How to Approach Forgiving Genocide in Rwanda: A Traveler’s Honest Narrative

🌍 The First Word Was 'No'

I stood barefoot on damp red earth outside Nyamata Church at 7:42 a.m., the air thick with frangipani and something quieter — the weight of silence so deep it vibrated in my molars. A woman named Chantal, her hands folded over a woven basket, looked at me and said, ‘You cannot forgive genocide. You can only learn how people live alongside it.’ That was my first lesson in Rwanda — not about reconciliation as a destination, but as a daily, unglamorous practice. How to approach forgiving genocide in Rwanda isn’t about closure or catharsis; it’s about showing up with humility, staying long enough to listen past the official narratives, and accepting that some questions have no answer — only presence.

✈️ The Setup: Why I Went — and Why It Felt Like a Mistake

I arrived in Kigali in late March 2023, just weeks before the 29th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. My intent was honest but shallow: I wanted to ‘understand’ Rwanda — to reconcile the country’s reputation for meticulous order, stunning landscapes, and post-genocide progress with the unbearable scale of what happened. I’d read Philip Gourevitch, watched Hotel Rwanda, skimmed UN reports. I thought knowledge equaled readiness.

I booked a three-day guided tour focused on memorial sites — Nyamata, Ntarama, Gisozi — assuming structured visits would provide clarity. My itinerary included gorilla trekking in Volcanoes National Park, a nod to ‘balance’: tragedy and triumph, grief and wonder. I carried a notebook, a wide-brimmed hat, and the quiet confidence of someone who’d traveled solo across Southeast Asia and thought trauma could be navigated like a bus schedule.

Kigali greeted me with clean streets, orderly traffic, and a humidity so dense it clung like wet gauze. At the airport, a customs officer scanned my passport, smiled faintly, and stamped it without comment. No questions about purpose. No probing glances. Just efficiency — the kind that felt less like bureaucracy and more like boundary-setting. I didn’t yet know how much that silence would echo.

🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Failed Me

The first memorial visit was Nyamata. I’d read about the church — how over 10,000 people sought refuge there, how the Interahamwe broke in with machetes and grenades, how blood still stains the floorboards beneath pews draped in white cloth. What I hadn’t prepared for was the smell: not decay — that had long since surrendered to time — but the sharp, medicinal tang of antiseptic layered over centuries-old stone dust and dried frangipani petals scattered by wind through broken stained-glass windows.

I walked behind our guide, Jean-Paul, a man in his late 40s whose voice never rose above a steady murmur. He pointed to bullet holes in the ceiling — ‘not from soldiers. From neighbors who climbed the roof.’ He gestured to a child’s shoe, preserved behind glass — ‘found under the altar. Size 22.’ I wrote it down. Then he paused, turned, and asked, ‘Do you know why we keep the shoes?’ I shook my head. ‘So no one forgets they were children. Not symbols. Not statistics. Children who wore shoes.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Not from horror — though that was present — but from disorientation. My mental map of ‘genocide tourism’ had no coordinates for this: no dramatic music, no timed audio loops, no designated reflection zones. Just quiet, precise facts delivered without flourish, and space — vast, unstructured space — left for me to inhabit. I realized I’d come seeking answers, but Rwanda offered only questions — and demanded I hold them differently.

📸 The Discovery: People Who Refused to Be Footnotes

Two days later, I met Chantal at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village outside Kigali — a residential community for orphans of the genocide, founded in part by Holocaust survivor Anne Heyman. She was 32, a biology teacher, and a survivor. Her parents and four siblings were killed in April 1994. She’d been 3 years old, hidden in a well by a Hutu neighbor who later testified at the Gacaca courts.

We sat on plastic chairs beneath a jacaranda tree, its purple blossoms littering the ground like spilled ink. She stirred sugar into her tea — three cubes — and said, ‘When foreigners ask me how I forgive, I tell them: I don’t forgive the act. I forgive myself for surviving when others didn’t. That is the work.’

She showed me photos on her phone: her students holding science fair projects, a mural they painted of DNA strands and baobab trees, a graduation ceremony where every graduate wore a white robe and carried a single candle. ‘Reconciliation here isn’t saying “it’s okay.” It’s saying “I will not let what happened stop me from teaching photosynthesis. Or planting cassava. Or laughing with my cousin — who was in prison for 12 years.”’

Later, I visited a cooperative of women weavers in Nyabihu District. Most were survivors; several were perpetrators’ wives or daughters. They worked side-by-side at looms, fingers flying, laughter erupting over dropped threads. One woman, Marie, showed me how to tie a knot in indigo-dyed raffia. Her hands were scarred — ‘from pulling my baby brother out of a ditch,’ she said simply. ‘He lived. I carry him in my hands every day.’

There were no speeches. No forced unity. Just shared rhythm — the shuttle clicking, the scent of boiled cassava leaves, the way sunlight caught dust motes above the loom. I learned that forgiveness in Rwanda wasn’t performed. It was woven — slowly, unevenly, stitch by imperfect stitch.

🚌 The Journey Continues: Beyond the Memorials

I extended my stay by five days. Not to see more sites — I’d already visited Gisozi, the national memorial where 250,000 victims are buried — but to move slower. I took the local Matatu bus from Kigali to Rubavu (formerly Gisenyi) on Lake Kivu. It cost 3,000 RWF (≈$3 USD), rattled violently over potholes, and stopped every 500 meters for passengers selling passion fruit, roasted maize, or hand-stitched keychains shaped like coffee beans.

In Rubavu, I stayed at a family-run guesthouse run by Emmanuel and Solange. Their home overlooked the lake, its surface shimmering under afternoon sun, boats bobbing like blue-green beetles. Over shared meals of ibitoke (plantains) and akabenz (local beer), they spoke of rebuilding — not as a slogan, but as concrete labor: re-terracing hillsides eroded by war, replanting coffee on slopes where bodies had lain, learning accounting so cooperatives could export directly instead of through middlemen.

One morning, Emmanuel drove me to a hilltop village where residents were installing solar panels on their homes — funded by a Belgian NGO, yes, but managed entirely by a local committee elected by consensus. ‘We don’t want pity,’ he said, wiping grease from his hands. ‘We want partnership. And time. Time to decide what partnership means.’

I began noticing small things: how shopkeepers refused to accept tips unless offered twice; how schoolchildren recited poetry about unity in Kinyarwanda, French, and English — not as propaganda, but as muscle memory; how the national anthem, played daily at 7 a.m. on radio stations, held a pause — exactly three seconds — after the line ‘twese hamwe’ (‘all together’) — a space for breath, for memory, for choice.

💡 Reflection: What This Experience Taught Me About Travel and Myself

This trip dismantled my assumptions about ethical travel. I’d believed preparation meant reading, budgeting, booking responsibly. But true preparation required unlearning: unlearning the idea that understanding trauma is linear; unlearning the expectation that ‘impact’ must be measurable; unlearning the traveler’s privilege to extract meaning while remaining emotionally untethered.

Rwanda taught me that respect isn’t passive observation — it’s active restraint. It’s declining the photo op at a memorial site because the light feels exploitative. It’s asking permission before sketching a survivor’s hands. It’s sitting through an hour-long silence in a Gacaca court archive room, even when your legs ache, because that silence belongs to someone else’s history — not your narrative arc.

I also learned the danger of conflating resilience with resolution. Rwanda is not ‘healed.’ It is actively, exhaustingly, tenderly healing — and that process resists tourism’s demand for tidy endings. My role wasn’t to witness recovery, but to witness the conditions that make recovery possible: consistent rain on newly planted tea bushes, the sound of a generator powering a health clinic at midnight, the weight of a student’s notebook filled with equations — not essays about genocide.

📝 Practical Takeaways: What Readers Can Apply to Their Own Travels

These insights emerged not from brochures, but from missteps and corrections:

• 💡Timing matters deeply. Avoid visiting memorial sites during the Kwibuka (commemoration) period (April–July) unless you’ve secured advance permission and understand the emotional gravity. Many sites close for private ceremonies; guides may decline bookings. I learned this the hard way when Nyamata turned away my group on April 7 — a date reserved for survivor-led vigils.
• 🤝Choose local guides deliberately. Not all licensed guides are trained in trauma-informed interpretation. Ask operators: ‘Does your guide have personal ties to the sites? Are they certified by the Aegis Trust or Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy?’ I switched to a guide recommended by the Kigali Genocide Memorial’s education team — his father had testified at Gacaca, and he carried survivor testimonies in his own handwriting, not printed scripts.
• 🌄Balance is logistical, not moral. Gorilla trekking isn’t ‘redemption’ for visiting memorials. It’s a separate ecological and economic commitment. Permits cost $1,500 USD and fund conservation — but also require physical stamina and strict hygiene protocols (no trekking if you have a cold). I spent two full days acclimatizing in Musanze before trekking, not for scenery, but because respiratory illness poses real risk to endangered mountain gorillas 1.
• 🍜Eat where locals eat — literally. In Kigali, I avoided ‘authentic’ themed restaurants and ate at mama mboga (vegetable vendor) stalls near Kimisagara Market. A plate of isombe (cassava leaves with eggplant) cost 2,500 RWF ($2.50). Payment was always in cash; cards rarely worked. Vendors taught me Kinyarwanda phrases — ‘murakoze cyane’ (thank you very much) — not as souvenir chatter, but as necessary transactional language.
• 📚Read before you go — but leave space for contradiction. I read Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza and Stronger Than Death by Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya — both powerful, both contested by Rwandan scholars for narrative simplification 2. I carried those tensions, not as flaws, but as evidence that memory itself is contested terrain.

🌅 Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective

I left Rwanda carrying no souvenirs — no carved wooden masks, no ‘Never Again’ bracelets. Instead, I carried Chantal’s three sugar cubes dissolving in my memory, the rhythmic click of looms in Nyabihu, the exact shade of red in volcanic soil near Musanze, and the unwavering certainty that how to approach forgiving genocide in Rwanda begins not with grand gestures, but with small, sustained acts of attention: listening longer than feels comfortable, asking fewer questions and holding more silence, returning to the same place twice — not for photos, but to notice what changed in the light.

Travel didn’t give me answers. It gave me better questions — and the humility to sit with them. Rwanda didn’t ask me to forgive. It asked me to witness — precisely, patiently, without flinching — and to carry that witnessing home, not as a story to tell, but as a discipline to practice.