Rwanda surprises us, but we didn't really have a clear idea.

Rwanda is the land of a thousand hills. It's green and cultivated down to the last scrap of land, right up to the highest elevations. There are a few national parks, but we skip them. Managed by African Parks, it's all too expensive for us.

Rwanda seems comparatively developed, even though living and working conditions are harsh. Most of the work is heavy manual labor. There's hardly any private car traffic. Much, including heavy loads, is transported by bicycle. Trucks and buses are mostly old. But: Many roads are paved, there are shoulders for pedestrians and cyclists, traffic lights, speed limits (like German speed camera posts!), and zebra crossings. Streetlights. Nice, intact houses with paved courtyards. No garbage at all. Paper bags instead of plastic bags.

And there seems to be a kind of middle class that travels out of Kigali "into the countryside" on weekends, goes hiking, plays volleyball, and meets friends for dinner.

Nevertheless, it's an idiotic idea to try to bring refugees from Europe here. Rwanda already has more than twice the population density of Germany and can barely feed its people.

And Rwanda has a national trauma that remains very present even after 30 years: the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi. Within a few days, it is estimated that one million people were brutally slaughtered in a bloodbath, preferably with machetes. The prehistory is complicated and has a lot to do with the colonialism of the Germans and Belgians. With the establishment of the distinction between Tutsi (has more than 10 cows) and Hutu (has fewer than 10 cows), an economic system became an ethnic one (assigned by birth and passport) of privilege and discrimination. This resulted in displacement, refugee flows, radicalization, inaction by the former colonial powers, and disastrous political influence by the French UN troops.

We visited two (of many) genocide memorials. In Kigali, besides commemorating the approximately 250,000 dead, the focus is more on the story itself. In Murambi, work is still being done to identify the dead and preserve the remains, with the help of the University of Hamburg. Not much remains of the more than 20,000 dead there because the climatic conditions accelerated decomposition. But the few mummified remains still show signs of agony, fear, and pain. Very touching.