Images from Kigali

Our teacher
Emmanuel arrives on his beloved 150 cc motorcycle, the tank duct taped and the whole shining and clean. He’s gone casual this morning, having foregone his usual suit for beige pants and a well-ironed blue and white striped shirt, carefully buttoned at the cuffs. He walks, with a rolling gait, due to a problem with one leg, perhaps polio as a child, to the room at the guest home where he teaches us Kinyarwandan, two hours a morning for two weeks. He is smart and funny and his passion for his language makes him an excellent teacher. He is trying to teach us the sixteen noun classes in Kinyarwandan and laughs when one of the students says ‘what the hell’ at an incomprehensible piece of grammar and then later jokes ‘what the hell’ himself at an irregular or complicated constructions.

Phil writes: A night out
A taxi ride on a circuitous and bewildering route through darkness, smoke-belching trucks and traffic circles, up round a hill of higher income neighbourhoods past the US Embassy, then down rutted lanes peopled by silhouetted walkers, soldiers in the headlights, finally arriving (after our lost guide calls for help on her mobile) at our destination, the Goethe Institute, where we have missed the reading of a Rwandan author of his new book, Hyena Wedding. But we listen to the question and answer, talk of justice and socialism, truth and genocide, the struggle of a Rwandan writer to find both voice and audience (this particular event drawing perhaps two dozen people, mostly university-aged Rwandans in an audience sprinkled with westerners. Afterwards we stay to watch a first-time performance of a student play in French, Femme de Mon Pere, about a girl's journey through genocide, love and loss, HIV and AIDS. Then back through the night.

Evening
Phil sits on a ledge below a patio railing, legs stretched out into the paved courtyard. He’s playing his guitar and beside him a very entranced very small child in a white t-shirt and green and blue shorts. His hands are clasped with fingers intertwined and he is swaying to the music. Suddenly a bird sings loudly.

A woman working
At the Amani Guest House, a woman does finishing work on a new brick structure.

An good friend
Coincidentally my friend Laurie Pearlman arrives in Rwanda the day after I do. Laurie, a trauma psychologist, and her husband, Ervin Staub, a genocide scholar, first came to Rwanda over a decade ago to facilitate seminars for politicians on responding to trauma and genocide. That led to their taking a central role in creating a radio drama that provides messages supporting people to be active bystanders, to work towards resolving conflict and towards peace and reconciliation. This soap opera – ‘Musekewye” or ‘New Dawn,’ was first broadcast on the tenth anniversary of the genocide and is now followed by 90% of Rwandan radio listeners which is most of the population! Laurie and I have reviewed each other’s writing, co-facilitated a seminar on the impact of working with trauma survivors and it feels so good connect here in Rwanda while she works with the radio project team on the messages to embed in the coming year’s scripts. Here we are, outside her hotel.

Our new home

We are now moved into a pleasant house in a middle-class neighbourhood on a hillside (there is nowhere here that is not on a hillside). We have a western facing view and can see ‘mu mujyi’- downtown Kigali. We have birds (whose name we don’t know but one sounds like an alarm clock and starts unbelievably early), an avocado tree, an overgrown garden, a roommate who will be here on and off for ten weeks (after which we will have three bedrooms to ourselves). We have inherited a guard, a 19 year old fellow with whom we communicate in our mangled French. We are a ten minute walk from the buses and mini-vans, small grocery stores, banks, and the VSO office and a forty minute walk from the Kimironko market where Phil bought today rice and a mélange of vegetables that he cooked for dinner.