Rwanda to Congo

Goma, Congo
Sunday, August 12, 2007

It has been a really, really, (did I say really) long journey to get here. It’s 10 PM on Sunday night and the trip that started at 10 AM on Thursday morning at San Francisco International Airport is finished. We’re in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo! Amazing! We arrived in Kigali, Rwanda on Saturday morning after flying overnight from SFO to London. Then overnight (again) to Nairobi, Kenya and then a short flight to Kigali where we spent the night at the Gorilla Hotel (after enjoying a platter full of goat meat - it was really good).

On Sunday morning we checked out of our hotel and drove to the Genocide museum that is a memorial to the catastrophe that took place in Rwanda. The museum is more than just that. It’s also a burial ground for an estimated 280,000 people who were massacred in 1994. Our guide told us that 1.7 million people died in a little over 100 days (that is a number almost twice as high as I had ever heard before). Either number (800,000 or 1,700,000) would be (should be) staggering to us. I found the museum deeply moving. My conversation with our guide (who lost most of his family in the genocide) gave me some hope for the future of Rwanda. He is a young man with a dream for his future. I met others in Rwanda who encouraged a similar hopefulness.

After leaving the museum we headed for the border (about a 3-hour drive) in 2 vans. It was the Rwandan version of Mt. Toad’s Wild Ride. Melissa Ho, who is a member of our team and has been in Africa for 3 months and has had numerous experiences in vans on this continent, said that she likes riding in the back row of the van so she won’t be able to watch what’s coming at us out the front window. I could not believe how close we came to people walking along the road as our little two-van caravan hurtled across Rwanda. We arrived at the Congo-Rwanda border at about 4:30 PM and started the hour-long process of exiting Rwanda and entering the DRC. We walked across the border as our luggage was driven in one of the vans. After getting visas for two of our team members we were finally in the DRC.

We met Harper and Melissa from HEAL Africa (who came to the border to pick us up) and started our short drive to the home of Jo and Lyn Lusi (where we’ll be staying for the next 9 days). What a dramatic contrast to Rwanda, a country awash in what one person has described as “guilt money”. For the most part the roads in Rwanda are paved (not entirely as we found out on our trip to the border). The DR Congo is the size of Western Europe and has 300 miles of paved roads.

How do I describe Goma? Here are some words that came to mind in those first few minutes on this side of the border: wild, chaotic, energizing, out of control, destroyed, broken, burned. In many ways it’s similar to other developing countries I’ve been in. I’ve been on roads in Honduras that are just as rough but those roads weren’t the result of lava that flowed to the height of a one-story building. Goma is an intense place that really needs people to care about what it has experienced and continues to go through. I guess that has something to do with why we’re here. God help us have your eyes and your heart as we open our lives to the Congolese people and the city of Goma.