2nd July Lake Mahuji Rwqanda

Rwanda is a very hilly country. We will be leaving it tomorrow and still have to come upon a road that has a straight stretch more than 500 metres long. At least the roads have generally been good and we even ventured to say the road from Lake Kivu back to Kigali was the best we have been on in Africa. Very windy but well built, good curves and regularly maintained.
Before leaving Lake Kivu we decided to drive around the bays a little and find a place to have breakfast. Were we stopped was near a concrete plaque with writing on it we couldn’t understand. On closer inspection I realized it was just above a mass grave measuring 10 metres x 4 metres. Not even this idyllic corner of the country was spared the slaughter. We also drove back to a church that had a memorial to 11,400 people killed in the area. The grave there would measure twice the earlier one.
Two other churches have become shrines to the destruction of April 1994. Both just south of Kigali and just off a major road. The one at Ntarama is a simple structure with a Sunday school and offices in behind. 5,000 were macheted to death in these buildings. The main church has racks of skulls on one end, the pews, which are planks of wood placed on a low cement base, are still there. Around the walls are piled the clothes of the victims while each side of the alter has the provisions the people brought with them. They were there for 3 days before being attacked. The Sunday school still has blood on the walls. Davita showed us around; a beautiful sad girl, she was 10 when the attack occurred and remembers so much.
At Nyamata the church is big and modern. It would be three times bigger than Ntarama. On the pews there are piles of clothes from those killed. If there were 5,000 at the earlier church there would have been 20,000 killed here going by the amount of clothing. I am pretty sure there was a church where 50,000 had sheltered but were all killed, but am not positive that was Nyamata. The woman there could not speak English. Behind the church a crypt has been built that houses thousands of skulls and other bones laid out on trays.
The UN were in the country when all this happened but didn’t have a mandate to take up arms against the gangs. The bloke in charge said that all he needed was 7000 troops and a mandate and he could have stopped the genocide. One plaque in the Kigali Memorial said that if the troops used to evacuate all the foreigners had been used to fight there would also not have been a slaughter.
We headed east after Kigali and ready to cross into Tanzania tomorrow morning.