Weekend at Lake Kivu

Three days away from diesel fumes and crowded buses, and the persistent evening smoke rising from the valley below our house. A weekend of reprieve for choked lungs and smarting eyes.

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Open water, islands, green hillsides tumbling to the silver water, lazy moments when the lake and the land and the air soften into blue like the island waters of my north-west coast home. There are echoes of home here, but it is not exactly yearning that overcomes us, we decide while eating fries and samosas on a restaurant deck overlooking the lake.

Rather, it is a welcoming familiarity that enables us to connect to where we are, to feel part of the earth. It is the feeling of belonging that the land offers, allowing us to fall beneath the uncomfortable otherness that is so central to our experience here. For this I am grateful. Outsider status is tiring, a constant chant of muzungu on the street, the barrier of language, the otherness of an older woman who rarely sees herself reflected in this country of young people.

The deep bays of Lake Kivu, the spaciousness of sky and water, the dry hillsides. This beautiful yet degraded and broken landscape breathes. This big earth doesn’t care about the colour of my skin or my age or my nationality; this big earth cares only that I breathe with her, that I acknowledge our kinship.

Early morning swim, the pirogues already out fishing, treading water some ways from shore while talking to a Rwandan swimmer. Switching back and forth between English and French, we find understanding.

But here, like everywhere in this wounded country, it is not possible to forget the genocide. The country is littered with memorials and at the edge of Kibuye there is a church, a beautiful church made of stone, with a tower and a roof slanting off to one side. It is cool in the church, solid stonework walls holding the night breezes. It is a large and open space, under supporting beams cobbled from small pieces of wood. At each end of the church is a round stained glass window, large pieces of bright colour set in symmetrical patterns. One window is flower petals, the other a circle of circles.

As you can see, beside the round window that invites a sense of unity, harmony, collectivity, hope, is a smaller, rectangular one. The same bright colours but in disharmony, suggesting chaos and fragmentation.


Inside, the windows glow brilliantly against the stone, and I could sit here forever, opening to what is here, returning to my breath each time I get distracted. We sit and sit and when we leave we carry with us the sturdy tranquility of this church which evokes the genocide but does not overwhelm with horror, does not let the genocide dominate but does not deny. This church says, yes, this happened, yes, we must never forget, and at the same time we are bigger than that story. There is more to us than that.

The starkness is outside, a memorial graveyard behind mesh fencing. Two rows of graves, headed by a wall with set-in shelving displaying rows of skulls.

There is no subtlety here, nothing to mediate the starkness of the concrete tombs and the skulls except a few flower and the wide open view across the bay and on the other side a terraced hillside. And the church.

All weekend the wind blows and blows. The trees bend and rustle, the tall eucalyptus with the silvery trunks, the lacy leaves of what might be cassia. Red bougainvillea curves to the earth and bounces wildly. On the lake a canoe moves quickly, the paddlers in a call and response that brings shore bound the rhythms of the blades slicing the water.  I am cool to the core, deliciously, feverishly cool. In the silence the trees talk and the paddlers chant and I am at peace.