Sue Horton's Blogs
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Gorilla Trek
We were outside the boundary of Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park when we spotted it: a mountain gorilla that had climbed over a stone wall separating the park from farmland to feast on eucalyptus saplings. We clambered down a steep hill and watched it from about 25 feet away as it tore apart the young trees to get at their bark and leaves. Our one-hour allotment of time with the gorillas had begun. Gorilla tourism is something Rwanda has nailed. The government has worked closely to develop its program with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, which continues Fossey's work of protecting and studying the mountain gorillas that live in the Virunga Mountains. Only 64 gorilla-trekking permits are issued each day, at a cost of $500 a person for foreign tourists, and no one can go into the forest without a guide. On the morning of the trek, we arrived...
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Public Health
Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., greets children before visiting a hospital in Kibuye, Rwanda. Saddleback Church hosted the 2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the Church. Photo: Allison Cox / Saddleback ChurchTuesday, Nov. 15: The statistics are impressive. Healthcare in Rwanda -- and access to it -- has improved dramatically in a very short time. Between 2005 and 2010, mortality for young children has been more than halved, and both the malaria rate and maternal mortality have dropped significantly. Ninety percent of children are fully vaccinated. The country has quite a low rate of HIV infection compared with other African countries, and those with the virus generally have access to treatment. As of 2010, 90% of the country had purchased government health insurance, though there is some indication that the number of insured may have dropped drastically in the wake of cost hikes (to a maximum of $12...
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Rwanda’s Strengths and Challenges
In this image from the Los Angeles Times database, a view of a village near Ecole Technique de Murambi in Rwanda is seen in 2004.Photo: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times Friday, Nov. 11: Our drive north to where the gorillas live, which included a long detour, took us through spectacularly beautiful scenery. It also revealed many of Rwanda's strengths, and its challenges. The roads are in excellent condition, even the parts that aren't paved. There are work crews everywhere, digging culverts so the roads won't flood and making improvements on the sections that need them. You also see the population pressure. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. But only a small portion of the population lives in cities. Most people live in rural areas and do subsistence farming. The country we passed through has been almost entirely deforested (though non-native eucalyptus trees have...
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Genocide Survivors’ Testimony
During the 1994 genocide, there was a mass killing of thousands of people at Ecole Technique de Murambi in Rwanda. These are some of the victims clothes.Photo: Francine Orr / Los Angeles TimesThursday, Nov. 10: It's late at night here, but I wanted to send a post today -- an amazing and overwhelming day. The 1994 genocide is never far from anyone's mind in Rwanda. But for some Rwandans it's a constant horror. This morning we talked with several survivors of the massacres, who told their stories through a translator. It's estimated that 250,000 genocide survivors are also rape victims, though that number may be low because some women won't admit what happened to them. Sevota, an organization set up in 1994 by Rwandan social worker Godelieve Mukasarasi to help rape survivors of the genocide, brought half a dozen women together to speak with us. I won't name them, in...
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Rwanda’s Take on the Conrad Murray Trial
Dr. Conrad Murray reacts after the jury returned with a guilty verdict in his involuntary manslaughter trial Monday in a Los Angeles courtroom.Photo: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / PoolWednesday, Nov. 9: Rwanda has weighed in on the Conrad Murray trial, and the wrong man has been convicted. Sunny Ntayombya, a columnist for The New Times (\"Rwanda's First Daily\"), believes that \"Michael Jackson did not die of cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of Propofol\" but rather at the hands of his family and hangers-on who drained his financial resources. \"I was over here in Kigali,\" Ntayombya writes, \"and even I knew that things were getting tight over at the Jackson household.\" \"Why,\" he asks, \"was Michael, at a ripe old age of 50, attempting to hold a series of backbreaking concerts that everyone thought could possibly kill him? Because he needed the money, simple as that.\" ...
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Genocide Memorial: Encountering the Dead
The faces of the dead at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.Photo: Sue HortonWednesday, Nov. 9: \"The country smelled of the stench of death … Rwanda was dead.\" Those words are from a display at Kigali's Genocide Memorial, and they describe the country's state after 100 days of carnage in 1994. Outside the memorial, in 14 mass graves more than 20 feet deep, thousands of people killed in the genocide are buried. Inside, the story is told in a series of displays. Most chilling is how much warning there was, and how it was ignored. As the so-called Hutu power movement was building, there were half a dozen sporadic outbreaks of killing, starting in 1990. But the world ignored them. Then, in 1994, the airplane of Rwanda's then-president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down, and within an hour the genocide began. Hutus involved in the massacres set up roadblocks and butchered Tutsis who stopped. They...
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The Master Plan in Action
Wednesday, Nov. 9: The winding dirt road leading to Koperative Ubumwe Bat'sinda, where about 250 households have been involuntarily relocated from a hillside shanty near downtown Kigali, wasn't made for a bus like ours. But the driver navigated it expertly, staying far enough away from the sharp drop-off at the side that we weren't nervous. People in the small shops that lined the road were curious about us and came out to watch the bus pass. Finally we came to the sign announcing we'd arrived. As we got out of the bus, we were surrounded by children. Soon their teacher walked up, and we asked him if he knew of a family we could speak to. He started to take us to the community center, but instead Fred Mwasa, the Rwandan journalist who's showing us around, pointed at a house and asked if we could be introduced...
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Capital Growth, for Good and Ill
Liliane Uwanziga Mupende, a government urban planner showing an architectural model of the government's plan for Kigali to our group of International Reporting Project gatekeepers.Photo: Sue HortonTuesday, Nov. 8: Kigali has an immensely ambitious master plan. Growth is a given in the capital, and the Kagame government is determined that the city's spread won't be chaotic -- for better or worse. First the good news: Rwanda has set a goal to be \"the green financial hub of Central Africa,\" as one poster I saw put it. All over the city, high-rises and high-end housing are being erected. Development is everywhere. An architectural model of the future sits in a planning office downtown, and we had it explained to us by both an urban planner ex-pat from a Denver architectural firm, who is a contractor for Rwanda, and her very impressive colleague, a young Rwandan woman,...
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Law of the Land in Kigali
Tuesday, Nov. 8: The inimitable Fred Mwasa, journalist with the Rwandan weekly newspaper The Chronicles, met us this morning to show us around Kigali. It’s an immensely interesting city. Observation 1: Kigali is incredibly clean. We passed dozens of women in simple uniforms with brooms sweeping. And they’re everywhere, not just in the city center but in the poor areas, too. There is no trash to be seen. Observation 2: As in most African cities, there are a lot of motorcycle taxis. But in Rwanda, not only does the driver have to wear a helmet, but he (we didn’t see any women motorcycle taxi drivers, despite Rwanda’s genuine progress on gender issues) also has to carry a second helmet for his passenger. Observation 3: Traffic is as orderly as in any city I’ve been in, and much more so than in many -- Boston,...
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First Impressions
Monday night, Nov 7: There is a smell unique to Third World cities. It's a combination of burning trash and cooking fires, and it hit me as soon as I stepped onto the tarmac at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda. That was impression No. 1. Impression No. 2 was how un-Third World the airport seemed. It wasn't grand, but it was pleasant, efficient and clean. Signs warned that plastic bags are illegal in Kigali, and one of our party who was carrying some things in a plastic bag had to turn it over to a guard. The biggest surprise, though, was how calm things were. There were no bandit cabs trying to hustle a fare or porters vying to carry luggage, no beggars or vendors selling their wares. Just smiling airport workers offering free carts and trying to be helpful. Our party was met by the extremely charming...
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