Back to Butare

My husband keeps asking me how I feel about my trip to Rwanda. He’s a psychiatrist and I leave tomorrow for my third trip to Rwanda and my second since November of last year. I keep telling him I’ve been too busy “to feel” anything. But now I’m being forced to think about it as I prepare for my departure.

Funny, this time I’m departing from within Africa as I now live in Accra, Ghana. I’ll be flying overnight across continent to Nairobi then catch an early morning flight to Kigali. I’m looking forward to what I call “the smoky African” smell when I get off the plane in Kigali; that smell is hard to come by here in West Africa, but for me it is almost symbolic and incredibly evocative of East and Central Africa.

I’m looking forward to the drive from Kigali to Butare, a route that I know well now. I can’t wait to see my good friend Ines Mpambara, a Rwandan-Canadian who moved back to Rwanda several years ago and became the director of the School of Journalism for a few years, and her newborn baby boy. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends and former students with whom I stay in email contact when I’m not in country. And I suppose I’m looking forward to seeing the state of Radio Salus, the university radio station I helped get on the air last November.

But I’m also incredibly apprehensive. The station manager recently resigned and I keep getting coded messages from a number of students about a myriad of “problems” at the station – students not getting the stipend they’re supposed to, programs not being produced and instead replaced with almost non-stop music, equipment issues (mostly lack of), and so on, and so on.

I can’t help but feel at least partially responsible for the success (or failure) of Radio Salus. I was around in 2003 during its inception (on paper) when I participated in talks at my then home, the Credo Hotel in Butare, with a rep from UNESCO and an American Fulbrighter and professor. The professor has since passed away, the UNESCO rep is on maternity leave which leaves me – the only one with any kind of historical memory about Salus.

But together with the apprehension is an energy, an energy that seems to wondrously kick in when I need it most. I’m going into this knowing I’ll be working incredibly long and very likely frustrating days. But I’ll be working with students who want this station to be a success, who believe in what they’re doing and who desperately want the legacy of the Rwandan genocide and the complicity of the media in the genocide to be something of the past. They want to show the world that Rwanda is not just about genocide and hate media; they know there is so much potential in this incredibly beautiful country.

And so do I.