Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Friday, August 22, 2008
South African Safari
The telephoto lens helped to get some great close ups of wild animals in South Africa.
Got to love blues
I took this at the Ottawa Blues Fest a couple of years ago. Boy they sure get some great music there.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
From Rwanda
These posts originally appeared on my blog spot earlier this year at rwandainitiative.ca. The Rwanda Initiative is a joint program between the journalism faculties at Carleton University and the National University of Rwanda.
The first time I ever publicly displayed my photos of the massacre scene at the Rwandan village of Kinyinya was to a class of Carleton University journalism students a couple of months ago. The black and white photos, taken on May 2, 1994, are bloody and gruesome. The images have haunted me for 14 years. I never intended them for publication. With hindsight, that may have been a mistake. Maybe if the world had seen just how brutal the butchery was, just maybe, political leaders would have been forced to intervene to stop it. At the time I thought a reporter’s words could drive home the message, and there was no need to show the graphic details. I was also concerned about the sanctity of the dead. Maybe publishing their photos might be disrespectful. At any rate, the photos remained unpublished and the world community did not act to stanch the bloodshed.
So why had I bothered to take the photos? I took them because I thought I had to record these scenes for evidentiary reasons. Someday someone might try to deny there was a genocide here in Rwanda. I wanted to make sure there was proof that these things had taken place.
I brought the photos out one evening to share with Professor Allan Thompson’s class in conflict reporting. His students were preparing themselves for possible assignments as war correspondents. So there was a professional reason to share the images, and to discuss how you deal with the heartache and fear, yet still function professionally as a journalist.
One image had been particularly tragic. I described it this way in the story I filed for The Globe and Mail in early May of 1994:
As a reporter, I wanted to know what had happened here. As a human being I needed to understand.
Some of the bodies were bloated from the hot sun. But other physical evidence suggested to Maj. Plante that we had come upon a very recent crime scene. These people had been killed just a few days before.
Kinyinya was such a small place, high in the hills overlooking Kigali, the capital, that it wasn’t even on the maps used by the UN peacekeepers. The urban sprawl of the past decade now makes Kinyinya almost a suburb. A real estate ad in yesterday’s Sunday Times, a local English-language paper, offers a large plot of land on the main road into Kinyinya for 30-million Rwandan francs, roughly equivalent to $6,000.
I’ve been back in Kigali for almost a week now, teaching a night class in advanced news reporting at the African Great Lakes Media Centre, part of a journalism partnership program Carleton has with the National University of Rwanda. I wanted to get back to Kinyinya at the first opportunity. Francois, my driver, was going to a wedding on Saturday, my first day off. But he agreed to take me to Kinyinya on Sunday. Nelson Gatsimbazi, a young journalist who is one of my night-class students, came with us.
Heading out of town, we made a sharp left at an intersection that I had remembered from 1994. Major Plante and I had been stopped there briefly at a roadblock set up by a Hutu extremist youth gang, looking for Tutsis to kill. Four bodies were at the side of the road. The intersection now has a traffic light. There is a snack bar at the roadside next to a large billboard advertising the services of MTN, the South African cell phone company that has expanded into Rwanda in a big way. Two traffic cops in fluorescent green windbreakers were randomly checking cars for safety violations and registration papers.
Francois recognized one of the officers. He honked and waved at the man.
The road out of town is now paved almost all the way to Kinyinya. The last few uphill kilometres are still a rutted red-earth track, now turned to slick mud from a torrential rain Saturday night. Francois downshifted and we crawled along. The sight of a muzungu, a white foreigner, sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota sedan attracts attention. Little kids started calling out in their few words of French, “Bon jour! Bon jour!” Some of the older boys ran alongside the car. We stopped once to ask directions from a group of women on their way home from church.
Then suddenly we were there. I began to recognize some of the houses.
There has been a lot of rebuilding and new housing construction. But I saw a house on the left where I had found two bodies just inside the doorway. Then we came to a clearing where I thought I remembered seeing the body of the old man on his back and the little girl.
We stopped and told a young man who we were and why we had come. “This Canadian was here in 1994 and he wants to talk to people about what happened here,” Nelson explained. The young man directed us to the stucco and brick house of Augustine Karinda, a Tutsi survivor of the genocide and one of the oldest men in the town. He was still shovelling mud out of the entranceway to his house from the overflowing creek that runs through his property during the rainy season. He excused himself to get out of his work clothes and to put on his freshest white shirt and khaki pants to properly meet visitors.
Augustine’s daughter brought out wooden folding chairs and we sat in the shade of a banana tree. One of Augustine’s fat hens clucked at us for invading the privacy of her yard, but then waddled off.
Augustine noted that my hair was grey, like his, and he joked about this being a meeting of two old men. He’s 65, a fact he had to double check by asking his daughter to bring his national identity card, which records his year of birth as 1942.
The new national identity cards, issued after the genocide, no longer list a citizen’s ethnicity. The old card system, which recorded Hutu, Tutsi or Twa as part of a person’s identity, was used by the extremists of the Hutu Power regime to target Tutsis for murder.Hutus and Tutsis share a common language and culture and so frequently intermarried that the arbitrary classification of ethnicity on a piece of paper was often the only thing to distinguish killers from the victims. This paradox is one of the reasons the events of 1994 are so hard to understand.
Francois chased the little kids away from the yard so that Augustine could tell his story with dignity and without the worry of youngsters having to hear about horrible murders.
Augustine had managed to save all of his immediate family members from slaughter. He had been well aware of the anti-Tutsi hate propaganda that had been broadcast for months by RTML, a radio station run by Hutu extremists. So on the night of April 7, when he heard the first radio reports that the president’s airplane had been shot down on its approach to the Kigali airport, Augustine knew there was going to be trouble for the Tutsis. Augustine, his wife and their two children left their house early the next morning and went into hiding.
He’s reluctant to provide details, partly because it is still a traumatic memory. But it’s also because Tutsis who were hidden by Hutus neighbours don’t want to expose their neighbours to risk. Hutus who had been found hiding Tutsis were often killed as an object lesson.
I asked Nelson to show Augustine my photo of the bodies of the old man and the young girl. Augustine gasped and averted eyes. Then he forced himself to look at it again, more closely. No, he didn’t know these people. At least he couldn’t identify them from the grainy old photo.
So many people had been killed in those days. It could have been any number of his neighbours.
But Augustine grabbed his wooden walking stick and led us down the road a couple of hundred metres to the house of another family of Tutsi survivors. There was a young man in this family who might have known the girl.
Elysee Haburemyi was just 11 at the time of the genocide. Now 25, he has built a new home for his mother and his siblings on the plot they had to flee in 1994. It’s a nice big house with a well-tended garden and a patio where his mother can sit and watch the birds in the morning. A hand-stitched embroidery work on the dining room wall reads “peace be in this house.”
Elysee’s father, Vital, had worked as a technician at a shortwave radio transmitting facility at the top of a nearby hill. Deutsche Welle, the German international shortwave service, had established the transmitting facility in this part of East Africa many decades ago. It is still there, its towers visible from the Haburemyi family’s front yard.
When the killings began, hundreds of Tutsis fled to the marshland and swamps below Kinyinya. Others went up the hill, seeking refuge at the fenced Deutsche Welle compound, a sprawling area with just a few buildings on the highest ground. At first, the German managers allowed anyone into the compound who could get there. But then the Hutu-led government army, the Forces armees rwandaises, or FAR, came and demanded the Tutsis. The FAR threatened to storm the facility with heavy machine guns. The German managers, fearing for their own lives, cut the best deal they could. They would be allowed to keep Vital Haburemyi’s family safely with them in the compound. Vital was their own one of their local employees who had managed to get his family inside the gates, ahead of the death squads. The other Tutsis inside had no formal link to DW or the facility. The Germans turned the other Tutsis over to the FAR and the Hutu youth gangs. Elysee thinks there may have been as many as 200 other Tutsis who were “expelled to be killed.”
Elysee, his father and mother, six brothers and two sisters were the only ones who could stay.
The genocide began in early April. At the same time, Tutsi-led forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front began to move south from Uganda into Rwanda to try to save Tutsis and seize power. Thus a civil war and a genocide raged at the same time. FAR and RPF soldiers fought a battle for the high ground around Kinyinya in late April. Sometime during the mayhem Vital was separated from his family and was slaughtered by FAR soldiers and a Hutu death squad, Elysee said. Elysee found his father’s body later.
Elysee held in his tears. I hesitated. But when he seemed composed I asked if he could look at my photograph. He agreed. No, he didn’t know these people. But he noted that the two bodies were in an open clearing of a banana grove. Most of the Tutsis in Kinyinya were killed inside their houses when the gangs broke down the doors.
This old man and the young girl might have been fleeing from another village when they were caught in the open by the death squads. They might not have been from Kinyinya at all, he said.
Elysee wanted to help me. I had come a long way. He had a friend, another young man his age, who might have known the girl.
He took us down the road to a tiny little place that dispensed Fanta, Primus beer, and goat kabobs that grandly called itself a restaurant, and he introduced us to his friend, Antoine Kabibi.
Antoine agreed to talk with us, but not here, not in public. There are things a Tutsi still does not dare to talk about within earshot of Hutu neighbours.
So, it was back up the road to Antoine’s house. He’s a gregarious young modern man, curious about my digital camera and wanting to know if my tape recorder could play MP3s like an IPod.
I steered the talk back to what had happened in 1994. Maybe his mother could help us?
We had heard her in the kitchen, but she had not made an appearance.
No, Antoine said. She couldn’t look at any photographs. She had been so traumatized by what had happened that Antoine was adamant he was not going to put her through another ordeal to try to identify dead bodies in an old photo. “I understand,” I said.
I suddenly had a painful insight into my own selfish actions. I came here unannounced, out of the blue, on a Sunday morning in June 2008. I came because I needed some kind of -I hate the word, but I can’t think of another- closure. But I came from Canada, a peaceful land. I didn’t lose members of my family. My own exposure to the Kinyinya massacre scene had been for just a few hours. How much more painful must it be for Antoine, his mother, and the other survivors who still must walk the dirt paths past the homes of those who had been slaughtered?
I figured it was time to pack up and move on, back into town. I might be doing harm. But Antoine was curious. He wanted to see the photo. He stunned me. “I know this place,” he said. “I saw this.” But there had been a third body there, he said, the naked body of a man.
He was right. There had been a horribly butchered body of a naked man in that clearing. I had framed the photo to exclude the third body.
Out of a sense of shame, or duty to the dead, or whatever, I did not photograph the naked man. There had been a line I could not cross. The old man had been wearing a jacket and pants. The young girl wore a red wool dress with white polka dots. Somehow, I could bring myself to photograph their bodies. But I could not capture the image of the naked man. I had suppressed the memory of the naked man for 14 years.
I had never told anyone about him.
No, Antoine said, he didn’t know who they were. But he could take me to the spot. He had walked past the spot in 1994, holding his mother’s hand, as Tutsis were being taken by the RPF to a hospital that the rebels had captured in fighting the previous day. There was still heavy fighting in the area and there was not enough time to bury the dead.
Antoine remembered the body of the girl. And the old man. But the image that had seared itself into his memory was the mutilated body of the naked man. He had never seen a naked adult body before, dead or alive.
Francois drove us to the location. It was actually about 500 metres further down the road than I had remembered. But when we arrived the pieces all fit. The raised dirt clearing, about a foot higher than the roadway. The row of sorghum plants on the edge of the clearing. The banana trees were bigger now. But this was the place.
Nelson had the camera. He photographed as Antoine and I huddled over my black and white print, standing on the spot where the bodies fell.
I gave Antoine a copy of the photograph to keep. He wanted to show it around. Maybe somebody else could identify these people. He took my cell phone number and e-mail address and gave me his.
I was still too stunned to think straight when Nelson came to my rescue, asking the journalist’s question I should have thought of.
Where would these bodies be buried now?
Gisozi. It’s a mass grave and a national memorial sight just seven kilometres away. The RPF, now the government of Rwanda, estimates that as many as 258,000 people are buried in the mass graves at Gisozi.
Many bodies were never identified before burial. But the bodies from Kinyinya were among those buried there when the 100-day genocide came to an end.
We had one more stop. Gisozi. Francois waited in the car. He had been to Gisozi before and didn’t want to see the graves again. There is still an open grave for the bodies that the Rwandan government continues to find in and around Kigali.
Armed national police officers were at the memorial park entrance, searching visitors for weapons. There had been a grenade attack at the memorial site this past April 7, the official anniversary of the start of the genocide. One police officer was killed and another wounded.
Many suspect the attack was launched by hardcore Hutu extremists.
Beautiful gardens surround the burial sites. There is a sign saying: “Please, don’t stand on the mass graves.” Nelson and I stood there for a long time, unable to speak or to look at each other.
When we returned to the car we found Francois listening to a soccer match between the national team of Rwanda and Ethiopia. It was an important qualifying match for World Cup competition and the score was tied.
We headed back to town, driving past Chez Lando, a night spot I had heard about. Nelson said he and his girlfriend, a university student, went there to dance. There’s live music on weekends. Francois said he took his wife there too, and we all laughed because Francois doesn’t seem to be the dancing type.
We neared the intersection where the traffic cops were still doing safety checks when the announcer’s voice on the car radio suddenly jumped two octaves as he screeched the news. Rwanda had scored a second goal and was in the lead late in the match. Francois started honking his horn. Other drivers, also obviously tuned into the game, joined in. The honking subsided as the match resumed. Then about ten minutes later the game was over. Rwanda won. The car horns blared again and drivers gave each other the high sign. Nelson, Francois and I whooped all the way down the hill.
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Jun 6
Voice for the Voiceless
One of the reasons I’m back here in Rwanda is guilt. Not just the generalized feeling of collective guilt all of us who were adults in 1994 should feel that the world community turned a blind eye to the genocide. My sense of guilt is personal. I feel it as a journalist. I was here in 1994 and I reported the slaughter. In the end it didn’t make much difference. So I failed. My tribe, journalists, failed to mobilize public opinion to end the killing. Even worse, many of my tribe, Rwandan journalists, participated in the genocide, spreading hate propaganda and broadcasting instructions over the radio to the killing squads.
So when I was offered the opportunity it seemed like a good idea to return here in 2008, to teach young journalists about the professional norms of journalism, the ethics, the humanitarian mission. But there are days when it seems like you’re getting nowhere.
I was deeply disturbed the other day when one of my students targeted a classmate with an ethnic slur. We were on a field trip to Kigali. In a moment of anger and jealousy, the culprit taunted the student, saying the innocent young man must think he is better than anyone else because “you come from Uganda.” This is racial code in Rwanda. It means “Tutsis think they are special. They are stuck up.” Tutsi refugee families indeed had settled in Uganda before 1994, and many have since come back. The taunt stung. It was unworthy of a future journalist who should be looking for ways to help heal the wounds suffered by his society. Who’s teaching these young people to hate? A report by Rwandan parliamentarians says ethnic hatred is still being learned by the young at home. I think it must be true.
The next morning I delivered an impromptu lecture on the evils of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and hoped some of my students would take the message home.
There are other days, however, when a journalist can feel he or she has made a concrete difference. I hope that Jean Hatzfeld, a journalist with the Paris-based paper Liberation, sees this so he can feel that satisfaction. Many years after the fact, his reportage made a big difference this week in the life of Jeanette Ayinkamiye, a Rwandan genocide survivor.
Jean Hatzfeld spent a lot of time in Rwanda in the late 1990s, collecting the stories of genocide survivors. His newspaper reports became a book, eventually published in English in 2000 under the title Life Laid Bare. Dr. Lin Piwowarczyk , a psychiatrist at Boston University who works with refugees and torture survivors, read the book and was moved by Jeanette’s story.
As a very young girl in 1994, Jeanette witnessed the butchering of her mother. Family members had fled their village for the marshes when the killings began. But the gangs found Jeanette’s mother. From her place of hiding under a pile of banana leaves, Jeanette heard her mother plead with the killers to finish her off with one swift machete blow. Instead, the men chopped off the mother’s arms and legs, leaving her to die slowly. Jeanette brought water to her mother and stayed with her until the end came three days later.
Lin Piwowarczyk works regularly with people from Africa at the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, but she had never been to the continent until this year. When the chance to visit a friend in Rwanda came along she grabbed it. I met Lin this morning. We ‘re staying at the same guest house in Kigali. Lin told me how she was so taken with Jean Hatzfeld’s moving account of Jeanette’s ordeal that she decided she needed to meet Jeanette. With the help of local people, she located the young woman a few days ago.
Jeanette is trying to eke out a living as a seamstress, mending clothing, in a market town not far from here. Lin bought Jeanette a sewing machine, her own machine. That gift will make a huge difference in Jeanette’s life, thanks to Lin. But hats off as well to Jean Hatzfeld. By giving a voice to the voiceless he made it possible for this big-hearted American woman and the Rwandan seamstress to connect.
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May 14
Press freedom?
This is a very interesting time for journalists in Rwanda. The minister of information had three troublesome journalists booted out of the room before her speech marking World Press Freedom Day on May 2. Yet Rwandans know this because the incident was reported in a state-owned newspaper. (Hey, I come from a country where the prime minister’s office wants to control who can ask questions at a news conference, because the PM gets irked at particular journalists, some from the state-owned broadcaster.)
The Rwandan Chamber of Deputies is debating a new press law that will require journalists to, in effect, be licensed by the government. To qualify for a press card a journalist would have to complete professional training, such as the undergraduate journalism program at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, where I am teaching an ethics course, or in-service training at the Great Lakes Media Centre in Kigali. Journalists will have three years to get the training. Many people in the business now do not have any professional training. I don’t see how all of them will be able to get that training in time. NUR and the GLMC have limited capacity.
I’m not sure how I feel about this press law. On the one hand, the situation is good news for my students and the others in the NUR journalism program. Media jobs are likely to open up for them. But I also bristle at the idea of any sort of media licensing. If a politician or a government bureaucrat has the authority to pull someone’s press card you have a system that is ripe for abuse. You don’t have an independent press.
I’ve always been of two minds about professional J-school training. I’m a graduate of the program at Kent State University in Ohio, and there isn’t a day that goes by in my working life that I don’t use a writing tool, or reporting technique that I first learned at Kent. But I have also worked with many outstanding journalists who have never spent a day inside a classroom of a J-school, or even a university for that matter. I would hate to see the lack of professional training become a bar to entry to the business in North America.
But Rwanda has a very sad and bloody history in which so-called independent journalists played a despicable role. Kangura, a newspaper that spewed racist hate messages from its pages in the early 1990s, was partly responsible for the development of a twisted “Hutu Power” ideology that became the backdrop for the 1994 genocide. Radio Libre des Milles Collines, a privately-owned broadcast outlet, actually provided tactical information and encouragement to the gangs of murderers who stalked Tutsi victims during those horrible hundred days of mayhem and civil war. Radio announcers read off lists of names of people who had been targeted for murder and broadcast the locations where they could be found. The media in Rwanda became a murder weapon.
So, I’m prepared to cut a lot of slack for a post-genocide government that’s worried about professional standards of journalism. I was here briefly in 1994, and the bloodshed I saw shook me. I’m glad to be back, teaching journalism ethics, in the hope that a new generation of Rwandan journalists will take a leading role in building a healthy democracy here, a country where a genocide like that of 1994 can never happen again.
Still, I am uneasy about the new press law and whether my students will be able to act independently and courageously if they have to worry that the government can pull their work papers.
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May 12
Weekend drive
A weekend drive in the countryside west of Butare is more than just a welcome diversion after my first week of teaching at the National University of Rwanda. It is an education in ecology and criminology.
My teaching colleague here with the Rwanda Initiative, the CBC’s Joan Leishman, and I took a road trip Saturday to a new mountain park about a two-hour drive from here to see monkeys. Our local driver, Akim, picked us up at 8 a.m. and we were no more than 20 minutes from town when we got the criminology lesson. Hundreds of prisoners were at work growing tea on a penal farm for those implicated – or allegedly implicated - in the 1994 genocide. Many of them have not yet had a trial. Rwandan officials say the numbers of suspects was so overwhelming after the 1994 civil war that they only now can see an end in sight to the backlog. So here are hundreds of guys – and a few women – wearing these bright pink prison work shirts and toiling away in the fields under a hot morning sun.
This actually represents progress, of sorts. When I was here last in 1996 during the refugee crisis men, women and even young children were locked up in terribly unhealthy and overcrowded prisons, waiting to sleep in shifts, and doing nothing much but trying to survive. Working outdoors sure beats that. Yet you have to wonder what waiting 14 years for a trial, with the possibility of a further sentence after that, does to the soul of someone who might be innocent. I haven’t seen anything in the local papers yet about the plight of the wrongly accused.
Akim works the five-speed gear box of his little Toyota madly as he passes transport trucks and mini-buses as we climb into the mountains. Traffic thins and then begins to disappear almost entirely as we approach a summit marking Africa’s continental divide. Rain falling on the east side of this mountain flows to the Nile and on the west it flows to the Congo, Africa’s two great rivers. When the skies are clear, as they are this morning, you can see as far as Lake Kivu and the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west and Burundi to the south.
We pay our fees and hire a guide at the park’s reception centre. We are the first visitors of the day. In fact we see only two other tourists all day, a pair of American nurses who are training Rwandan colleagues. The visitor’s book indicates this vast and beautiful park gets maybe a dozen or so visitors all week. But the reception centre is as spiffy as the one you would find along the Ice Fields Parkway between Jasper and Banff. There is a little souvenir stand selling local goods and – get this – the book Carleton’s own Allan Thompson edited about the role of the media in the 1994 genocide. Wish I could have had a distribution like that for my book.
(Pardon any typos. As I write this the lights keep going off. There’s a thunderstorm raging. And I thought the rainy season was over.)
Anyway, Clement, our guide, leads us on foot into the jungle. The trail is pretty clear for the first half-hour or so. Clement checks in with some of the park’s other rangers to find out where the monkey business is today. They report the current location of a massive troupe of about 400 black-and-white mountain monkeys. We saw one at the trailhead, and we could have just snapped the photo there and then, and had our picnic lunch. But no, we are serious trekkers and we want to see the whole colony.
They are gathered today on a far mountainside. Through the binoculars you can just make them out. But we are moving in closer, and headed off the trail into the jungle. Clements hacks away vines and other thick vegetation with his machete as he leads us down into a deep valley. We soon meet up with two of his colleagues who have hacked out a little lookout for us so we can sit and see the monkeys straight across from us on another steep slope. These guys range in size from babies to some that look as big as my golden retriever. There are hundreds of them. And viewing them was worth the effort it took to get there.
Akim is with us and he gets even closer, coming back with some remarkable images on his cell phone camera. He is showing them to us and just then his cell phone rings. Here we are perched on the side of a mountain in a tropical rain forest and he gets a call from his wife. Can he bring home some charcoal on his way back to town?
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Apr 28
Am I ready for this?
OTTAWA - I’m off to Rwanda today, the third time in my life. The first time I packed a flak jacket. There was a civil war going on in 1994, and a monstrous genocide that the world refused to acknowledge. Most of the Rwandans I encountered were on the run for their lives. In one mountain village there were only dead bodies, scores of them. There were no living witnesses to tell the tale.
In 1996, anticipating long days and nights in the field, I packed granola bars and other dry foods. In a pathetically inadequate gesture, I gave it away to Rwandan women and children who were among the tens of thousands of refugees returning from fetid camps in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many walked barefoot over jagged lava shards. On a damp Sunday morning I sat by the roadside with a woman who held her dead baby in her arms, a little girl. We waited for the men with the shovels, the burial detail from a United Nations agency.
My packing is more complicated this time. I’m not going as a newspaper correspondent. I’m going to teach journalism ethics to young people at the National University of Rwanda. This time I’m not thinking about what I need to pack for survival. I’m labouring over my choices of books and teaching materials. It’s hard to find published case studies that are culturally appropriate. The best stuff I’ve found is from the International Center for Journalists. They have a packet of cases illustrating ethical dilemmas facing journalists in developing countries. Only a couple of cases are from Africa, but the examples from Latin America should travel well.
But will I? An old white guy who only knows a couple of words of Kinyarwandan? What do I really know about the history and culture of my students? I will be teaching in English, which is the second, or even the third language of my students.
Alice Musabende and Jeff Sallot
Thank heavens for Alice Musabende, a very bright Rwandan woman who is completing the masters of journalism program at Carleton. I was her teacher this last term in a directed readings course. But I was also her student. We would sit in my office and gab at length about Rwandans and Canadians, how they are different, and how they are the same. Thank you,Alice. Still, I have so much to learn.
The first time I ever publicly displayed my photos of the massacre scene at the Rwandan village of Kinyinya was to a class of Carleton University journalism students a couple of months ago. The black and white photos, taken on May 2, 1994, are bloody and gruesome. The images have haunted me for 14 years. I never intended them for publication. With hindsight, that may have been a mistake. Maybe if the world had seen just how brutal the butchery was, just maybe, political leaders would have been forced to intervene to stop it. At the time I thought a reporter’s words could drive home the message, and there was no need to show the graphic details. I was also concerned about the sanctity of the dead. Maybe publishing their photos might be disrespectful. At any rate, the photos remained unpublished and the world community did not act to stanch the bloodshed.
So why had I bothered to take the photos? I took them because I thought I had to record these scenes for evidentiary reasons. Someday someone might try to deny there was a genocide here in Rwanda. I wanted to make sure there was proof that these things had taken place.
I brought the photos out one evening to share with Professor Allan Thompson’s class in conflict reporting. His students were preparing themselves for possible assignments as war correspondents. So there was a professional reason to share the images, and to discuss how you deal with the heartache and fear, yet still function professionally as a journalist.
One image had been particularly tragic. I described it this way in the story I filed for The Globe and Mail in early May of 1994:
KINYINYA VILLAGE, Rwanda — From the wounds and the way the bodies fell, it appeared that the old man had tried to protect the little girl from the machete blows.
He was on his back, his arms spread out wide. His chest was split open. The girl, probably no more than three years old, was face down near his side. The top of her head was gone.
“My God, who could do this?” Canadian Forces Maj. Jean-Guy Plante asked. In his 30 years as a military policeman and United Nations peacekeeper around the world, Plante said, he had never seen anything so horrible. “How could this happen?”
There was no answer. There were no survivors to tell the story. Only butchered bodies…
He was on his back, his arms spread out wide. His chest was split open. The girl, probably no more than three years old, was face down near his side. The top of her head was gone.
“My God, who could do this?” Canadian Forces Maj. Jean-Guy Plante asked. In his 30 years as a military policeman and United Nations peacekeeper around the world, Plante said, he had never seen anything so horrible. “How could this happen?”
There was no answer. There were no survivors to tell the story. Only butchered bodies…
As a reporter, I wanted to know what had happened here. As a human being I needed to understand.
Some of the bodies were bloated from the hot sun. But other physical evidence suggested to Maj. Plante that we had come upon a very recent crime scene. These people had been killed just a few days before.
Kinyinya was such a small place, high in the hills overlooking Kigali, the capital, that it wasn’t even on the maps used by the UN peacekeepers. The urban sprawl of the past decade now makes Kinyinya almost a suburb. A real estate ad in yesterday’s Sunday Times, a local English-language paper, offers a large plot of land on the main road into Kinyinya for 30-million Rwandan francs, roughly equivalent to $6,000.
I’ve been back in Kigali for almost a week now, teaching a night class in advanced news reporting at the African Great Lakes Media Centre, part of a journalism partnership program Carleton has with the National University of Rwanda. I wanted to get back to Kinyinya at the first opportunity. Francois, my driver, was going to a wedding on Saturday, my first day off. But he agreed to take me to Kinyinya on Sunday. Nelson Gatsimbazi, a young journalist who is one of my night-class students, came with us.
Heading out of town, we made a sharp left at an intersection that I had remembered from 1994. Major Plante and I had been stopped there briefly at a roadblock set up by a Hutu extremist youth gang, looking for Tutsis to kill. Four bodies were at the side of the road. The intersection now has a traffic light. There is a snack bar at the roadside next to a large billboard advertising the services of MTN, the South African cell phone company that has expanded into Rwanda in a big way. Two traffic cops in fluorescent green windbreakers were randomly checking cars for safety violations and registration papers.
Francois recognized one of the officers. He honked and waved at the man.
The road out of town is now paved almost all the way to Kinyinya. The last few uphill kilometres are still a rutted red-earth track, now turned to slick mud from a torrential rain Saturday night. Francois downshifted and we crawled along. The sight of a muzungu, a white foreigner, sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota sedan attracts attention. Little kids started calling out in their few words of French, “Bon jour! Bon jour!” Some of the older boys ran alongside the car. We stopped once to ask directions from a group of women on their way home from church.
Then suddenly we were there. I began to recognize some of the houses.
There has been a lot of rebuilding and new housing construction. But I saw a house on the left where I had found two bodies just inside the doorway. Then we came to a clearing where I thought I remembered seeing the body of the old man on his back and the little girl.
We stopped and told a young man who we were and why we had come. “This Canadian was here in 1994 and he wants to talk to people about what happened here,” Nelson explained. The young man directed us to the stucco and brick house of Augustine Karinda, a Tutsi survivor of the genocide and one of the oldest men in the town. He was still shovelling mud out of the entranceway to his house from the overflowing creek that runs through his property during the rainy season. He excused himself to get out of his work clothes and to put on his freshest white shirt and khaki pants to properly meet visitors.
Augustine’s daughter brought out wooden folding chairs and we sat in the shade of a banana tree. One of Augustine’s fat hens clucked at us for invading the privacy of her yard, but then waddled off.
Augustine noted that my hair was grey, like his, and he joked about this being a meeting of two old men. He’s 65, a fact he had to double check by asking his daughter to bring his national identity card, which records his year of birth as 1942.
The new national identity cards, issued after the genocide, no longer list a citizen’s ethnicity. The old card system, which recorded Hutu, Tutsi or Twa as part of a person’s identity, was used by the extremists of the Hutu Power regime to target Tutsis for murder.Hutus and Tutsis share a common language and culture and so frequently intermarried that the arbitrary classification of ethnicity on a piece of paper was often the only thing to distinguish killers from the victims. This paradox is one of the reasons the events of 1994 are so hard to understand.
Francois chased the little kids away from the yard so that Augustine could tell his story with dignity and without the worry of youngsters having to hear about horrible murders.
Augustine had managed to save all of his immediate family members from slaughter. He had been well aware of the anti-Tutsi hate propaganda that had been broadcast for months by RTML, a radio station run by Hutu extremists. So on the night of April 7, when he heard the first radio reports that the president’s airplane had been shot down on its approach to the Kigali airport, Augustine knew there was going to be trouble for the Tutsis. Augustine, his wife and their two children left their house early the next morning and went into hiding.
He’s reluctant to provide details, partly because it is still a traumatic memory. But it’s also because Tutsis who were hidden by Hutus neighbours don’t want to expose their neighbours to risk. Hutus who had been found hiding Tutsis were often killed as an object lesson.
I asked Nelson to show Augustine my photo of the bodies of the old man and the young girl. Augustine gasped and averted eyes. Then he forced himself to look at it again, more closely. No, he didn’t know these people. At least he couldn’t identify them from the grainy old photo.
So many people had been killed in those days. It could have been any number of his neighbours.
But Augustine grabbed his wooden walking stick and led us down the road a couple of hundred metres to the house of another family of Tutsi survivors. There was a young man in this family who might have known the girl.
Elysee Haburemyi was just 11 at the time of the genocide. Now 25, he has built a new home for his mother and his siblings on the plot they had to flee in 1994. It’s a nice big house with a well-tended garden and a patio where his mother can sit and watch the birds in the morning. A hand-stitched embroidery work on the dining room wall reads “peace be in this house.”
Elysee’s father, Vital, had worked as a technician at a shortwave radio transmitting facility at the top of a nearby hill. Deutsche Welle, the German international shortwave service, had established the transmitting facility in this part of East Africa many decades ago. It is still there, its towers visible from the Haburemyi family’s front yard.
When the killings began, hundreds of Tutsis fled to the marshland and swamps below Kinyinya. Others went up the hill, seeking refuge at the fenced Deutsche Welle compound, a sprawling area with just a few buildings on the highest ground. At first, the German managers allowed anyone into the compound who could get there. But then the Hutu-led government army, the Forces armees rwandaises, or FAR, came and demanded the Tutsis. The FAR threatened to storm the facility with heavy machine guns. The German managers, fearing for their own lives, cut the best deal they could. They would be allowed to keep Vital Haburemyi’s family safely with them in the compound. Vital was their own one of their local employees who had managed to get his family inside the gates, ahead of the death squads. The other Tutsis inside had no formal link to DW or the facility. The Germans turned the other Tutsis over to the FAR and the Hutu youth gangs. Elysee thinks there may have been as many as 200 other Tutsis who were “expelled to be killed.”
Elysee, his father and mother, six brothers and two sisters were the only ones who could stay.
The genocide began in early April. At the same time, Tutsi-led forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front began to move south from Uganda into Rwanda to try to save Tutsis and seize power. Thus a civil war and a genocide raged at the same time. FAR and RPF soldiers fought a battle for the high ground around Kinyinya in late April. Sometime during the mayhem Vital was separated from his family and was slaughtered by FAR soldiers and a Hutu death squad, Elysee said. Elysee found his father’s body later.
Elysee held in his tears. I hesitated. But when he seemed composed I asked if he could look at my photograph. He agreed. No, he didn’t know these people. But he noted that the two bodies were in an open clearing of a banana grove. Most of the Tutsis in Kinyinya were killed inside their houses when the gangs broke down the doors.
This old man and the young girl might have been fleeing from another village when they were caught in the open by the death squads. They might not have been from Kinyinya at all, he said.
Elysee wanted to help me. I had come a long way. He had a friend, another young man his age, who might have known the girl.
He took us down the road to a tiny little place that dispensed Fanta, Primus beer, and goat kabobs that grandly called itself a restaurant, and he introduced us to his friend, Antoine Kabibi.
Antoine agreed to talk with us, but not here, not in public. There are things a Tutsi still does not dare to talk about within earshot of Hutu neighbours.
So, it was back up the road to Antoine’s house. He’s a gregarious young modern man, curious about my digital camera and wanting to know if my tape recorder could play MP3s like an IPod.
I steered the talk back to what had happened in 1994. Maybe his mother could help us?
We had heard her in the kitchen, but she had not made an appearance.
No, Antoine said. She couldn’t look at any photographs. She had been so traumatized by what had happened that Antoine was adamant he was not going to put her through another ordeal to try to identify dead bodies in an old photo. “I understand,” I said.
I suddenly had a painful insight into my own selfish actions. I came here unannounced, out of the blue, on a Sunday morning in June 2008. I came because I needed some kind of -I hate the word, but I can’t think of another- closure. But I came from Canada, a peaceful land. I didn’t lose members of my family. My own exposure to the Kinyinya massacre scene had been for just a few hours. How much more painful must it be for Antoine, his mother, and the other survivors who still must walk the dirt paths past the homes of those who had been slaughtered?
I figured it was time to pack up and move on, back into town. I might be doing harm. But Antoine was curious. He wanted to see the photo. He stunned me. “I know this place,” he said. “I saw this.” But there had been a third body there, he said, the naked body of a man.
He was right. There had been a horribly butchered body of a naked man in that clearing. I had framed the photo to exclude the third body.
Out of a sense of shame, or duty to the dead, or whatever, I did not photograph the naked man. There had been a line I could not cross. The old man had been wearing a jacket and pants. The young girl wore a red wool dress with white polka dots. Somehow, I could bring myself to photograph their bodies. But I could not capture the image of the naked man. I had suppressed the memory of the naked man for 14 years.
I had never told anyone about him.
No, Antoine said, he didn’t know who they were. But he could take me to the spot. He had walked past the spot in 1994, holding his mother’s hand, as Tutsis were being taken by the RPF to a hospital that the rebels had captured in fighting the previous day. There was still heavy fighting in the area and there was not enough time to bury the dead.
Antoine remembered the body of the girl. And the old man. But the image that had seared itself into his memory was the mutilated body of the naked man. He had never seen a naked adult body before, dead or alive.
Francois drove us to the location. It was actually about 500 metres further down the road than I had remembered. But when we arrived the pieces all fit. The raised dirt clearing, about a foot higher than the roadway. The row of sorghum plants on the edge of the clearing. The banana trees were bigger now. But this was the place.
Nelson had the camera. He photographed as Antoine and I huddled over my black and white print, standing on the spot where the bodies fell.
I gave Antoine a copy of the photograph to keep. He wanted to show it around. Maybe somebody else could identify these people. He took my cell phone number and e-mail address and gave me his.
I was still too stunned to think straight when Nelson came to my rescue, asking the journalist’s question I should have thought of.
Where would these bodies be buried now?
Gisozi. It’s a mass grave and a national memorial sight just seven kilometres away. The RPF, now the government of Rwanda, estimates that as many as 258,000 people are buried in the mass graves at Gisozi.
Many bodies were never identified before burial. But the bodies from Kinyinya were among those buried there when the 100-day genocide came to an end.
We had one more stop. Gisozi. Francois waited in the car. He had been to Gisozi before and didn’t want to see the graves again. There is still an open grave for the bodies that the Rwandan government continues to find in and around Kigali.
Armed national police officers were at the memorial park entrance, searching visitors for weapons. There had been a grenade attack at the memorial site this past April 7, the official anniversary of the start of the genocide. One police officer was killed and another wounded.
Many suspect the attack was launched by hardcore Hutu extremists.
Beautiful gardens surround the burial sites. There is a sign saying: “Please, don’t stand on the mass graves.” Nelson and I stood there for a long time, unable to speak or to look at each other.
When we returned to the car we found Francois listening to a soccer match between the national team of Rwanda and Ethiopia. It was an important qualifying match for World Cup competition and the score was tied.
We headed back to town, driving past Chez Lando, a night spot I had heard about. Nelson said he and his girlfriend, a university student, went there to dance. There’s live music on weekends. Francois said he took his wife there too, and we all laughed because Francois doesn’t seem to be the dancing type.
We neared the intersection where the traffic cops were still doing safety checks when the announcer’s voice on the car radio suddenly jumped two octaves as he screeched the news. Rwanda had scored a second goal and was in the lead late in the match. Francois started honking his horn. Other drivers, also obviously tuned into the game, joined in. The honking subsided as the match resumed. Then about ten minutes later the game was over. Rwanda won. The car horns blared again and drivers gave each other the high sign. Nelson, Francois and I whooped all the way down the hill.
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Jun 6
Voice for the Voiceless
One of the reasons I’m back here in Rwanda is guilt. Not just the generalized feeling of collective guilt all of us who were adults in 1994 should feel that the world community turned a blind eye to the genocide. My sense of guilt is personal. I feel it as a journalist. I was here in 1994 and I reported the slaughter. In the end it didn’t make much difference. So I failed. My tribe, journalists, failed to mobilize public opinion to end the killing. Even worse, many of my tribe, Rwandan journalists, participated in the genocide, spreading hate propaganda and broadcasting instructions over the radio to the killing squads.
So when I was offered the opportunity it seemed like a good idea to return here in 2008, to teach young journalists about the professional norms of journalism, the ethics, the humanitarian mission. But there are days when it seems like you’re getting nowhere.
I was deeply disturbed the other day when one of my students targeted a classmate with an ethnic slur. We were on a field trip to Kigali. In a moment of anger and jealousy, the culprit taunted the student, saying the innocent young man must think he is better than anyone else because “you come from Uganda.” This is racial code in Rwanda. It means “Tutsis think they are special. They are stuck up.” Tutsi refugee families indeed had settled in Uganda before 1994, and many have since come back. The taunt stung. It was unworthy of a future journalist who should be looking for ways to help heal the wounds suffered by his society. Who’s teaching these young people to hate? A report by Rwandan parliamentarians says ethnic hatred is still being learned by the young at home. I think it must be true.
The next morning I delivered an impromptu lecture on the evils of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and hoped some of my students would take the message home.
There are other days, however, when a journalist can feel he or she has made a concrete difference. I hope that Jean Hatzfeld, a journalist with the Paris-based paper Liberation, sees this so he can feel that satisfaction. Many years after the fact, his reportage made a big difference this week in the life of Jeanette Ayinkamiye, a Rwandan genocide survivor.
Jean Hatzfeld spent a lot of time in Rwanda in the late 1990s, collecting the stories of genocide survivors. His newspaper reports became a book, eventually published in English in 2000 under the title Life Laid Bare. Dr. Lin Piwowarczyk , a psychiatrist at Boston University who works with refugees and torture survivors, read the book and was moved by Jeanette’s story.
As a very young girl in 1994, Jeanette witnessed the butchering of her mother. Family members had fled their village for the marshes when the killings began. But the gangs found Jeanette’s mother. From her place of hiding under a pile of banana leaves, Jeanette heard her mother plead with the killers to finish her off with one swift machete blow. Instead, the men chopped off the mother’s arms and legs, leaving her to die slowly. Jeanette brought water to her mother and stayed with her until the end came three days later.
Lin Piwowarczyk works regularly with people from Africa at the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, but she had never been to the continent until this year. When the chance to visit a friend in Rwanda came along she grabbed it. I met Lin this morning. We ‘re staying at the same guest house in Kigali. Lin told me how she was so taken with Jean Hatzfeld’s moving account of Jeanette’s ordeal that she decided she needed to meet Jeanette. With the help of local people, she located the young woman a few days ago.
Jeanette is trying to eke out a living as a seamstress, mending clothing, in a market town not far from here. Lin bought Jeanette a sewing machine, her own machine. That gift will make a huge difference in Jeanette’s life, thanks to Lin. But hats off as well to Jean Hatzfeld. By giving a voice to the voiceless he made it possible for this big-hearted American woman and the Rwandan seamstress to connect.
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May 14
Press freedom?
This is a very interesting time for journalists in Rwanda. The minister of information had three troublesome journalists booted out of the room before her speech marking World Press Freedom Day on May 2. Yet Rwandans know this because the incident was reported in a state-owned newspaper. (Hey, I come from a country where the prime minister’s office wants to control who can ask questions at a news conference, because the PM gets irked at particular journalists, some from the state-owned broadcaster.)
The Rwandan Chamber of Deputies is debating a new press law that will require journalists to, in effect, be licensed by the government. To qualify for a press card a journalist would have to complete professional training, such as the undergraduate journalism program at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, where I am teaching an ethics course, or in-service training at the Great Lakes Media Centre in Kigali. Journalists will have three years to get the training. Many people in the business now do not have any professional training. I don’t see how all of them will be able to get that training in time. NUR and the GLMC have limited capacity.
I’m not sure how I feel about this press law. On the one hand, the situation is good news for my students and the others in the NUR journalism program. Media jobs are likely to open up for them. But I also bristle at the idea of any sort of media licensing. If a politician or a government bureaucrat has the authority to pull someone’s press card you have a system that is ripe for abuse. You don’t have an independent press.
I’ve always been of two minds about professional J-school training. I’m a graduate of the program at Kent State University in Ohio, and there isn’t a day that goes by in my working life that I don’t use a writing tool, or reporting technique that I first learned at Kent. But I have also worked with many outstanding journalists who have never spent a day inside a classroom of a J-school, or even a university for that matter. I would hate to see the lack of professional training become a bar to entry to the business in North America.
But Rwanda has a very sad and bloody history in which so-called independent journalists played a despicable role. Kangura, a newspaper that spewed racist hate messages from its pages in the early 1990s, was partly responsible for the development of a twisted “Hutu Power” ideology that became the backdrop for the 1994 genocide. Radio Libre des Milles Collines, a privately-owned broadcast outlet, actually provided tactical information and encouragement to the gangs of murderers who stalked Tutsi victims during those horrible hundred days of mayhem and civil war. Radio announcers read off lists of names of people who had been targeted for murder and broadcast the locations where they could be found. The media in Rwanda became a murder weapon.
So, I’m prepared to cut a lot of slack for a post-genocide government that’s worried about professional standards of journalism. I was here briefly in 1994, and the bloodshed I saw shook me. I’m glad to be back, teaching journalism ethics, in the hope that a new generation of Rwandan journalists will take a leading role in building a healthy democracy here, a country where a genocide like that of 1994 can never happen again.
Still, I am uneasy about the new press law and whether my students will be able to act independently and courageously if they have to worry that the government can pull their work papers.
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May 12
Weekend drive
A weekend drive in the countryside west of Butare is more than just a welcome diversion after my first week of teaching at the National University of Rwanda. It is an education in ecology and criminology.
My teaching colleague here with the Rwanda Initiative, the CBC’s Joan Leishman, and I took a road trip Saturday to a new mountain park about a two-hour drive from here to see monkeys. Our local driver, Akim, picked us up at 8 a.m. and we were no more than 20 minutes from town when we got the criminology lesson. Hundreds of prisoners were at work growing tea on a penal farm for those implicated – or allegedly implicated - in the 1994 genocide. Many of them have not yet had a trial. Rwandan officials say the numbers of suspects was so overwhelming after the 1994 civil war that they only now can see an end in sight to the backlog. So here are hundreds of guys – and a few women – wearing these bright pink prison work shirts and toiling away in the fields under a hot morning sun.
This actually represents progress, of sorts. When I was here last in 1996 during the refugee crisis men, women and even young children were locked up in terribly unhealthy and overcrowded prisons, waiting to sleep in shifts, and doing nothing much but trying to survive. Working outdoors sure beats that. Yet you have to wonder what waiting 14 years for a trial, with the possibility of a further sentence after that, does to the soul of someone who might be innocent. I haven’t seen anything in the local papers yet about the plight of the wrongly accused.
Akim works the five-speed gear box of his little Toyota madly as he passes transport trucks and mini-buses as we climb into the mountains. Traffic thins and then begins to disappear almost entirely as we approach a summit marking Africa’s continental divide. Rain falling on the east side of this mountain flows to the Nile and on the west it flows to the Congo, Africa’s two great rivers. When the skies are clear, as they are this morning, you can see as far as Lake Kivu and the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west and Burundi to the south.
We pay our fees and hire a guide at the park’s reception centre. We are the first visitors of the day. In fact we see only two other tourists all day, a pair of American nurses who are training Rwandan colleagues. The visitor’s book indicates this vast and beautiful park gets maybe a dozen or so visitors all week. But the reception centre is as spiffy as the one you would find along the Ice Fields Parkway between Jasper and Banff. There is a little souvenir stand selling local goods and – get this – the book Carleton’s own Allan Thompson edited about the role of the media in the 1994 genocide. Wish I could have had a distribution like that for my book.
(Pardon any typos. As I write this the lights keep going off. There’s a thunderstorm raging. And I thought the rainy season was over.)
Anyway, Clement, our guide, leads us on foot into the jungle. The trail is pretty clear for the first half-hour or so. Clement checks in with some of the park’s other rangers to find out where the monkey business is today. They report the current location of a massive troupe of about 400 black-and-white mountain monkeys. We saw one at the trailhead, and we could have just snapped the photo there and then, and had our picnic lunch. But no, we are serious trekkers and we want to see the whole colony.
They are gathered today on a far mountainside. Through the binoculars you can just make them out. But we are moving in closer, and headed off the trail into the jungle. Clements hacks away vines and other thick vegetation with his machete as he leads us down into a deep valley. We soon meet up with two of his colleagues who have hacked out a little lookout for us so we can sit and see the monkeys straight across from us on another steep slope. These guys range in size from babies to some that look as big as my golden retriever. There are hundreds of them. And viewing them was worth the effort it took to get there.
Akim is with us and he gets even closer, coming back with some remarkable images on his cell phone camera. He is showing them to us and just then his cell phone rings. Here we are perched on the side of a mountain in a tropical rain forest and he gets a call from his wife. Can he bring home some charcoal on his way back to town?
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Apr 28
Am I ready for this?
OTTAWA - I’m off to Rwanda today, the third time in my life. The first time I packed a flak jacket. There was a civil war going on in 1994, and a monstrous genocide that the world refused to acknowledge. Most of the Rwandans I encountered were on the run for their lives. In one mountain village there were only dead bodies, scores of them. There were no living witnesses to tell the tale.
In 1996, anticipating long days and nights in the field, I packed granola bars and other dry foods. In a pathetically inadequate gesture, I gave it away to Rwandan women and children who were among the tens of thousands of refugees returning from fetid camps in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many walked barefoot over jagged lava shards. On a damp Sunday morning I sat by the roadside with a woman who held her dead baby in her arms, a little girl. We waited for the men with the shovels, the burial detail from a United Nations agency.
My packing is more complicated this time. I’m not going as a newspaper correspondent. I’m going to teach journalism ethics to young people at the National University of Rwanda. This time I’m not thinking about what I need to pack for survival. I’m labouring over my choices of books and teaching materials. It’s hard to find published case studies that are culturally appropriate. The best stuff I’ve found is from the International Center for Journalists. They have a packet of cases illustrating ethical dilemmas facing journalists in developing countries. Only a couple of cases are from Africa, but the examples from Latin America should travel well.
But will I? An old white guy who only knows a couple of words of Kinyarwandan? What do I really know about the history and culture of my students? I will be teaching in English, which is the second, or even the third language of my students.
Alice Musabende and Jeff Sallot
Thank heavens for Alice Musabende, a very bright Rwandan woman who is completing the masters of journalism program at Carleton. I was her teacher this last term in a directed readings course. But I was also her student. We would sit in my office and gab at length about Rwandans and Canadians, how they are different, and how they are the same. Thank you,Alice. Still, I have so much to learn.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Is this another time waster?
Okay, I've just spent an hour setting up this blog and I'll be damned if I have any profound thoughts to share with anyone. Maybe because it's late and I'm tired. Stay tuned.
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