Six Days in Rwanda

Hello Finally!
I have safely returned from a wonderful trip to Rwanda. I actually don’t know how to sum it all up in a blog; but it’s best to say it was a wonderful yet overwhelming experience. We started off on Sunday, August 30, by going to a Rwandan church service, and that in itself is a story. Our small group (broken off of the large group of USP students) was treated like celebrities in this church service, they sang for us, fed us extremely well and thanked us for coming (which was really nothing in comparison to all they did for us).

The trip continued on from there by going through the week in succession of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. So at the beginning of the week we learned about and visited sites explaining what caused the genocide and what happened within the genocide. 1,117 000 Rwandans (mainly those of the Tutsi tribe) died within in the span of one hundred days. It was really interesting to see how far Rwanda has come within the fifteen years of the genocide as we drove through the capital city Kigali and heard from survivors of the genocide. Rwanda, under the leadership of Paul Kagame, is now much more clean and organized as well as peaceful.

Nevertheless Rwanda is still scarred. I just need to tell one story, hopefully without making this post too long. But one day in Kigali, Rwanda, we were driving in our big bus to this woman’s shelter which was on the top of a mountain. On our way up we saw a lot of men, who were all prisoner Hutus who had committed crimes in the genocide, working on the road. The farther we got up the mountain, the more workers there were, and the more scared I was getting. And all of the sudden our bus got stuck on this section of road they were working on. Everyone got silent and to be honest, I feared for my life as approximately sixty or so Hutu men surrounded our bus. But rather then just watching or anything, they pushed our bus out of the dirt. It was very surreal.

Anyways, there are many more stories of beautiful Rwanda, but I’ll have to save them for when I see you all again! I am now back at school and starting classes and getting use to going to a school with 6000 students (when I am use to a mere 750… if that) and be one of the 45 white students. I am joining a choir here and hopefully going to be playing volleyball. This upcoming Saturday we start our first homestay which will be for two weeks. It will be really neat to be living with a family and still going to school. Well I love and miss you all. I hope your lives are all going well! Thank-you for your thoughts and prayers and I really hope to stay in contact.