Rwanda

Yesterday was a very interesting and very sad day.  A group of us hired a taxi and drove across the border to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.  Kigali is a surprisingly clean and modern city (by East African standards).  In Kigali we visited the Genocide Museum and a church.  The museum commemorates the 1994 genocide when an estimated 1 million Rwandans were massacred in a period of 3 months.

 They also had exhibits commemorating other genocides including the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the killing fields in Cambodia,  More than 250,000 bodies are buried in mass graves on the site of the museum.  

We had lunch at the hotel in Kigali made famous in the movie Hotel Rwanda.  It was a beautiful hotel and quite busy with both locals and foreigners. Interestingly, they did not have even a plaque commemorating the heroic acts that occurred at the hotel during the genocide.

After lunch we went to a church 25 km south of Kigali.  The church was sheltering 10,000 people who were all killed.  They have racks of skulls and bones of the victims, with the marks from the machetes and clubs used to kill them very evident.  On the front gate of the church you can still see the damage caused by the grenades used by the attackers, and the clothing from the victims is still in piles on the floor.  It rought back memories of Yad Vashem for those of you who have been there - though the fact that these massacres occurred so recently made them all the more shocking.

Our tour guide was 12 years old during the attacks and survived by hiding with two of her sisters in a swamp.  Her parents and 2 other sisters were killed at the church. 

All in all, a very informative and very depressing day that left all of wondering how something like this could have happened while the Western world stood by and did nothing.