When this post goes live, God willing, I’ll be in 24-hour quarantine at a hotel in Kigali, Rwanda. The Chaplain and I, with my parents’ help, are getting away together for the first time since the pandemic.

We’ll be staying with a friend once we’re out of quarantine, so other than having a couple of ideas about what I want to do while I’m there (fabric shopping, lots of outdoor time, and maybe a visit to the library and the Shokola Storytellers Cafe), the pressure is off for planning activities during the trip. Instead of reading the guide books I got out of the library, I focused on reading books by authors from the region.

Here are two I wanted to share. Both are set the 1990’s, although the second jumps back and forth from present day.

Small Country, by Gaël Faye

From the perspective of a privileged son of a Rwandan mother and a French father living in Burundi, almost all of this coming of age story takes place in Burundi. I didn’t realize that there was unrest throughout the region, including in Burundi, at the time of the genocide in Rwanda. The story paints a vibrant world that exists in the tension of growing unrest, while also being full of the kind of experiences ubiquitous to middle schoolers everywhere. I learned about the effect colonization had on the region, and due to the parallels in the story to the author’s own background, couldn’t help but wonder how much of the story was biographical.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clementine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

While Small Country mostly skirts the edge of the violence and danger of war, Clementine Wamariya’s story is starkly different. Separated from her family by the conflict in Rwanda when she was a small child, she spent years in the care of her older sister, moving between refugee camps and living in countries throughout the region until they were granted refugee status and were moved to the United States. The cost of those years of wandering is clear in the pages of the book.

The story describes with cutting detail the emotional, physical, and psychological cost of war, and how the cost is born silently by so many – we only hear the voices of those who somehow, through chance circumstances, find themselves on a pedestal with a mic in their hand.