Fried Banana, cassava, beans, spinach, rice and sweet potatoes for lunch ...and supper. Its the traditional Rwandan meal. Delicious, after a miserable delay in Nairobi airport with only airline fodder for sustinance.
Our lunch time restaurant is pleasant, modern, self service. Well dressed young Rwandan men and women sit at tables talking into mobile 'phones. Like any 21st century city, Kigali is addicted to technology. Huge adverts adorn the busy, hillside roads, they shout loudly; mobile banking; MTN internet; cell phones.
Inside the cool of the Genocide Memorial the image of modernity is quickly banished. Display cabinets of femors. Row upon row of photographs clipped to strings; wedding snaps;student cards; picnics on rugs. These are the dead.
Children (the same age now, as my own student daughters) Survivors. They talk about the day their parents were machetted to death, perhaps it was the year my girls remember starting school.
A room full of skulls, which could have been my parents, my husband, my children ..me
Nearly two decades since the Genocide Kigali is booming with construction. It's green and fertile land is changing. It's people set on healing the wounds of it's past, it's government setting the pace of change. "no one has time to fight with neighbours" said Julienne, my guide for the afternoon.
Is the new Rwandan blueprint working? I hope to find out a little more in the next weeks.
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