Music and sorrow in Rwanda...

Long lost stories - part 3

Music and sorrow in Rwanda...

At the beginning of May, in the middle of the Ugandan school holidays, I found myself on a night bus with the destination of Kigali, Rwanda. Jamal, who is a singer here in Kampala, needed to record some new songs in Kigali and sure, why not come with him… I was curious about Rwanda, knowing what cruelties have happened there, while all the stories I heard and read couldn’t be more positive. So time to see for myself..

We arrived at the border around 5.00 in the morning, FREEZING cold… Jamal almost died, but come on, this is ‘normal’ weather for a real dutchy. The first thing I noticed was the difference in looks of the Rwandan people, lighter colour. The second noticeable thing was that there was not much of a hurry to be found in the Rwandan people… We were gonna be picked up by Dan, which of course took much longer than planned, then going for lunch not much later: you sit down, you wait for the menu, 10 minutes later, you wait for the waiter to take your order, 10 minutes later, you order, 10 minutes later, you get your drink, 30 minutes later, you’re still waiting for your food, another 15 minutes later, you start getting grumpy, another 5 minutes later, you loose your patience, you start bugging the waiters, you get answers like: but HE was serving you, not me! Yeah, we don’t care who served us, we just want our food, we have been waiting for an hour and a half… Finally. The food came ‘only’ another 10 minutes later. But well, there’s still no hurry in Africa! I forgot…

I had never been into music studios in my whole life, but the music studio where we went in Kigali is the 3rd African studio I see… The owner, a Ugandan guy living in Rwanda, was really nice to us and wanted to do everything for us. So it happened that Jamal could record two new songs for free. Those studios are such a relaxing place (at least for me, when you just sit and listen, heheh). Musicians and singers walking in and out, singing people, nice loud music… Anyway, the studio was kind of our ‘home base’ that week. The supermarket next door, where I went every now and then to get a cold soda to survive the hot and stuffy studio was quite interesting also.. The girl that worked there came into the studio often, so after she had seen me for a couple of days, she suddenly came to me and said: ‘you’re so beautiful, I love you…’ Eh, wow.. Thank you, eh merci… People in Rwanda speak Kinyarwanda and French, their English isn’t too good. So I guess this girl didn’t really know what she was actually saying (or am I that loveable after 2 days already?! ). Anyway, it was flattering…

The last day of my stay, we went to the Genocide Memorial. And actually, I don’t have any words to describe the impressiveness of this memorial. I remember visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem about 8 years ago, a museum about the holocaust, which also made a deep impression on me… Just like the Genocide Memorial. I don’t think many people could go through the museum without dropping tears. The videos of survivors that they show are really heartbreaking, not even mentioning the photos… Horrifying, shocking, sickening… I had to turn my head away most of the time.

The last part of the museum was specially designed for the children that were killed during the genocide. Absolutely the most heart breaking part of the whole museum. They placed huge photos of children and put down their age, their favourite food, their favourite activity and then the way they were killed…

And all of this is real, it has really happened… So surreal, when you see the Rwanda of today. I am really impressed with the way the Rwandans have built up their country. Only 14 years ago these brutalities took place, but all you see now is a beautiful, clean, quiet and organized city. Compared to Kampala it is such an improvement: clean streets, only 1 passenger allowed on a boda boda and only WITH a helmet, clean air, safe… But of course this is just the outside, many wounds still need to be healed…