About Me
Friday, March 28, 2008
Last night in Kigali...
Well... sadly... tonight is my last night in Kigali... I am going to miss it here... two months have FLOWN by... I have made so many friends... and met so many random people, had so many random experiences...I am actually really sad to leave... but I am sure I will enjoy my last month in Kampala... SERIOUSLY this semester is FLYING by and needs to slow down a little....
tonight... we are "kareoking" at the Mille Collines again... and this weekend.. SAFARI... we have a lot of fun things coming up.... but I am truly going to miss it here...
Good Bye Kigali... I hope we meet again
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
EASTER weekend!
Then Saturday morning we left for our trip, we went to Kubuye.. where we stayed in a hotel right on Lake Victoria... it was beautiful! one of the prettiest places ever! the Next morning (easter) we went to church where we sang (they really like the white people to prefrom here) And then after lunch we went on an adventure... we took a boat out on the lake and stopped at a few islands. The first one was Bat Island, and they dont call it that for no reason. There were thousands of Bats flying all around, it was INSAINE... i have never seen so many bats in my life. We hiked the mountian on that island and it was BEAUTIFUL.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The view from a court room and a mass grave
Yesterday we visited the Guchacha courts. It was an odd experience to be a few feet away from someone convicted of murdering. The court was a lot different then the courts in
This experience was also very frustrating. I was frustrated by the way the hearing was going. I was mad that it was all people saying what they thought, or heard. It was one person’s word against another, and I didn’t think that there was enough evidence to be putting people in jail, or to be sentencing people for something that they really don’t have enough to judge on. I also we amazed by the fact that it is fourteen years after the Genocide, and these people are just now getting a trial. I know that there are so many people accused of crimes, and that if they all went as long as they went yesterday there is no way that it could have been done in less time, but I think of the one man who was tried. He had already spent 12 years in jail, and he was pleading innocent. All evidence was what people said, or thought, nothing concrete. What if this man was innocent and 14 years later he had his trial, and with no evidence they set him free. 12 years of his life were wasted in jail because of what people said. Also, how concrete can evidence be after 14 years? These courts are good, and it is a good way to try to obtain justice, and I know that one court can’t do all the trials, but it seems almost ineffective. How can you know what people did 14 years ago by people differing stories? Do these people really want justice? Or do they just want to feel like the crime paid on their loved ones has been rectified. It was very interesting though, and neat to see the way the courts work here.
So then today we went to the Nyamata Memorial site. It was a very hard thing to see. I am reading a book right now called “A Time for Machetes”, which is about the killers of this area. A man goes and interviews them about the genocide, and talk about killing in this church, so going to this church where I heave been reading about what these men did was a little difficult. We walked up to this church, and they are doing a lot of re building and beautifying (i.e. planting flowers, making a path, etc) this building, which was a little nuts. It has already been 14 years, and they are just starting now to beatify this building. We walked into this church, the door way was blown in, and the man told us that that was how they got into the church by blowing out the door. There were tons of holes in the ceiling as well from the effects of the bomb. There was over 10,000 people hiding in this church, a place where they thought they could find refuge. It was a church, it was supposed to be a safe place, but even the house of God meant nothing to the killers of the genocide. Out of the 10,000 people, two children survived. There was gun holes all over the church, doors looked like they had been ripped open very harshly. When we walked in, to the left was a broken door, and inside was all the cloths of the people that died. I felt a little ever whelmed looking at this room full of cloths; it was almost from the ceiling to the floor, piles and piles of cloths. We then walked down stairs where there was a case of bones and skulls, as well as a grave at the bottom. The man told us, the woman in the grave was a woman who fell in a well, and because she fell in the well, it is the only in tact body that was not completely mutilated by a machete. He then took us outside to the mass graves. We were allowed to go into these graves. The first one was just coffins with many bones in each. The second one was bones. There was hundreds and hundreds of skulls, thousands of bones. From the ceiling to the floor on every wall there were bones. You could see the way these people died, holes in the skulls, faces completely missing, huge crushed places where the machete had blown. You could smell the death in that room. You could see the thousands of people who had died. There were just so many skulls, with no race, gender, age, just a human skull with teeth, skulls that were once humans hiding in a church thinking that they might be saved. I have seen skulls before, in science, or in a book, but always for learning purposes, bones given after the death for the sake of learning and research. These skulls in this mass grave were not given after the fact for the sake of learning. They were lives forcibly taken for no good reason and rest in a mass grave because there were too many deaths, and people were in too many pieces to have their own graves. This memorial was a little hard for me. It was more then just reading, and hearing people’s stories. I was in the church these people died in; I was in the grave these people will spend the rest of their existence in. So many lives were taken during the genocide. I still cannot understand how people could hate one another so much.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Dealing with Genocide
“Human nature is for man to be a killer” is what our tour guide told us today. We went to the genocide memorial today. It was an intense experience. To have been here for a month already and still in some ways be so ignorant of the things that have happened here. The memorial was more of a walk though, with pictures, videos, testimonies. Upstairs there was a little section of all the genocides that have gone on around the world. There have been so many, in Europe, Africa, and
(The pictures are of the mass graves and names of people killed in the Genocide taken outside of the Memorial, cameras were not allowed inside)
Saturday, March 1, 2008
as life continues in Rwanda....
It is officially month three…. On the culture shock scale… this is the month that you are a little sick of things… don’t get me wrong… I love being here… but things like… not being able to get places, walking everywhere…people seeing a price tag on my forehead…telling MUZNGU all the time… asking for money… OVER charging for everything… these are the things that today… I am a little sick of…. BUT… I still love it here and in no means ready to go home….so here is some news…I am officially an American movie star… well according to the man at burbon who I told…. I told him we were American movie stars and he believed me and told me if I brought in my movie or poster he would hang it up and promote it. Im pretty sure he gave us extra internet time due to our “status”. We brought our guard Alfonze with us to the coffee shop today… he thought it was great… It fun to have the tennessee people here all week! we did alot of hanging at burbon... exploring down town.... going out here is much different then at home... but it is still fun to have friends and pretend you are a normal 21 year old....I had an interesting week though. I went up north again… but this time with a short term team. I think I am convinced that short term teams are a waste of money. There was this team of 6 people… they kicked teachers out of their house so that they had a place to stay, and it seemed like FH was just trying to find something for them to do. They were only slowing down the process of building the house (which I helped build VIA hoeing and digging, and haling water…ect.) The Africans are much more effective then the Americans, and they can do it much faster. The funds they used to come could have built tons of houses in stead of one…but… what can ya do. So we ended up walking water up and down this hill carrying jugs water to make the bricks (also kind of a waste seeing as we had a car… but we walked it so it felt like they were doing something). The team was so gung ho about it too… they just wanted to go go go go go… do do do do do…no breaks…. They couldn’t just BE… they needed to be doing. I am sure they are going to hit a wall soon. They want to live rugged and African… they don’t want to wash their cloths, or have any kind of modern conveniences. When actuality… it is rude to be dirty, Rwandans are very clean, and there are people to wash their cloths, so not washing them is just being silly really. So all in all… I felt frustrated with this team… and the money and time they spent to come here…but at the same time these trips are reasons that people learn about poverty, what it means to own it….missions…. ect… trips can really change people and teach them more about who they are in Christ… But at the same time…. Is it a good thing for the community? It it a good use of money? It just seems silly to have people spend thousands of dollars to do something less effective, or walk water up and down a hill when a car could do it 10x faster… is it worth the things the few westerners that go learn??? I just don’t know… it was very strange to be on the other side of things though… to be the person who is living there, helping the short term team… I have been here for 2 months now… and