Pictures and Video

I've finally sorted and arranged all the pictures and video's up on Flickr, you can check them out here:

My Flickr Picture Sets

Sadly one of the best video's isn't really working with Flickr video, so I've uploaded it here:

Kigali Memorial Centre

Excuse any poor punctuation or spelling, this is all getting typed on a French keyboard which has a different layout and a bunch of keys for letters like èçéù. Of course that means that I've moved on from Kampala staying with friends (many thanks to Kody and Gab) to Rwanda. The primary reason I came was the Kigali Memorial Center. It was dedicated in 2004, ten years after the genocide in Rwanda which left over a million people dead. The center describes the chain of events that led up to intense violence in the spring of 1994, and documents the stories of the survivors. The museum travels chronologically through events, starting back with the German and Belgian colonial periods, the building tensions during independence, and finally the breakdown of the peace agreements and ensuing violence in 1994. It was an unfathomable experience; the videos of survivors recounting how they watched their family members be killed, many times by friends, was heartbreaking. The center houses displays where family members can hang pictures of the loved ones lost in the terror. Seeing the thousands of individual faces lost to the violence is overwhelmingly difficult. The Rwandans took an thoughtful step (especially for someone coming from a center that hosted reconciliation workshops) of in implementing a community court, with the goal of reconciliation and justice, called a Gacaca court. You can read more about it here, or at the memorial center site.

The center also documents other genocides in history, and tries (as best as anyone can) to explain the common experience that the victims and survivors shared, and the motivation behind each incident. Finally, as you walk outside you can walk around the grounds of the center, where mass graves house over 250,000 victims of the genocide. It was such an intense and powerful experience, and I would recommend anyone who visits East Africa to go see it.

Masai Mara

After we left Nukuru in central kenya, we headed over the edges of the rift valley on torn up Kenyan road to the Masai Mara. The Masai Mara is the northern section of the Serengeti on the Kenyan side, and it is absolutely packed with the big game animals that we so often associate with Africa. We saw lions, elephants, and giraffes; along with the thousands of wilder beasts that make an annual migration in August. It was truly amazing, but I'll let some of the pictures speak for me:

It's amazing how close the wildlife, especially the large predictors let you get to them. The lion pictures come from the last morning we were there. As we were driving out we spotted the male lions head poking up out of the grass. We we drove over it ended up being a whole family, with the cubs running around playing the whole time we were there. I have tons more, and some great videos that I'll put up on Flickr when I get back to the states.