Rwanda & Uganda: Why We Went
I’ve been trying to write about Rwanda and Uganda since we got back, and I keep getting stuck — not because I don’t have enough to say, but because I have too much.
This wasn’t a light trip. It was a mother-and-son trip with a lot of joy in it, yes, but also a lot of weight. And if I’m starting anywhere, it has to be Rwanda — because Rwanda was the reason.
I’ve always been curious about Rwanda.
I’m 43 now, which means I was about ten when the genocide began. Old enough to remember the word, the headlines, the horror — and young enough for it to lodge somewhere deep, not as a “travel destination” but as a question that never really went away.
But if I’m honest, the reason I chose Rwanda now wasn’t only about the past.
It was about the present.
Because while the world keeps spinning like normal, we are watching genocide unfold in real time — in Gaza, and in Sudan — and it does something to you. It changes what you can tolerate. It changes what you can ignore. It changes what travel even means.
I didn’t go to Rwanda for cute photos or a bucket-list tick.
I went because I needed hope.
Not the fluffy kind. Not the “everything happens for a reason” kind. Real hope — the kind you can only believe after you’ve seen what a country looks like when it has been shattered and somehow, against all logic, rebuilt.
Why it mattered to bring Romeo
Romeo has grown up in a house where we talk about the world as it is, not as we wish it was.
So yes, he knows what genocide means. Not because I want to burden him, but because I refuse to raise a child who thinks suffering is something that only happens “somewhere else” to “other people.” We talk about Gaza. We talk about what power does. We talk about propaganda. We talk about who gets to be called human.
And travel — real travel, not resort travel — is part of that education.
I’m not interested in raising a child who can name capital cities but can’t feel empathy. I want him to be open-minded, receptive, curious. I want him to learn that history isn’t a chapter in a book — it’s something people carry in their bodies.
This trip was also Romeo’s first proper sub‑Saharan African experience, and I was curious to see how he would take it in. He’s travelled enough to be receptive, but Africa is different. It asks different things of you. It gives you different things back.
Landing in Kigali: the first shock
There’s a moment that always happens when you step off a plane in Africa.
The air hits you first — warm, thick, alive. It was dark when we arrived, and still, everything felt… beautiful. Clean. Calm.
And that word — clean — kept coming back all week.
Rwanda is clean in a way that’s genuinely shocking (in the best way). Plastics are forbidden. The streets feel cared for. Things feel organised. There’s a sense of order that a lot of people simply don’t associate with Africa — because Western narratives love chaos.
Arriving in Kigali
Rwanda quietly humiliates those narratives.
And that matters.
Because part of why I came was to learn resilience. I’ve been to several East African countries — Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania — and I love that side of the world. But Rwanda is different. Rwanda makes you ask: How did they do it?
And then you realise you don’t even know what “it” is.
Because rebuilding isn’t just infrastructure. It’s psychological. It’s social. It’s spiritual.
It’s living.
The only thing that actually scared me
I wasn’t nervous about coming to Africa. I’ve been to Africa many times and I’m comfortable here in a way that surprises people who only know it through headlines.
The only thing that genuinely scared me was malaria — proper mother mode. I invested a lot of money in malaria pills, mosquito repellents, and every day we covered ourselves in DEET like it was a ritual.
But emotionally? I knew what I was walking towards.
The Genocide Memorial: the part that stays with you
The visit to the Genocide Memorial was intense.
At the Genocide Museum
Some of the history I already knew — but knowing facts is not the same as listening to survivors. Hearing people speak about what they lived through is a different kind of violence on your nervous system. It makes everything real again, even if it didn’t happen to you.
And it does something else too.
It messes with your head.
I noticed myself doing something I’m not proud of: every time we were in a taxi, I’d find myself trying to work out the driver’s age. Doing the maths. Trying to place them in time.
Were they a child?
Were they a teenager?
Were they involved?
Were they a victim?
Were they a perpetrator?
It’s not a healthy game, but it’s what your brain does when it’s trying to make sense of something that should never have happened.
And then you remember: in a genocide, the categories don’t stay neat. People don’t stay neatly labelled “good” and “bad.” That’s part of what makes it so terrifying.
Romeo had his own version of trying to understand.
He was confused by the graves — why they didn’t have pictures. He’s used to cemeteries where one grave is one person, one name, one photo. I tried to explain that in mass graves, you don’t always know exactly who is where. That sometimes there aren’t names to put on a stone. That sometimes the violence is so large it breaks the way we normally make sense of death.
And then there was the children’s room.
The Children’s Rooms
That was the part that broke the illusion that this is “history.”
Because you’re looking at children’s stories — ordinary little details that could belong to any child anywhere. Favourite food. Favourite toy. Who they loved. What they enjoyed.
And then, in the same calm font, the way they died.
A lot of them were Romeo’s age. Some were younger. Babies.
Romeo was reading. Trying to understand. And he couldn’t comprehend it. Not because he doesn’t understand that killing is evil — he does — but because the scale and the cruelty don’t fit inside a child’s brain.
And honestly? They don’t fit inside an adult’s brain either.
Forgiveness: the question I can’t answer
Rwanda is often spoken about as a story of reconciliation.
And I understand it in theory.
I understand that a country can’t survive if everyone is trapped forever in revenge. I understand that people had to find a way to live next to each other. I understand that rebuilding a society means making choices that are bigger than what one heart can carry.
But I will never understand it in my body.
Because I could never forgive.
I could never forgive the people who killed my child.
And that’s the psychological knot Rwanda left me with: admiration and confusion at the same time. Deep respect — and a question that doesn’t resolve.
How do you move forward?
How do you move on?
How do you rebuild a society when the people who destroyed it are still part of it?
I didn’t go to Rwanda to collect answers.
I went to witness what survival looks like.
Just a few days before the 32nd anniversary
The hope I was looking for (and actually found)
This is what Rwanda gave me:
Proof that “after” exists.
Not in a way that erases what happened — nothing can erase it — but in a way that refuses to let genocide be the final identity of a place.
Rwanda is not only a memorial.
It is a living country. A functioning country. A country with dignity.
It’s a country that has rules that work. A country that doesn’t accept plastic everywhere. A country that feels organised and cared for. A country that, in its own quiet way, shows you what’s possible when people decide they are not going to stay broken.
In a world where we are watching people be dehumanised in real time, that matters more than I can explain.
This trip wasn’t easy. It wasn’t meant to be.
But it was necessary.
And it reminded me why I travel with Romeo the way I do: because education isn’t only school. Because empathy isn’t automatic. Because the world is bigger than our comfort.
Rwanda did that for me.
Uganda came next, and it brought a completely different energy — more freestyling, more everyday life, more joy threaded through the heaviness — and I’ll write about that properly when I’m ready.
But Rwanda is where this story begins.
Because Rwanda is where hope stopped being a concept and became something I could actually touch.
Love & Light,
Emma