After a long day at Bisesero, I enjoyed a lovely morning - with a hot shower followed by some reflective time sitting in the wicker chair on the patio outside my room - only two meters from the shore of Lake Kivu.  The birds’ morning chatter was enchanting.

I loved the waiter in our hotel.  When I would ask him for something to drink, he would lean over as though to whisper something in my ear and ask, “Do you want it very, very cold?” (You have to say “very, very” very fast to get it right.) When I would say I did, he would have the greatest smile and then he would hurry off to the kitchen; he would return grimacing at the cold temperature of the bottle as he did his best to make the few customers happy.

In Kibuye we visited the church - an incredibly haunting experience. The memorial to the dead is actually under the church; though the gate was closed, we could see the bones to which we were already become eerily accustomed. On April 17, 1994 over 1000 people were murdered in this church where they had sought protection from the Interahamwe. Clea Koff, in her book The Bone Woman, writes about arriving in the church to do the exhumations and finding bloodstains on the wall of the church. I found it difficult to believe that the church is now a place of worship - with joyous hymns echoing in its cavernous space. I struggled with resentment toward the church because the church and its clergy had not only turned its back on the faithful, but had often acted as perpetrators. I was puzzled how any of the members of this congregation could return.

The question of faith is very complicated in Rwanda.  If one compares the Rwandans to the Jews at the end of the Holocaust, they appear to have not abandoned their faith, but embraced it. However, there is a rise in Pentacostalism and Islam - which clearly shows that there is a “crisis in faith” in predominantly Catholic Rwanda.

We then went to the post office to mail postcards. A lovely experience, which took twenty minutes; thankfully, I was the first - and only - person in line. Each postcard needed four over-sized stamps which required a bit of strategic planning in order to get them all in place without covering up the messages that I had already written. Modest, our driver, was helping me - and he had less concern about the aesthetics of it all than I did. The woman behind the counter was laughing at my type A personality.

After a walk through Kibuye town, watching the women carrying cassava leaves and bananas  - among other things - including small appliances - on their heads, we started on the road south to Butare.