The country of a thousand hills (part one- the City!).

A few weeks ago I spent six days exploring one of Uganda’s neighbouring countries, Rwanda, starting in the capital, Kigali. I visited my friend Becks, who is doing a two year VSO placement there. Becks is a Education Leadership Advisor in Western Rwanda (see next blog post!) and is training and supporting head teachers to develop their leadership and management skills (you can see Becks' blog here). 

Here are a few interesting facts about Rwanda:

• Rwanda is often referred to as "pays des mille collines" or "the country of a thousand hills". This is not an exaggeration; there seems to be hardly any flat land!
• Plastic bags are banned in Rwanda and you’re not allowed to take them into the country.
• The currency is the Rwandan Franc.
• On the last Saturday of every month, the whole country stops whatever it’s doing for the morning and works for the public good, cleaning streets, repairing roads and building schools. This is mandatory and is known as Umuganda day (literally meaning "community service day").
• There are a number of local beers. I tried out the Primus:

• It’s culturally unacceptable to eat whilst walking along the street.
• Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in its Parliament of anywhere in the world — nearly 64%.
• The main languages are Kinyarwanda, English and French. Up until 2008, French was the main language taught in schools. In 2008 the government announced that English would be the main language to be taught and the curriculum was changed, pretty much overnight. This created some challenges for the teachers! I found that people were very keen to teach tourists some key Kinyarwanda phrases. Here are a few:

 

This photo was taken at Nyamirambo women’s centre, which I visited In Kigali. The centre was set up by 18 local women and runs as a collective, offering training, education and employment to women and promoting gender equality.

In particular the women are trained in tailoring and make clothes, purses, bags etc to sell and generate an income. All the fabrics are very bright and I was struck by the vividness of the colours the women in Rwanda wear; influenced I think from their Western neighbours; countries such as the DRC.

 

I bought the orange dress/ top (next to the flipchart in the pic above) for my niece, Lily. I imagine she will be the only baby in Burton Latimer wearing West African fabrics! (although she did burst into tears when I showed her it on Skype last weekend! (the only time she cried in the hour long Skype call…!)).

I spent a really lovely morning with the staff at the centre learning about the work they do, exploring the area and eating a local lunch. Nyamirambo, Kigali's Muslim quarter, is the oldest part of the City and most multicultural peopled with migrants from across the continent. My lunch was prepared by one of the local women, Rosa, a Congolese refugee who lived in a small house with her son and daughter. It was quite a privilege to eat lunch with her in her home (and she was a very good cook!).

 

Local tailors

 

Local lunch

As we walked around the area, we visited some women at a local hairdressers. They were insistent on weaving my hair. They did two strands:

 

 

(I kept these in until the evening. It took me quite a long time to take them out (I’m not sure what everyone else in the restaurant thought, as I piled up threads of hair on my table…)).

I spent the rest of my time in the centre of Kigali. Kigali is known to be one of the cleanest and most ordered African capitals. I was struck by how less chaotic it felt than Kampala, in particular the roads and traffic (no pot holes, pavements exist, there are lots of traffic lights and signs and people take notice of them, moto drivers wear helmets and don’t load their bikes high with all kinds of belongings (I actually saw a boda in Kampala this week with two people on it and a double bed frame!)).

A couple of pics of the centre of Kigali:

 

I spent a couple of days exploring the city and visiting the sights, which are mainly focussed around the genocide. April was the 20^th anniversary month of the genocide (there has been quite a lot of coverage in the British press about the development of Rwanda and Kigali since the genocide. You can see one of the articles here). 

In 100 days, an estimated one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by the Interahamwe. The Kigali Memorial Centre honours the 250,000 buried there in mass graves and tries to explain how the genocide happened and how it was largely ignored by the international community. There is a section on other genocides that have taken place across the world. The centre is also acts as an international education and research centre; educating school children, delivering conflict resolution training and carrying out research, in an attempt to ensure that genocide never happens again.

 

 

I also visited the presidential palace (now called the State House Museum), where the former president Hayarimana’s plane was shot down; a catalyst to the start of the genocide. I found it slightly eerie and ghost like, with everything left in its place from that day and the plane wreckage still in the grounds.

I went to the Camp Kigali Memorial, a memorial to the 10 Beligian UN peacekeepers who were killed on the first day of the genocide.

 

Each pillar represents one of the peacekeepers that died and the number of cuts in the stone relate to the soldier's age.

 

Finally Becks and I went for a Primus at Hotel des Mille Collines, otherwise known as “Hotel Rwanda”.

After Kigali, I explored the west of the country and its amazingly beautiful rivers and landscapes. Blog post to follow.....