June 28

June 28, 2013

Yesterday I took a trip to Gisenye with Lydia, Liz and Rachel.  Gisenye is a port town on Lake Kivu bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Gisenye is also beside the city of Goma in the DRC.  Goma is the city where refugee camps were set up after the genocide. These camps were mostly holding Hutu refugees and very few Tutsi victims.

On Thursday morning we took a 3-hour bus ride to Gisenye, which was pretty cramped.  Once we got to Gisenye we took a cab to our hotel which ended up being another branch of Bethany (the guesthouse we stay at in Kigali).

We decided to go straight to the border and scope out our chances of getting to cross – which were slim to none.  We went to the small border first and talked to the guard.  He was pretty nice and let us take a few pictures although we couldn’t actually cross the border into Goma.

Since we didn’t have much luck, we decided to go to the larger border crossing.  There were throngs of people moving across the border and I had no idea that many people went back and forth every day.  There were a lot of people who were physically disabled crossing the border and we guessed it was to get treatment but we’re still not really sure.

The guard this time told us we had to have a visa from the Congo embassy and wasn’t happy about us taking pictures.  We went further back to take some pictures of Goma and the volcanoes and one government official got super frustrated with us for “taking pictures of his people”. 

It started to rain so we took refuge under a building.  We met a Rwandan man who was around our age.  He told us that he was going to school in Goma and had to cross the border every day.  Rwanda changed its national language from French to English in 2008 (I think) and in order to continue his studies in French he had to travel to another country.  This was very interesting because I never thought about students having to deal with that as a result of the new national language.

Overall we had a successful trip to Gisenye even though we weren’t allowed to cross the border and we pissed off a few government officials and guards.  Just looking across the border at the Congo was a strange experience and felt very eerie, especially with the volcanoes.  I would definitely recommend anyone visiting Rwanda to explore this city.