Posts Tagged ‘Kigali’
The lonely coffin
One other image from the memorial today in Gisozi sticks with me: a coffin, left alone in one of the museum rooms. I could see half of it through the glass door. It had been left alone, all the people that arrived with it taking their chairs around the program, or heading down to the [...]
Genocide memorial day
Today is the 14th anniversary of the genocide. I’m used to genocide anniversaries. I spent 8 years organizing Holocaust memorials in my home town and on my undergraduate campus, and I tried to get a Rwandan genocide memorial going at SIPA, though it never took off. Which is to say, I mark genocide anniversaries by [...]
Road rage, or, why not to live with a doctor
Two days ago, I wrote a post like this, but it was all wild and triumphant. It was a love note to motos, and a farewell to my old, cautious self who had refused to get on the back of them. The computer died, though, and I lost the post. Since then, I have again [...]
To learn how to party, come to Kigali
3 kegs of Mutzig, a DJ with speakers that throbbed like a dance club, and a goat on a spit. That’s right. A goat on a spit. Plus, we had a mural of a trojan horse painted on our wall. It looks more like a Transformer than an illustration of any epic, but it doesn’t [...]
You know you’ve hit the next peg of development when…
There’s a rush hour. That’s right, Kigali has a full-fledged rush hour. It took ten minutes to get from the hilltop to the traffic light near my house, the entire length of which is maybe a quarter of a mile. The lane opposite us was free and clear, but we were clogged like the Lincoln [...]
Short is the new tall
Coffee, that is. That’s right, people. There’s a Starbucks-like coffee shop in Kigali. Only here, a tall is a medium. Even for those of us schooled in the vocabulary of ventis, it’s less confusing than if it were in Kinyarwanda, I suppose. English is the language of money…
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [