Rwanda - Kigali then out

Leaving Kigali - notice the brilliant sunshine yet again!
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So after a brief but impactful 10 days in Rwanda it's time to shape up and ship out back to Uganda. Rwanda is certainly one of the most beautiful countries we have ever seen and you literally can't take your eyes off the landscape. The tightly packed, terraced hills and mountains are a riot of bluey-greens, peppered with tiny, terracotta-tiled bungalows. Every woman here steps out in brightly coloured local fabrics and it must be against the law not to have a baby tied to your back and an implausible load balanced on your head, whether you're walking gracefully along the road or working in the fields.

Yet for all its astounding beauty we are glad in part to leave. Keen to understand what happened here we had immersed ourselves in the history of the genocide.  When you're going through towns you're reading about, seeing people whose fingers had clearly been hacked off all those years ago, and bearing witness to the genocidaires themselves working in the community, it can be pretty intense and traumatic. The horror of it all would creep up on you suddenly. When we were in the Butare museum we were faced with a wall of pictures of the past presidents and without warning it all got to much. Being faced by the architects of evil was like a blow to the stomach.

Leaving Rwanda

In Ethiopia we learnt a lot about ourselves (don't worry - not in a  'found myself' way). Here in Rwanda we have learnt a lot about how low modern, civilised society can sink.

We were saddened to learn of the fire-bombings in south London and though I don't for a minute draw comparisons between them and the Rwandan tragedy, it is quite sobering really to think that it's all part of the same continuum, and how blind prejudice and ignorance can lead people to have such total disregard for human life.