The Heart of Darkness

Last week I went with two other girls I work with, Nicole Galovski and Susie Maloney, and three guys we know to Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC. Eric Kreutter was starting a new project for his organization, Cornerstone (www.cornerstonedevelopment.org, www.inveneo.org), in Bujumbura and checking up on their project in Kigali. Our first day in Kigali we went to the Genocide Memorial Centre (www.kigalimemorialcentre.org). Visiting the museum and the memorial (also the site of mass graves) was an intense experience. It is hard to believe that the genocide happened in my lifetime. Now Kigali seems like such a modern, put together city (so much aid money poured in after 1994), it's crazy that just 14 years ago it was a hell on earth. My favorite part of the memorial and also the hardest part was a room with children's pictures, telling how old the kids were when they died, how they died, and also their favorite foods and hobbies. It humanized the atrocities for me. Our first night in Kigali we stayed with this really awesome girl that Eric knew-Winter Wall who works for Keza (www.keza.com).

Our second day we left for Burundi. Eric brought a Rwandan who works with Cornerstone to scout out a house in Bujumbura and be our translator. If Kigali reminds me of a western city, Bujumbura reminds me of ghost town in the Old American West. The streets there were almost deserted--really strange for a capital city in Africa--usually their are tons of people on the streets. Everything looked run down. After a 12-year ethnic civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi, the same ethnic groups as in Rwanda, the government of Burundi just signed a cease fire with the last rebel group in May 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/country_profiles/1068873.stm). No wonder the place looks so empty. We stayed at a guest house on a corner across from UNICEF on one side and the French Embassy on the other, but still no life to be seen. We found this really cool modern looking coffee bar called Aroma, it looked brand new, like it had just opened since the cease-fire. We had dinner and breakfast there-it was kind of like our hub. We spent a wonderful afternoon on at this cute resort restaurant and bar on the shores of Lake Taganyika playing cards, eating fish with the bones and the eyes still in them, and listening to/watching traditional drummers and dancers.

We took the bus back to Kigali, spent the night at one of Cornerstone's Youth Corps homes with a group of he coolest Rwandan guys I've ever met...they tried to teach us traditional dance andwe had a mini-dance party, played cards, and talked about life and the history of the area. One of the guys explained to us how there was no longer Hutu or Tutsi, just Rwandan--how cool to hear! The next morning, Nicole, Susie and I left for Goma. All the roads where we'd taken buses thus far had reminded me of Colorado (or what I imagine Colorado would look like, even though I've never been there). But the road from Kigali to Goma is the most beautiful road I've ever been on--hills, terraced fields, African women carrying baskets on their heads--it was like Eden.

Goma is right across the Rwandan border in the eastern D.R. Congo. One of my favorite things about traveling by land in Africa is that you have to get out of the bus and walk across the border, you get stamped once on one side of the border and then walk across a couple hundred feet of no man's land, and then you get stamped on the other side and the bus picks you up. Crossing the border from Uganda to Rwanda and Rwanda to Burundi was beautiful. The Gisenyi-Goma crossing was on the shores of Lake Kivu. We met some Americans at the border, one who worked for the International Rescue Committee (www.theIRC.org) in Bukavu and two others who had just been in for the day to visit HEAL Africa, which they recommended we check out. Our first order of business was to find food and then a hotel and then stay in for the night. As we were trying to do this, an SUV of UN South African troops stopped and offered us a lift to a good restaurant they knew of--Salt and Pepper. They were really great and we ended up running into them the next day as well. Some ex-pats we met at the restaurant helped us find a nice safe resort hotel to stay at on Lake Kivu. We spent the next day being driven around by Alex, a really great guy who worked at the hotel. He drove us to HEAL Africa and down streets still covered in volcanic rock (it made for a roller coaster of a car ride). A volcano erupted in Goma in 2002 and there was really still ash everywhere. We ran into a man who worked for an obscure part of the UN that told us about how the UN was just trying to keep a window of stability open long enough to get aid and infrastructure in, but that it wasn't working and he was trying to figure out how to get all the foreign troops out. He told us to visit the volcano and then leave. Fighting broke out 15 miles away that day. Everyone we had talked to about going to Goma assured us that as long as MONUC was in Goma no rebel armies would dare enter the city. We saw tons of UN troops piled up in trucks going out into the bush. We were comforted knowing that we were just across the border from Rwanda and we left the next morning. Goma is a common place for tourists because of the mountain gorillas and the volcano, so we'd known lots of people who had gone there and attested to it's safety. It was still a relief stepping back across the border to Rwanda.

I am fascinated by the situation in the Congo, and all of Africa in general and the interconnectedness of the entire continent--for example that at one point in my lifetime the DRC president had enlisted the help of Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe to help him fight against forces from Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. I can't believe I only took one course on African history the entire time I was at UVA. I really want to learn French and Arabic and Swahili and spend my lifetime on this continent. At the same time I wonder what it means to be an American here and to also contribute to the rebirth of the continent that colonialism and tribal wars destroyed. I wonder whether there is any ethical legitimacy at all in my desire to be here. I could see myself doing work in the Middle East, in southeast Asia as well, anywhere aid groups are pulling out. I would really like to work for the IRC, UNHCR, or UNICEF at some point in my life. Nicole and Susie and I share a desire to work in places like this. I became really close with Nicole and Susie on our trip and I'm so excited about the upcoming months.