Stories: Rwanda

  • Up Close With Amazing Gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park

    by Hollyfield, Amy | Rwanda | August 14, 2013

    It's early morning in the mountains of northwestern Rwanda. There's cool mist and anticipation in the air. Time to go gorilla trekking. Nearly 500 live in the mountains straddling Rwanda, Uganda and Congo, 25 percent closely watched by the nearby Karisoke Research Center, a legacy of the late Dian Fossey. It is one of the largest mountain gorilla populations in...

  • The Ghosts of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’s Churches

    by Robbins, Ed | Rwanda | July 13, 2012

    Rwanda has come remarkably far since the genocide of 1994, but reminders still haunt its landscape. Ed Robbins, a freelance videojournalist for TIME and IRP, reported from Rwanda on an IRP Gatekeeper Editors trip.

  • How to Greet a Mountain Gorilla

    by Robbins, Ed | Rwanda | June 20, 2012

    Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park is home to more than 480 critically endangered mountain gorillas. As part of an effort by the Rwanda Tourist Board to combine tourism and conservation, the park now offers gorilla tours. For around $500, visitors can spend an hour up close and personal with a clan of mountain gorillas. Proceeds from the tours fund further conservation...

  • Rwandans Fight Poverty While Others Fight Over the Numbers

    by Paulson, Tom | Rwanda | June 14, 2012

    Many miles south of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ in Kigali is the site of one of the worst massacres of the 1994 Rwandan genocide where the majority Hutu ethnic group sought to eliminate their rivals, the Tutsis. As one local, Donald Ndahiro, told me during my visit here to the Bugasera District: “This was the place they used to send...

  • Growling With the Gorillas: A Rwanda Mountain Trek

    by Davis, Rebecca | Rwanda | June 09, 2012

    It's not easy shaking a bad reputation. Take the gorilla, for example: It's been saddled with a sketchy rep for as long as anyone can remember. Something along the lines of big, hairy, ferocious and superhuman in strength. A bit daunting, perhaps. And yet folks who work with and study gorillas say they are as much gentle as...

  • International News Coverage: A Vanishing Species?

    by Schidlovsky, John | Rwanda | June 01, 2012

    I’ve been hanging out with some great apes recently. In 2011, I was in Indonesia and in Rwanda, on trips organized by the International Reporting Project (IRP), the Washington D.C.-based journalism nonprofit group I founded in 1998. In both countries, I got to spend some quality time with endangered apes: orangutans on the Indonesian part of Borneo and...