RWANDA by Arwen Niles
E
Arwen enjoys banana beer in Rwanda. One Love-sponsored sports competitions. The reception staff at One Love are also recipients of prosthetics and I was eager to find out more about how well the limbs functioned. I hired one young man who had lost his legs to childhood polio to accompany me to two small memorials south of the capital: the churches of Ntarama and Nymata, where over 7,500 Rwandans were killed while seeking refuge. I spent afternoons sharing Cokes and chapatti and chatting about volleyball practice with another woman in her twenties who wears a prosthetic leg to replace the one lost in a car accident. One of my enduring impressions of Japan is that of a country of coexisting extremes. While it was to an altogether different extent, this is what most struck me about Kigali. United Nations envoy trucks and the vehicles of prominent diplomats share the road with death-tempting moto-taxis and microbuses so packed they would put any Japanese commuter train to shame. And there doesn’t seem to be anything in the middle. There’s nothing to glue these two parts together, yet everyone goes about their business as though it could never be any other way. Up the hill from One Love and just past the main roundabout is Union Trade Center, a shopping centre that is also home to the popular Bourbon Coffee, where expats and well-off locals enjoy free wifi along with their high end coffee. Down the road sits the legendary ‘Hotel Rwanda,’ officially known as Hotel des Milles Collines, a four star hotel that regularly hosts diplomatic and business meetings. Back outside on the dusty street, locals sell phone cards and maps and backdated magazines. One day after a visit to Kigali Memorial Centre, I decided to make the uphill trek to the city centre. Between the manicured gardens of the memorial and fountains of the roundabout, it was nothing but slums. I walked alongside a few teenage boys who looked unkempt and slightly stoned, and passed chickens and abandoned spaces with only remains where homes used to be. I’ve heard it said that Japan’s current economic and social prosperity can be traced back to the nation’s post-war ability to adapt to a shifted reality. It was only by truly accepting the end of combat that the Japanese were able to make the most of what was left when the smoke cleared. Making my way up through the rubble in the darkening streets, I thought about this, and how while it’s one thing to accept food and medicine from your former enemies, it’s entirely another to live with them in peace. From Kigali I continued on to Gisenyi, a small town on the banks of Lake Kivu, which is just across the border from the massive refugee camps
Image provided by Arwen Niles.
arly last May, as I was flipping through an issue of New Yorker magazine, I came across an article featuring Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his efforts to rebuild the nation 15 years post-genocide. I was a cool, green 14 years old when the slaughter played out, and Rwanda has always meant one thing to me: murder. Not just murder in a United States, handgun kind of a way, but systematic murder, evil murder, carried out with the cruellest of intentions. Here, however, was a journalist reporting a stable and peaceful country with a strong leader and a growing infrastructure. Knowing I would have some time off in August, and realising how crucial capital is in maintaining a calm society, I wondered if I might be able to invest my yen in a trip to Africa and swap out the bloodied Rwanda of my memory. While researching for my travels, I stumbled upon the Mulundi/Japan One Love Project, which is run by a Japanese woman and her disabled Rwandan husband, Mami Yoshida Rudasingwa and Gatera Rudasingwa. Known by locals as simply One Love, the project consists of an orthopedic workshop that provides the community with free prosthetics, along with guesthouses and a popular restaurant to help fund its operation. I also recalled a National Geographic article investigating the murder of several rare mountain gorillas that inhabit the jungles along the Rwanda/ Uganda/Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) borders. I learned that I could purchase a permit that would allow me not only to track these gorillas, but also support their preservation by providing tourist dollars and economic incentive to end poaching. And so it was settled: I was going to Rwanda to stay at the One Love guesthouse in Kigali and track the mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park. Like the facilities at One Love, the prosthetics have value more for their utility than aesthetics. A young Rwandan woman showed me around the offices and the orthopedic workshop, and gently put me to shame by her superior ability to speak Japanese. As Mami had done years before, this woman had learned to make prosthetics in Japan, spending a year in Yokohama studying the craft and then returning to Rwanda to pass this knowledge on to her fellow workers. The workshop itself is a hot and dusty room that smells of the paint being rhythmically applied to stacks of walking sticks, but out of this modest space, and using the most basic of materials, comes the life-altering gift of mobility. Recipients of limbs gain a new access to the daily physical acts of living; they are now able to contribute to their households by joining the local workforce and to enjoy the liberation of play through various
real-life story
ONE LOVE
in Goma, DRC. I then moved on to Ruhengeri, where all gorilla trekkers stay overnight in preparation for their early morning hikes. When we arrived at the base of our assigned mountain, we were met by an enthusiastic crowd that had gathered to greet us and solicit work. Though I hadn’t brought much along, I hired an ex-poacher in his thirties to carry my rain jacket and have lunch with me at the top of the mountain. Sharing space with a group of gorillas that currently runs 39 strong was an exceptional thrill, but so it was also with the surrounding community, the very first I’d met not just willing but eager to have their photos taken. Scores of children swarmed the tourists, hugging us, posing with us, and ultimately climbing all over us, giddy and impatient to view the shots. On my final day in Rwanda, I hired a man from the DRC to drive me through the country’s winding ‘thousand hills’ back to the capital to catch my onward flight. Those who travel regularly know that a country is much more than the sum of its symbols. We all realise that there is more to Japan than sushi and samurai. And although there remains much work to be done in its rebuilding, now when someone mentions Rwanda, I no longer think of desperate people hacking at one another with machetes while the whole world sits on its hands and waits. Instead, I picture lush forests and banana beer, people with beautiful French accents and impossibly white teeth, and a nation that, less than two decades post-genocide, has collectively risen to the challenge of reinvesting in, and reinventing, its future. For more information about the One Love project, to make a donation, or to find out about visiting for yourself, visit www.onelove-project. BAB info/oneloveproject.org/index.htm. Being A Broad June/July 2010
19