Holiday Week #2: Kigali I

Quick warning: this post contains no pictures, nor investment work, nor anything cheery.
Our second stop on our holiday week was Kigali, and although lots of fun was had (coming in #3 soon!), we did take some time to visit a few memorials to Rwanda's genocide of 1994. It's a change of tone from the usual witterings that I usually post, and I'm not even sure I'm wittering any less in my attempts to find the right words, but it was a part of my time in East Africa that deserves more than to be swept aside in favour of my silly pink shoes. 

I can't say I'm comfortable with gift shops and bus parties and dubbing it "worth visiting" in a Lonely Planet style, but the Kigali Memorial Centre is an exceptionally poignant memorial to the events of 1994 and the thousands of victims buried at the site. It is very deliberately a memorial centre, and not a museum - the information centre indoors is joined by walls and gardens of remembrance, and a separate research archive, all with the intention of allowing people from all walks of life, with different experiences of the genocide, to remember the Hundred Days of Madness that ripped Rwanda apart twenty years ago.

Of any museum or war memorial I've visited across the years, the Centre was the most intensely personal - the exceptionally graphic images, mass graves and personal input of survivors and families make for a very visceral experience, for want of a better word . In and amongst boards of information, family photographs fill one room, silent but for a video of survivors recounting their stories. The rural church memorials we went to the following day have been left largely untouched for twenty years, still with blood stains on walls, bullet holes in rooves and piles of victims' clothing left on pews. One of the most interesting sections of the information centre was an exhibit looking at Rwanda's tragedy in the context of other genocides, and mass killings not recognised as genodical, of the twentieth century - whole chapters of brutal history still not acknowledged by modern governments and unbeknownst to the outside world.

Certainly some harrowing mornings in Kigali, but impossible to gloss over and - now - impossible to forget.