Entries in Life

So, I didn't get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla's Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants.

In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn.

There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions' manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses.

As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you're interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I've got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com.

Why there and not del.icio.us?

Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog.

As many Rwandans say, forgiving is an effort that one makes in order to make life livable, especially since victims and the ex-prisoners have to live together as neighbors again. (— from Reconciliation still a major challenge

Rwanda has too many guilty people for “classic justice” — it just “didn’t meet expectations”.

Classic justice is having trouble dealing with the hundreds of thousands of genociders that will show up in court. The guilty and the victims are everywhere.

So Rwanda has implemented public confession, after a fashion, in the form of its Gacaca courts. Confess, and your sentence will be reduced.

Still, as the quote above hints, it isn't always easy. Victims and perpetrators have to live next door and they can be a danger to each other.

Describing the experiences of living in the same communities, some survivors said that despite having forgiven and reconciled, they found it hard to look each other in the eye.

Tonight, after confession, my priest told me "Confession is easy, relationships are hard". I immediately thought of this article. Confession, giving voice to your sin, seems so easy, but we have to do it so often. Screw up, confess. Screw up, confess. Repeat ad infinitum, it seems.

Because confession is so easy and does not, in and of itself, mean change, it is nothing compared with going back and reconciling with the one you wronged.

When I've hurt my wife, she isn't satisfied that I've gone to confession. She wants real change.

When the man who killed your family confesses to his crime and has his sentence reduced or forgiven completely, you aren't going to be satisfied when he moves in beside you. You want real change. (And probably, if we're honest, some "classic", retributive justice.)

Confession is easy. Reconciliation is hard.

Any mention of Rwanda seems to evoke the Genocide there fourteen years ago. Since then, we've had at least a couple more (Darfur, Kosovo), but before Rwanda, there was Cambodia. Dith Pran, the Journalist from The Killing Fields said on his deathbed: One time is too many.

Genocide pops up in the strangest places. Reading this travel account of a couple of Jewish backpackers in Germany is telling. It starts out easy enough.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson.

But ends with this haunting image:

Near the exit was a beautiful bronze sculpture that read, "Never again." Beyond the sculpture sat fifteen orange tents. There were fifty Rwandan refugees sitting in the dirt and cooking lunch. There was a cardboard sign in front of them with the words: "You said never again."

Is Dith Pran's dream impossible? Will we always have genocide?

I don't know. I'm pessimistic enough to think that people will always suffer from irrational hatred.

I suspect that the institutional intolerance that Rwanda is currently using is not the right way to get fix the problem in the long term. Now-a-days, Rwanda sacks officials for believing the wrong thing. It may work for now, but as long as people continue to believe the "genocide ideology", it won't matter if they lose their jobs, the beliefs persist and people will continue to elect people who think the wrong thing.

Here we are, sixty years after the end of WWII, and Germany still hasn't managed to cleanse itself of racists.

I suspect it takes something more subtle. And it takes more time.

There is one comment on that last link, though, that gives a note of caution: “He who says he knows the way, does not know the way.” -- Lao-Tze

Since going to Rwanda, I've been more interested in keeping tabs on what is going on in the country.  I set up a Google Alert and have been getting some interesting things.  I've been letting these build up, so it is time to clear out my browser.

• Bikes to Rwanda and Wells for Life were two charities working in Rwanda that I found.  While I like the Bikes charity, the video in this blog post is filled with familiar yellow water containers that I saw rural Rwandans lugging along the road.
• This journalist goes to see some gorillas in Rwanda and mentions the Mountain Gorilla's Nest hotel that we stayed in to see the golden monkeys.  He describes it as "an unsympathetic mishmash of a place", but I prefer their rates to the £347 (US$687) a night in the posher hotel he used. Did I mention Rwanda isn't cheap?
  
•  Can the Congo Save Itself? talks about the fighting along the Congo-Rwanda border. I met a couple at the Serena who traveled around Africa quite a bit. They were the first to say what others have confirmed many times since: Rwanda is a one of the safest, quietest places in Africa. "A good place to start" was how they put it, with vivid examples from other countries to reinforce the idea.  Even though it is fairly safe, the guards we had on our trip to see the monkeys hinted at the dangers along the borders.
• What is Unspoken in Rwanda talks about the beauty of Rwanda and the constant awareness that some of these people are former genociders. Kesse Buchanan recognizes the friendliness of the country, but, in the end, can't reconcile it with what she knows about its past. This isn't the chaotic Africa I am used to! ... I just can't comprehend how everyone can be so friendly but capable of genocide. The genocide is everywhere and nowhere. How do people go on?
  
• Then genocide in Rwanda 14 years ago are something Kenyans and Zimbabweans are thinking about.  Evidently along the lines of "Do we have to get that bloody to get democracy?":
  

  At one point, a stunned delegate from Rwanda was even asked whether the genocide in Rwanda had been worth it as it had paved the way for a more democratic and open society that was based on progressive, egalitarian laws.
  
  He responded by saying that the price Rwanda had paid for its peace and democracy was too high, not just in terms of the cost of reconstruction, but because it was written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of his country’s men, women and children.
  

• A Catholic Priest was convicted of participating in the 1994 genocide.. His participation was particularly gruesome -- he had his church, which was filled with 1500 parishioners -- bulldozed.  Of course, there are many people who don't like the institution of the Roman Catholic church and they jumped on this case as further fuel for their hatred.  This is the sort of person who will tell us that Mother Teresa is evil and the pope is a Nazi.  Many of these people misunderstand the purpose of the church, but, there are those who understand it perfectly well and are just opposed to it. Arguing with willful ignorance is just as futile as attempting to persuade those who understand but disagree they they are wrong, so I won't attempt either here.
  

I think I'm done writing about this trip, but I wanted to point you to some rough videos I took with my camera.  They'll give you some idea of the dancing we saw.

• Semi-professional Dancers at Gorilla's Nest (~10m)
• More (~15s)
• Women dancing with Baskets on their heads (~15s)
• Children from the Volcano Lake (~1m)

Sorry for the quality and lack of editing.  But you get the idea.