Words 
So tomorrow is a ludicrously early start to Kigali, Rwanda via Brussels for research work for the Pervasive Monuments project. What started as Spomenik, now has taken on a paralell project looking at public memorialisation and technology in education in post-genocide Rwanda. On top of having been vaccinated for everything from Yellow Fever to Malaria I’ve been reading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, which is nothing less than mind-blowing. If you ever think that you’ve had it rough, read this book. Being a self-styled semi-expert on the Balkan and ex-Yugoslavia, I thought I might have known a thing or two about people and the politics that divide them. That is until I started reading this.
Rwanda is a fascinating and, from what I hear, a now once again lovely place trying to get back on its feet in amazing ways, from a self-styled Singapore of Africa urbanisation scheme to becoming one of the biggest data centres of Africa. Its going to be amazing seeing how they’ve dealt with what is probably the most brutal genocide of the 20th century 1 to working on memorialising this and trying to throw themselves into the 21st century at breakneck speed at the same time.
- A reported 800,000 people were summarily massacred in a mere 100 days ↩
Tags: Horizon, Pervasive Monuments, Rwanda, ubicomp
