Arriving in Bujumbura

The road to Bujumbura drops from the mountainous border down to the shores of beautiful Lake Tanganyika, humid and ringed with fat palms and leafy banana trees. As we continued through the verdant landscape I asked Yusto about the war, and he proudly but solemnly launched into a Burundian history lesson in Swahili, pointing out hilltop forests where rebels used to hide and shoot at people farther down the mountain, explaining how whole classrooms of Hutu children were taken out of school by the army and made to lie on the road, where they were then run over by trucks.

He told us that in Burundi the Hutus were the primary victims of post-independence violence, but now they’ve gained political power, whereas the reverse is true in Rwanda. Interestingly, he referred to himself as “Mrundi,” putting national unity before tribalism. When I asked Yusto how he survived the war, he told us that he fled to Kigoma for a year in 1993 but didn’t like the lack of freedom and the discrimination he felt as a refugee, so he came back and gritted it out with his wife and nine children. Once a bomb fell just 30 meters from their house, but Yusto says you just get used to it.

As we drove, we saw groups of soldiers in army fatigues sitting along the road armed with AK-47s, watching out for robbers and rebels. We also saw the striking Burundian flag, but it was not nearly as prominent a white flag displaying an eagle clutching a rifle and a leafy branch in his talons. Yusto explained that this is the party flag of the new president, Pierre Nkurunziza, and the rifle and branch represent his time in the jungle, when he and his men ate nothing but manioc for ten years.

In his eagerness to tell us about his country, especially his palm oil export business, Yusto literally screamed in my ear throughout most of our trip. He was obviously a successful businessman; he had a five-inch thick wad of bills on the dashboard that he dipped into to buy necessities like fruit, fish and milk, all of which he shared generously with us. Personal relationships are the bedrock of African culture, and Yusto clearly values his: he must have stopped along the road every fifteen minutes or so to greet friends and talk at leisure with them. He taught us how to greet people in Kirundi by saying “Amahoro,” which always elicited laughter and excitement from the locals.

The poverty, however, was some of the worst we’ve seen in our travels throughout Africa and Latin America. The roadside villages were a constant procession of filth, dilapidation and hunger. Beggars crowded our windows each time we stopped, an old man with elephantiasis of the feet stretched out his arms in a plea for us to take pity on his grotesqueness, and a young boy tried to shake Anette’s hand…here is how she experienced it:

“My first impression of Burundi was surprisingly good, nothing like what I expected after reading the ominous warnings of the US and Norwegian embassies. The gorgeous landscape with high mountains, dense green vegetation and big banana trees was a real contrast from Iringa and Kigoma in the dry season. But in the middle of it all was poverty, much more desperate than what we’ve seen until now in Africa. Dirty children, hovels for homes and stores. When we were passing through a slum-like area with muddy roads and people with ragged clothing, Yusto stopped to buy some fruit.

I was absorbed in watching the fruit transaction and didn’t notice that a little hand had pushed its way through the open window where I sat. When I turned my head I saw right into the face of a small boy with sad eyes. Hoping to get him to smile a bit, I grabbed one of his fingers that was resting on the window and pressed gently. That was when I noticed that the finger I had grabbed was as good as dead, like a rag doll’s hand. The boy’s wrist was a stump and his hand just hung there like useless skin. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that dead hand hanging from the end of a moving arm.”

At dusk we finally reached the outskirts of Bujumbura and realized that if we had been on public transport, we would never have made it to the city before dark. Yusto - just like all the Tanzanians who took it upon themselves to be our guides and caretakers - drove us right to a hotel in the center of town and got out to make sure that the manager gave us a good room for the night. We thanked him sincerely for all his kindness and then went to eat dinner and celebrate our arrival in this alluring country.