“The Cover of the book is one of pain and suffering but the story of Rwanda is beautiful”

Well after months of planning and hours of air time we touched down here in Kigali to a very British welcome of grey skies and rain in the air. Our journey here was a relatively sound trip even if our Team leader nearly created an incident with the aviation authorities after launching a cricket ball around the aisles at 50,000ft. However that didn’t stop us winning our Top gear style race to Kigali with Lee on his solo mission via Ethiopia. Loser obviously had to buy the first round of Mutzigs.

Our first port of call was the Kigali genocide museum, which i can honestly say is the most harrowing place I have ever been to. It’s hard to comprehend the sheer scale of the place, a mass graveyard of over 250,000 bodies on a site no bigger than half a football pitch. Inside the museum the stories of survivors about how they witnessed the brutal murders of their families just overwhelmed. Every one of us just walked around the place in silence engrossed and appalled at what we were seeing and reading. As we all gathered outside one of CWB’s great stories, Don, he reminded a simple truth, “Never judge a book by its cover. The cover is one of pain and suffering but the story of Rwanda is beautiful.”

In the evening we did what every good cricketing tour party does and that was go for a curry. There we met up with some of the big wigs of Rwandan cricket and had a good old chin wag about what to expect over the next two weeks. On a personal note it was a gorgeous curry which I keenly got stuck into much to the amusement of the others as empty dishes piled up around me.

To round off the evening the Pied Piper Lee, who needs little introduction, lead us down to the local for a couple more Mutzigs which turned quickly descended into something off Jeremy Kyle.

All in all not a bad first day for Team Rwanda Autumn ’13

G Mac