On the Road from Ruhengeri: A Journey Into the Land of a Thousand Hills

Between April and June of 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed within 100 days. Most of those massacred were Tutsis—and those who perpetrated their killings, Hutus. The violence was sparked by the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6^th, 1994. Within hours of the attack a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later. It would be the greatest known genocide in modern human history.

I’ve stood facing this caged window for over an hour—afraid to move, afraid to breathe, to blink my eyes—calculating the escape. These walls are reminiscent of a place I believed I had only ever imagined. Decrepit cement, bare and cracked. A worn candlestick and a hollowed box of matches guard the floor mattress. Sheets once white, now yellowed with age and use. Over the frail bed drapes are drawn against a single window, concealing the iron confines fashioned against each of its four corners. I’m reduced to only the sound of my own breath. The air here is suffocating, and I’m dirtied with the day—feel my skin alive, infested. There are memories that aren’t my own—the deaths of a million people, and the dread of disease plaguing this orphaned nation deep in the remote belly of this darkest continent.

There is a stimulated panic in my breathing that is maddening; the rapid rise and crash—but space and time seem to slow—eyes dark like globes; lids falling into harmony—vacant—lashes heavy like blades of a turbine magnified in slow motion.

A young boy sits guard outside—he sways back and forth in a rocking chair that creaks with every ascent and decline. His gaze is drowsy and bleeds into the black night. Further beyond him a concrete rise defines the perimeters of  the fortress he protects—a home for volunteers.

My attention returns to the room—though there is no draft, a chill raises the hair on the nape of my neck and travels down the divide of shoulder blades. I twitch—my gaze lands on the fluorescent bulb that hangs over the rotting mattress. A thing circles the dying light—body black, its form like a snake, fat like a worm. Without breaking sight of the creature, I kneel slowly to the ground, fingering its hard foundation for a loose sandal. I feel my body tighten, my fingers tighten around my rubber weapon, and I slap at the thing—it crashes to the mattress. Fallen, it slithers, twitching, wings broken. You embodied everything about this place—your dark body, your hissing sound. Your death.

Shaken by the action from my paralyzed fright, I grab hold of a headlamp that rests against my backpack and head for the door. The others are asleep, and the movement soon becomes a dance through the house’s shadows, created in the voids of light streaming in through the windows from the night’s nearly full moon. I find my way to the kitchen where I know there’s a door that leads outside—and steps away a small guesthouse for the “houseboy”.

His name is Dusingizimana, but they call him “Dusi” for short. He grew up an orphan, but now works in exchange for house and food, acting as a host and guide for the volunteers who have come to help—we came here for the children.

Reaching for the door’s handle, a bounded fate I’ve anticipated proves real—we have been locked inside of the house for our own safety. I pull again at the rusted knob, and then over and over—helplessly. I struggle to catch my breath, but it’s too heavy. God, no.

            I hear a voice—“Who’there?”

            The sound is deep and his English broken, and I realize it’s the young night watchman. Pressing both palms of my hands against the cold glass, I call out for Dusi.

            “DUSI—PLEASE! PLEASE! GET DUSI!” I’m whispering the scream, and my words are short, desperate. I begin to see white teeth forming a grin, and I can finally make out the boy in the darkness. He’s smiling at me, eager, shaking his head—I realize he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

            “LET ME OUT!” My voice strains from the lump forming in my throat; my eyes begin to well. I’m throwing my hands against the glass, pointing at the house where Dusi is—but he doesn’t understand—it all becomes babble.

            It’s beginning to hurt—the fear—and I feel my breath as though it has somehow mixed with sand and glass. Loose strands of hair flutter in a draft I can’t trace—there’s dirt on my face, on my hands and beneath the nails of my fingers; my lips are cracked—I bite down, the salted taste trickles to the back of my throat, and I close my eyes—shut them so that my skin tightens, my mouth forced to expose teeth clenched. It’s the middle of the night. You have nowhere to go.

            During the genocide and until 2006, Ruhengeri was one of twelve provinces of Rwanda, sharing its borders to the north and northwest with Uganda and DR Congo—both of which harboring histories of civil unrest. In an attempt to address political and social issues that arose from the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the government decentralized its power in creating five geographic provinces, also weakening ethnic divisions. Today, Ruhengeri is a city in Musanze district, in the Northern Province. Geographically privileged, it is the closest town to Volcanoes National Park which harbors approximately half of the world’s mountain gorillas. However, defying its strategic significance, Ruhengeri is an unremarkable town, sprawling nebulously at the foothills of the Virunga Mountains. The area became a battleground during the Rwandan Civil War, ominously predecessing the genocide in the early 1990’s.

            I hear a second voice—it’s Dusi, and I see him push past the guard. Unlocking the iron divide that’s bound to the door, he comes to me, taking firmly into his grip my forearm as I reach out to him.

When I had arrived at the airport in Kigali, it was Dusi who met me with an arranged driver, and we befriended each-other almost immediately. I found he had a genuine smile—eager to inquire about my travels to Rwanda, and easily amused when language failed and we resorted to a spectrum of physical gestures, expressions, and laughter:

Girl, aye  think you crasee!

Hey, are you sure we should be driving so close to the edge of a cliff like this?

Simultaneous laughter.

“Dusi, I can’t do this!” He’s holding on to me, trying to calm me down. “Please, help me! Help me get out of here!” Our voices are low, and I’m pleading with him, begging him—because I was never ready for this trip.

“Ok, ok, pleas—you mus—you mus meet me ‘ere aygain een fave minute. Aye take you.” He tells me this in his broken Kinyarwandan accent. “D’you undastand?”

Yes.

Everything that is vital I keep on my body: money, passport, journal.

Dusi leads, and we head out into the night to find a working phone—he stays close to my side, leading me away from the light to deter any attention that may fall upon us—or more accurately, upon me. I tread the ground with my head down.  Men pass us in the darkness, and at the immediate crossing of paths I realize that Dusi’s pace slows and he waits for them to continue on—ensuring our ambiguity—looking back to see that I’m ok. The smell of liquor reeks in the air at their passing. It is New Year’s Day.

Dusi asks, “Hayfa, so, what is wron’?”

I explain to him that I made a mistake in coming to Rwanda. “You know how some things may be right for some people, but not for—I shouldn’t have come.”

He nods his head. Quietly, “Yes.”

I wanted to tell him more—so that he could understand. So that I could understand myself.

I had traveled for three days to get to Rwanda, with flights from New York to London, London to Nairobi, then Nairobi to Kigali. I admired and quietly found a confidant in an adventurer whose tales of shamanic healing in the remote Peruvian Amazon were reminiscent of daydreams I’d conjured—peering into many dark sky nights, or out of numerous frosted classroom windows. On the flights from New York to Kigali I had read a book of her own account into the heart of Papua New Guinea. The story begins recounting an earlier journey through Africa where she was kidnapped and nearly gang-raped by a group of rebel soldiers in Mozambique.

A young girl walking alone passes me and Dusi in the darkness—her face is expressionless. I turn my head to look back at her and watch only as her feet leave soft tracks in the loose dirt, its unsettled dust like ash as she passes.

Ruhengeri isn’t unlike a shanty town; its rows of concrete crudely constructed to serve a most basic purpose. Deviating from the road, we reach a small sidewalk concession. A middle-aged woman works the stand—she has the company of two men, and the threesome seem not quite sure what to make of us as we approach. There’s a brief exchange between Dusi and the woman—in the meantime, the men have grown completely silent, watching. Although the interaction seems unmenacing, Dusi is on edge and I can’t help but translate his reservation. He tells me I’ll have to pay one US dollar for every international call—a bargain by any standard—and in a clumsy gesture of hesitant intent, I hand over a twenty dollar bill to the woman. Neither of us have change. Dusi hands me the receiver and nervously fumbles with the phone’s dial—I briefly get through to my family in New York, long enough to let them know I’m scared to hell and we’ve gone out in the middle of the night to try and find a way to get to Kigali before morning.

We lose the connection.

Dusi decides we’ll try to find another phone, and we set back out into the darkness.

I feel a sickness in my stomach, my nerves as though they are alive, writhing in my gut. Every passing minute feels as though it has bled into hours.

Somehow, we end at the beginning where we started; I realize the attempts to reach my family has likely only left them entirely uncertain of my own safety. Now Dusi and I sit against the concrete barricade of the wall surrounding the place I’m attempting to escape. The moon nearly full cascades its whitewash in hues deep blue, consuming the blacks of our eyes. I lower my head and cry into my hands. God, please—I promise I’ll believe.

“Aye know a boy—maybe he’ able to get a car an’ take you Kigali.” I lift my head from my hands—the moonlight has illuminated the fine crystals of perspiration against Dusi’s dark face. The whites of his eyes seem to glow. “But you mus’ wait ‘ere fo’ me. Aye make sho’ you safe.”

Quietly, I agree.

Back inside the house I wait for Dusi to return. Over an hour has passed and I wait within an open room nearest the door to the guarded porch, blindly flipping through the pages of  a London gossip magazine that someone’s left behind—Prince Harry to Serve in Iraq; the Scandal Behind Blair’s Early Departure; Dubai creates Multi-Island Oasis Depicting “The World”: Land for Sale”. I search the island map for Rwanda—it isn’t there.

There is movement outside—I become deathly still staring at the door’s handle until Dusi enters.

The boy has agreed to the plan, and he will take us both to Kigali for $80 US. “He meet us een few hour—pleas’ try an’ sleep, Hayfa.”

But I can’t, and Dusi refuses to leave me alone.

“Dusi, do you think I’m crazy?”

“Yes—” he laughs, leaning back against a hard-wood chair. “Aye think you ee’nteresting.”

I smile; laugh for the first time since we first drove together to Ruhengeri. “Do you have any family?” He looks to the ground, and immediately I feel a sinking in my chest. “Dusi, I—”

“No.” He looks directly into me now. “Only one sista’. She live ‘een da o’phanage. Befo’ aye cam’ ‘ere, aye live in da o’phanage, too.”

I don’t want to act in pity of him—he’s stronger than that. Stronger than me.

“Aye was born een Mutura Provence. The war sta’ted when aye was een da first grade. We all fled to Congo with my whole family—aye mean my fayve sistas and aye, and both my parents. My fatha’ had two wive—my mom and anotha’. We spent only about one week een Congo, an’ afta’ my fatha’s death, we returned home with my mom. When we reach home a few days lata’, even my mom passed a’way. After ‘dat, one of my fatha’s brothers took me and my sista to the Imbabaze o’phanage. The res’ of my sistas stayed home.”

What could I say—my own life was incomparable. I was a student—I wanted to be an adventurer. I wanted to live my life dangerously. I believed I could handle whatever this place had in store for me.

But it became real.

“Do you go school?”

“Yes.” A simple answer.

“What you study?”

“Writing—” I feel my own hesitation. “I’m a writer. I want to tell stories about places and people.”

“Will you write about me? If aye eva’ leave Rwanda, aye neva’ come back.”

“I promise.” I promise, Dusi. I will write about you.

“‘Ave you seen many places?”

“Many. Many places.”

“Wow!” Another beautiful smile. “Wee’ll you tell me?”

And I did—in our obscure hideout somewhere in the heart of Africa, I told him about the Middle East, about Europe, about the Americas.

“Aye wish wan’ day aye too go to New York—that would be lovely!”

Hours pass, and it’s five o’clock in the morning. The sun will be rising soon, so Dusi decides it’s time to leave.

Dusi asks me the meaning of the waning crescent that hangs from my neck.

“Da’ sky?”

“An escape.”

“You MUS’ be a dreama’,” he says, quietly laughing.

 “Will you write something fo’ my sista’? A letta’? Aye want her to know you.”

Girl, I don’t believe in angels, but one found me today.

We walk into the early morning night, retracing the same steps we had taken earlier. Ruhengeri sleeps and we wait on a street corner for the boy. A passing truck stops, white and rusted—the men inside motion to us and I slink into the shadows, but at least one has noticed and keeps his eyes fixed past Dusi as he approaches the car. I am tired. I feel myself beginning to submit—the energy or will to keep going is waning. I barely notice that Dusi has already waved the men on when far off in the distance a pair of headlights appear over a hill on the horizon. As it nears, the car is rattling away as though all of its parts would at any moment dismember themselves at every revolution.

Inside, the car reeks with the stench of stale sweat, and I gag at my inhalations until I become acquainted with the smell. The boy doesn’t even look back—but I am looking back, and soon the few lights from the village are lost to the twilight. The sun is rising.

The drive on the road from Ruhengeri seemed a call to death itself—the cool night air had left a heavy fog that was now entangled beneath the canopy of trees. Too thick to see beyond the vines that had pendulously suspended themselves overhead, we swerve dangerously close to the edge of the winding dirt road—breaks in the mist exposing jagged cliffs that drop into the jungle valley. It is as though the boy is driving blind—he knows this road and effortlessly slices a swath through its path, by instinct alone that he knows the curves.

The fear falls away—exhausted in all ways I rest my head back and close my eyes. You came this far.

I don’t care if I die.

It is the sudden grinding of brakes and heavy friction of our car that throws me from my sleep. My eyes open to the blaring sun—I had been unconscious for over an hour, and we are in Kigali—another day alive around us. We have been stopped at a security checkpoint—but this is unusual, and I know it. I look to Dusi, but he only looks ahead, expressionless—eyes vacant. Military police surround us, their AK-47’s raised—I feel a numbness in my jaw travel to my gut, my chest tightens.

A soldier approaches Dusi, but he says nothing and continues to only look ahead in defiance as the young boy in the driver’s seat leans across the width of the car and motions towards me. I recall the adventurer’s account of Mozambique and the rebel soldiers that had taken her captive. She had been about my age at the time—naïve and young in a place that was not her own. I look to the soldier.

He leans his face through the open window, and I agree to meet his glare but can bring myself to look no longer than a moment before repeating Dusi’s action in defying his gaze. The whites of his eyes are yellowed like the rotting mattress—I can feel his breath, his heat against my face, but I only stare now through the dirtied glass of the car’s windshield. You did this to yourself.

The soldier steps back—keeps his black gaze to pervade my own. It is in that moment that I recognize a physical difference between Dusi and the military police at the checkpoint. Neither Dusi or the boy at the driver’s seat is much taller than me—their builds muscular, stocky, and their skin as dark as the night we had just escaped. The soldier, however, stands taller and his build thinner, his skin lighter—the lines in his face harder.

On the road from Ruhengeri, I traveled with Hutus.

The soldier waves us on, and once more my eyes meet his own. The genocide had been well-planned—roadblocks were effortlessly erected and the army and interahamwe had gone into action. Within days of the start of the violence, the United Nations sent a force of 2,500 but quickly retreated to only 250 after the murders of ten Belgian soldiers. The world turned a blind eye to Rwanda. In only 100 days nearly one million people were massacred by order of the Hutu government. Neighbor against neighbor, they used military arms and rustic machetes to murder and rape and pillage. They were ordered, “These are the enemy. Kill.”

We move forward—Dusi turns back to me smiling, and I can see the relief in his face. I look back to the soldier until he is lost to the dust—these last images of Rwanda consumed by his yellow eyes, burning like ashes in the fall.