Photos: Top Left: A view of the city of Kigali taken from the Genocide Memorial Museum. Top Right: Women selling fruit on the main street. Bottom Left:  Judi and I in front of the  Sainte Famille Church, where approximately 2000 Tutsi had taken refugee from Interahamwe - the majority of whom were massacred.

There are those that say it is better to travel than to arrive.  I don’t think that they have ever flown Kenyan Airways to Kigali.  After an interminable layover in the Nairobi airport, where I learned how to solve a Sudoku puzzle for the first time, we arrived in Kigali.  We were met by the director of the Hotel Mille Collines who drove us directly to the hotel.  We knew we were tired from the journey, but we thought we were hallucinating when we pulled into the hotel grounds and saw roadblocks, trucks filled with Rwandans clutching each other tightly, and ruffians wielding machetes.  It was not the welcome we had expected.  It turned out that we had arrived on the final day of shooting - this time of a film dedicated to Romeo Dallaire. It proved to be only the beginning of a surreal week in Rwanda.

Judi and I decided to make the most out of our first day by going directly to the Genocide Memorial Center.  The memorial appeared to have been influenced by the USHMM (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) in Washington.  There was a room with pictures of the victims of the genocide - most of them donated to the museum by surviving family members.  The main portion of the exhibit is a history of the events that led up to the genocide in April 1994. Once the curator was able to get the electricity back on, we were able to see how the Rwandans have chosen to document their national tragedy.

In general, the exhibit focuses on the atrocities committed by the Hutus against the Tutsis.  Close to one million Tutsis died in the genocide. There is, however, no discussion of the fact that in neighboring Burundi, the murder of Hutus by Tutis was used as propaganda to stoke suspicion of the Tutsi - or that there were several Hutu who hid and thereby saved Tutsi - or that there were atrocities committed by the RPF as they liberated Rwanda and stopped the genocide.  There is definitely a pro-government feel to the museum - with Paul Kagame being praised throughout. Later in the trip, we would hear video testimony that ended with “and this is why we must obey our president.”

In spite of an apparent - and not altogether subtle - politicization of the genocide, the museum is incredibly moving. They have integrated video testimony throughout the museum - and there were many young Rwandans coming to the museum to listen to them - and at times finding it all a bit overwhelming. The final room of the museum gives faces to the children who died in the genocide.  Stories of the brutality of their deaths are in sharp contrast to the happy, playful children in the photos. As a teacher, I found this one of the most painful exhibits we would see.