A best friend visits -- part two.

The next day, we got started late. We went and got coffee for Erin, and then we went to the Baha'i temple right near my house. Sam came with us again. There was a Baha'i man there this time, who wanted to tell us everything about the Baha'i faith and where there are temples -- and he was very insistent that we visit the Baha'i temple in Chicago (the only one in North America; there's one on each continent, plus one in Central America), until he found out how far away Chicago is from where Erin and I live. We walked around the grounds, which were as beautiful and peaceful as I remember them.

To be honest, I don't even remember what we did for the rest of Thursday. At some point, though I don't remember exactly when, we went to the National Theatre craft market. Erin got some things, and I got more things, and it was pretty typical. That may have been on Thursday, or it may have been on Sunday -- this is the problem with blogging a week later. I forget exactly when we did what.

In any case, on Friday we woke up really late again and went to Kabira Country Club, about a mile from my apartment where you can pay 30,000 UGX (they raised prices!) to use the pool. It was a bit overcast, but we were working with limited time, so we went anyway. The sun came out in full force briefly, at which point we jumped in the pool, but it shortly started thundering and threatening rain, so we got out and went into the restaurant. They have pretty excellent Indian food, which we ordered. After lunch, we went to this dress shop in Bukoto that Emily had told me about, where I showed the woman this beautiful and huge bolt of fabric I had bought at the craft market and asked her to make me a dress. She said it was a lot of fabric, so Erin decided to have a dress made as well. We picked out our designs and got our measurements done, and then the day was sort of over. We briefly thought about going out to Iguana, the nightclub I always go to when I go out. However, we had decided to go to Sipi Falls over the weekend, so we made an early night of it.

On Saturday morning, Olivia, Erin and I woke up early and went to the bus station, where we caught a 9am bus to Mbale, a town in the eastern part of Uganda, near the border with Kenya. The bus ride took exactly four hours, and it wasn't bad at all. The bus conductor was hitting on Erin, but it gave us an opportunity for conversation with someone, so it was fine. When we got to Mbale, we had to get on a matatu to go to Sipi itself -- or so we thought. It turned out the matatu conductor spoke no English, so when we tried to speak to him to ask where we needed to go, he just ignored us. They also crammed more people into the matatu than I've seen in a while -- in South Africa, there are regularly 20 people in the matatus (which have seats for 12 people), but in Kampala they generally stick to 14. In Mbale, there were 25 people in the matatu; we were literally on top of each other. A Ugandan sitting next to me told us that we had to take the matatu to "the junction," and then get on another taxi. We got to the junction -- but by then, it was only the three of us left, and they just turned the matatu off and got out. We were like, what do we do now? But as soon as we got out, there were boda bodas who were asking us where we wanted to go. There was a sign that said Sipi was 12kms away, and one of the boda drivers was from Sipi, so we got three bodas and went up to Sipi.... in the rain. Which hurts on a boda, by the way.

We got to Sipi at around three in the afternoon, and the place we had made a reservation at was kind of a dump -- but very cheap. You get what you pay for. Still, we decided to stay. We ordered lunch, but they had to go into town to buy the ingredients, so it took about an hour or so for the food to be ready. We ate and then went out into Sipi, which has literally one road, to look around. We just sort of walked around a bit, attracting a lot of attention to ourselves. Everyone kept asking us if we wanted a guide to go to the falls, but we had already made an arrangement with someone through the hostel. It started to rain again, so we headed back. There was no electricity, so we read in the failing light -- and when the sun well and truly set, the hostel provided us with a kerosene lamp. Erin and Olivia both fell asleep really early, but I read for a while longer before finally being tired enough to sleep.

We woke up the next morning, ate breakfast, and set out for our hike. I was really nervous, because they kept talking about a 10km hike, and I was imagining it was all uphill and that I was going to die. But we ended up paying for the "medium circuit" hike, and I was actually fine. We hiked to two tiers of one waterfall, then over and up behind a second waterfall. The area is absolutely beautiful, and the waterfalls were very pretty. I slipped in the mud and fell down at one point, getting really dirty but thankfully not hurting myself; inevitable. We walked back into town just as everyone was getting out of church.

We were finished with the hike and back at our hostel by around 1pm, and they called boda bodas to take us back down to the junction to meet a matatu back to Mbale. We had planned to stay the night in Mbale, but it was early enough that we got another bus back to Kampala that very afternoon, which I think we were all happy about. Sam met us at the drop-off point, and Olivia, Erin and I went to dinner immediately -- we hadn't had much to eat that day. Sam offered to wait, but it was his day off and I didn't want to feel rushed (I hate when people are waiting for me), so I told him to go home. He said he would, but then after dinner he was still there. Sigh. So Sam took me home, and Erin and Olivia shared the taxi that we had all planned to take home. Sam gave me a present -- a bunch of sweet bananas and passion fruits, and then he left.

A best friend visits -- part one.

I got back to Kampala from Johannesburg at around 7pm. My best friend, Erin, was due in on a flight from Amsterdam at 10:15pm, so I just decided to wait in the airport for her. It was a pretty boring couple of hours -- I read some, I ate some, I watched some football. I actually ended up missing her arrival, because her flight actually landed at 9:30pm, and I wasn't paying attention yet. At around 10:10, I went over to the waiting area and saw that the flight had landed, and I sort of flipped out. She came sauntering back in after about 10 minutes, and had apparently been wandering around outside looking for me. Okay, so a rough start.

On her first day, Sunday, we woke up late-ish and did touristy stuff. We called Sam, even though it was his day off (he insisted he wanted to see me), and we all went to Gaddafi National Mosque. I had been there before with Ben, but it's the only true tourist attraction in Kampala, so I thought we would start there. We climbed to the top of the minnaret this time, which afforded some pretty nice views of the city. And sadly, I learned that this mosque is actually the third largest in Africa; Idi Amin had plans to build the biggest one, but the beginning of the foundation lay untouched for 40+ years, and when the Libyan architects came in, they tore it all down and built it a bit smaller. Ah, well.

We spent some time inside the mosque and learned more about the history and its upkeep. Apparently, it's so huge and so expensive that Gaddafi promised to pay for it for the first 25 years of its existence. The guy who was showing us around told us about how huge some of the bills are, and there's no way Uganda could pay for it -- or maybe they could, but Museveni isn't a Muslim, so he wouldn't. I asked the guy what would happen if Gaddafi were removed from power, and his answer was, "We will pray to God." Not the most practical plan in my opinion, but there you go.

After the mosque, we went to the Kasubi tombs. This was a risk from the outset, because I knew they were really damaged by a fire in March 2010 and I wasn't sure how much there really was to see. Four kabakas ago (the kabaka is the king of the Buganda kingdom) decreed that all kabakas should be buried in one place, the Kasubi tombs. So the site holds the remains of the last four kabakas, although the big building and the tombs themselves were basically destroyed in the fire. They walked us around the compound and showed us where all the princes and princesses are buried, and the widows of the kabakas, but there was really not very much left to look at. They're furiously rebuilding, because the current kabaka is also supposed to be buried there -- but right now, there's no there there. I left a small donation to help with the rebuilding.

The next day, we decided to take a look at the "other" Kampala; the places where all the normal Ugandans spend their time. We went to the old taxi park, which is this giant bowl in the city where all the matatus (the shared taxis) begin and end their journeys. I had read in the guidebook that there was one particular restaurant with a good view over the taxi park, so we climbed up and down buildings trying to find it. We eventually decided that it must not exist anymore, but we found a pretty good view anyway.

You can almost make out some method of the madness. We went down into the park itself, where there are actually signs indicating where all the taxis in a certain area of the park are going. Erin and I were planning to go to Jinja the next day, so we found the ones going to Jinja and asked about prices -- Sam helped a lot. We would never have been able to navigate without him.

After the taxi park, we went on foot to Owino market, which is this huge multipurpose market where Ugandans basically buy everything. They sell clothes and shoes and food and spices and everything you can imagine. It's labyrinthine, and again Sam was indispensable. The photos (from Erin) don't adequately capture the utter and complete chaos, but maybe you get the point.

After Owino, we went back to the apartment. We went out for dinner, and then went to bed early, because we had to be up early the next day to go to Jinja.

Jinja is the source of the Nile, about two hours east of Kampala. Diane and Bruno's brother, Michael, drove us along with Ben. The day was actually sort of a failure -- Jinja is known as the adrenaline capital of East Africa, and Erin and Ben both wanted to go bungee jumping, but Michael mostly just drove us around. We went to Bujagali Falls, which is mostly just a set of rapids, then we drove to the source of the Nile -- which is conveniently located behind a man-made island, and they charge you 20,000 UGX per person to go out and see the actual bubbles coming up from the ground. We passed.

We got back to Kampala late-ish and called it a day. Sort of lame that we wasted a whole day on a failed trip to Jinja, but c'est la vie.

A very busy few weeks -- part one.

I have been horribly neglecting my blog, and my only excuse is that I've been doing fantastically interesting things. Since I last updated, I spent four days in South Africa meeting with an NGO for school, and then 10 days with my best friend exploring Kampala and the surrounding (or not-so-surrounding) areas. Since there's a lot to post about, I'm going to do it in multiple entries -- but I definitely want to capture everything that's happened in the last few weeks, so get ready to read a LOT.

My last days at my organization was pretty uneventful. I finished almost everything I was supposed to finish, and will continue to work with my supervisor on finishing up one report we were working on together. The day after I finished at work, I left for South Africa. For those who don't know, I'm on the board of a student-run pro bono group at Penn Law called International Human Rights Advocates, and we find NGOs to support with research throughout the year. I chose a really great legal organization in South Africa that focuses on HIV/AIDS, health and human rights more broadly -- but I had never met any of them (at least not officially; I worked for their sister organization in South Africa three years ago, so I had actually briefly met some of them), so we had decided it was a good idea for me to fly down to Johannesburg to meet with them and finalize the MOU.

There was actually an experts' conference on tuberculosis taking place the day I arrived, so when I got to Johannesburg, I went straight to the University of Witswatersrand campus to attend the second half of the conference... mostly just because I was interested. Most of the NGO's staff was there, so I met a bunch of new people, and the conference itself was really interesting. The contrast between refugee rights conferences (which I attended throughout the summer and found very dry and boring) and a true activists' meeting on health and human rights was stark: I felt much more in my element than I had all summer working on refugee rights, and was actually genuinely interested in all the presentations. In the end, the organization came up with a list of 25 action points -- a hallmark of activists' meetings -- to bring to the attention of the government.

After the conference, the attorney with whom I'd been in touch, Aga, dropped me off at the (very nice!) self-service apartment where I was staying, just four doors down from her house. She was swamped with work after two days of conferences, but offered to get a quick dinner with me. We ordered Chinese from a place nearby, but when we went to pick it up, they were... out of chicken. So we sat in her car and chatted while we waited for our order to get delivered from the other branch of the restaurant somewhere else in Johannesburg. It took over an hour... so much for a quick dinner. But we brought it back to her house and I ate with her and her husband, Matthew (also an attorney), who was really interested in the American legal system and grilled me on subject-matter jurisdiction for a while out of curiosity. It was a good feeling to actually know some of the answers, even though civil procedure was definitely not my best course from my first year of law school.

On Thursday, I went into the office with Aga. We had planned to meet in the afternoon with the head of research to go over the MOU, so I just sort of whiled away the morning. I had offered to be a "day intern," and Aga asked me to do some research on an issue related to foreign nurses' inability to get placed in South Africa, which I started to work on. Aga had suggested that I go to Constitution Hill in Braamfontein in the early afternoon, so I didn't get much work done. I made myself a sandwich in the office for lunch, and then she dropped me at Constitution Hill. The High Court of South Africa is there, and there was a case in hearing that day, so I went into the courtroom and sat in the gallery and listened for about an hour. It was fascinating for my little nerdly brain, even though I hardly understood what they were talking about, as it was very technical stuff. The case was about a private businessman who had forcibly evicted a number of poor black South Africans, who subsequently had nowhere to live -- I think the argument was about whether the city of the province had an obligation to find them housing. The group of evictees was at the courthouse.

At 1pm, I went on a tour of Constitution Hill. It used to be a group of jails during apartheid -- separate jails for black men and white men, but black and white women housed in the same facility. It was very interesting, although I didn't necessarily learn anything about apartheid that I didn't already know; white prisoners got shoes, black prisoners didn't. White prisoners got more and better food, black prisoners got less substantive food and more "high-energy" food so they could do manual labor all day. However, a lot of famous people were held on Constitution Hill -- Nelson Mandela was held there for a few months, Winnie Mandela, Barbara Hogan (the interim health minister after the terrible denialist minister under Mbeki was removed), and Mahatma Gandhi. Apparently, Gandhi actually lived and practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg for about 15 years, and he really started his movement here. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions before he left for India to really get things rolling. The things you don't know. There was a whole exhibit on Gandhi in Section Four of the prisons.

After the tour, Aga told me she was in a meeting and couldn't pick me up for about half an hour. I went and sat inside the courthouse (but not in the actual courtroom) again. The courthouse is unlike any court building I've ever seen; it's like a modern art gallery. The front says "Constitutional Court" in all 11 official languages of South Africa, and the doors have the Bill of Rights carved on them in all the languages, including sign language. The inside is based on the African notion of "justice under a tree," and there are symbolic elements of a tree all through the main entry area. There actually is an art gallery in the building somewhere.

As I was waiting, the group of evictees went into the courtroom for the second part of the day's hearing. There was one woman with two young children who stayed outside, and I made friends with the older kid. He only spoke isiZulu, which I obviously don't speak, but we managed to play quite a bit anyway. We actually got yelled at by one of the guards, who said they could hear the kid laughing inside the courtroom... oops.


Anyway, we didn't end up talking about the project at the NGO on Thursday. But Aga and another staff member, who is actually Ugandan, went out for dinner together which was nice.

I went back on Friday, where Aga, the head of research and I met for about two hours in the morning.We got the project all planned out and finalized the MOU -- I think the project is going to be good. Then one of their research fellows, a young Namibian guy just out of law school at the University of Cape Town, took me to Nando's for lunch. Nando's is my favorite South Africa restaurant/chain -- all chicken, all peri-peri (African birds-eye chili), and it is amazing. After lunch, a group of people sat around the main tables and sort of chatted about goings-on for a while, and then Aga and I left the office early, because Aga had a number of presentations she had to plan. I just read for the rest of the day, and then I left the next morning to come back to Kampala.

A waterfall and a safari.

I have been so busy with work this week that I haven't even blogged about my safari outing last weekend. But fear not, I am alone in a puppy-stinkified apartment this afternoon, and so I have nothing to do but blog.

When I got back from Rwanda last week, I had two days off from work before I left for my safari. I wasted one of these days spectacularly, but had some adventures on Friday. I finally made it to the Baha'i temple in Kampala, which happens to be approximately 5 minutes away from where I live. The temple has acres and acres of gardens, and it's up on a hill so it has nice views of Kampala. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the temple itself -- and besides, they had a guy up in the rafters cleaning the ceiling -- but it was very pretty on the outside.

On Saturday morning, I got a special hire to take me out to Red Chilli Backpackers in Bugolobi, where I was meeting my travel buddies and our driver to head up to Murchison Falls. I got there early and almost fell asleep waiting for everyone else, but they arrived eventually. There was immediately drama: Irena's travel agent friend had told us we would be doing a game drive on Saturday and on Sunday, and the driver insisted that there wouldn't be time to do a game drive that day. He had a pretty bad attitude about it, which did not bode well for the rest of the trip. In fact, his bad attitude came and went. By the end of the trip, some of the people in our group loved him, but I was still fairly ambivalent.

In any case. We set out a bit late, at around 7:30, and our driver informed us that we would need our passports to get into the park. Well, no one had told us that. Most of the group had their passports, but Sona and I did not. As it happened, we drove right near my neighbourhood, so I asked the driver to swing by my flat so I could get my passport. Problem solved.

We made a stop early on for snacks and water, and then I passed out for the next 4 hours or so. I woke up in time to see some of rural Uganda, which is really green. We stopped in Masindi for lunch at a place called "Traveler's Corner" and was full of mzungus... Red Chilli was running its own trip to Murchison Falls that weekend, and we kept bumping into their group of 20+ tourists along our way. The food was all right... I got a cheese sandwich that was mostly toasted bread, but it did the trick.

After lunch, we drove another two hours or so to get to the top of the falls themselves. Along the way, I got to know my travel companions. I already knew Sonakshi and Irena, but Cary and Loida were new. Cary is getting his masters in international development policy at Duke and did Peace Corps in the Ukraine, while Loida just finished her masters in public health at Emory with a focus on infectious disease. Everyone on the trip except me was working at UNICEF in Kampala, mostly in the Technology for Development program.

We eventually got to the falls. Murchison Falls is a spot on the Nile in central Uganda where the entire river squeezes through a spot that's about 6 meters across. It apparently has gotten wider over the years due to erosion, but it's still fairly impressive. I'm a bit spoiled for waterfalls, as I've been to Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border -- and Murchison pales in comparison to Victoria Falls. But it was a nice spot with some nice views.

At first, we were the only people up there. After a while, though, a big group of Ugandans showed up... and a lot of the men had beers, which made me really nervous. The last thing I need to see is a drunk man falling into a giant waterfall. Our driver told us about how, even if you somehow miraculously survived the waterfall itself, you'd end up getting eaten by the crocodiles at the bottom of the falls. Nice of him to put that image in our heads. Like I said, he was sort of a strange guy. One of the Ugandan tourists was blatantly taking photos of Sonakshi and me with her cell phone camera. She wasn't even being subtle -- we were staring right at her as she pointed her phone at us. Weird.

Cary, Loida, me and Irena

After hanging out at the top of the falls for a while, we started the fairly long drive back to our lodging for the night. We couldn't find any spots inside the park itself, so we had to go back through the gate to this women's cooperative full of bandas (huts). We took very cold showers and then Irena, Loida and I went out for a "community walk." Since the lodge site is within the community, I guess they have members of the community take tourists around to see the village. I didn't catch our guide's name, but his English was very good.

Apparently, the village is actually made up of people from 8 different tribes, including migrants from DRC. Since they all speak different native languages, they use Swahili to communicate with one another. Our first stop was a tobacco farmers' homestead, where he had a giant structure with drying tobacco leaves inside. He told us (through our guide's interpretation) about the process for cultivating tobacco, which apparently takes almost an entire year for one season -- from planting to selling. He said it's good money, but it takes patience and a bit of risk-taking, because the structure that the tobacco dries in is really flammable and so it can be dangerous to light the fires inside. His grandkids were hanging around too, and they followed us around for a while.

We went from place to place, meeting with people and hearing their (very rehearsed) stories about life in the village. There was a party going on at a bar (if you could call it a bar) in the middle of town, and we tasted their "local brew," a sort of maize-based beer. We learned all about the different crops as we walked through fields of them, identifying sorghum and potatoes and cassava. We finally ended up at a man's homestead where he told us about childbirth (???) and the ceremony surrounding it. At that point, it was getting dark, so we headed back to the lodging for dinner. The food was so good... they had said they were making goat, which I was a bit worried about, but everything was in separate pots so I could easily avoid the goat. There was rice and beans and potatoes and cabbage, and it was probably the best Ugandan food I've had so far.

There was a generator running the campsite, which was nice because otherwise it would have been pitch black. We all got ready for bed, which was quite the ordeal. The beds in the bandas had mosquito nets, but there were SO many bugs and mosquitoes inside the bandas (and outside the nets). Loida and I got a bit hysterical, considering leaving the light on so we could "see the enemy." The generator shut off at one point, so Loida and I lay in the pitch black dark and laughed hysterically about how dark it was. But we made it through the night no worse for the wear.

We had hoped to get up really early to get a good start on our morning game drive, but the gate to the park only opened at 7am. Our driver tried to bribe the gatekeeper, but to no avail. So we entered the park at 7, and drove the hour and a half or so to the ferry site to be there for the 9am ferry. The game park area was on the other side of the Nile.

Cary, Sona and Loida

The ferry ride only took about 5 minutes, and then we got back into the van and drove into the game park. Our van had a "sunroof" that popped up, so that we could stand up and see around us and to look at the animals. 

And then the game drive started. We saw loads of animals (although no leopard -- I still haven't ever seen one!) -- Ugandan kob, Jackson's Hartebeast, elephants, one really bedraggled lion, huge herds of giraffes, and water buffalo.

 

After a few hours, we headed to the Red Chilli site inside the park for lunch. The restaurant was REALLY busy, and it took us over an hour to get our food. We grabbed the food and ran, because we were supposed to be on a boat ride down the Nile to view the falls. Apparently 5 other people hopped onto our boat, and they were like, "okay, 5 people, let's go!" and left without us. So we arrived at the river and there was no boat. Our driver freaked out a little bit, but eventually this privately hired boat agreed to let us on. It turns out the boat was hired by an Indian couple whose families had been expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin, and this was the wife's first trip back to the country since her childhood.

It was interesting to talk to them, and we saw even more animals from the boat -- like about a million hippos, which was terrifying, and a couple of really huge crocodiles. We also saw some elephants on the shore, and one big bull elephant who had probably been expelled from his herd hanging out in the middle of the river. True fact: hippos kill more people every year than any other animal in Africa. They're incredibly aggressive, and while they won't eat you the way a crocodile will, they will snap you in half with their jaws just for the fun of it. (I am really afraid of hippos.)

It took us about 2 hours to get to the falls, and when we got there, the view wasn't all that impressive or different from the top of the falls. But the boat ride was nice in its own right, so I guess it was okay.

It took about an hour and a half to get back, and then we went back to the Red Chilli campsite. We weren't staying at Red Chilli itself, but rather at at Ugandan Wildlife Authority guest house inside the campsite. This meant we had our own rooms and a little house to sleep in. But we used the Red Chilli showers (one of the best showers of my life), and we got dinner at the Red Chilli restaurant again. After dinner, we bought a deck of cards and Cary and I taught Sona and Loida to play hearts.... which I handily won, despite Cary's trash talking.

We had an early start the next day, so we all turned in at around 11pm. The generator had been shut off, so we got ready for bed in the dark. The mosquito nets were all sort of sadly hung, and we found a huge spider in the house that Cary had to get rid of for us. It wasn't the greatest accommodation in the world, but it worked.

We left by 6am the next day, and the drive back was uneventful. I got dropped off near the bypass and walked back to my flat, where I changed and went into work. It was the beginning of a truly crazy week at work, which is now over. My supervisor and I were working on a report on women, adultery and customary law in South Sudan -- it's really interesting stuff, and has involved some actual statutory and legal analysis, which I've really enjoyed doing.

Rwanda: Days 3 and 4

So, the morning of my third day in Rwanda, I woke up at 5:30am. Becky had invited me to visit her favorite of the two schools she works at: one is just a normal primary school, but the other serves deaf children and provides vocational training for children who are the heads of their households. The school is about an hour and a half outside of Musanze, so we had to meet at 6am to get there in time for the beginning of the school day.

The walk was uneventful. It was cold, and my legs were really sore from the hike the day before, and I gave myself a horrible blister. But other than that, uneventful. We made it to the school by 7:30, and we were greeted by the kids. The deaf kids are all younger than the CHH (child-headed household) participants, and they mostly greeted us by shaking our hands and then hugging us. They asked Becky in sign language what my name was, and I was thrilled that I could answer myself. My summer camp sign language classes were useful after all!

 

The kids all lined up and sang/signed the national anthem together. There's one deaf child there who Becky thinks is also autistic, and the school just lets him sort of do his own thing. He attached himself to me during the national anthem, holding my hands and not letting go for most of it. But he can apparently sign the entire national anthem, and I saw him doing part of it.

After the national anthem, the deaf kids and the CHH participants split up. The CHH participants go for morning prayer -- they sang some songs, prayed in Kinyarwanda, and then it was over. It only lasted about 20 minutes, although Becky said sometimes it can last an hour or more. After the morning prayers, the CHH participants split into their "modules": some are learning to weave baskets, some are learning to sew, some are learning electrical repair, etc. I ultimately joined the basket-weaving group, and they showed me how to wrap the colored raffia around the stronger material that makes up the core of the basket. I was pretty bad at it, and they definitely laughed at me. After a while, I asked if it was okay to take out my camera, and they said it was. I took some pictures, but then they wanted to see the camera, but they couldn't quite figure out how to work it. They got the hang of it eventually.

As the time neared when I had to leave, Becky took me to a little shop that sells the products the kids make. I bought a few things, including a basket made by a woman in a related widows' cooperative.

I said goodbye to the kids and went out onto the road to try to catch a bus back to Musanze. All the buses that went by were full and refused to stop -- we waited for an hour before I finally gave up and called Greg to ask him to tell Pascal to come pick me up at the school. Pascal did indeed come out to pick me up, then we swung back by the guest house to pick up my stuff and set off for Kigali.

The drive to Kigali was -- again -- uneventful. Pascal and I chatted for a while, and we listened to his music, and we drove in silence for part of the way. It took a lot longer when he drove it (2.5 hours) than when Greg did, because Pascal wasn't driving like a maniac. As we approached Kigali, we had some beautiful views of the city, so Pascal pulled over and we got out and took pictures.

When we got into Kigali, we went straight to the Genocide Memorial Centre. Pascal didn't come in with me, and understandably so. The exhibit didn't have any information I didn't already know, really. I did learn that the Hutu/Tutsi distinction is completely artificial in origin -- the colonial powers originally said that if your family had more than 10 cows, you were Tutsi, and if you had fewer than 10 cows, you were Hutu. (It might have been vice-versa, I wouldn't swear to this.) For a while, it was even malleable; as you gained or lost cows, you changed from being Hutu to Tutsi and back again. It's so frustrating to see the damage that such a thoughtless act of European arrogance can bring. You kind of want to go back in time and shout at people -- a million people in 90 days, you idiots, that is the price of what you're about to do.

I also learned that HIV-infected genocidaires would deliberately rape women and then leave them alive to deal with the consequences -- there is a whole wave of Rwandan women who were deliberately infected with HIV during the genocide and who are still dying today.

I couldn't help do a bit of comparing genocides, Rwanda's with the Holocaust. I guess it's inevitable that my brain would go there, although it seems so tacky to compare and contrast. The really remarkable thing about the Rwandan genocide is that it happened out in the open -- people were dragged into the streets and had machetes put through their skulls. This was a messy, violent genocide. It wasn't tucked away and done systematically in camps; people were taken from their hiding places and beaten, raped, and publicly executed. I don't know whether the degree of precision makes the Holocaust more or less horrifying. I think it's a judgment call that's impossible to make.

The really impressive part of the Memorial Centre is two circular rooms in the middle of the first floor. In one, the room is dark, and there are back-lit cases of skulls and bones from victims of the genocide; a woman's voice reads out the names of victims. It wasn't quite as awe-inspiring as I imagine the churches are in Kigali that are full of skulls (I didn't realize these were in Kigali until it was too late, or else I would have gone), but it was still quite sobering to think that every skull in the case was a person with a family and a story.

The other circular room in the center of the building had photos of victims lining the walls, with a video running of Rwandans talking about their lost loved ones. I sat and watched the video from beginning to end... it showed grieving fathers, sons and daughters, talking about their memories from before and during the genocide.

In the back of the building, there were mass graves, full of victims of the genocide. I think the closest I came to being overwhelmed was when I decided to try to put a stone on each of the slabs covering a mass grave. Even with dozens of bodies in each grave, there were too many for me to realistically place a stone on each one.

I went back to find Pascal waiting for me after I finished. He asked how it was, and we got into a conversation about his own experience during the genocide. He was 16 and living in the Western Province. His two sisters, mother and grandmother were all killed in the genocide; they had tried to hide under a bypass, but were discovered and killed early in the genocide. (He remembered the date: 15 April 1994, nine days after the genocide began.) Pascal's brother and father were smuggled into the DRC by Hutu friends, and Pascal himself stayed for two months with an elderly Hutu woman who lived in his neighborhood.

The other activity I had planned for Kigali was going to a craft market, although I admittedly didn't feel much like shopping after the genocide memorial. I went anyway, though, and it was a bit of superficial retail therapy -- I bought lots of things in a very short span of time, and then I had to stop because I was running out of Rwandan francs.

Pascal and I decided to do a driving city tour. We drove around Kigali and through the hills, but it was mostly looking and not a lot of "touring." Pascal ended up taking me to another genocide memorial, one he had never been to -- it's funded by the Belgian government, in memory of the 10 Belgian UN soldiers who were executed by the Rwandan army on the second day of the genocide, because they had been protecting the prime minister. After the President's plane was shot down on 6 April, the prime minister became the titular head of state. The Hutu militia executed her and her husband on 7 April, along with the 10 UN soldiers who were protecting her. The memorial is at the site where they were murdered, a former army barracks. One of the soldiers somehow had a gun with him and fought back, and you can still see all the bullet holes in the side of the building from the military shooting to kill him. The remaining 9 soldiers were chained together, put inside one of the buildings, and left with a grenade.

Thoroughly depressed again, we tried to find an internet cafe so I could get online for the first time in four days. We failed, so we ended up just going to the Step Motel, where Pascal helped me carry my things upstairs and then left me. I was seriously bummed out that my camera battery had died at the Belgian memorial, because the motel had beautiful views of the city.

That's really the end of my adventures. I called my dad and told him about my trip. I ordered dinner in the motel, and I had a long, involved conversation with John, who runs the motel, about different American accents. I watched CNN for a while, including catching the live verdict in the Casey Anthony trial -- that was cool/good timing. But then I just went to bed. I had gotten up so early the previous two mornings, I was exhausted.

I had breakfast the next morning and John drove me to the airport. The flight was uneventful, and I got back into Kampala without a problem. Thus ended my Rwandan saga...