Crossing over to Rwanda was unsettlingly straightforward. We easily and fairly changed money with a generous South African trucker, avoiding the terrible official rates and unreliable black market changers. At Rwandan immigration, I tried to switch to my British passport to get in for free. The official rejected me at first, telling me that it was against the law to change passports but when I said that it was usually fine, he just smiled, whispered “don’t tell anyone, ok?” and stamped me in. He even left the office and led us past the waiting trucks into the small border town to find a trustworthy black market changer and a cheap hotel!
As was so often the case, the fauna mysteriously changed almost immediately at the border. I could only assume that it was due to the difference in the way the two countries and cultures treated the landscape, because surely nature would dictate a more gradual transition. Tanzania had been largely comprised of open plains and arid scrublands but on the Rwandan side things were distinctly tropical. Banana and tea plantations and other cultivated crops dominated. Sure the ecosystem wasn’t natural but the difference can’t have been entirely artificial. Whether natural forest or, more often, crops of some description, the whole country seemed to enjoy a thick coat of lush greenery. At least that’s how I remember it.
The fancy, plush new bus (in which, oddly, nobody was without a seat) cruised along the fancy, newly laid road all the way to the capital. Kigali was not only clean and bustling with energy, but blessed with road safety! Motorbike riders wore helmets, cars stopped at traffic lights and reserved horn-honking only for when it was absolutely necessary, and even indicated when turning corners or changing lanes! This was handy, because it was the first country I had visited since France to drive on the right side of the road so took a bit of getting used to. On more than one occasion I nearly stepped out in front of traffic after looking the wrong way, only to have Leslie grab my arm at the last moment.
The first child we met in Kigali smiled and proffered his hand vertically, rather than horizontally, requesting only a simple handshake. This was quite a shock: kids usually asked for money or sweets! Many friendly locals took a moment out of their busy schedules to say hi, or just shout: “Ça va, Petro? (Howsit, Jesus?)” I was called Petro literally hundreds of times before learning that it was the local name for Jesus*. This made sense. My ever-expanding beard and shaggy hair had earned me this title with increasing frequency in recent months. Leslie liked the beard, but I also loved the attention: there’s nothing like biblical celebrity status to make you fall in love with a place!
Inexpensive accommodation was hard to find in the capital. The only dirt cheap place in town was the church-run backpackers. It had strict rules about the mixing of genders within dorm rooms and the consumption of alcohol, but we would cope. I tried to get us a room as Gavin and Les waited outside:
Me: “Avez vous une chambre pour trois personne ce soir?
(Do you have a room for three people this evening?)”
The nun: “non, desolee.
(No, sorry.)”
Me: “hmm. Ok. Je m’appele Petro. Maintenant avez vous une chambre?
(Hmm. Ok. My name is Jesus. Now do you have a room?)”
The nun and her assistant laughed at my joke... but they still didn’t have a room. We eventually found one somewhere else.
Foreign aid is a complex and sensitive subject, so anything I say is obviously just observation-based. If my readers would like to contribute something, please post a comment! (The below toilet is not what I think of your opinions.)
Kigali was a clean, developing city and seemed unaffected by the worldwide financial crisis. The toilets were flushable and the buses, as I have mentioned, were immaculate. Every one sported an in-tact windscreen and soft, stain-free seats. There was even a system in place for pre-purchasing tickets, designed to guarantee a seat for each and every passenger. This level of organisation seemed very out-of-place but it can be, I think, easily explained: it’s the product of a country overcompensating for past failures. The 1994 Rwandan genocide left the country in tatters, so it’s understandable that there would be pressure on the new government to prevent a bloody resurgence. The influx of international funding seemed to be put largely to good use. American aid workers were everywhere, populating the many cafés and restaurants. It was great to see so much effort being put into rebuilding a destroyed land, but what happens when the NGOs (Non-Government Organisations) collectively decide that their job is done and move on to temporarily prop up some other crisis-plagued community? Apart from anything else, who will order all the soy vanilla Frappuccinos?
I got talking with a Zimbabwean NGO worker (who will remain nameless... because I can’t remember his name) in a supermarket who said that he didn’t really agree with the way things were being handled. He expressed concerns that, to employ an overused analogy, Rwandans were being given too many fish and not enough rods. When the international aid runs out, he predicted, Rwanda will be in serious trouble. It’s a well known fact that during the genocide, many of the country’s most educated people were slaughtered, leaving gaping holes in the workforce. Our new friend accused the NGOs (including his own) of avoiding the difficult task of finding a long-term solution. He said that, when the international aid finally leaves, the holes will just reopen. At the time of writing, international aid has been in the country for fifteen years so their long term positions, however transitory, must seem permanent to locals. The holes they leave will be difficult to fill indeed.
I imagine that it must be extremely difficult to manage the distribution of foreign cash, so it’s inevitable that a certain amount is going to be misspent. We saw what I consider to be misuse of aid money on a few occasions. One such occasion was while we visited a small village in the south of the country. Early one afternoon, we noticed an unusually large congregation of locals sitting at the side of a dirt trail. They sat tensely, peering up and down the road in anticipation of what I assumed to be public transport but then a truck pulled up. The driver got out, opened the double doors at the back and unloaded sack after sack onto the roadside. It was a free-for-all. Locals grabbed what they could, loading the bags onto shoulders and makeshift wooden wheelbarrows. Interested in the delivery, we approached some men as they attempted to negotiate theirs under a minivan’s back seat. The large paper bags and plastic sacks were stamped clearly with “USAID” and that country’s annoyingly recognisable rectangle of stars and stripes. As I snapped some pictures, one of the men involved strode up with his hand out, palm forward, “no photo!” Les announced that the food had come from her country therefore she had a right to be there, adding that we were in a public place anyway. He reluctantly backed off. I considered it odd at the time that he tried to prevent us from witnessing the event, but in hindsight it seems obvious. He was humiliated for accepting handouts and didn’t want to have it rubbed in his face.
The bags contained rice, most likely sourced from outside Rwanda, thrown into the laps of a population of farmers in the middle of highly fertile farmland. Both sides of the road were fringed with lush, green crops that continued outwards, draping and undulating their way across the hills like a mystical, patchwork quilt. Considering the natural abundance of the area, surely dumping food on these people was counterproductive. Several dozen people spent their day waiting for first dibs on free food rather than working in the fields to produce their own, and who can blame them? But what good does this kind of donation do? Train locals to wait for food to appear on a truck? They aren’t stupid –they know that the well will dry up eventually, but if they don’t claim the free food in the meantime, some other family will. Meanwhile, the international community gives itself a pat on the back for “helping”, shedding the guilt they feel for having ignored this country when it needed them most (see the next blog entry for details on the genocide). Money dumped into Rwanda is entered into a spreadsheet on a computer in an office somewhere, totalised and used by politicians (and NGOs trying to raise more money) to represent moral decency... meanwhile, thousands of people in less fertile, more desperate, but less newsworthy countries die.
We soon learned that although French was the most widely spoken language in Rwanda, nearly all educated city-folk spoke good English**, as well as Kirwanda, Swahili and, often, at least one other local dialect (Africans’ knack for languages never ceases to amaze me!) In the countryside, we were told, locals mainly spoke local dialects, but many also knew French, so we decided to switch over from Swahili for a while. More than just the need to communicate with locals drove this choice, however. Les and I had made a decision: we weren’t going to travel all the way to Cairo with Gavin. Instead we would end our time together in a more comfortable setting: Europe. We booked tickets to Italy where we would travel for two weeks before finding a place to stay in France. We would stay there for the whole month of August, to learn the language, and just relax – constant travel takes its toll. Leslie, intent on catching up with my (not extensive) vocabulary, embarked on a regimented study routine: she would memorise twenty new words a day until we reached France. This way she would have something to build on by the time we started our first lesson. For the time being, it would help with communication with locals anyway. We were keen to learn more about the country, especially regarding the Genocide that rocked this unfortunate land less than fifteen years before.
In fact, I have so much to say about it (I consider myself something of an expert now that I’ve read a book on the subject) that I’m saving it all up for the next episode. Stay tuned for the next cheery entry: Rwanda: The Genocide.
* I think it was Petro, but I can’t find a confirmation of this. If anyone could help out, please post a comment!
** Their English was not always excellent. It was often at that perfect level that’s good enough to make the mistakes humorously stand out. For example, I approached a stranger looking for directions: “Excuse me but I have a question” to which he promptly replied, much to Gav and Les’s amusement, “Which question?”























