President Kagame Speaks to the BBC

This seemed worth linking to:

The challenge of re-inventing Rwanda

When I tell people that I'm moving to Rwanda at the end of this year, the standard reaction of nearly everyone who hasn't visited the area is "ohmygodyou'regoingtodie". Fair enough, everyone, I suppose that before I started researching the country for the purpose of this program, the first word in my head after a mention of Rwanda was invariably 'genocide'. Even now, it seems nearly impossible not to look at every aspect of the country through genocide-colored glasses.

Let me put your minds somewhat at rest: The genocide part of the genocide, with machetes and abject terror and the 100 days, ended in 1994. When I was seven. Since then, while the recovery process seems to have been understandably bumpy and painful at times, Rwanda has emerged as one of the safest and most peaceful countries in East Africa (and one of the most modern, since so much that was destroyed during the genocide had to be rebuilt). A few (all?) of the countries bordering Rwanda are seeing their fair shares of conflict, many of them as direct results of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, but Rwanda itself seems to be a bit of an eye to that hurricane.

Seems. I'm going to say seems a lot on this rwblog; as some of you know, perspective is my Achilles' heel. How can I know that Rwanda is peaceful and safe without being in Kigali feeling safe and at peace? (Having just read Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, I feel the need to see for myself even more than I did.) I'm going to try to build up as much of a knowledge base as I can before I leave, but I'm trying to let knowledge in while keeping expectations out. When I tell that rare person who has actually been to Rwanda that I'm going, the reaction is never negative; it's some variation of: "Good. You should." If everyone who visits the country falls in love with it, then maybe it will just take a critical mass of outside visitors to spread the good word that Rwanda is not what it once was. Maybe the re-invention that Kagame talks about has to come from without as much as it's already come from within.