State of Fear
{ September 2nd, 2008 }
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(above) A memorial site where 14 Belgian U.N. workers were killed for protecting an official in 1994.
Paranoia. Distrust. Fear. Waiting to erupt again. Those are the ways that friends living in Rwanda have descirbed the feeling here. “People here never smile at one another. They don’t trust each other,” one person said. Another person, a Ugandan who moved to Rwanda following the Genocide told us just this morning that his wife is sill afraid to live here. She now lives in Zanzibar, only rarely returning to visit her family.
In many ways it’s a state of fear that I can only imagine must be something akin to what followed WWII in Germany. Although Kigali, Rwanda is very advanced with high internet penetration and nice roads, it’s a band-aid on a deep wound that will take many generations to heal.
“You see that valley over there,” the taxi driver said to us pointing to a gorgeous, green valley that stretched for miles. “When I came here in 1994 that valley was full of bodies. It was horrible.”
After that I rode in silence trying to absorb the enormity of the things that have happened here.
