dave.ofmassdestruction.com

Another day in Rwanda. Yesterday was my turn to get hit by the demon lag. We were in the Ministry of Health with their Director of IT when a wave of sleepiness started pouring through me. Add to that a constant low-grade nausea (that I assume is from malaria med) and it was clear that last night was a good night to just stay in. That’s exactly what happened and I even went to sleep quite early. Somehow the couple of power outages we had last night woke me up – the silence of the building was so stark maybe? Still, I got a good amount of sleep and still I am in my temporary office feeling sooooo sleepy!

I am sure I will get over this… just in time for me to leave.

mah has a decent update of yesterday I think I dozed through some of that so its good for me to read. Although I was with him at the Ministry of Health, most of my day before then was spent writing up some specifications for our handhelds project. I’ve a very long way to go on those and still don’t have all the information I really need to write them. Its going to take a while.

OK, so let me talk genocide for a moment. It is impossible to be here without running into history. It was 1994 when something likke 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. To see the country now it is hard to tell something so horrible happened here. And yet, there are little signs almost everywhere – not physical “signs”, in fact there are very few of those, but just impressions and feelings. Actually, just recently a very good article was written about this very thing. Its a decent article and describes what happened on the site the hotel I am in, and many of the areas I’ve been walking though. This article was reprinted yesterday in the New Times, which is a local English newspaper.

I fully intend to get to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre sometime – whether or not it will be on this trip is unclear but that’s ok as I will have to come back again this year… maybe more than once. Those who have been talk about it in pretty much the same way as those who talk about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I would think it perhaps even more powerful in some ways considering 250,000 people are buried just outside its doors.

If one thinks about the genocide too much it is haunting and too sad to clearly contemplate. If one ignores it they do not honor the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the slaughter. Nonetheless, this place does not feel like a place where something like that could happen. At all. In many ways I think that is because they have been dealing with it in so many correct ways. Economy and health are almost always the reasons people turn to blame and divisiveness and both are a huge focus in Rwanda. Let’s hope they get it right.