-Public buses are powered by Biofuel (there are not too many which makes it easier, but still!)
-Rwanda is producing its own energy supply via electro plants build on Lake Kivu that transform its methane supplies into energy
-All across the country we did not see one single African-style hut; the houses no matter how small have all brick roofs
-No obvious tin-build townships anywhere to be seen
-Optic fibre glass cable is laid throughout the country making Rwanda one of the countries with the most wide availability of high quality internet on the continent
-Rwanda is committed to supply each school child with a computer within the next 5 years
-Rwanda has one of the highest percentages of female members in government worldwide, it is in the same top 5 as the Scandinavian countries (people hope that with more females governing the country genocide will be less likely to occur again!)
-Plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda making it the cleanest country in Africa
-On the last Saturday of each month all city roads all closed from 8 to 11 am for public cleaning, the whole community participates by walking through the streets and picking up whatever waste they can find (although there is none!)
-Crime is virtually non-existent according to what we have been told, have read and seen.
-The traffic lights in the capital have timers on them so drivers and pedestrians can see how
many seconds they have left to cross... this is really not matching in the African time-concept!
-Drivers stop at zebra crossings...
There are some obvious reasons for the well organised state of this country and some less obvious.
One of the more obvious ones is a tight organisational structure on which Rwanda’s society is based. This structure was even recognised by the colonisers making it, unlike other African countries difficult to impose their foreign rule on; Rwanda was fully closed to foreigners up to the 16th century. Rwandans amount to only 11 millions, all speak the same language, Kirwanda, and have the same believes and past these factors make a uniform coordination of a country a far easier matter than by having different tribes, religions and languages such as in the case of Kenya or even South Africa.
The main reason however, that seems to tie this nation together is what it is most famous for, the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. 99.9% of all Rwandans were affected by some sort of violence during those times losing a family member, friend or neighbour. 10% of the population was killed. This is hard to comprehend. The Genocide Memorial in Kigali is a much recommended place to visit and learn about the past. Rwandan people do not want to forget the past, out of fear that it could happen again; there are memorials in each tiny little place. The most important for them seems to learn out of what happened, support all affected and forgive by putting responsible people on trial. Since there were not enough courts in the country each village established its own. The court cases continue up to today.
How Rwanda managed to accumulate enough wealth to create an infrastructure like the one it has remains a bit less obvious. Yes ok, it has a tourism industry, but there are really not that many tourists around (we met 6 in the whole of the country) and how many people do you know that have been to Rwanda? The country does not have significant natural resources or major industries. The main source of income except tea and coffee exports seems to be a fairly tight taxation system to which everybody adheres to (at least those living above the poverty line) and which also causes the European level of pricing.
Nobody did refer to the level of foreign aid that the country has received after the genocide. But we speculate that the foreign community felt such guilt for their involvement or non-involvement during 1994 that it might have tried to pay this guilt off in terms of financial support.
The UN was present during the genocide but did not intervene, it would have been capable of preventing it but the people on the top were too busy discussing the matter in their offices in Geneva and could not take a decision on whether it was a genocide or not what was going on in Rwanda. Once they decided that they should help the people being openly slaughtered on the streets they could not agree on who was to pay for it. Once that was settled, 100 days had passed and 1 million people had been killed.
Just as a side note, the French government was supplying the Hutu regime at the time with weapons to carry out their massacre... French companies were kicked out of the country immediately after 1994 by the president.
There is a strong presence of the police, in uniforms and undercover, this does not seem to bother people. They see it as means to prevent any possibility of the past repeating itself and at the same time it makes the country one of the continent’s safest, for Europeans this a concept hard to comprehend but since the people are happy, why not!
Apart from all that, Rwanda has most definitely the prettiest women in Eastern Africa.
It is a tiny country in terms of distances and in comparison to most of the others we are passing during this trip so we ended up driving through almost the entire country and still did not spend more than 10 days here.
We are on our way back to Chapati land, Tanzania!
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