One year ago today: Sept 23, 2005 (Colobus monkeys, genocide memorial)

We started off the day at Nyungwe park headquarters. We were hoping that the trackers knew where either the chimpanzees or the huge troops of colobus monkeys were. Unfortunately, neither was the case -- so we received our refund for the chimpanzee tracking and set off to see a smaller group (maybe 50 or so) of colobus monkeys in the area. They're kind of like skunk primates.


Black-and-white colobus monkey.

Afterwards, we began heading back toward Kigali. But first, we had an important stop to make at a genocide memorial. We visited the Murambi Memorial Centre outside the city of Butare. This memorial is situated at a school where an estimated 27,000-40,000 Rwandans were brutally massacred during the civil war. Apparently, local people were told to take shelter at the school, and then were systematically killed. That 40,000 innocent people, including babies, children, and the elderly, can be killed in a single event chills the soul and is truly tragic.

A very large number of corpses were somehow preserved in lime in a mass grave. These corpses fill several large buildings as a harrowing reminder of the brutality of the genocide. We also met several survivors who work at the site, and we listened to their first-hand accounts of losing their family during the genocide. It was a very emotional and difficult visit, but somehow I'm glad that we went, as it opened our eyes and hearts in a new (and yes, painful) way.


Corpses at the Murambi Memorial Centre in Rwanda. For those who haven't yet seen it, I highly recommend the movie Hotel Rwanda. It is extremely well done, hopeful, true, and not overly graphic in its violence.

We arrived back at Kigali in the evening and stayed at the "One Love Guesthouse". This guesthouse is run by a Japanese doctor who provides prosthetic limbs and physical therapy to genocide survivors in Rwanda. This would be our last night in Rwanda, and we would return to Kampala by bus the next day.


A banana-laden truck.