Patrick’s Graduation

Welcome to Kigali, Rwanda.

After about 30 hours of traveling, Claudia and I got to the hotel last night in time to collapse into our beds, then get up in what felt like about 20 minutes to get ready to leave.

Our morning started with a 2+ hour drive from Kigali to Ruhengeri. We were headed there for the university graduation of a young man, Patrick, that Ginger and I have sponsored for 10 years. This sponsorship focused on keeping the child’s education expenses covered.

Ginger and I had met Patrick and his mom, Helen, 9 years earlier when we visited Rwanda. Patrick is a success story, so far. He has great ambition and is willing to work for what he wants. This has made for a number of pretty challenging conversations along the way. But Ginger told him in 2014 that if he kept up his end of the bargain, we’d keep ours. And he came through.

More on the graduation, below.

Rwanda is a small, mountainous, lush, green, and very clean country. It is certainly a leading candidate for the most beautiful country I’ve been to. Note in the random street scene below, there isn’t a speck of trash anywhere. The government has employees who keep it clean. Once a month, they have what they call Muganda, where everyone in the country (including politicians and the president) go out for 4 hours and clean.

Claudia and I hired a driver for this leg of the trip: “Three hotels in three nights.” With a couple hundred pounds of luggage in tow. Our driver is Egide. As we drove, he pointed out lots of interesting things.

In the mid-1990s, there was a major genocide in Rwanda. This legacy is still very prevalent, including driving by a number of mass graves and memorials for those killed. One part of our journey was next to the river. Annually the country releases many flowers into the river in memory of the bodies found in the river during the genocide. Some were killed and thrown in. Others were just tied up and thrown in. Most wound up in Tanzania. This was the “River Road” from the movie Hotel Rwanda.

We also noted that there were very few dogs to be seen. They are all over in other countries in the area. Egide said this is also a result of the genocide. During the killings, the local dogs started eating the bodies since there was no one to pick the bodies up. The government later killed off all the dogs to eliminate the attacks and scavenging.

A third story involved Egide’s wife. She lived through the genocide. She was 8 at the time. Her parents and sister were killed while she was forced to watch. She begged them to kill her too, but the killers refused. They told her they wanted her to remember.

At that time, many of the wealthier houses had elevated metal water tanks to provide water. The killers would go around and shoot the water tanks to force the families to come out from behind the compound walls. Then they’d be killed. Egide’s wife hid in the water tank at her house and looked out through the bullet holes. There was a road checkpoint in front of the house. Many people were killed at the checkpoint when the people (boys) manning the checkpoint felt the traveler didn’t have the right reasons to be there. She watched this before escaping to the abandoned home of an ex-patriot.

A few years ago, Egide and his wife were in a minor business transaction. His wife froze. Later she was able to explain that the guy they were signing a contract with was one of the leads on that checkpoint. He had been imprisoned as a minor and eventually released. Today, killers and the remaining family of those killed still coexist in the country.

More on this later, but back to the graduation.

When we arrived, Claudia and I joined Helen and the pastor (Jean) who works with the organization through which we sponsored Patrick. They informed us they could only get two admission tickets and they’d decided Claudia and I should go. We quickly forced Helen to agree to go with me, in Claudia’s place. In the end, Jean scrounged two more tickets, so we all went.

We arrived at the site of the graduation at 8 AM after the drive mentioned above. That was the required time. The graduation then started at 10. There was copious speechifying, some in English. The rest in Kinyarwandan. We were on hard plastic chairs under a tent. It was crowded and very uncomfortable. Then it started raining. Hard.

The people whose chairs were outside the tent tried to move as far in as they could. Everyone in the tent squished together to make more space. Making it even more crowded. It was then even more uncomfortable.

The speeches continued.

There were over 800 graduates. Some were from the Masters’ program, but most were undergraduates. The Civil Engineering department was the largest.

A dance troupe from the school performed once early in the ceremony and then close to the end. The first shot below is of the guys wearing what I believe were stylized lion manes.

While the guys were dancing, the women waited, below. In the second performance, during the early part, a number of graduates, in their caps and gowns, came over and joined the dance troupe. They were members and were joining for one last performance. The performances were the highlight of the actual ceremony.

Below, I am with Patrick and Helen.

The area of Rwanda we are in has a number of volcanoes around. Below is one of them. Note beyond the people walking on the left, there are several police/military with assault weapons. They are pretty common in the area due to proximity to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is a short drive away. Quite a few people who were involved in leadership of the genocide escaped to DRC and have led groups along the border. In fact, our hotel this night is even closer to the border and there are armed military patrolling the grounds.

Below is another volcano. This is the one where the borders of DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda all come together.