...

... machetes. Simba was in Gisenyi just before it started, but said that his parents suspected something was going to happen, so they all crossed to Goma, where they stayed for its duration. It is completely understandable that people don't want to talk about what happened, but I did wonder if this silence is present between Rwandans themselves. I asked Yves about this one afternoon, and he said that they do talk about what happened amongst themselves sometimes, which I was glad to ...

... to describe how I felt prior to visiting genocide memorial in Butare. I was not excited; I was not anxious; I was not scared. Even now, after having seen the aftermath of the genocide, I still can't describe how I feel. I think I hoped to find the answer at the end of Mr. Miller's book. On the bus ride to Butare, we stopped at a small village so a woman could get off. A group of kids came running over and stopped dead ...