beautiful breakfast in the morning after sleeping in their queen size
extra long guest bed. I woke up to 6 or 7 different bird songs, each
lasting maybe 5 minutes and followed soon after by the next. Their
house is on a nice hill, with a great view of one of the less
populated valleys of the city. However, apparently as recently as a
few months ago the whole side of the hill opposite them was full of
small dirt huts with many hundreds of people barely eeking out a
living. My guest's thoughts were that the upcoming election needed to
look good and the city couldn't be tarnished by too many low income
people living there. Whatever the case, everyone who lived on the hill
has been re-located and the huts demolished.
After breakfast, Volker took me on a tour of Kigali for a couple
hours: maybe one of the best ways imagineable! He showed me a number
of different sections of the city.. seemingly grouped by economics and
by hill-side community. In Kigali there are the very very wealthy and
the poor. Middle-income families don't exist in Rwanda so you are one
or the other: the city's housing reflects this. Some houses are
absolutely massive, rivalling some of the bigger ones in Canada. There
are many Congolese who live in Kigali, with wealth derived from the
rich resources in that country. Otherwise, successful businessmen or
perhaps politicians are the only ones who can afford such luxury in
the midst of substantial poverty.
The flight to Arusha was uneventful and I didn't get to see Mount
Kilimanjaro, as it was dark by the time we were approaching the
mountain. I got a ride into town with the safari company that I'd be
touring with the next day, in one of their land rovers that would
frequently lose its headlights as we were driving along dark highway
roads at 80kph. The driver's response: Hakuna matata. He would then
proceed to fiddle with the headlight switch until it turned back on
again, maybe up to 10 seconds later… made for a tense hour of driving,
given the number of people walking the streets at night there.
I shared the ride with 2 girls who had also just come back
from Rwanda, where they had been visiting for work. They were law
students from the States helping out with the Genocidaire trials for
Rwandans convicted of genocide in Arusha. They told me about the
hundreds of cases that are ongoing and awaiting trial. Their job was
to do research for the prosecutors: presumably pretty grim and
heart-wrenching work. These trials are large and are numerous… a major
problem for the court systems in Rwanda. As an attempt to remedy this
bag lock, Rwanda has created special trials that are run by community
members throughout the country. They are designed to let the victims
face the defendants in court and are apparently (understandably) very
emotional, but perhaps cathartic at the same time.
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