Blog post 3 from Gavin in S5!

Day 3 started off with a delightful breakfast consisting of a variety of different fruits such as pineapples and some other tasty looking fruits (I don’t exactly know what they were).  There were also some lovely pancakes which were gone within seconds.

The first order of business today was going to the genocide memorial site in Kigali. We all were expecting to see some pictures of what was in store for us but I wasn’t prepared for what I experienced in there and some other members of the group can agree. When we left the guest house it was a tough time as we were in the middle of a storm.  Dr Murray and I decided to wear shorts out there – some of the members thought I was completely insane! After about a 20 minute drive roughly we arrived at the memorial.  The group got off the bus and we went to the main reception/gift shop where we watched a short clip of some survivors testimonies.  This gave the group a taster of what we would soon see in the

actual mueseum.

We soon made our way into the main building and we slowly and somewhat mythodically went through the exhibits.  The first area of the exhibit was explaining what was happening in Rwanda before the genocide.  Belgian colonialists had occupied Rwanda for a long time and introduced many things to the populus such as Christianity for example.  The belgians had also pretty much implemented the racial system which seperated the entire populus into the 2 main groups after many tests (basically like when The Nazis racially profiled the Jewish population).

We then got to the area which talked about the beginning of the genocide.  It all kicked off after decades of planning by the Hutu people against the Tutsis when the leader of Rwanda’s plane was shot down.  Most of the politicians that were against the idea of the genocide were slaughtered brutally.  Roadblocks and chaos started to reign and I was quite shocked at the fact that the final nail in the coffin was the slaughter of the govermental power in the country.  The next several months were completely brutal as hundreds of thousands of people were mutilated and massacred like cattle in a slaughterhouse.  Some of the pictures I saw of the genocide had horrified me and had definitely changed me.  After a walk through seeing bones and other things we had entered the area which had told us of some of the children that perished during the crisis.  There was a picture of a little baby at only 9 months which was brutally murdered by Hutu militants. This completely gave me the chills and I felt very worried thinking of my own siblings.

After we got through the rest of the exhibits we had lunch back at the guest house consisting of sandwiches with egg, salad and garlic with some chips which were basically like what we have in Scotland.  We then got back on the bus and we started to make our way to Nduba which is a poorer region of Kigali.  On the way there we went to the market and we bought several sacks of food consisting of cassavas, bananas and Irish sweet potatoes (tatties).  I had the lovely job of handing the money over to the people. I had to use my mental maths skills (which are completely terrible) to calculate how much I had to give them. I eventually did it and I returned to the bus to see that most of the seats were occupied by sacks of food.

We got on our way to Nduba and halfway there some of the potatoes went flying towards Dr Murray.   As we arrived we were welcomed by the group occupying the area.  We gave introductions in Rwandan tongue to test ourselves (I was completely terrible).  We listened to the elder people of the village which were heartwarming.  I was then asked to announce to them all what we had bought them.  They were all so happy and we gave them the food.  They were all very thankful and shortly after we had a sing along about a girl who lost a red ‘Yo-Yo’ which was confusing but they loved it. We also listened to them sing and Dr Murray and one of the older gentlemen had a ‘dance off’ which I thought Dr Murray won. they thanked us for everything and it was so sad to leave them. Hannah was holding one of the babies which was quite sweet to be honest.

Once we got back eventually we had a lovely dinner of spaghetti, meatballs and pizza (which had pineapple and ham on it), then some of the group went to the local shop close to the guest house.