by Raissa A. Rwagasore

When I say that I’m from Rwanda, for those who know it, the first thing that comes to their mind is Hotel Rwanda. It’s a movie that tells a story about a man, his family, and how he saved people during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. In 1994 from 7th April to June 13th, a period of 100 days, Rwanda lost more than 800,000 Tutsis and became the last Genocide of the 20th Century. I was lucky to be born after the Genocide. Both my parents are Genocide survivors together with my older sister, who was five months old then. My siblings and I were not lucky enough to have an extended family. All our grandparents, together with their children, except my parents, were killed in the Genocide. They didn’t live long enough for us to know them, and to know the feeling of having grandparents. When I came to the US, I was hurt at how people perceived Rwanda. There’s more to it than the small country that had a Genocide.

Rwanda is not the way it was twenty-four years ago. The country has grown economically, socially, politically, and culturally but people in America don’t seem to realize it. Chimamanda Adichie, the Nigerian author of Americanah, We Should All Be Feminists, and many other works, once said in her Ted talk called “The Danger of a Single Story,” that a single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. The same thing can be said about Rwanda. The media shows one side of it, just as when you type Rwanda into the Google search bar, the first suggestion is Rwandan Genocide. People have created their own image of Rwanda but don’t know the other side of the story.

I’ve had many people ask me what my ethnicity is, if I am was Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, and I have to explain to them that these ethnicities don’t exist anymore. We removed all recognition of the ethnic groups that made us kill one another. Since it was a government that led to all that happened, today’s generation is so lucky to have a good government. President Paul Kagame, who was the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and is now president. Together with the other members of the RPF, he fought the Interahamwe (The Hutu organization that killed the Tutsis) and stopped the Genocide. H.E Paul Kagame was elected in 2003 with a seven-year presidential term and is still the president up to 2024. Together with the Rwandan parliament, they have taken Rwanda to another level. He established a good education system for the youth so that they can get a good education and become useful in the development of the country. The capable leaders of Rwanda are good mentors for the new generation. The Rwandan education system started a program called Mudasobwa, where they gave laptops to children who are not able to afford one.

In the Rwandan culture, helping one another is important. I grew up in a country where we all help each to take care of where we live. Each last Saturday of every month, Rwandans gather in their neighborhood and clean it. We plant trees, construct houses for the poor, pick up garbage, and perform many other services. As a result, Rwanda was named one of the cleanest countries in the world. Apart from being one of the cleanest countries in the world, Rwanda is also ranked in the top ten safest countries in the whole world. It might have been unsafe at one point, but it ranks ninth on the list of the safest countries. Rwanda puts an effort into maintaining the security of its people. When you walk around the Kigali at night, you are likely to see policemen walking around ensuring people’s security and sacrificing their sleep to make us feel safe. Rwanda also holds the record as the first country in the world that stopped the use of plastic bags. Due to the effect of plastic bags on the environment, they were replaced by biodegradable reusable paper bags.

As a young woman, I am happy that the majority of seats in the Rwandan parliament are now held by women. It makes me and other young women feel well represented in the government and gives us female leaders to look up to, unlike other countries where men are the majority of elected representatives. Women like Rwanda’s minister of foreign affairs Louise Mushikiwabo who was elected as the secretary general of the international organization of la Francophonie (OIF) — an organization of French-speaking countries that is comprised of eighty-four states including Senegal, France, Canada, and many more others– make us feel that we can do more for Rwanda outside the country itself. In my country, there’s a lot of opportunities. Do you want to start a business? Go to Rwanda. In Rwanda, it takes 48 hours to start a business. The Rwanda Development Board helps people to start businesses in many fields such as agriculture, infrastructure, and many others. All those opportunities are what made Rwanda what it is today.

You can’t accurately describe how Rwanda is today without mentioning its beauty. Rwanda is a beautiful country in the middle east of Africa, often called the heart of Africa or the country of a thousand hills. As you can probably tell from the title, “the country of a thousand hills,” Rwanda has a lot of hills and mountains. Because of its many mountains, Rwanda has 50% of the remaining population of mountain Gorillas. The mountain gorillas are an endangered species and Rwanda does everything to keep them safe. Rwanda started a program called “Visit Rwanda” that encourages tourism in Rwanda and to see other beautiful places such as the Akagera National Park in the east near the Tanzanian border. Visit Rwanda has caught the attention of many people and has also increased the tourism industry. Ellen Degeneres, the host of the Ellen show, was in Rwanda recently to visit the mountain gorillas and to build a permanent home for them. Apart from the parks and animals, which is what people usually go to African countries to see, Rwanda has its Kigali Convention Center, which is among if not, the first most expensive buildings in Africa. It’s found in Kigali city and hosts different meetings. It also has a hotel where people can stay. There are a lot of places to go in Rwanda, and you can’t possibly fully understand its achievements well without being there.

After the Genocide, Rwandans saw the result of bad leadership, the flaws that were in the country, and by correcting those flaws, Rwanda is where it is now. Each year, in a period called Kwibuka (meaning “remember”), Rwanda dedicates a week in April — from 7th to the 13th– to remember all the Tutsis who died in the 1994 Genocide. H.E Paul Kagame said, “ We cannot turn the clock back nor can we undo the harm caused, but we have the power to determine the future and ensure that what happened never happen again.” It’s good to know the other side of Rwanda so that the next time that I or someone else says that we are from Rwanda, you won’t only think of Hotel-Rwandaas a reference. We are the products of our past, but we are not prisoners of it.