Butare

Last week we too a 5 day trip to Butare, a southern province of Rwanda and home to the National University of Rwanda. I was really excited to get to see another part of the country, except for the fact that we were leaving the school at 7am, which meant that I had to get on the bus at 6am, which meant that I had to get up at 5am. Eddy was really excited about this, as he has to get up at 5 every day for school and cannot comprehend why and how I sleep all the way until 7am every day.

I was the first person to wake up that morning. The house was dark and quiet, and there was no noise from the street outside. As I lay in bed willing myself to get up, I heard the quiet sound of the call to early morning prayer from the mosque around the corner, and as much as I was not happy to be awake that early and really wanted to go home, I was grateful in that moment to be able to be in such a beautiful place.

Despite the early hour, I did make it to school on time. I don't know why I always worry so much about being on time to things, considering that in Africa ten minutes late is early. I hate African time.

It's only a three hour drive from Kigali to Butare, but we left early so that we would have time to make a few stops along the way. We all piled onto the bus, and the first thing we did before everyone went back to sleep was look up the results from the Oscars. I'm so upset that I missed them, and I really want to see The Artist now.

Our first stop was the museum of pre-colonial history. At first I was really unhappy that I'd been woken from a great nap to go to a museum, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. Well, parts of it at least. They've built life size models of traditional homes, including the king's house (before the Belgian king had a Western style house built for him) and the homes of his milk girl, who prepared the king's milk, and the beer boy, who prepared the beer. Unlike all the other houses, the beer boy's house did not have a step outside of it, because they figured he would be drunk from spending so much time making and drinking beer and they didn't want him to fall and hurt himself. The houses were made of dried grasses tied into tight bundles and then packed together. They weren't large, but inside there were still walls sectioning off different areas of the house. It wouldn't have been a bad place to live. I decided later that it was worth waking up to get to walk through a traditional Rwandan house.

Our next stop was the Murambi genocide memorial. At the time of the genocide it was a school under construction, almost complete. Local officials told Tutsis that they would be safe there, but it was a lie. Instead 50,000 people flocked to this place, all to be killed in one day and then buried in mass graves. After the genocide these bodies were exhumed, and 2,000 of them have been preserved and are now displayed in the classrooms of Murambi. Room after room filled with bodies. Two thousand is so many, and almost a million were killed in the genocide.

Our first night in Butare I was sick. I had managed to avoid getting sick up to that point, but all the avoided illness caught up with me that night and I spent most of the night throwing up. I finally went back to bed around 6:15. My alarm went off at 7, and in addition to being absolutely exhausted, I was still sick. If Ruth hadn't given me some pepto I probably wouldn't have gone to class. I brought some with me to Rwanda, but left it at my homestay, because there was no more room in the bag I was taking and I hadn't needed it so far. I bet that I wouldn't have gotten sick if I'd brought the pepto with me.

As you can imagine, I was thoroughly miserable that morning. The night before, as I was sitting on the bathroom floor, I found myself thinking that this was not worth it and that I should've stayed home where I would get to sleep in my own bed and see my friends and would not spend all night throwing up. Despite the fact that I wasn't vomiting anymore, that was still more or less my thought process that morning. The turning point came with my bath that morning. We were staying in the guest house of a Catholic school, and the nuns has brought each of us a bucket of hot water to bathe with. That was the first time I've had hot water since I got here, and being able to pour warm water over my head was an inexpressible comfort. I was equally comforted when I got to breakfast and there was coffee, even though I couldn't drink much of it. So even though I was sick and exhausted, that was one of the best mornings I've had here, and my day would've been infinitely worse without those small comforts. God bless the nuns.

That morning we went to the National University of Rwanda to tour the school and meet with the Student Club for Unity and Reconciliation (SCUR). As you can imagine, walking around in the heat was the absolute last thing I wanted to do, so most of the tour was lost on me, except the part where our guide said that the forest on campus was home to more than 4,000 monkeys. I haven't seen a monkey yet, and I really want to. I feel like it's an obligatory part of a visit to Africa. After the tour we sat down for our meeting with the students of SCUR and to hear about the work they do. I fell asleep almost immediately upon sitting down, so all I know about them is that they go to secondary schools and give students presentations about unity and reconciliation, whatever that means. Honestly I feel like I didn't miss much though, because a lot of people felt frustrated afterwards that the presentation had been very vague and that they didn't feel like they'd learned anything about what these students actually do. I'm happy that I got to nap instead.

That afternoon we visited one of my favorite groups thus far, a women's cooperative located about an hour outside of Butare. This group now includes hundreds of women spread across the province, bringing together widows whose husbands were killed during the genocide and women whose husbands are in prison for committing the genocide. We got the hear the story of this group, how these women initially hated each other, but 16 years later they are part of a community that works together to help each other survive. It doesn't matter now who was a victim and who was a perpetrator, and today there is even intermarriage between the children of these two groups. Meeting these women and getting to hear their story was the most inspiring experience I've had here thus far, and it gives me hope that reconciliation is possible, and convinces me even more that the future of Rwanda depends upon its children.

The other really exciting visit of the trip was when we got to meet with two men who rescued and hid Tutsis during the genocide. It was great to get to hear their stories, and to know that not everyone bought into the hatred and fear promulgated by the government at the time. A recent survey found more than 400 people who rescued people during the genocide, and that was only in some provinces, not all of Rwanda. It is possible that as many as a thousand Hutus rescued Tutsis instead of killing them. So far there have been minimal efforts by the government to find the people and tell their stories, but multiple NGOs are currently working on it. Their stories are inspiring, and they need to be told.

The only other major event of the week was Sabrina's birthday! She turned 21 on Thursday, and, being unfamiliar with Butare, we weren't sure how we were going to celebrate, until Tuesday night when Sabrina met a Swedish guy who owns a club here, and he offered to open it up for us on Thursday so we could celebrate. It was fantastic, and I'm glad I can say that I've now been to a Rwandan nightclub.

We also had a lot of free time in Butare, so I had a lot of much needed time to rest and catch up on journaling before coming back to busy life in Kigali. Our next major excursion is in two weeks, when we go to Uganda for two weeks to study the conflict there. After that we'll have two weeks left with our homestay families before beginning our ISP periods, when we are living on our own and spending all our time on our research. This is going to be over so soon!