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Moments from the trip: Perry Beeman’s reflections

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Hiking on the job

If you want to write about the environment, you have to see the environment. In Gishwati Forest, I paid for my request to attempt to photograph the chimpanzees that scientists are researching by participating in a 101/2-hour hike one day. That was after a three-hour hike the day before.

Much of Rwanda is above 5,000 feet, so daytime temperatures are often a pleasant 75 to 80 degrees.

But when you are hiking narrow, occasionally steep trails, you break a good sweat. You pack enough water to last maybe three hours, but you can get plenty dehydrated when the trek goes into overtime.

Through most of the hike, we viewed some mountain monkeys, but not much else. That is, until we started seeing evidence that the chimps were near. Lead scientist Rebecca Chancellor pointed out "wadges," the chewed-up blobs of bamboo that chimps spit out when they're done extracting the juice. She found a chimp nest in a tree, then another, and a place on the ground where a chimp had matted down the vegetation for a rest. She spotted fresh poop.

Over and over, Chancellor asked our group if we wanted to spend "just 15 more minutes" because the chimps appeared to be running from us. Chimps generally don't like to hang with people, unless they've had a long time to get used to them. The quarter hours turned into 60 minutes, over and over.

As late afternoon approached and we risked not getting back to the research station in the daylight, we gave up. A few steps later, we rounded a curve in the trail, and a chimp, in full view, screamed from a tree branch. We later saw a second chimp.

Victory. The scientific team hadn't seen a chimp weeks. Out came the cameras as the chimps stared down from high tree limbs.

The trek back was long, rubber-legged and rainy. The return to the field station brought a quick downing of virtually any drink in sight.

Then came the most glorious bucket shower ever, a mix of freshly boiled and room-temperature water. Steam everywhere. A new man.

Dinner was goat, green beans and carrots, brown beans, pineapple and pasta. At an evening campfire gathering, a villager played the inaga, a traditional Rwanda instrument played with the fingers, that looks something like a dulcimer.

Benjamin Beck, Great Ape Trust's conservation director, had hauled bags of Doritos on a transcontinental flight because scientist Aaron Rundus, Chancellor's husband, loves them. You can't buy Doritos, or much else, at Kinihira. Rundus and Chancellor peeled a pile of avokas, or avocados, to make guacamole. It was high life in the hills.

The chimps, it turned out, were playing with us.

A few weeks later, an intern from a Rwanda news agency made a similar visit. She spotted the chimps less than 25 minutes after hitting the trail.

Life in Kinihira, near the Gishwati Forest

Kinihira, on the outskirts of Gishwati Forest, is a wonderful place, in its own way. Life is as simple as it gets.

By dawn, the road is already a parade. Children wearing foam clogs and one-color school uniforms, often blue or beige, walk to school. Others grab a hoe and head to the rolling fields. Ditches carved by the rain serve as sidewalks between cement-block homes.

Multi-colored chickens scratch at the main drag, made of dirt and rock. A tiny general store goes begging for customers. A man gets a haircut in his front yard. An elderly woman sorts beans on a mat. A 75-year-old gentleman looking distinguished in a suit sits on a chair in the middle of the village, watching life go by.

Children swarm around me, straining to get a look at my camera. A parent tells them to back off. Parents and teachers routinely whack kids with a switch to keep order here. The headmaster hits hardest of all.

Life goes on at a slow pace, but change is coming quickly. Men build a new house. There is talk of a school addition, and Iowans are involved in efforts to improve toilets. Power lines are creeping into the region.

Eco-tourism for mud lovers

Rwanda's tourism is not for those who enjoy the comfort of a monorail ride at Disneyland. It takes work.

One day, I accompanied the Gishwati Area Conservation Program on a chimp-tracking expedition in Cyamudango Forest, next to Nyungwe National Park. It's a spectacular area with mountain views, monkey sightings from the road, hundreds of bird species, and, if you are lucky, a chance to see the elusive chimps.

We drove most of the day on rough roads, crossing bridges made of muddy, uneven logs, seemingly lined up without much support. The bridges sometimes offered an intimidating view of a drop of thousands of feet.

We survived. We pulled in about 4:30 p.m., and I assumed that given the rain and impending darkness, we wouldn't be hiking far that night. I was wrong.

Four hours later, we had traversed a valley, on and off the trail, tracking chimps that were advertised as accustomed to humans but clearly weren't. It rained most of the time, and the trails were muddy and steep. For this, we got to see one chimp, high in a tree, and really visible only in a zone where we were in the path of any urine the ape might have chosen to expel.

A melodic awakening

I thought I was having a dream. It was 3:30 a.m. in Gisenyi. I was sleeping off travel weariness when a beautiful, if unexpected, melody came blasting from a loudspeaker at the local mosque. It was a call to prayer.

In rural areas, if you're not up by 4:30 a.m., you're a slacker. Daylight lasts 12 hours at the equator, and Rwandans need every minute of light to grow their food.

Gorillas in the rain

It's almost not an official visit to Rwanda unless you lace up the hiking boots and plop down the $500 fee to watch rare mountain gorillas for one hour.

For the trek, I shuttled out of Musanze, rather than staying at closer-in lodging in Kinigi, near the Volcanoes National Park area the gorillas inhabit. One of the closest hotels is a development success story, community-owned Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, where the promise of hot showers, fine food and other perks commands up to $750 a night. The community shares the profits.

I visited Group 13, which has 25 members. The muddy trip took four hours there and back, but only 2.5 hours of that was on the steep, high-altitude slopes. It was easy compared to longer hikes in Gishwati and the higher-altitude and steeper routes in Nyungwe National Park.

The gorillas were deep in the bamboo. At last, with the help of radio communications between the guides and the advance team of gorilla-spotters, we approached the group.

Suddenly, I was amazed to see an infant gorilla not more than 20 feet to my left, eating.

Often, as we observed the gorillas, they walked farther away. Many gorillas were eating. Infants were wrestling. We had several good glimpses of the silverback, or dominant male gorilla. At one point, he broke a big branch and scurried off. Several infants started to charge us, but they backed off when a guide made noises suggesting everything was OK.

This wasn't viewing an ape through a zoo enclosure. We were in these gorillas' home, and it was thrilling.

Not all green

During an interview with Rose Mukankomeje, director general of the Rwanda Environment Management Authority, we sipped water from plastic bottles. She detailed the country's ban on plastic shopping bags, its new land use plan and moves toward landfills and better sewerage systems.

I asked whether the country was recycling the plastic water bottles. No answer. I asked again. "Not at this time," said Rose, as she's known everywhere in Rwanda. "We're working on it."

There is an informal reuse program, though. Kids yell "pass the bottle" to passing motorists. They want to reuse the bottles.

Women in Rwanda

Rwanda gets criticized for human rights problems, including the treatment of women. During the genocide, rape was rampant. Now, as the country builds a new life, women make up more than half of Parliament.

Challenges remain. Prostitution is common. "Bar girls" sit along walls of major restaurants. Women from their teens to middle age approach foreigners on the street. Billboards all over the country feature a man and woman offering a young woman or man cash. The message: "Hakanira Ba Shuga Dadi," or "Don't go with Sugar Daddy."

Rwanda's adult prevalence rate for HIV and AIDs in 2007 was 2.8 percent, more than four times the U.S. rate of 0.6 percent.

The old and the new

At a soccer game between area eco-clubs, a chicken strolled through pregame warm-ups, a testament to the area's longstanding agricultural traditions. Just beyond the field stood a cell tower, a monument to the newer, modern Rwanda.

Joy after the sorrow

An acquaintance in Gisenyi invited me to the Pentecostal church on Sunday.

About 1,000 people crammed into a sanctuary. At the insistence of someone in authority, we sat near the altar, with the ministers. The service was in Kinyarwanda, but it was easy to pick up the reference to the "muzungus," meaning "white people." The ministers asked me to address the congregation. I managed to say a greeting in Kinyarwanda, which sent beaming smiles across the room. In English, I said I was there to write about the environment in their beautiful country. A translator passed on the word.

As several choirs sang, men sprang to their feet to skip to the middle of the floor and dance. The preachers offered a sermon. The rhythm section dared people to stand still.

The raw emotion of the moment set in. I suddenly felt, in my soul, the resilience of the Rwandan people.

Many don't have power, tap water or flush toilets. They are among the poorest residents of the world's poorest continent.

Some live every day with the psyche-sapping memory of seeing friends and relatives raped, clubbed, hacked or shot during the 1994 genocide. Some live yards away from the killers.

In other ways, they have abundance.

Here they were, worshipping, with beaming smiles and upturned hands, grasping the promise of a new day. They welcomed a stranger from another land with a hearty "muraho!" and a firm handshake.

"Uplifting" is a nice word. But it's not strong enough to describe the positive power in that sanctuary. "Hope" comes closer.

A new day

Akagera National Park "” Daybreak. Few are up and around except the baboons trying to steal breakfast in the lodge restaurant. A mist hangs over Lake Ihema, the boundary between Rwanda and Tanzania. The day's warmth arrives early. A few of the hundreds of bird species offer background music.

In a blaze orange and red sky, the sun fights to emerge from horizon clouds, then brashly strokes the colors of dawn.

The symbolism is stirring.

A new day in Rwanda. New light. New hope.

Hard to forgive

I went several weeks in Rwanda without hearing the words "Hutu," "Tutsi" or "genocide." Then, I would hear someone say the country had a new policy that began "after 1994," or "after the genocide."

One night, a man asked to share my table at a coffee shop. He didn't know I was a reporter. He was a minister, considering a doctoral dissertation on what churches did, or did not do, in response to the genocide.

Incredibly, this man's father "” also a minister "” was killed by young men the father had baptized. Forgiveness has come hard.

"I don't seen forgiveness as an instantaneous thing," the coffee-shop visitor said. "It's a process."

Perry Beeman spent five weeks reporting in Rwanda as part of a grant from the International Reporting Project (IRP).

Click here for the full multimedia package as it appears on The Des Moines Register web site.

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