More Than Eyes Can See: a nine month journey through the AIDS pandemic by Rhidian Brook

Author:Rhidian Brook [Rhidian Brook]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780714520100
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

For my birthday we decided to go into Kigali and celebrate with a day at the Hôtel des Mille Collines, the capital’s best hotel and famous for being the actual hotel in the film Hotel Rwanda. This book-ending of stays in remote, uncomfortable places was something that helped keep the spirits up (we had done it in Mumbai and Calcutta and would do it wherever we could); but it was never totally comfortable; it always felt like a cheat, going from pit latrine to porcelain bidet; from coleslaw to roquette and focaccia. How easy it is to switch from lack to largesse and back again.

We caught a bus into town, our exotic presence causing more mirth among the passengers. The bus driver cranked up the radio that was pumping out a pretty lively Afro-pop that we all jiggled our legs to. Suddenly I realised that the song we were listening to was about Arsenal Football Club. The recurring lyric at the end of the verse being ‘Arsene Wenger, Arsene Wenger’, the name of the club’s French manager. The song then went into a litany of reasons for the club’s greatness. The song, sung in Rwandese was currently in the country’s top ten. The ubiquity of football throughout Africa had this slightly misleading normalising effect on the mind of (European) visitors. Like the landscape and the wonderful wildlife, it made you think things were fine after all; but the music did make me think if these people can sing a song about Arsenal then surely their minds are on lighter, brighter things. Paul Kagame did cite the increase of the numbers of people playing and watching football as a sign that things were returning to normal. Sport, he said, was one way of taking people’s mind off heavy things.

The hotel was a modern, pleasant L-shaped, seven-storey building built around a swimming pool and tennis courts and set in a terraced garden. The clientele was largely black and, according to the waiter, Rwandan; elegantly dressed businessmen and women sat drinking bottled beer and Perrier discussing things. Waiters served people who sat at tables poolside. This was where, during the Genocide, the then hotel owner, Paul Rusesabagina, opened up his hotel to both Tutsi and Hutu refugees and then, using bribes and favours he had built up as manager of the hotel and blackmailing a corrupt general, he managed to save the lives of 1,268 refugees. It was hard to imagine this place being sanctuary to a thousand people fleeing for their lives but this was where that particular drama – now re-enacted and committed to celluloid – had been played out.

At the bar I met a young American who was a doctor, specialising in infectious diseases – HIV/AIDS in particular – studying at Princeton and here in Rwanda doing groundwork. We got talking and he explained that he was actually based in Kampala, but had come to Rwanda on assignment. Because he was American and a doctor working with AIDS I asked him if he had read a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

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