After Stone Town we spent three days at a Nungwi beach on the northern tip of the island. I wish I had a lot of interesting stories to tell of our stay there, but I'm not going to lie, we spent a lot of our time relaxing, reading, eating and sleeping. We did have a fire on the beach a couple nights, and some locals brought out a djembe that they sang and danced to. I also tried my first ever coconut that some guy fetched from a tree for Rilla. It was better than I expected it to be!
We took the overnight ferry back to Dar Es Salaam on the 3rd, VIP style! It arrived at 6am and we spent half the day catching up on e-mails and eating. Rilla and I went to the airport for our flight to Kigali. We left at 5pm and flew to Addis Ababa Ethiopia where we had a two hour layover. We then flew to Entebbe Uganda, and then without having to change plans we arrived in Kigali Rwanda at 2am. It was a very long, out of the way trip and I will console myself with the thought that we probably saved at least $200 by flying in such a way (please do not tell me otherwise!). We slept in a booth at a coffee shop at the airport until the sun came up and then went in to town to find a hotel.
Kigali is a beautiful city!! It is very clean, people are friendly AND they drive on the RIGHT side of the road! It actually confused me at first to see them driving in a way that I, up until this year, considered normal and the only way to go! You would never know from from the city, all that they went through only 17 years ago!
We went and visited the Kigali Memorial Centre. It was a very impacting day! We read about all of the history. They had videos with survivors talking about their experiences of the genocide. They had a room with the belongings of those who were killed, one with bones (a lot of the skulls were badly damaged), and one section with pictures of children, each explaining what the child was like and then how they were killed. There are 250 000 people buried at the memorial, but over 1 million were died. It was extremely sad to hear the stories and details of all that happened. They also had a section that detailed 5 other genocides that have taken place throughout the world. I can't believe that over and over, people have planned the mass slaughter of whole ethnicities of people. It boggles my mind how people can think that it is a good idea, let alone carry out the killings and then live with themselves afterwards. The most disgusting thing to me, was how they murdered people. It wasn't enough to just kill them to be rid of them, they tortured them, raped the women, threw them into latrines, made them kill their friends or children before being killed themselves, etc. Women were raped over and over, often by men who were HIV +, and then were left to live out what was left of their lives. Survivors talked of people who had been close family friends turning on them. There were some positive stories of people who saved lives by protecting them in their homes. One guy dug a big trench to hide people in. His wife cooked meals and his daughter took the meals to them under the pretense of taking out the garbage. The man covered the trenches with dirt and planted potatoes on top so that nobody would know there were people underneath. This was extremely brave because anybody caught helping was killed themselves.
We also went to the Hotel des Mille Collines, which was the hotel that inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda. You would never know the things that took place there by being there. It is a really nice, luxury hotel with a pool and $10 desserts. We walked around for a bit and then tried to find the movie so we could watch it. Unfortunately we didn't, but we did make our own ice cream sandwiches!
Check out our video that we made while still living in Kenya!
