The iBot zone

Background info So I started writing this post over a month ago and continued for at least ten times. But now I deleted everything. The thing was becoming a boring disgrace. Which is a great pity, since it was my favorite topic up to that point of our trip. The visit of the largest slum on the African continent! And I was just over-doing it. Too many details for the history, filled with doubts if I get everything right. So now the short and dirty version. Firstly, numbers: according to different sources cited in Wikipedia, the slum has between 170.000 and 2.000.000 inhabitants. Mind-boggling, isn't it? Well, more realistically it's probably something between 300.000 and 800.000. But read the Wiki article, I'll leave the judgement to you. And all numbers there are anyways over 10 years old, so who really knows? Next, history: of course the thing started again with colonialism – how could it be otherwise? First it was a home to colored (forced) railroad workers that weren...

I'll just skip all order now and write this piece straight from the heart. Today in Kigali we visited the Rwanda Genocide Memorial. I write  this now while the feeling of utter horror and disgust is still present and I'm still swallowing the un-cried tears. Oh and not all of them were un-cried. But now is the right time to publish this, before memory smoothes a few corners and edges and thus minces my words. [edit: unfortunately I didn't manage to finish it in one go, but left earlier parts as they were written.] We all learned about genocides in school. As a European the most prominent role is of course held by the holocaust by the Nazis. We learned about the statistics, the terrible injustice of persecuting a group of society, the cruel methods as well as some prominent singular fates, for example the one of Anne Frank. We read books, watched documentaries and movies like Schindler's List about it. But none of these activities can replicate that haunting feeling when ...