Notes From the Land of a Thousand Hills

Monique Muise

The idea for this entry came during a lunch I had with a friend in Kigali a few weeks ago. I was opening my wallet to pay for my soup and salad, when he noticed a photo I keep tucked inside.

“Who is that?” he asked, pointing to the smiling, fair-haired child in the picture.

“This is my cousin, Luke” I answered. “He’s eight. He goes to school in Canada, and he really likes playing hockey.”

“My cousin likes to play football,” said my friend. “He is eight as well.”

That’s when it struck me how similar children are, no matter where they grow up. They all have an innate curiosity about the world around them, a strong attachment to the people who raise them, and a basic innocence that we seem to lose as we get older. The eight-year-olds I see in the schoolyards of Kigali, Butare or Gisenyi would probably get along pretty well with the eight-year-olds in Toronto, Montreal or Halifax.

I decided to travel to a schoolyard in Kigali’s Kimisagara district, where I spoke to six children between the ages of 7 and 14. These are not huge in-depth interviews, but small portraits that provide a glimpse into each child’s life and personality.

Clarisse

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 12
Primary 5
Family: Mom, Dad, and one younger sister
Likes: traditional dance, playing with other kids, resting
Favourite food: bananas
Wants to become: a doctor

David

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 7
Primary 1
Family: other kids at the orphanage where he lives
Likes: sweeping the courtyard, playing with other kids
Favourite foods: rice, passion fruit,
Favourite person: Mr. Gysimba, director of the orphanage
Wants to become: the President of Rwanda

Jeanne

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 14
Primary 4
Family: Mom, two brothers and one sister
Likes: spending time at home working with her Mom
Favourite food: beef
Would like to see: America
Favorite subject: English
Wants to become: a doctor (so she can help people and their families)

Emmanuel

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 12
Primary 5
Favourite subjects: English and Math
Family: Mom, Dad, and five sisters
Likes: playing soccer
Favourite person: His second-oldest sister, Chantal
Favourite food: rice
Wants to become: a secondary school teacher

Yvonne

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 12
Primary 4
Favourite subject: English
Family: Mom, Dad, four sisters and one brother
Favourite food: beef
Likes: taking care of her brother, playing basketball, dancing
Wants to become: a mother, a doctor

Olivier

Photo/Ashley Burke

Age: 7
Hasn’t started school
Likes: playing soccer
Family: Mom, Dad, a brother and a sister
Favourite food: mashed potatoes
Favourite person: his older sister

Monique Muise

Ok, yes…I know this blog is supposed to be about young HUMAN Rwandans, but what are rules for if not to be broken?

I attended a very important ceremony this past weekend, in which 18 newborns were christened in front of thousands of people.

These newest members of the Rwandan community are actually mountain gorillas, born in the high-altitude jungles of the Virunga mountains.

Each newborn gorilla represents a small victory for conservationists in Rwanda and around the world, as they try to preserve and protect this endangered species. The Kwita Izina ceremony, the fifth of its kind, attracted international attention and was covered by foreign and domestic press.

Unfortunately, you can’t get a real sense of what it was like from an Associated Press brief. Hopefully, this radio piece and accompanying photos will provide a better sense of what it was like to be in the thick of it.

*** Stay tuned for a new piece about young entrepreneurs in Rwanda, coming in the next few days. This one will feature humans, I promise.

Monique Muise

Sugar daddy.

The term conjures up images of a creepy older man hanging around the bar on a Friday night; buying numerous fruity concoctions for his (much younger) date, repeatedly checking the placement of his hairpiece in glass behind the bar, and shamelessly making eyes at anything else within a hundred feet that happens to have a pulse.

But here in Rwanda, this greasy creature inhabits a world beyond the club scene or the seedy hotel room. He can be spotted pulling over to offer a ride to a girl as young as 12 who is on her way to school, or strolling onto a university campus during break time under the guise of a relative for “visits” with female students.

Photo/Ashley Burke

He also takes the form of the “sugar mommy” – an older woman who approaches a young boy who attends the same church service as she does, or who is working as a day labourer in her home.

However it might begin, these relationships always results in a situation where the balance of power is shifted squarely towards the older person. A Rwandan sugar mommy or daddy will offer gifts like cell phones, land, beer or even cold hard cash to help cover school fees. They are attentive, flattering and generous with both time and money.

After a few meetings, sex inevitably makes its way into conversation. Young people are perceived as the ultimate sex partners - physically attractive, pliable and eager to please. And they rarely insist on the use of a condom.

That’s where things get very dangerous, says Philbert Rugumire. He works for Public Service International, an organization working to address health issues in Rwanda.

“There are enormous risks,” he explained. “You’ll note that young women between 20 and 24 years old are five times more likely to be infected (with HIV/AIDS) than young men. This contamination is coming from older generations, not boys of their own age.”

Rugumire says the sugar daddy/sugar mommy phenomenon is becoming more widespread, and represents one of the greatest threats to the health and well-being of young people in Rwanda today. While statistics for boys are still hard to come by, health officials say that one in ten Rwandan girls has had sexual relations with a sugar daddy.

In response, the government has launched an all-out assault on the sugar daddy/mommy phenomenon though a new campaign called “Sinigurisha” – which translates into “I am not for sale”. Huge billboards now line the streets in both urban and rural districts, depicting adolescents shunning the advances of older “patrons”. The same messages appear in newspapers, and in radio and television spots.

Photo/Ashley Burke

The public is being bombarded with a simple message: this behaviour is not ok.

“We organized this campaign because the situation in this country was not favourable to the healthy development of young Rwandans, particularly with regards to sexual practices,” said Protais Mitali, the Rwandan Minister for Youth, as we sat across from each other in his well-appointed office last week.

“We saw that this behaviour was increasing - and I’m not saying it was out of control, but it was a situation we could not leave alone and we had to take appropriate action to combat these practices.”

Mitali added that the biggest challenge has been getting people to take this problem seriously.

“It’s hard in some ways because there are people who don’t believe this - who think that we are exaggerating by deploring these practices and these manipulations,” he said.

I began to understand what he meant when I arrived to work the next morning and mentioned that I was working on a piece about sugar mommies and daddies.

“Hey, ask that girl over there! She has a sugar daddy!” … (“I do not! He’s my boyfriend!”)

“What’s wrong with sugar daddies, anyway? Do you need one? I know some people…”

“Hey, you can be my sugar mommy!”

I realized then and there it was going to be difficult to find anyone willing to talk about this without bursting into uncontrollable giggles. It’s still largely perceived as a bit of harmless fun – a sexual relationship where everybody wins.

Unfortunately, young men and women are coming up the big losers. Beyond the serious risk of contracting the AIDS virus, young people are vulnerable to numerous other complications.

“It’s through this unprotected sex that a young girl can become pregnant, and become very vulnerable,” explains Rugumire. “It’s also these relationships that can create problems within families, as parents struggle to understand why the child is having sex with someone so much older. It can also compromise a young person’s education, and therefore their future.”

As I wandered between various government offices and NGOs, I began to wonder what this trend looked like at the ground level. While no young boys or girls were willing to talk about it (even anonymously), I finally managed to get an interview with the acting principal of a local school, Emile Rubayita.

He looked at me gravely from across his desk, obviously a bit suspicious of the young western journalist probing into such a sensitive topic.

“I have heard of cases like this in this area,” he began cautiously, emphasizing that none of the students in his school has yet been targeted.

“I hear of people who trick children by giving them money, biscuits or candy to trick them into sleeping with them. It’s very dangerous because adults can violate a young child. If a fifty-year-old tricks a twelve year old into having sex, the child could be seriously hurt.”

The image alone was enough to make my stomach turn.

Whether or not the Sinigurisha campaign will have any effect will be difficult to measure, but the Rwandan government seems to believe it’s worth the effort – and so does Rubayita.

“The state must do everything possible to protect our children,” he said. “After all, our children will be our leaders in the future, and so we must protect them.”

Monique Muise

Lights, camera, ACTION!

As promised, here is the full-version radio documentary I produced on the rise of filmmaking in Rwanda. The audio file runs approximately 8 minutes.

Enjoy!

Monique Muise

“CUT!”
The command comes so suddenly that I nearly jump backwards and burn myself on a studio light.

I’m standing in an incredibly hot, impossibly small living room in one of Kigali’s many suburbs. Around me, about a dozen people are crammed into the tiny space like freshly-packed sardines. The floor is littered with cords, tripods, and lighting equipment – all the usual trappings of a movie set. I’m afraid to breathe, lest I knock something very expensive to the floor.

The director of the shoot, a thin German with a thick accent and a penchant for cigarettes, is now giving a series of instructions to the 12 film students grouped around him. All of them look to be in their late teens or early twenties.

“You see, you must not cross this line, you understand?” says the instructor to his two lead actors, seated together on a couch. “And try to be a bit more relaxed. More natural.”

Then he turns to a young man holding a boom microphone. He’s got the name “Tim” sewn into the breast pocket of his button-down shirt (à la garage repairman) and his forehead glistens with sweat as he struggles to stand still near the hot lights.

“You are always crossing the light! It makes shadows!” the instructor explains.

“Ok…scene one, take six…ACTION!!”

Welcome to Hillywood.

Here, in the land of a thousand hills, a new industry is slowly taking shape, fuelled by the dedication of a few committed pioneers and a mass of eager young filmmakers. At the centre of this bourgeoning trade is the Rwanda Cinema Centre, a film school and production company all rolled into one. Tucked inconspicuously into a converted house on a quiet street, the centre hosts a new four-week program each month, and the 20-or-so spaces always fill up rapidly.

In a week’s time, the class filming today will have finished its movie, and another crop of aspiring directors, producers and technicians will pour into the classroom. They’ll learn everything they need to know to produce a short movie. The centre also organizes an annual film festival, which will begin next week.

The popularity of filmmaking, especially among young Rwandans, is expanding at an incredible pace.

I decide to take a break from the set and take a walk up to the main office to speak with one of the centre’s coordinators, Rodrigue Karekezi, about the reasons behind this growth.

“Filmmaking is one way of telling stories though pictures,” he tells me. “But it’s also a financial opportunity. It’s new here in Rwanda, but people can learn it. There have been other African countries that have been successful in filmmaking…so why don’t we Rwandese take advantage of this economic potential?”

The scene has finally wrapped on the film set down the street, and the students are all in high spirits as they stroll back into the main cinema centre building. But few bites of rice and beans and a sip of Fanta later, they’re eager to get to work on scene two.

“You will come back with us?” asks one young man as he bounds out the door with a camera in hand. I’ve barely had time to digest my three spoonfuls of potato, but I agree. Their enthusiasm is infectious.

“It’s so attractive because young men and women are still dreaming,” explains Duff Eriq, one of the students taking this month’s course. “Older people need to think about their families and those kinds of things. They think about their past. But us, we are still young. We are dreaming about our future. We want to change something in our careers, in our lives.”

So great is the demand for this kind of training that the cinema centre is expanding. Soon, it will move out of its current, cramped home and into a brand new, high-tech building being built just around the corner.

“This is a new generation,” says Christian, one of the employees (and a former student) at the centre, as we walk past the construction site. “Before the genocide, Rwanda was very isolated. There were not a lot of openings to the outside world. Some people travelled, however it was not common. But (the genocide) prompted people to begin trying to understand one another. This is a new beginning.”

This industry is still most definitely in its infancy. But the level of interest shown by students like Duff Erik suggests that Hillywood is here to stay.

“I want to take this as a profession,” he tells me. “I want to make it, I want to create opportunities. The beginning will be tough, but I want to be a professional.”

***This blog entry will soon be available in the form of a short radio documentary, which will include an additional interview with the Cinema Centre’s founder, Eric Kabera.

Monique Muise

You wouldn’t expect a morning news meeting to turn into an intense and involved debate about press freedom.
But that’s exactly what happened in the small newsroom at Contact FM here in Kigali earlier this week.

The vast majority of news meetings I’ve sat in on (in my admittedly short journalistic career) have been brisk and to-the-point affairs, normally lasting less than 30 minutes. Meetings here can drag on twice as long, and this particular one lasted almost 90 minutes.

It should be noted that Contact FM is a bit different than other newsrooms in this country. We have a mixture of Rwandans, Ugandans, and Kenyans (and now two very disoriented Canadians) all working together to produce a daily news bulletin in three different languages in less than 8 hours. It can get dicey on the best of days.

So it came as no surprise when, first thing on a Monday morning, someone thought we should have a ‘chat’ about the media bill currently making its way through the Rwandan Parliamentary system.

“What’s going on with this bill now?” asked my friend and colleague Eugene Anangwe.

What indeed. Even someone following the legislation’s laborious progress through the Rwandan parliament might be finding themselves a bit lost.

The bill deals exclusively with the press in this country, and has been contentious from the start. Many media outlets and individual journalists were upset over several articles contained within the proposed legislation, saying they would repress press freedom in the country. Eventually, the Rwandan Parliament gave the bill its blessing, but President Paul Kagame refused to give it his final stamp of approval. Instead, he sent it back to Parliament for further debate – where it now sits waiting to be re-examined. All the bureaucracy has meant the average Rwandan has begun to tune out to the whole affair. The media, however, remains riveted.

“This is very important!” exclaimed one of our news editors. “This affects the very heart of everything we do!”

That certainly got ball rolling. Why have we not asked the Minister of Information (who tabled the bill) about the contentious items the bill contains? Should we even have this legislation? How far has Rwanda really come in the past decade in terms of media freedom?

It was bedlam.

I sat and listened to the ideas and opinions whizzing past me from very direction. What exactly was I witnessing here? The result of too many cups of java and a slow news day? Or a small part of the slow process that gives birth to a free press?

I remembered the words of the Minister of Information, Louise Mushikiwabo, who I interviewed with a colleague last week.

“It’s important for reporters to know that when they need important information and they don’t have access, they can appeal to the government,” she said. “What is clear is that this government wants to be able to account for what we do. And we want to be challenged.”

Her words were the right ones, but the fact remained that her bill was drawing a lot of criticism.
Later in the afternoon, I found myself sitting across from Gaspard Safari, the president of Rwanda’s Press Association. I asked him about specific problems he had with the legislation.

“Well, It doesn’t mention anything about defamation and libel,” he said. “What that means is that, by extension, if a journalist is guilty of defamation or libel, what is going to apply is the criminal court (likely a jail term) which we think is not a very good thing.

“For me, in the last couple of years, yes there’s been some progress. But I think…we need to do a lot in terms of putting in place the mechanisms that allow us to have a free media. You cannot have freedom without a freedom-friendly media law.”

This first attempt at drawing up a set of rules surrounding press freedom and media coverage in Rwanda has obviously met with mixed reactions. But the fact that journalists around the country, including those sitting around me in the morning news meeting at Contact FM, feel comfortable standing up and expressing their views on this topic is a positive sign.

What must come next, according to Safari, is access to basic training for all journalists working here, so that they can develop the skill set that he says “goes hand in hand with professionalism.”

And there’s also a desperate need for something that we Canadians take for granted: legislation pertaining to access to information. This would that everyone, from the farmer working in the fields near Butare to the journalist sitting behind the desk in Kigali, could get their hands on government records and declassified files.

The road stretching out in front of the media here is long, and probably fraught with challenges. After just two weeks here, I’m in no position to say if those challenges can or will be overcome. But in a country where private radio stations and newspapers were unheard of only a few years ago, people are talking, challenging, questioning, and debating.

And that’s as good a first step as any.

Monique Muise

It’s Monday afternoon, and I’m finally heading home after a long day at work in Kigail. A polite but aggressive young man ushers me onto the nearest bus, which is rapidly filling up with people on their way to God knows where. Predictably, the interior is comparable to the inside of a pottery kiln. Incredibly hot, dry and full of various odours, both recognizable and totally unfamiliar. People pile in and out, pushing and pulling as they squeeze themselves into whatever space they can find. Then the bus lurches forward into traffic. After a few moments, I turn away from the window and am confronted by the tiny face of a small girl.

About 13 months old, she’s propped up on her mother’s lap in the seat in front of me, and like most people I encounter throughout my days here, she’s staring intently and unabashedly at me. She seems to recognize that I look a bit different than the other people on the bus, and she reaches out one tiny hand over the back of the chair and grabs my index finger - then bursts out laughing. For the next ten minutes, I scrunch up my face, wave, laugh and poke the end of her nose as she emits little screeches of delight.

And then she and her mother are gone, back into the throng of people on the street.

I’m left wondering about this child, and others like her who are growing up in Rwanda today. They are born into a community that still bears deep scars left by the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, but they have no living memory of the event that changed their nation forever - and that still defines Rwanda, for better or worse, around the world. Anyone under the age of about 18 was either too young to recall the events of 1994, or had not been born when the genocide occurred.

These young people are now creating a new identity for their country, based on their own experience. They are musicians, moto drivers, cashiers at the local supermarket, university students, children playing in the park, or babies laughing on the bus. They line Rwanda’s path toward the future, but some remain very much aware of the past, working to educate others about the genocide so that it is never repeated.

I hope to use this blog to introduce you to some of these young people - to tell their stories and to provide some insight into their lives, both individually and collectively.

Stay tuned.