The high price of a wife these days

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s question of what tribe Sarah comes from was today’s doozie from my driver and another Lutheran World Federation staff person in Ikotos who were taking me to one of the projects in the area. We somehow got on the subject of men and women and how they marry in Africa. I was told that women are “bought” with cows when a man wants to marry her – the man’s family “buys” the wife from her family with the cows – 25 in this part of the world. This I already knew. They asked me if this happens in my culture. I told them no, that I did not “buy” my wife with cows or anything. I explained that Sarah had gone to university and had been self-supporting for some time with her own job and was independent from her parents already when I married her. At this they were astonished and had a good laugh about this big difference between our cultures.

But come to think of it, how many cows is Sarah really worth anyway?

Those Iowans - they're downright tribal!

I am currently in Southern Sudan, visiting the three project areas of the Lutheran World Federation’s Sudan program for my work on its 2008 annual report (this is the organization/program that Sarah works for).

Yesterday we were driving around some of the areas in Panyagor, one of the project areas. The projects always have drivers taking people around to the various project sites in the LWF vehicles. So the driver and I were talking and getting to know each other. The driver there is a native Sudanese, a fairly young man who is married but already has five kids. He asked about me. “Does your wife come from the same tribe as you?”

Huh?

Is Iowa a different tribe? I must admit I’ve never been able to figure Iowans out. They are a bit foreign to me, indeed. But I had a bit of a challenge explaining to him that we don’t really have tribes in the U.S. But how was I supposed to answer that question? Are we from different anythings?

Visiting the obscure country of Burundi

Here are some things I learned or observed on our road trip through Tanzania to visit Burundi and Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. In all, we drove 3,707 km/2,303 miles from our home in Nairobi west through Tanzania to the capital of Burundi – Bujumbura – then north to the capital of Rwanda – Kigali – and back east again.

• Out of the four countries we drove in on this trip, Kenya, our own home/country, has the worst roads of the lot. This is surprising, given that it’s the wealthiest and arguably the most developed of all countries in East Africa. But this could be the very reason – this is why it has the most cars and trucks that use the roads and wear them out perhaps more than they do in Burundi, Rwanda or Tanzania. We took one route in Kenya west to go into Tanzania, but stretches of one road were so bad that on the way back, we chose to take a longer route once back in Kenya, hoping to avoid this stretch. But we happened upon another long stretch of road that was under construction, which meant we had to drive on a long, bumpy side road!
• Much more so than in Kenya, people carry things on their heads and ride bicycles for transportation and to haul things in Tanzania and especially in Burundi and Rwanda. Instead of carts for cargo or even wheelbarrows, people use their bicycles to haul all manner of goods, from huge bags of charcoal or bales of hay to people – using them as a town’s official taxi service (we saw a lot of women riding side-saddle, sitting over the back wheel on a carrier). And it just made sense to us – but apparently not to the bicyclist - the many times we passed a bike that the load they were trying to haul was just way too heavy. Several times we saw an overturned bike, the load obviously top-heavy, with two people standing next to it, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do next. Or we could never figure out how the bicyclist could balance such a tall or heavy load and ride their bike. And we’re not sure why, but we don’t see people walking and carrying things on their heads much in Kenya at all, but this is common in the other countries we visited.
• We visited the world’s third- and fourth-largest freshwater lakes – driving around Lake Victoria in Tanzania and stopping there both ways and visiting Lake Tanganyika at one of our destinations in Burundi. And we hail from the shores of the world’s largest freshwater lake – Lake Michigan/Huron (which are considered one lake together, since they are at the same elevation and water passes freely between them).
• Good thing we are flexible drivers. When we moved to Kenya, we had to learn to drive on the left side of the road again, and we are now quite adept at it. Tanzania also drives on the left. But as soon as we got all the way across Tanzania and crossed the border into Burundi, we needed to switch sides of the road. This was challenging in itself, but we had our right-hand-drive car with us, so the steering wheel was on the outside of the road. But both of us did quite well switching to the other side of the road there and also in Rwanda (and then back again in Tanzania and Kenya). It’s odd that neighbors like this in Africa drive on different sides of the road. It must be according to who the country’s colonial power was. For Kenya and Tanzania, it was Great Britain, which drives on the left side, and for Burundi and Rwanda, it was Belgium, which drives on the right.
• We are also grateful we have some fairly flexible skills in the language department as well, that we had previously lived in a French-speaking country. We didn’t find many natives in Burundi who speak English, and we managed to ask a few times for directions to the American embassy. In Rwanda, however, we found more English speakers, since they get a few more tourists there.
• Driving west from Nairobi, we passed through a wide variety of terrain. We went down into the Rift Valley and skirted Masai Mara game park, which is the Kenyan extension of the famous Serengeti in Tanzania. On the eastern side of Tanzania we passed through an area that had hills jutting up out of the plains and outcroppings of boulders that sometimes had interesting piles of balancing rocks. Much of Tanzania was very flat, but these plains varied from very dry to being hit by torrential downpours, which we got caught in a few times. Once we hit the western side of Tanzania, it becomes very hilly. Both Burundi and Rwanda are very hilly. In fact, Rwanda’s nickname is the “Land of a Thousand Hills.” The land is also very lush. We saw many kinds of trees in these countries, including banana, coffee, tea, palm, baobab, eucalyptus and pine.
• As much as Rwanda has been through, as concerned as it should be about racial tensions, the social atmosphere and alleviating poverty, it is also very concerned about its environment. Surprisingly, it has essentially banned the use of plastic bags in the country. In fact, at the border, a guard asked to see in the back of our car (our luggage) to see what we had in plastic bags, and then he asked us to throw at least one away (he didn’t catch all the plastic bags we had). They even had some free paper bags that we could have taken. In some places in many African countries, the land is so littered with thrown-away plastic shopping bags (I’ve seen this a lot around the refugee camps in Kenya). I’m not denying that plastic bags are bad for the environment, and it certainly is unsightly to see them discarded and blown away and stuck on bushes and trees in rural areas. But I’m just surprised that Rwanda would be so concerned about the role of plastic bags and that it would take such widespread action on a countrywide scale. Indeed, especially the rural areas – along the roads – are quite clean of such rubbish.

Our purpose in making this trip was to see some other countries and parts of the East Africa region while we are living here. I had never been to Burundi and Rwanda before, but Sarah had for work when we were living in Geneva.

I wrote about our time in Rwanda in an earlier entry on this blog, so here is a bit about our time in Burundi:

In Burundi, we stayed at the home of one of my former coworkers from the ELCA in Chicago in the capital, Bujumbura. Her husband has been stationed with the State Dept. at embassies in Bangkok and London (we visited them there once when we lived in Geneva). A while ago, he bid on a post in Burundi and got it, and they arrived there in August. So we were their first visitors. My former coworker is also now working at the American embassy in the capital.

The Kleibers lucked out and were given an embassy-owned house to live in that used to be occupied by the deputy chief of mission (the #2 in charge after the ambassador). It’s located in the hills above the downtown area, and it has a spectacular sweeping view of the city, with Lake Tanganyika beyond that and the hills of the Democratic Republic of Congo on the horizon. It’s an enormous house with a huge terrace that is great for entertaining. It also has a large garden filled with tropical plants and flowers that is well-cared for (by their hired gardener, paid for by the taxpayers of the U.S., of course). The house is definitely designed for wealthy expatriates who have domestic servants and who like to entertain – a huge dining room with a well-separated kitchen, two large bedroom suites plus a couple of other smaller bedrooms, a cold-storage room, etc. It’s a lovely place to relax.

Because Tony has lived in Bangkok, all of their house’s décor is Asian – many objects from Thailand, Burma, China and the region. As soon as I walked in, I thought, “It’s a little corner of Bangkok right here in the heart of Africa.” All of these same decorations were there in their American-style apartment in London, where it also seemed a bit out of place. The Kleibers are in their early 50s and have never had children, so all the delicate statues and shiny lacquer ware from Vietnam were definitely not toddler-friendly. So we really had to keep an eye on Lexi, but she really loved running around on their front lawn.

Burundi isn’t exactly a well-known country, certainly not as well-known as its neighbor to the north, Rwanda, which has a notorious reputation for its genocide. As such, it doesn’t attract many tourists because there isn’t much to do there. None of the countries that border these large lakes seem to really take advantage of the lake as a resort destination. We know some people do have boats and use the lake for recreation, but they’re white. The day we arrived in Bujumbura, we had been driving for two and a half days, and we arrived in time for a late lunch, and we spent the rest of the day just relaxing outside on the terrace and enjoying the view and the garden.

That night the Kleibers invited some other expatriates over for dinner. We met the director of the counterpart to Sarah’s organization in Burundi. He’s got Dutch nationality but grew up in Tanzania the son of missionaries and has an American wife. All the other couples were American and worked for the embassy or the U.N. (except for the wife of one man, who is French and West African; she was awfully outgoing and bold, eating the olives from my salad, which I don’t like, off my plate at dinner). It’s always fun to meet other expats but ones who have lived for many more years outside the country and to hear about how many places they have lived and how much stuff they have collected.

The following day was a holiday in Burundi, so the Kleibers were able to spend some time with us. In the morning, we took a drive to try to find the monument marking the spot where Livingstone met Stanley, but as I said, the country doesn’t get many tourists, and like in Kenya, these sorts of haunts aren’t marked well or at all. So it ended up being just a drive only along the lakeshore south of the city. We stopped at a couple of small handicraft markets. They had the same stuff we see in Kenya and Tanzania. And in the afternoon we went to a fancy hotel (for the tourists they do get) that has a large pool and a beach on the lake. So we swam in the pool and walked along Lake Tanganyika. Lexi was afraid of the waves again.

So our visit to Burundi wasn’t marked by many tourist highlights like our other recent trip to South Africa was, but at least we saw a new country and one that has a different sort of past than Kenya.

Public holiday to celebrate Obama's victory

Today, Thursday, has been declared a public holiday in Kenya to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president. Apparently Kenya's prime minster, who is from the same tribe, in the northwestern part of Kenya, as Obama's father, and who hails from the same area of the country, declared this day a holiday.

We think this is odd in many ways:

• In a way, it's a day for Kenyans to celebrate democracy, the fact that Americans voted in, in a peaceful way, a man from the opposition party, a man so foreign to the office of the presidency. This when Kenyans can't hold a democratic election themselves, one that is peaceful, and simply allow the opposition leader, who arguably won the vote, into office as a true democracy would allow.
• It's strange that we, American citizens, the only ones who had a say in selecting Obama, have to be outside our own country to get a day off to celebrate the election of our own president.
• We wonder how Kenya can suddenly declare a nationwide holiday for the next day. I figure only small countries can do this. It would just be logistically impossible for a big country for the U.S. to do this. But it doesn't seem to inconvenience anyone here to be told they don't need to work the next day. Jane, our house help, seemed delighted to get a day off work and never asked us if her absence today would cause any problems (it won't, since Sarah's office is obviously closed too). But things in Africa are always so loosey-goosey. Hard and fast plans are never made for anything, or if they are, it's okay if they're changed or canceled.
• What does one do to celebrate an occasion like this? I saw in the newspaper that a hotel in Mombasa this week was serving two types of double-decker hamburgers named the McCain and Obama burgers. The chef created them because he knows Americans like hamburgers. Perhaps we need to eat something American. But for breakfast we "celebrated" by making French toast!

But we have the whole day to figure out what to do, think about the impact of Obama's election and savor the victory for Kenya, the U.S. and the world!

Happy days are here again!

This morning I have been awake for most of the past seven hours (and not sleeping very well before I got out of bed) - since just before 3:00 a.m. - and for much of that, I was watching the presidential election returns come in and Obama’s victory speech from what I will claim now as my (last) hometown - Chicago.

Again, to remind you of the historic nature of Obama’s election to the presidency (besides all those other firsts you have heard about over and over):

• This is the first time since Abraham Lincoln that Illinois has sent someone to the White House.
• This is the first time since JFK that a sitting senator has been elected to the presidency.
• (not so seriously) The candidate whose last name did not end in N was elected, but the taller of the two candidates did win. Also, does anybody know if Obama is left-handed? That may be why he won.
• Chicago has now proven itself as a national political powerhouse, something that has not happened in a long time. I’m sure Mayor Daley is pleased that his city is in the spotlight these days, especially as he’s placed it in the running for the Olympics. I wonder if he’ll get an appointment in the administration.

And again, I’ll state that earlier I was a Hillary supporter, and this was really supposed to be her day. It must be a bittersweet day for her (and Bill). But still, as a die-hard Democrat (and originally a Massachusetts one), I couldn’t be happier that my party has recaptured the White House.

But overall what I want to say is this: Because of the monumental nature of this election and selection, for the above reasons and more, my confidence in the United States of America is restored. Sarah and I were planning to return to the U.S. anyway next year to live and work, but now I feel we can do that, and with some pride. The U.S. really showed – to itself and to the world - that it has matured in choosing Obama as its leader. As an American living abroad, I am so pleased that America’s stature in the world, in places where we have lived like Geneva, from the houses of world power and influence, to Kenya, where millions of people live hand-to-mouth lives, will change instantly today. The disastrous era of George W. Bush ends today (and the Republican party is in shambles, which is a position the Democrats have been in more than once). America’s image has been restored, and I don’t mind so much living abroad and representing a country that is willing to turn around and put itself on the right course again. (BBC News has an article - "President Obama and the world" - that does an excellent job talking about what I'm referring to here.)

But another reason I am rejoicing today, along with millions of others who know how significant (in many ways) Obama’s election is, is because of my new perspective in this election. This is the first presidential election I have experienced as a parent. Sarah and I have recently brought a person into this world, a new U.S. citizen, and she will return with us to a country under new leadership, one that cares about what the U.S. does in the world and that cares that it acts responsibly. I know Obama won’t be perfect and won’t accomplish everything, but I feel like the world will be a safer place for my child because of his election, a new concern I have now as a parent. And like Obama himself said during the campaign, his campaign and that of Hillary Clinton meant that his daughters – and mine as well – now have every opportunity open to them – even the highest office in the land, the most powerful position in the world. It doesn’t matter what race or gender you are – everything is open to anybody. Sarah and I happened to have a girl baby last year, and there are still so many places in the world where every opportunity isn’t open to women. But now new paths in her country, at least, appear to be open to her, as today has proven. I wonder what her generation will accomplish when they are old enough to lead.

But for now, I’m thrilled that my generation is closer to being in power in the U.S. and this world (I don’t quite feel like Obama is my generation – he’s a bit too old to be one of my siblings). I don’t really need to feel ashamed anymore as a representative of my country living abroad. And by living in Kenya for the time being, where the son of a native has just been elected U.S. president, I actually now have something to be proud of!

My faith restored (somewhat) in Nairobi restaurants

My faith is a bit restored in the Nairobi restaurant scene. Earlier I wrote on this blog about how disappointed I was that I could not find a good Pad Thai. After church this morning, we went out to a mall clear on the other side of the city which we decided to visit because we were halfway there from church anyway. We were planning to have brunch at the nearby Nairobi Java House, one of our favorite restaurants. But while at the mall we saw a restaurant advertising crepes. We always enjoyed having these in Geneva and on visits to various places in France (and the Dutch pancake version in The Netherlands and South Africa). We decided to eat there, but rather than having what had originally enticed us into the place, we each ended up with something different. I was delighted to see one of the lunch special was rosti, a favorite Swiss dish. My favorite place to eat this back in the “motherland” was at a small, dark café a half a block from the capital building in Bern. I always describe it as the Denny’s skillet breakfast. Sarah had some sort of filled potato pancakes (so she had something like a crepe).

The presumed owner was standing in the dining area making the crepes, and Sarah discovered that he’s from Switzerland. Although the place is called the Latin Café, it’s quite broadly European, and we felt very comfortable there, so much so that I had to stop myself from speaking to the waiters in French. They also have quite an extensive offering of different kinds of fondues, so we will have to return there to savor that favorite dish from Switzerland. For dessert, we had a yummy chocolate fondant (a cross between pudding and cake). This is a very European thing too (and very rich and satisfying). I thought I might even be able to get a decent cappuccino there – let’s hope!

Visiting Rwanda and the horrors of the genocide

Last week the three of us piled in the car and took a long road trip west to visit Burundi and Rwanda. The highlight of the trip, er, the lowlight – okay, the most significant part - besides visiting some friends in Burundi was visiting the memorials for the genocide in Rwanda that took place in the early 90s.

I’ll write about the other parts of the trip in another entry on this blog later, but I want to give you my impressions of what we saw in Rwanda here first. We made sure we saw Hotel Rwanda before we visited. If you haven’t seen this movie, do watch it (because chances are you’ll never get to Rwanda like we did). It’s not as well-made as Schindler’s List, but it’s in the same genre and it will hopefully affect you just as much as Schindler’s List did.

When we left Burundi, we drove north into Rwanda and stayed the first night in a medium-sized city called Butare, a pleasant tourist stop with all the helpful services. About 30 km outside the city and outside a village along a rural road is the campus of a former technical school. It’s set among the hills surrounded by hamlets where people raise their animals and grow their food. All along the main road to get to the adjacent village are churches and schools. It’s a quiet, peaceful setting – today, that is. But maybe it’s only quiet because of people’s remembrance and reverence for what happened there, or maybe it’s so haunted by the horrible memories that no one dares to disturb the quiet of the place that is trying to heal its wounds.

The campus was actually never used as a school because it was under construction during the genocide. At one point, for about a week, 50,000 members of the Tutsi tribe fled and took shelter there before they were all massacred. It was later discovered that the very ones who told them they should flee there for “safety” were the government itself, which was behind the genocide. Now the campus is a memorial to the genocide, since so, so many people died there. They were buried in mass graves and then exhumed, and some were reburied elsewhere. This would all make the place significant enough and reason alone for one of the country’s major memorials to the genocide.

But what makes this place significant is the graphic way it portrays the genocide. Inside four blocks of six classrooms each are the dead bodies of a few thousand victims of the genocide, and when one “tours” this memorial/campus, the main part of the tour is viewing these dead bodies. So imagine walking into a minimally finished classroom (just the basic concrete walls and floors), and on three or four wooden-slat platforms are rows and rows of dead bodies placed side by side. To me, they looked like mummies with no clothes, and they had all been preserved with lime, so they were mummies that were bleached white. And like actual mummies, their muscles and flesh had wasted away, so they were mostly bones covered only with a layer of leathery-looking skin (again, very white). They weren’t skeletons – bones only – but contorted, twisted dead bodies.

What hits you first when you walk into each room is the smell – most probably the lime. And then the sight, of course. You see people’s faces – not a skull with empty eye and nose sockets – but covered with skin. Occasionally you would see a tuft of hair on top of a skull, and that, to Sarah, was chilling. There are things like this that remind you that these were real people – living, breathing people with lives and families and who worked and grew up – at one point. To me, they were first many, many dead bodies, and I had to mentally remind myself that, although they were bleached white “mummies,” they all once looked like the Africans with dark brown skin, like the small group that was following us around room to room (the main tour guide spoke broken English, but I think having a baby and being the only visitors there at the time attracted a few other people who appeared just to be hanging out there for the day). What was the most sad and shocking was the sheer numbers of the bodies you could see – and this was only a portion of the murdered who were exhumed and chosen to be preserved so they could be put on display at this memorial. Why did they do this, I asked the man. “To remember,” he said very firmly, but with a taste of bitterness in his mouth, it seemed – like why should something like this have happened and been forced into their memories.

Also sad and shocking was remembering that the last thing every single one of these people knew was fear and pain. When the killings happened, women were raped, some people were made to kill their children and husbands first before they themselves were killed, and people were beaten, hacked to death with machetes, or shot.

Talk about a powerful sensory and physical experience – visually, with smells, and definitely viscerally. I remember being hit this way physically when going through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and getting to the room where there were hundreds of shoes on display. The smell of old leather and sweat left in the shoes hit me first, and in that way I was reminded of the humanness of it all – that the victims of that genocide wore shoes and were ordinary people just like all of us. But this was the same sensation with the smell and a lot more – not just an object that a human used, but the human him/herself – his/her body. And it was the same sort of experience of visiting a concentration camp like we did in Germany – only worse. On our visit to Dachau, outside Munich, I remember feeling like I could hear, in the emptiness of the place, the thousands of people who had been there. I could hear their voices in the cramped living quarters, and especially when I stood inside the gas chambers, the very place people were slaughtered. But in that place, what I “heard,” the sensory experience, was inside my head. What hit me hardest in the concentration camp was seeing the ovens where bodies were incinerated. In those places, they killed people and then wiped off the face of the earth any last trace of them – that’s how much Jews were hated. But there, in that place in Rwanda, there was a visual reminder – a trace, a body - of who had been there and who was killed, and it made it much more real, tangible, but also stark and scary.

I could have taken pictures of these dead bodies, but I just would not have felt right in doing so. I felt I needed to leave them there without taking anything away with them out of respect and for their dignity. I did search on the web for some photos that others had taken at this place, and here is one:


I didn’t want to, but I made sure to look carefully and thoroughly at some bodies in some of the rooms. Yes, I looked at faces. Occasionally there was a hand on a face, and it made me wonder if that person was killed and frozen in their last pose while they were alive, one of shock and horror – a hand over a mouth that was gasping or shielding their eyes from witnessing murders in those very classrooms. Occasionally a hand or foot was broken off. There were sunken bellies and lots and lots of contorted, writhing bodies.

There were all sorts of people in all of the rooms – young and old, tall and short. There were babies and toddlers. We did not bring Lexi inside any of the rooms with us (one of the people walking around with us kindly watched her). But I saw several bodies of children who appeared to be about Lexi’s age, and I thought how awful it was to have children killed, or even how awful it is that this sort of thing is happening in her lifetime – that such horrors are still going on in her world today.

It was strange, but a woman with our tour guide went ahead of us to unlock each room (each opened to a passage outside). She did it as if there were ordinary things inside, as if to invite us to her museum of many rooms. I guess I couldn’t really expect her as a memorial employee to be falling apart emotionally in opening the door to reveal something horribly sad. This was simply her job and she had done it many times before. But could one ever get used to doing that job? Before we started visiting the rooms, I dreaded what we would see. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had described what was there, but I didn’t know what all these dead bodies would look like. I almost expected to see people’s faces and be able to look into their eyes (dead bodies like one sees at the new crime scene on the crime shows on TV).

Again, there were 24 rooms like this in all. After seeing 12, I said I had seen enough.

Our tour guide wanted us to see just one more, which was a little different than the rest. Inside on one platform were 150 skulls neatly lined up, and on the other platforms were other types of bones that had been separated from bodies.

It was everything you can imagine it was – haunting, chilling, shocking, alarming, horrific, sad, etc. It was all almost too much.

In other buildings, we were shown some of the victims’ clothes and where some French peacekeeping troops stayed.

The next day, we drove on further north to the country’s capital, Kigali. There they have the country’s main memorial. It was established by a U.K.-based foundation that educates people on genocide. It is very well-done and presents the background to the genocide – the history of the country during colonial times, explanations of the cultures and tribes, and the players in the genocide. If the earlier memorial was the visceral, sensory one, then this one provided well the intellectual side and presented the irrationality of the genocide. One could blame just about anybody – or everybody – for the genocide. You could go back and blame the countries that first colonized Rwanda – first the Germans and then the Belgians. One interesting fact about what these colonizers did is to essentially create the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. Apparently before the Germans colonized the country, there were many tribes there, and then the Germans decided arbitrarily that one group was the one who owned ten cattle or more, and the other group owned fewer than ten cattle. Over the decades, the Tutsi and Hutu tribes were pitted against each other in various ways, which ultimately led to the genocide. But again, whom should one really blame? You could go back a long way or else look at recent events and players in them. But one finger that should be pointed is at the rest of us – the international community at the time, the group of nations in the West who basically did nothing but sit and watch this genocide taking place. People from Kofi Annan to Bill Clinton have later admitted that they had the power to do something to stop the killing and regret not taking more action.

At this museum/memorial are gardens where there are also mass graves of victims. We also learned from the displays there of other sites of major massacres. In some cases, huge numbers of Tutsis were killed when they took sanctuary in their churches. In one case, the pastor allowed all of his parishioners to be slaughtered inside his church. In this genocide, humanity was at its worst.

Being in Kigali today, if you knew nothing about the genocide and if you were, say, visiting the city on business, you would probably never know that the country had been torn apart in such a violent way so recently. The city is busy, alive and vibrant. It appears the economy is booming, and there’s a construction boom all over town. People are out on the streets, and business workers downtown go out to lunch and enjoy themselves. There are huge plans to clear slums and put up 5-star hotels all over the city. Foreign investors have bought large tracts of land where slums are, built new housing for the slum’s residents in other areas, have paid them for their land, and will put up their hotels. Huge houses selling for US$400,000 are being built in new neighborhoods. Business areas will be cleared in 2010 and new areas developed. Even the original Hotel Rwanda – the Hotel des Milles Collines (Thousand Hills Hotel), which, surprisingly, is right downtown – is being renovated to capitalize on the increase in tourism and its fame from the movie. We tried to go there for a drink and dinner after our tour of the city but discovered the whole place is closed. It is great to see the country moving forward, but we were a bit puzzled about who would come to stay in the 5-star hotels – can any Rwandans afford it, or what else in the city would attract tourists to come and stay there? The tourist office is very professional about marketing the capital and other parts of the country, but I wonder what reputation the country has beyond the genocide. Unfortunately, people know Rwanda well only for its violence and genocide. I didn’t see the tourist office saying, “Come to our formerly war-ravaged country to relax and enjoy yourself! We’re not killing each other anymore!” But I wondered how and why they expected tourists to come – for what now after the genocide?

On our city tour, we also saw where ten peacekeepers from Belgium had been killed early in the violence. This spot is now a memorial as well. And at various places around the country, sometimes in rural areas, by the side of roads, are smaller memorials. Some are in the form of a small plot of land that looks like a graveyard. Inside these are probably a large common grave for many people. They are usually decorated with some purple fabric and painted with words like “RIP” and “We will never forget you.”

Also a few times while driving through the country, we passed a prison and could see prisoners outside working (behind fences). I found a travel article that a journalist had written about her visit to Rwanda, and she had noticed these prisoners as well. She wrote:

"...in the car, Foufou, my driver's daughter, had pointed out crumbling houses bombed by the killers, smaller memorials and even pink-clad prisoners convicted of war crimes toiling in the fields.

"I asked her why they are allowed to roam out in the open.

"'They will not escape,' she said. 'They have no place to go amongst their neighbors.'"

After seeing all of this, but especially the first memorial with all the dead bodies, we were obviously very moved and disturbed by this period in the country’s history. I was outraged – and still am – that such things could occur in the supposedly civilized 20th century – and that they still do in the 21st century in places like Darfur. I am moved enough to write to my representative in Congress (but I just may wait until later next week, since my senator in my last home in the state of Illinois happens to be a man by the name of Barack Obama, and I hear he might be leaving his position soon). I hope you would be inspired too by what I have described to you here to write to your member of Congress and/or the president. In my last full-time job, I worked with my employer’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a result of the violence and genocide that is going on there. I could tell you a lot about the many terrible things that are happening there as well – villages being destroyed, women being raped, men being slaughtered – and that continue to this day, even after we saw what happened in Rwanda. I urge you to write to your legislator and ask him/her to work to end such situations like the genocide in Darfur. If you need help with this, to know what issue to write about or who your representative is, the ELCA's advocacy website is one place to find this information. We as Americans are in a position to do something about this because of the unique and supreme power and influence of our country, and if you plan to vote next week, then you know you have the power and privilege to participate in our democracy and elect leaders who have authority not only in the territory of the United States, but power and influence in places like Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Northern Uganda. Tell them, as I will, and as we heard in Rwanda, an echo from the Holocaust of Europe in World War II: Never again!