Nyamata Genocide Memorial

This was the first genocide site I visited when I arrived in Kigali. I was expecting to be blown away and I certainly was.  The church is in a small peaceful village with a school nearby – hard to imagine the atrocities that occurred there.  A woman in charge of tours at the church didn't speak English so our tour guide translated. It's hard to believe, but 10,000 people died in that church. I walked in and immediately I was floored. There were huge piles of clothes from the people who were killed. You can still see the blood stains on most of them. We were told that in one part of the church was where the children were killed, and the clothes in that area were distinctly children's clothing. We then walked out and around to the mass graves. The guide brought us down into one that has thousands of skulls and bones sorted out. You could see the skulls that were bludgeoned by clubs or machetes. 

This was a truly powerful experience that is outside of Kigali and therefore reminds you how terrorizing the experience was for this small village. I highly recommend it if you want to see how the genocide affected a rural village. 

There was a sign-in sheet and a donation basket, but I was unsure of how much to leave. I didn't want to be rude by leaving too much or too little.

Visiting Nyamata is an incredibly intense experience, and a wrenching one, and definitely one that all visitors to Rwanda should have. I was surprised by how little of the effects of the genocide one sees in daily life in Rwanda now, but if you visit a place like the Nyamata memorial its effects become all too clear. The church is filled with the clothing of the people who died there, and the roof is still full of holes from the bullets and grenades that killed them. The tour guide even points out the specific corner where children were thrown against a wall to be killed - my god. And the knowledge of the genocide is even more inescapable at the end of the tour, when the guide takes you down into the crypt behind the church that holds 41,000 people. It's unreal, and all too real.If you visit one site outside of Kigali, make it this one. This needs to be remembered. There's a good paved road running out to Nyamata, and the memorial is clearly marked. (And do make a donation - my guide informed me that they don't get any support from the government to preserve the site.)