Out of Rwanda
I managed to get out of Rwanda in one piece, having convinced the Star to pay for a one-way ticket to Lilongwe. I figured it would be far easier than trying to get through Western Tanzania, an area of the continent that my guidebook was rather silent about.
My last week in Rwanda without Tess, a British woman I’d met my first night in Kigali, with a decidedly boring one, saved at the last minute by the arrival of an American girl named Isabelle, who was sent to me from Kampala by Tess.
I was in Rwanda primarily to write about some American missionaries and felt completely frustrated after a month of getting the run around. At the last moment, I managed to get out to two of the churches the Purpose Driven missionaries had visited, one in Kibungo, where the pastors and a translator trotted out some little-seen Rwandan generosity. The town seemed to be carved out of banana groves and we took a drive up into the hills to visit some of the parishioners, including the little orphan whose picture I put up a while back.
A few days later I wrangled a ride with an Anglican official to Kindama, a two hour drive down a “road” that was the worst I had seen in Rwanda. It was a bit hard to believe that a country like Rwanda, with butter-smooth roads and winding, terraced hills, could have an area like this, which was mostly flat and marshy, with a road that seemed to get worse and worse as it stretched on toward Tanzania. The church service was long and hot and entirely in Kinyarwanda, but the singing was amazing. The interview afterward was not exactly forthcoming – we had a major language barrier as neither of us really spoke French – but the pastor and I could laugh about it. We had a pleasant lunch together and then I took some photos of him with his wife and their seven children.
The next day, I packed my bags and left the Kigali hotel for the seventh and final time, walked into town to check my email, bought some samosas to eat for lunch and basically whiled away the morning until it was a reasonable hour to turn up at the airport. I was incredibly glad to get out of Rwanda, a country that is beautiful to look at but is so scarred by its history, it’s a tough one to handle for an extended period of time. Isabelle was telling me about a Rwandan man she’d met, who took her to his mothers grave and told her all about his experience of the genocide. His mother was raped by four soldiers – including a friend of the family – and left for dead. His father had both hands cut off by rebels at a roadblock and they’d left him at a hospital. He was never seen again. This man, who was 12 at the time, had walked to a refugee camp in Uganda. At the end of the day, Isabelle thanked him and told him how much she enjoyed meeting him and making friends with a Rwandan. He responded by telling her he loved her and would always love her and that every breath he drew from that moment forward would be for her.
All of which is to say that Rwandans are a bit intense. This particular man told Isabelle he could never love a Rwandan woman, as they were all so deeply damaged by the genocide they were incapable of love. In the span of 45 minutes, he sent her four text messages, each more breathless and lovesick than the one before. Every young man I met seemed to be lovesick. Eric, a 23-year-old tennis player, actually asked me to clip off a lock of hair so he could carry it in his wallet. He was serious. It was the last time I saw him.
Kigali had just hosted a three-day worship-a-thon featuring American televangelist Joyce Meyer, so the entire crew was waiting in the airport lounge. I had done a little research on her, figuring I could attend one of the sessions at the stadium and file a freelance story on the influx of missionaries into Rwanda. The weather and my trip out to the church conspired against me, though. Still, I found out that Ms. Meyer is worth about $95 million. She has no congregation, but makes her money through personal appearances, taped services, syndicated radio shows and a book-writing career whose productivity rivals Barbara Taylor Bradford. A few years ago she was busted by the IRS for the dodgy set up of her ministry and for using tax rules for pastors to circumvent paying for her extravagant lifestyle, which features a private jet and three Mercedes Benzes.
Anyway, the entire Joyce Meyer crew was waiting in the lounge, looking at pictures of their trip. A woman with a huge head of curly hair wandered through the security scanners and wondered aloud: “Should I just go into the VIP lounge? I mean, am I VIP enough?” Turns out she was the singer at the event. (So the answer to her question was: No. No you are not.)
In typical Kenya Airways fashion, we were squished like sardines into chairs that could double as torture devises. A few hours later we touched down in Nairobi and since I was in the sixth row, I bolted out of the plane like a racehorse out of the blocks, made my way to the customs desk and managed to get my $20 transit visa before the rest of the passengers had even queued. I had a long to-do list now that I was back in a big city. I wormed my way downstairs and settled my night’s accommodation while waiting for my baggage to arrive. I had hoped for the Panari Hotel, where the owners spent $600,000 building a huge ice skating rink, but instead it was some place I’d never heard of and the airline woman told me it was “a little outside of town.” I even haggled trying to get the airline to pay for my visa, but to no avail. Then I went to the bathroom. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And still no luggage. There was not even a sign flashing on any of the carousels suggesting that the baggage had arrived. I pestered a few of the guys in the lurid green vests and they told me to “wait, wait” as though I was some twitchy European that had just landed on African soil.
Finally, more than an hour after arriving, my red backpack came spinning out of a carousel marked “Johannesburg.” I hope it enjoyed the trip.
It was another hour’s wait for the Budget bus to leave for the hotel. There were two women and a couple French men and myself and we’d all been on the bus waiting for some mystery passengers who never arrived. We drove into the city – I feel like I know Nairobi so well now, even though I’ve never been beyond Westlands – and pulled up at the Boulevard Hotel. We stayed here with my parents when they were visiting, so I know it costs $90 a night, comes with hard, over-stuffed pillows, offers DSTv and a yummy buffet breakfast. The women started to get off the bus and the driver told them, no, no… you’re going to the Safari Club. My eyes popped. The Safari Club is even more exclusive than the Boulevard Hotel and the women were duly impressed when they got off the bus. Then we drove past the Serena, past the PanAfric and up into a hill where we stopped at my hotel, a down-at-the-heel hotel place where the walls were made of onion skins, the bathrooms had seen far, far better days and the television managed to pull in the local station, but with static interrupting the sound.
I tried the phone, since I had made plans to do an interview while I was in town. It was now approaching 9 p.m. I couldn’t get through, so I went for my complimentary dinner, then tried again. We made plans to meet at the Hilton.
My last week in Rwanda without Tess, a British woman I’d met my first night in Kigali, with a decidedly boring one, saved at the last minute by the arrival of an American girl named Isabelle, who was sent to me from Kampala by Tess.
I was in Rwanda primarily to write about some American missionaries and felt completely frustrated after a month of getting the run around. At the last moment, I managed to get out to two of the churches the Purpose Driven missionaries had visited, one in Kibungo, where the pastors and a translator trotted out some little-seen Rwandan generosity. The town seemed to be carved out of banana groves and we took a drive up into the hills to visit some of the parishioners, including the little orphan whose picture I put up a while back.
A few days later I wrangled a ride with an Anglican official to Kindama, a two hour drive down a “road” that was the worst I had seen in Rwanda. It was a bit hard to believe that a country like Rwanda, with butter-smooth roads and winding, terraced hills, could have an area like this, which was mostly flat and marshy, with a road that seemed to get worse and worse as it stretched on toward Tanzania. The church service was long and hot and entirely in Kinyarwanda, but the singing was amazing. The interview afterward was not exactly forthcoming – we had a major language barrier as neither of us really spoke French – but the pastor and I could laugh about it. We had a pleasant lunch together and then I took some photos of him with his wife and their seven children.
The next day, I packed my bags and left the Kigali hotel for the seventh and final time, walked into town to check my email, bought some samosas to eat for lunch and basically whiled away the morning until it was a reasonable hour to turn up at the airport. I was incredibly glad to get out of Rwanda, a country that is beautiful to look at but is so scarred by its history, it’s a tough one to handle for an extended period of time. Isabelle was telling me about a Rwandan man she’d met, who took her to his mothers grave and told her all about his experience of the genocide. His mother was raped by four soldiers – including a friend of the family – and left for dead. His father had both hands cut off by rebels at a roadblock and they’d left him at a hospital. He was never seen again. This man, who was 12 at the time, had walked to a refugee camp in Uganda. At the end of the day, Isabelle thanked him and told him how much she enjoyed meeting him and making friends with a Rwandan. He responded by telling her he loved her and would always love her and that every breath he drew from that moment forward would be for her.
All of which is to say that Rwandans are a bit intense. This particular man told Isabelle he could never love a Rwandan woman, as they were all so deeply damaged by the genocide they were incapable of love. In the span of 45 minutes, he sent her four text messages, each more breathless and lovesick than the one before. Every young man I met seemed to be lovesick. Eric, a 23-year-old tennis player, actually asked me to clip off a lock of hair so he could carry it in his wallet. He was serious. It was the last time I saw him.
Kigali had just hosted a three-day worship-a-thon featuring American televangelist Joyce Meyer, so the entire crew was waiting in the airport lounge. I had done a little research on her, figuring I could attend one of the sessions at the stadium and file a freelance story on the influx of missionaries into Rwanda. The weather and my trip out to the church conspired against me, though. Still, I found out that Ms. Meyer is worth about $95 million. She has no congregation, but makes her money through personal appearances, taped services, syndicated radio shows and a book-writing career whose productivity rivals Barbara Taylor Bradford. A few years ago she was busted by the IRS for the dodgy set up of her ministry and for using tax rules for pastors to circumvent paying for her extravagant lifestyle, which features a private jet and three Mercedes Benzes.
Anyway, the entire Joyce Meyer crew was waiting in the lounge, looking at pictures of their trip. A woman with a huge head of curly hair wandered through the security scanners and wondered aloud: “Should I just go into the VIP lounge? I mean, am I VIP enough?” Turns out she was the singer at the event. (So the answer to her question was: No. No you are not.)
In typical Kenya Airways fashion, we were squished like sardines into chairs that could double as torture devises. A few hours later we touched down in Nairobi and since I was in the sixth row, I bolted out of the plane like a racehorse out of the blocks, made my way to the customs desk and managed to get my $20 transit visa before the rest of the passengers had even queued. I had a long to-do list now that I was back in a big city. I wormed my way downstairs and settled my night’s accommodation while waiting for my baggage to arrive. I had hoped for the Panari Hotel, where the owners spent $600,000 building a huge ice skating rink, but instead it was some place I’d never heard of and the airline woman told me it was “a little outside of town.” I even haggled trying to get the airline to pay for my visa, but to no avail. Then I went to the bathroom. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And still no luggage. There was not even a sign flashing on any of the carousels suggesting that the baggage had arrived. I pestered a few of the guys in the lurid green vests and they told me to “wait, wait” as though I was some twitchy European that had just landed on African soil.
Finally, more than an hour after arriving, my red backpack came spinning out of a carousel marked “Johannesburg.” I hope it enjoyed the trip.
It was another hour’s wait for the Budget bus to leave for the hotel. There were two women and a couple French men and myself and we’d all been on the bus waiting for some mystery passengers who never arrived. We drove into the city – I feel like I know Nairobi so well now, even though I’ve never been beyond Westlands – and pulled up at the Boulevard Hotel. We stayed here with my parents when they were visiting, so I know it costs $90 a night, comes with hard, over-stuffed pillows, offers DSTv and a yummy buffet breakfast. The women started to get off the bus and the driver told them, no, no… you’re going to the Safari Club. My eyes popped. The Safari Club is even more exclusive than the Boulevard Hotel and the women were duly impressed when they got off the bus. Then we drove past the Serena, past the PanAfric and up into a hill where we stopped at my hotel, a down-at-the-heel hotel place where the walls were made of onion skins, the bathrooms had seen far, far better days and the television managed to pull in the local station, but with static interrupting the sound.
I tried the phone, since I had made plans to do an interview while I was in town. It was now approaching 9 p.m. I couldn’t get through, so I went for my complimentary dinner, then tried again. We made plans to meet at the Hilton.
posted by Palmer in Africa at 9:02 AM
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