Kigali Again

We got back from Kigali yesterday after a very successful trip. We ended up staying an extra day because Monday was another voting holiday (they seem to happen about once every month- these mysterious voting holidays that we only find out about last minute). The car problem ended up being something totally minor and silly so that was easily fixed on Saturday. While Okan was at the mechanic, I went with another Fulbrighter to an art exhibit called "the eyes of hope project". The program gives children cameras and encourages them to take photos of their lives. The project then prints out the best ones (some of which are amazing) for sale: http://www.eyesofhopeproject.com/photographs.php?gallery=muyenzi

Afterward we went to the Remera market where you can find everything from shoes to tomatoes to chickens to electronics to jerry cans. Just about everything under the sun. I practiced my haggling and purchased some woven baskets and some presents for my nieces and nephews.

Then on Sunday we went about a half hour south of Kigali to two churches that are now Genocide memorials. During the genocide, most people gathered at churches or schools for safety because in previous genocides, they were safe havens. Each of the two churches that we visited were sites of massive massacres, one where 5000 people died, the other 10,000. They were gruesome and disturbing: shelves and shelves of skulls and bones, clothes and other mementos (picture below of children's shoes, and of a Tutsi ID card) from the murdered.

It is hard to wrap your head around it all. Both churches are in fairly small villages so you can imagine that everyone from miles away must have gathered there. In addition to the mass graves, one church had every single pew piled high with the clothes that the people were wearing when they were murdered (picture above).

They were both horrific and extremely disturbing, but we felt like we should visit them. I'm not sure how to describe "why" we felt like we should visit them. In some ways to show our respect to the culture, in some ways to learn more about what happened, in other ways, to remind ourselves of the depravity that all human beings are capable of (picture below of the church with hole in wall from grenade).

My meeting with the WCS program leader at Nyungwe got put off until Monday morning, which worked out fine. The meeting couldn't have gone better. I'm really excited about working with them and they said I could use their camera traps! Yay! So I'm hoping to deploy those in the next week or two which will require a week up at Nyungwe.

After the meeting we had all of the rest of Monday free and so we went to the pool at the Serena hotel (the only 5 star hotel in Kigali) where we read and used their pool. On Tuesday we went and paid for my research permit and then headed back to Butare in the early afternoon. Now we are trying to figure out our housing situation and whether we should stay in the house we have now for one more month (until I move to Nyungwe full time), or try and find something else.