International Womens Day and a trip to Butare

Monday was International Women’s Day.  The city of Nyanza (where I am right now) celebrated with a ceremony during the day.  Three to four Secondary schools were there singing and dancing as everyone came to the stadium for the celebration.  The kids were in the infield dancing, and it wasn’t long until they pulled the “muzungu;s” (the PC volunteers) out of the audience to dance.  Boy was that a big laugh. We were jumping up and down and dancing and having fun, but definitely not following any choreography.  After everyone was present at the ceremony, different groups of dancers performed traditional dances accompanied by a big drum and vocals.  They started with young girls, under five I would guess.  They were all so cute, and I couldn’t believe they could learn such a complicated dance!  Next was the teenage girls, followed by older women performing very traditional Rwandan dance.  I took some pictures that will soon be uploaded.  After the dancing, a couple women gave speeches (in Kinyarwanda) which was later translated for us in English.  These speeches were about women empowerment.  Most of these women speakers were beaten by the husbands and are now divorced and now have stories of becoming self sufficient on their own.  In is great to see that women have very large roles in Rwandan society.  In fact, we learned that 48 percent of the Parliament here is made up of women, so International Women’s day was a big deal here.

This weekend we went to a town called Butare, about a 45 minute bus ride.  Our first stop was at a history museum with old artifacts and photos of Rwandan life.  I nearly DIED when I saw a section of the museum labeled “sports.”  There were a few photos that I could not believe what I was looking at.  I quickly read the explanation, which went a little bit like this,

“ Different exercises that were classified as sports were often practiced by young people from important families at the Kings Court.  Some of these activities consisted of the bow and arrow, throwing a spear at a target, and throwing a spear at a moving target.  But it was THE HIGH JUMP that fascinated spectators the most ever since its European arrival in the Nineteenth Century”

I nearly DIED when I saw this! I took a picture of someone High Jumping, and will post soon, but how cool! 

            Next we had lunch in Butare.  I found an American place called “Cheers” and new this would be a good bet.  I treated myself to a cheeseburger and chocolate shake; yes, I am definitely American. Surprisingly, it was pretty good!  After lunch I was feeling pretty good but was not expecting what was to come.

            We drove about 20 more minutes to another Genocide Memorial.  This memorial was not a museum like the first site we went to, rather more of a monument.  It was a secondary school on top of a hill that the Tutsis were told would be a safe place for them to hide during the war.  Fifty thousand Tutsies hid with no food or water for two weeks until the Hutis came and killed all the hiding Tusies and threw their bodies into mass graves.  This monument was preserved as the same scool 16 years ago, and in 1995 (one year after the war) they exhumed the bodies in the mass grave and preserved the body in some type of lime treatment and had the bodies laying in each of the rooms.  This was a very shocking site for us all.  It literally took my breath away to be able to so clearly see these bodies that had been preserved.  The amount of children was heartbreaking, and the bodies were so well preserved, you could almost see expressions on their faces.  Nobody was prepared for this and it came as a huge shock.  Its so easy for us to forget that the genocide did happen, but even though it was 16 years ago, it still very much so lives on.  Our language teachers live with us, and they were all apart of the war, so it was harder for them to “relive” the horror than it was for us.  I still can’t imagine even though I have gotten a small tastes of Rwanda’s past.  I have said this before, but Rwanda is such a strong and hopeful country to be able to recover from what happened in 1994.