Rwanda part two: climbing Bisoke volcano

After leaving Kigali we headed west to the Parc National Des Volcans. The volcano range sits right on the border of Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo, and one of the volcanoes can actually be said to reside in each of these countries depending on what side you’re climbing!

The national park is better known as a haven for gorillas rather than a location to trek volcanoes, however for the price of $500 per hour to see the gorillas, we sadly couldn’t take advantage of that opportunity. We’d heard, however, from other similarly cheapo Bisoke volcano trekkers that some people happen to stumble upon gorillas by chance – much to the guides’ annoyance – so we had our fingers crossed.

We reached the guesthouse at dusk and spent the evening reading books and snuggling up on sofas by a big open fire in the lodgings. Up at six, we ate a hearty breakfast of eggs – with unappealing grey yolks – and hideously greasy bread, with the only joyful experience being the exceedingly strong coffee and the sweetest baby bananas.

That morning I decided that dawn and sunrise beat dusk and sunset hands down. There have been many occasions since coming to Uganda where I’ve been out and about just after sunrise and I’m always mesmerised by the light. Waking up in this Rwandan volcano range was no exception. From the high terrain I looked down over an expanse of undulating hills. In between the treetops, the clouds lightly clung and layered themselves with such breathtaking grace. I attempted to take some photos to illustrate this (see previous blog), but to my dismay I couldn’t do it justice.

After paying our park fees of $75, we met our guide Ignacious. At this point, other than looking up at the formidable volcano, I hadn’t really considered what we were about to attempt. In the lonely plant East Africa guide book, all it says about Bisoke is ‘the ascent takes you up the steep southwestern flanks of the volcano to the summit, where you can see the crater lake’. Nothing too frightening or challenging in that sentence, and what defines ‘steep’ anyway? Well, in this case, ‘steep’ was about a 45-degree angle. I would like to say that it was even steeper because of the pain I was in, but maybe that would be an exaggeration.

The four-hour climb was relentless in terms of the steepness; there was literally no let up until we reached the summit. As you head higher up the volcano the vegetation changes quite dramatically. In the beginning the walk is very green and lush, trekking through thick forest, however as you climb higher – and the ascent in terms of altitude is very quick – the vegetation changes to become more alpine, with the streams of slippery mud, turning into pathways of smooth, but surprisingly non-slippery rock.

The few days before, the area had experienced a lot of rainfall and so for 75% of the walk we were trekking calf-deep in thick, extremely unstable mud. To say we fell over a lot would be an understatement. The park guides and porters must have seen us coming, because two porters offered their services right at the beginning, and we very firmly told them that it wasn’t necessary. They followed us up anyway, and just as they had obviously predicted, about ten-minutes into the climb, two of the girls in our group requested their services. I think we all realised quite quickly that this wasn’t going to be an easy feat, and the porters became very useful by helping to pull the girls up the volcano through all the mud.

The first half was manageable and I felt like I was coping quite well. I was out of breath constantly, but my legs were behaving and doing what I told them to. As I was climbing and scrambling around, tripping over and grabbing whatever was available, it reminded me of a time in Bristol many years ago when my Pupa suggested that we climb a rock face that was just as steep. At the time he was in his mid seventies and already walked with the aid of a stick, but I suppose we thought ‘if he thinks he can do it then so can the rest of us!’ I walked behind him, thinking that maybe we’d need to grab him as the pieces of rock loosened under his feet, but in the end it was him and his stick that saved me: I lost my footing and as my feet fell beneath me, I was holding on with just my hands. He turned and held his stick out to me and pulled me up.

This time I had Adam at my side, pushing my bum up when naturally formed steps carved into the volcano were too high for my legs to meet unaided. By the time we were a third of the way up, the two girls who’d requested porters were a little way behind and we decided to split up into two groups. This very quickly made me the weakest link, but hating defeat and refusing to ever give up on a challenge, I kept going as fast as I could. The last third was painful: my legs were shaking and I began counting to three, mustering up energy, when I came to a step that was exceedingly high.

All day the weather was playing games with us: the clouds would set in so quickly we were sure the rain was coming, but instead ten minutes later the sun would break through and clear the air again. It got colder as we climbed and the cloud thickened, but this was such intense exercise that the coolness of the clouds forming around me was a great and welcomed relief. In the last fifteen minutes of the climb the clouds dispersed and the sun came out as if to reward us for our efforts. The views from the top were awe-inspiring (see previous blog). We were 3711m high, which is not particularly high, but we could see all the way to the ground below, making us feel like we’d come a long way. My legs were truly like jelly by this point, and as great as it was to reach the summit, I was very aware that we were only halfway through the challenge.

After a rather hideous lunch of greasy cheese and greasy bread sandwiches, we headed back down. I have to say that I enjoyed this part much more. It was mainly strenuous for my legs, but with less cardio vascular pressure, we were able to chat for most of the way down. Near the bottom, we found out from the guides that on the way up we’d been literally metres from one of the three gorilla groups that are habituated. The guides were not allowed to tell us this, as we hadn’t paid, but still it was extremely annoying. As we were discussing this frustration, we heard and saw the bushes moving to our right and Lorna (I wish I could say this too) saw the black fur of a gorilla! So, as little as this glimpse was, we’re claiming that we saw a gorilla!

Just past this point of jubilation, the terrain began to plateau and the true damage to my thighs became apparent. Within a few minutes I realised that I could no longer really walk. Lorna gave me her stick – I already had one – and I used them as crutches to get me down. Two minutes into this, I suddenly became very light headed and my nose felt very hot. I put my fingers to my nose and realised I was having a nosebleed. Adam and Lorna came to see I was OK and then I sort of fainted. I didn’t pass out, but a feeling of ecstasy came over me and I lost all control of my body for a few seconds. Ultimately, I was fine!

So this was the end of the volcano trek; an exhilarating, but exceedingly challenging climb, that left me unable to walk properly for a week!

To end this entry, there are a few things I want to mention about tourism in this area and the affect on the villagers. From one angle it can be said that the way tourism is handled here is excellent. For the gorillas, yes they are habituated to human presence, but people do not encroach on them all day every day. Only one group is allowed to visit them per day and once they are located, this one group are only allowed to stay there for an hour. Tourism has also created business within the area in terms of accommodation and eateries, but there is a negative side that seems quite out of hand.

The children here beg; they chase the cars with little awareness of their own safety, holding out their hands to the car windows. Some run alongside holding up pictures they’ve drawn of the gorillas, hoping for money. At some point, some expats, or tourists have made the catastrophic mistake of giving money to these children and in that second a precedent was set. You would think that the parents of these children would discourage it, but they actually are teaching their children to beg. We passed one woman on foot at the beginning of the climb and she told her toddler to hold out his hand to us. It is so tragic and I can see it will be a very hard thing to try and change. The guides on the other hand are aware of how negative and unproductive begging is and firmly tell tourists to not give the children anything, and tell the children to stop begging and to go home, but this does little to discourage them.

They see muzungus heading up the volcano everyday and they know that we are rich. Even if 9/10 times they beg and get nothing, they know there will be some ignorant, conceited tourist, who thinks they are ‘saving children’ by giving them a few dollars. But for these children, they are growing up to think that dependency is a good way of life, when instead they should be learning to be self-sufficient, relying on themselves for survival.

Rwanda part two: photos of Bisoke volcano

Views from the top of the volcano - 3711 metres high crater lake at top



Gorillas in the Mist lady

We climbed this! 4 hours of vertical climbing in sloppy mud!

Rwanda part one: photos

morning view of mountains raised above the clouds in Rwanda

views on the drive to Kigali

Lunch in Kigali - cheese fondue! or should I say, fondue de fromage!

slums close up

View from the memorial centre of the slums

gardens at Kigali memorial centre

plaque of child's comment on the genocide

On the way to Kigali

In Uganda, people often get L and R mixed up!

Rwanda part one: Kigali memorial centre

Our journey began at four o’clock in the morning, when our trusty driver, Paul, picked us up in his 10-seater van. After collecting our fifth recruit, Susanna, we headed toward the Ugandan-Rwandan border.

Eight hours of driving later, we had to stop for three hours to fix the breaks…apparently they weren’t working properly! While we were stationary we received a text from a friend telling us that Kigali – Rwanda’s capital and also the city we were heading towards – had been subjected to a series of coordinated grenade attacks the day before. As scary as that sounds, and I’m not denying that I wasn’t frightened, I’ve learned since being in Africa that this type of activity is a common occurrence. Most often it’s politically motivated; in Rwanda, its national elections are this summer and the attacks were a product of the pre-election tension that is so common in Africa. I don’t think complacency is the right word, but I guess I’ve adjusted to my circumstances. If this had happened in London then the whole country would have been in disarray, yet in Africa, incidents like this are viewed as minor inconveniences when compared to decades of civil war, colonisation and genocide that so many African countries have experienced.

Back on the road by three pm we got to the border two hours later. Adam and I had budgeted to spend $60 each for visas, however it turns out that the British supposedly helped to end the genocide and therefore Brits can enter for free. The same applies to the Americans – so our friend Hannah was exempt also, however Susanna, an Aussie, had to pay her 60 bucks. I’m not sure what I was expecting once we entered into Rwanda. We thought officials at the border would notify us of the terrorist activity, but no one said anything. By the time we’d done our due diligence and were back on the road it was getting dark. The road leading into Kigali hugged steep precipice-ridden hills to the right, with sheer drops into darkness to the left. Uganda and Rwanda had experienced several landslides in the preceding few weeks, and the remnants littered the road. I was a little scared; scared of being stoned to death by the loose rock above me, and also of what we might be faced with when entering the capital city.

It turns out there was nothing to be worried about. Entering Kigali there was no behaviour to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary. When we got to our hotel we asked the staff about it and they played it down. Whether that was because they were trying to protect us as white tourists coming to stay in their centrally located hotel, or whether they really did view it as a minor, run-of-the-mill pre-election incident, I’m not sure.

The following morning we got up early and headed for the Kigali Memorial Centre. The centre opened on 7^th April 2004, marking the ten-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda where over 1,000,000 people were murdered over a 100-day period. On average, 10,000 Rwandans – mainly of the Tutsi tribe – were killed per day. The centre is built at the site chosen for the mass burial of the 250,000 victims of the genocide in Kigali. The memorial has three exhibitions: one is to document the genocide in 1994, one is a children’s memorial, the last an exhibition on the history of genocide around the world.

What can I say…I walked around the exhibitions for two hours with tears streaming down my face. I had to keep reminding myself that this only happened 16 years ago – in my lifetime. I can’t believe that the international community let it happen. The human rights abuses and atrocities that occurred are unbelievable. My understanding of the genocide is so much greater now, and that meant learning some horrific things; the main one being that the genocide was indirectly caused my Belgium. Belgium occupied Rwanda during World War One, and consequently was given a mandate to indirectly govern the country from 1923 up until Rwanda’s independence in 1962. With colonialism came identity cards, segregating the 18 different clans that previously lived together harmoniously. The Belgians made these distinctions racial and elitist, with the Tutsis wrongly identified as being 15% of the population, because they had more than ten cows per household. 84% were again wrongly identified as Hutu with less than ten cows. The Rwandans were split up according to their wealth and with this came tensions.

Simultaneously the Catholic Church – imposed on Rwandans during colonisation - increasingly conveyed the ‘Hamitic’ ideology that portrayed the Tutsis as the superior group. Subsequently most chiefs and sub-chiefs were Tutsi, with Hutus rarely gaining any privileged positions in society.

After independence Rwanda became a highly centralised, repressive state with a single-party system. The regime was characterised by the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis. When the Hutu, Major General Juvenal Habarimana, gained power through a coup d’état in 1973 he established the Interahamwe, an extremist Hutu youth militia that gained enormous popularity. Their ‘Hutuness’ was promoted at the expense of Tutsi lives and by 1990 the ideology of Hutu power and the eradication of the Tutsi influence was largely established.

The second thing that shocked me is that the genocide was rehearsed; it was planned to the extent that every Tutsi’s name in Rwanda was written down in a document used to systematically kill every living tribe member. The death lists had been prepared in advance. As early as December 1990, Kangura – a leading propaganda newspaper – had published the “Hutu Ten Commandments”, which stated that any Hutu associating with Tutsi neighbours and friends was a traitor. In the end, more than 20 newspapers and journals incited the hatred of the Tutsis. A weapon that they used in their propaganda was to claim that the Tutsis were planning a war that would leave no Hutu alive. This was a lie.

The third absurdity was that the UN could have put a stop to the genocide before it began. An informant code-named ‘Jean-Pierre’ who was a former member of the security for the President of MRND, Hutu President Habyarimana’s party, came forward with information that was ignored. He told the UN that 1,700 Interahamwe had been trained in army camps and were registering all Tutsis for an extermination plan that would kill up to 1000 Tutsis every 20 minutes. He was willing to warn about the dangers of Hutu extremism in return for his security. His protection was not provided. The head of the UNAMIR passed this information on to secretary general’ s military advisor in New York. No action was taken in response to the fax. Not long after this Jean-Pierre disappeared, his fate never to be known.

When the genocide began, the violence spread like wild fire. Women were beaten, defiled, humiliated and in the end murdered often in front of their children and husbands. Any sharp object was used to smash, pulverise and abuse children. People that were shortly before friends, who ate dinners together and looked after each other’s children, turned on each other. Moderate Hutus, who refused to enter into the bloodshed, fled to refugee camps in neighbouring Uganda to avoid being murdered or imprisoned themselves as traitors.

The fourth horrifying truth is that 5000 UN troop members were sent in to Rwanda simply to take non-nationals safely out of the country. A UN commander, Lt. Gen. Dallaire, estimated that it would have only taken this number of troops to stop the genocide altogether. Instead, the UN mission was recalled.

From the start of the genocide, not one additional peacekeeper or armoured personnel carrier arrived in Rwanda before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in July. The international community stood back and watched as millions of people were systematically brutalised and murdered.

The consequences of the war for the people of Rwanda are immense. The few women whose lives were spared were often raped by men with HIV on purpose to spread the infection. Burying the dead in dignity was almost impossible due to the costs. Mass graves are all over Rwanda, with no idea of who is beneath the ground. For those that survived, the trauma they will forever experience is unimaginable. But being a poor country, the means to counsel and support these people is lacking. What’s more, the Tutsi victims are living day by day with neighbours who are Hutus, some of whom would have murdered someone they know. The wounds of the country are far reaching.

To my complete surprise however the city of Kigali was so developed compared to that of Uganda. The roads were clean – no rubbish to be seen. They have strict road systems and gardens of flowers that line the streets. There are street lamps and endearing gates. It is remarkable. Some theorists argue, such as Paul Collier, that after a civil war a state has its greatest opportunity for reform and change in policy and this may be the case in Rwanda. Uganda is a different story. The civil war only affected the north of the country, yet the south does not have the infrastructure or the policies of Rwanda. I can’t say I know the why they are so different.

The memorial centre was a fantastic insight into the genocide. Rwanda’s story is so sad, but on the surface they seem to be coping and recovering remarkably well…despite the grenade attacks.

Pics from Sembabule, SW Uganda

Kampala - a city of many perspectives

Kampala is a city of many perspectives. In any one second, in a fixed space and time, people are experiencing such openly different existences. It is easy for expats to forget that Kampala – and in the larger context Uganda – is still very much developing. The city is so vibrant, with such generous, friendly and seemingly happy people that it is easy to be shocked by other images you come across. For instance, at night we often get home via our taxi-driver friend in his rather plush car that has two mini plasma screens in it. One night, back in my first few weeks here, a car-full of us were engaged in a karaoke session to the likes of Phil Collins’ “Groovy kind of love”, and Abba’s “I have a dream”. We were laughing; we were relaxed; we were oblivious. I happened mid note to look out of the car window and was faced with a barely-clothed three-year old at the foot of the window lightly tapping, wanting us to open up and give her money.

I wish I could say it was heart breaking, that her face was pleading and innocent. But it wasn’t. She was vacant. She was a three-year old with the expression of a tired, fed-up middle-aged woman finding life too hard. The juxtaposition of five comparatively rich ex-pats living it up in a fancy car and a child living in severe poverty on the streets, with but a car door between us, hit me like a ton of bricks. Versions of that scene on that night have occurred many times since, and each time I feel life is unfair and wrong and I feel ashamed of the privileges that I have. But the reality is that this is a common everyday image in Kampala – two starkly different perspectives coexisting in the same space and time.

That night had other connotations for me, with another poignant reality hidden just beneath the surface. I remember thinking that I loved the music we were listening to – girly, poppy tunes - but that our taxi driver loved them even more. This driver, a truly wonderful Ugandan man, is clearly a homosexual; however if he ever admitted that to himself or anyone else for that matter then he would be imprisoned, and if this current anti homosexuality bill gets passed in Uganda, then he could be sentenced to death. (I will discuss the anti homosexuality bill in more detail in another blog). I doubt that he knows he’s gay – he may never allow himself to accept it because of the horrific realities that he’d have to face.

I actually had a conversation with him about homosexuality a few weeks ago. He brought up the topic and I was shocked my how vehemently he agreed with the bill, and how homophonic he was. I know that this seems to be a complete contradiction - a gay man being homophobic - but I think that, for him, by taking this viewpoint he’s protecting himself. What our conversation also highlighted was how intricately linked religion and anti homosexuality are in Uganda. The bible says that homosexuality is wrong, and so the majority of Christians believe that also. But what I don’t understand is how that then translates in to Ugandans thinking people should be imprisoned or even killed for their sexuality? That isn’t Christian thinking.

Religion in so many ways is fundamentally important and good for the people of Uganda: it gives them hope and comfort in the face of a hard and unforgiving world. But it is also used as a tool for manipulation and oppression. My friend Lorna was telling me that she knows of one church where the pastor asks his congregation to give up 10% of their income for ‘God’. What that actually funds are his flights on his private jet plane. When the people ask what he’s doing with the money – because there is no evidence of it being spent on them – he says that the money ‘directly goes to God up above’. People believe that. They trust him and so they give up the precious little that they have. Obviously this is just one case – and it is probably rare – but if they people readily accept such blatant abuse of their rights, then how else have they been brain washed? Do they also believe that homosexuals should be killed because their pastor has told them that’s God’s will?

Kampala gives a false sense of wellbeing to the transient ex pat visitor. We find the city spoils us with fun and invokes a carefree attitude. But just under that fine veneer, that fragile surface, lurks much harsher truths. Truths that will take probably all of my six months here to even begin to understand.

Pics from Katakwi, Kitgum and Pader field visits