Hotel Rwanda

I was going to watch "Hotel Rwanda" today. I already knew I couldn't watch it at night, or my nightly dreams of Africa would turn to nightmares. The night after I visited the genocide museum I woke up in the night and jumped out of bed, thinking I was being pursued. That was plenty, thank you.

I decided to watch the "making of hotel Rwanda" first and I could already feel the tears coming. I even paused it once to distract myself, not ready to burst out bawling. Watching this movie will be very real this time, very personal. Rwanda is a small country and we saw a lot of it. A video of Immaculee Illibagiza held a ton of familiar scenes and had me in tears the other day.

The hotel is in what I called the "diplomatic district" of Kigali, in a neighborhood of heavily-fortified compounds winding around a hill. The President's residence is in the same area, and we were there because the Anglican Cathedral, offices and guesthouse are close by. Across the street from the Cathedral is the massively-fortified USAID compound.

As an aside, USAID has signs all over Rwanda, in the hinterlands and along the highways - they seem to be doing a lot of work on farming - I saw they had a booth in the Rwanda Expo where they sold various types of flour that they are helping the Rwandese to produce. They also seem to be running health centers, a project which makes me wince because USAID is notorious for engaging in "population control" when funded by Democrat presidents of the US - ie: pushing abortion on 3rd world populations. It's a pretty sick business. Right now abortion is not legal in Rwanda but the UN is so abortion-pushy (just check out www.c-fam.org) that they'll be lobbying for it, and the President has made a national "suggestion" that families limit themselves to 3 children. This is a "slippery slope" proposition that will not help the country but hurt its economic and moral future, but unfortunately even nice, educated Christian families are buying into it.

Anyway, back to Hotel Rwanda. So one day my van was on its own and driving a different way through the diplomatic district, and all of a sudden I saw the huge "Hotel des Mille Collines" sign. I gasped when I saw it because a) it was big and only about 15 feet from the car window, b) it surprised me because I never thought of seeing it, and c) it was like running into a movie star linked to a terrible event. I think in that moment I realized on a deeper level that the genocide was more real than my emotions were even allowing me to feel, and an onion layer of my natural self-protective denial (that I didn't know was even there) was peeled off. Suddenly I knew that the movie I'd seen a few years ago was real, and that all the agony of bodies all over the roads wasn't just an idea or something interesting to talk about with experts. I looked around at all the huge compounds and their expensive security, and thought about how every one of them emptied out, evacuating foreign staff and leaving Rwandese to die. Not one of them used their amazing structures or followed their supposed altruism to shield anyone. The genocide memorial museum says that only the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders remained in the country during the genocide.

All of this flashed through my mind, and then all I could see as we drove through that heartbreaking district were bodies. In my mind's eye I saw bodies all along the roads, piled up against the very walls and compound gates which should have been saving protection. A horrible, dark spiritual heaviness, very palpable, descended and I felt it every time we drove through that district until we drove off the base of that hill.

And I got angry, lividly angry.

I wanted to move to Geneva, partly because of all the fascinating international organizations there. But Geneva has come to Kigali, to cash in on the success story and all the action of a country being rebuilt. Much of it is a big help I am sure, but it also made me so angry to think about all the organizations who did nothing when it really counted and now are just cashing in and getting a piece of the action, the coolness factor of being in Rwanda. It's disgusting. And while I want to go back there too, it's more because God put it to me in such a way that to refuse Him is to refuse His calling and to "walk away sad" like the rich young ruler. That's a different thing altogether.

So I gave up on the movie for now and will watch it another day. Instead I did some research about the conflicts surrounding the hotel manager. It turned out to be a very good example of why I am sobered by the complexity of Rwandese culture. I won't pretend to have a handle on it at any time.

My reading projects for all this: "A Thousand Hills" - biography of President Paul Kagame, leader of the military that ended the genocide and has rebuilt Rwanda; and "Leave None to Tell the Story" - Human Rights Watch report by Allison des Forges. We'll see what I learn, and what my Rwandese friends have to say in response.