Sombre Arrival

Trip Start Feb 06, 2008
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Trip End Mar 03, 2008


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Flag of Rwanda  ,
Saturday, February 23, 2008

We started this morning with breakfast overlooking the sunrise on the Ngorongoro Crater.  Our flight to Rwanda was at 12:15 pm.  Since the drive from Ngorongoro to Kilimanjaro airport is normally four hours we planned to set off at 7 am but Moses was late.  No time for animals today.  Moses stepped on the gas and drove our clunky Land Rover like a Formula One driver through the hairpin curves and blind turns all the way to the airport.  We shaved 45 minutes off the drive with one speeding ticket on the way.  We don't know if that's his personal best but we needed all the time we could get given our experience at Nairobi International Airport.
 
The ticket purchasing process involved one elderly woman who spent over half an hour literally writing our plane tickets out by hand.  She didn't seem too concerned though when the pre-boarding announcement came and went, and she was only halfway through processing our purchase with another girl behind us waiting to buy two tickets herself, and we had yet to check-in, go through security and immigration, etc.  Africa is full of such inefficiencies and you need a lot of patience and a sense of humour.  For instance, while we were waiting for our plane, we watched while one younger worker slowly painted a wall while his two supervisors supervised him from a nearby bench.
 
We made it onto the plane which was an old twin engine prop aircraft.  We arrived in Kigali, Rwanda two hours later and checked into our hotel.  We hired a taxi to take us to the Genocide Memorial Museum.  We had been to Auschwitz, but this experience was more visceral mainly because as we were touring the site, a large group of genocide survivors were also visiting and a few of them broke down into uncontrollable sobbing.
 
The memorial documents Rwanda before the genocide when the Hutus and the Tutsis apparently lived harmoniously together before the colonization and division of the people along tribal lines by Belgium.  The racial tensions created by that backdrop set the stage for the genocide.  Now 14 years after the genocide the country is working to put itself back together and to bring the genociders to justice.  The final room which showed pictures of children and recounted how they died during the genocide was particularly heartbreaking.  Perhaps the most disturbing thought coming out of the memorial was that since such a large percentage of the population actually participated in the genocide, it made you think that many of the murderers are still amongst the general population despite the mass of people already in jail.  The burning question for everyone we met here is what each of their stories are during the genocide, but how do you ask such a question?
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