I’m no Rwanda expert. I’ve only been there once, for about 3 weeks. I worked with a group of about 10 Rwandese, most of them in their early 20s, and a couple in their mid 30s to 40s.

During those 3 weeks we worked hard, but my oh my did we also party. M. was a big fan of Waragi with passion fruit juice. Every day around 5, she’d start in and eventually the rest of us would join her. Waragi is Ugandan rum, with the fame that you can drink and drink, and you don’t get a hangover. That’s what most of us did. It was one of the best times of my life, drinking, joking, dancing, and working with this group of beautiful people.

As I sat with them all in meetings or at meals, everyone sharing jokes together, I couldn’t help but wonder: who’s who? I’d seen Hotel Rwanda. I’d read about the horrific genocide that had happened about 15 years earlier. I knew that everyone I was working with had been somehow affected, that they’d all been caught in the middle of it at some point. It seemed like an incredible feat for them to be working together, sitting around a table together, talking about working against genocide mentality, when they must have been pitted against each other,[...]

[Published in AidBlogs - Read the original article]