For some time now, my friend Chong and I have been bandying about plans to take a weekend to go hiking in one of Rwanda’s national parks. Chong has been stationed in Rwanda for 16 months working with vocational training programs in both the Ministries of Education and of Labor. Suddenly, it looked like Kenya Airways’ arbitrary cancellation of my plane ticket, which essentially left me stranded in Africa for one more day, would serendipitously grant our long dormant plans a new lease on life. However, once the client got wind of our intentions and of the fact that I had a free Saturday in Rwanda, we were abruptly rerouted. “You have to go see Sina Gérard,” I was told. “You won’t believe what this one man has done.” The client reassured me that Mr. Sina was located on the way to Volcanoes National Park anyway. Needless to say, we never made it to Volcanoes. But it was worth the detour.

Since Saturday morning happened to be Muganda (see the previous post for more information on Muganda), and a van full of muzungu would have drawn unwanted scrutiny when the entire country was supposed to be performing community service, we didn’t set out from Kigali until almost 1 pm. There were eight of us, mostly Chong’s colleagues from the Ministry of Education.

Shamefully, this was my first visit to the countryside outside Kigali, and I found myself constantly straying from the conversation to steal glimpses of the scenery. I don’t know how to describe it without falling into clichés of winding roads and gorgeous verdant hills but, well, I guess I just did. But the highlands of central Rwanda are no gently rolling hills. Kigali itself lies (depending on where you are in the city) of between 1300 and 1600 meters, or between 4,000 and 5,000 feet, and the surrounding hill country rises, I believe, to heights of greater than 2000 meters. The topography rises and falls constantly, which became sickeningly clear as the jeep lurched and pitched while navigating the hairpin turns the road took as it weaved its way out of the city (Chong’s colleague Alan, who piloted our vehicle and rally drives in his spare time, was perhaps guilty of taking the turns considerably faster than was strictly necessary). The area around Kigali looks a lot like what I imagine Hawaii looks like, or at least it looks a lot like the island on Lost – which I gather is actually filmed on Kauai. Though I might add, a very densely populated Hawaii. Rwanda has the highest population density on the African continent, with more than 10 million people packed into a territory the size of Massachusetts (or Belgium, depending on your frame of reference). But whereas most people in Massachusetts and Belgium are crowded into Boston, Brussels and Antwerp, by far the vast majority of Rwandans — somewhere to the tune of 90% of the population — live in rural areas. As we drove along, the intensity of cultivation in the country was evident — the countryside outside Kigali is beautiful, but it is bursting with human activity. The fields, many of which are nestled somewhat precariously on surprisingly steep slopes, were inordinately busy, and children played everywhere along the sides of the road. It was as a stark contrast to the eerie quiet that had prevailed during Muganda. Certainly the bustling activity made the landscape seem more undeniably human than the desolate roads and arteries of suburban America.

About 50 kilometers from the city, we came to a cluster of shophouses and workshops. It was here that Sina Gérard (Rwandans often list their surnames before their first names) came out to meet us. Sina Gérard is a rural entrepreneur who started out in 1983 with a small bakery, and essentially built a small-scale rural Rwandan version of the South Korean chaebol conglomerates like Hyundai and Samsung that are involved in almost every economic sector in that country. After the genocide, the Rwandan economy – much like the country itself – was in shambles. Sina thought he could add value to local farmers’ strawberry, passionfruit and pineapple crops by processing their production into juice, which would earn higher prices on the market both for Sina and for the farmers. Around 1997, he began distributing seed to the farmers, who in turn sold their produce to Sina at market prices. Gradually, his operation expanded. From fruit juices, Sina began making akabanga, the fiery chilli sauce now found on Rwandan tables everywhere (Sina invented the recipe). But Sina’s curiosity and enterprise led him into areas of activity that you might not expect to see in a hamlet an hour outside Kigali. His company operates experimental farms that dabble in everything from grapes to chayote to macadamia nuts. Towering kilns, used to make bricks, rise somewhat incongruously from the side of the main road that is lined both with flowers planted by Sina’s operation and by a ditch that is bringing high-speed fiber-optic cable to the heart of Africa. The government needed a supplier to make school desks, so Sina set up a woodworking factory that won the bid and became perhaps the only woodworking operation in the country to employ a large proportion of women carpenters (incidentally, Rwanda is the only country in the world where women make up a majority in the legislature). A bakery and restaurant sell the produce of his operation to passersby traveling the main road between Kigali and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Touring Sina’s operation was (as no doubt it’s intended to be — I’m sure I’m not the only foreign visitor to be dispatched to admire it) like visiting a miracle showcase of what might be possible in Rwanda through sheer force of determination, entrepreneurship and hard work. But this was no Potemkin village. I suppose the whole point of a Potemkin village is that you don’t know it is one, but the authenticity of the place was attested to by the fact that, where our whirlwind tour did occasionally veer into the whimsical and borderline surreal, it was the kind of whimsy that was more clearly the product of stretching the limits of one man’s imagination rather than of large-scale state manipulation. But whimsical and surreal it certainly was. How else to describe a place where you could turn a corner and see a flock of crested cranes leaning their strangely plumaged bodies precariously toward you as both they and you gawk with curiosity? What to make of walking among pens of pigs innocently gorging themselves into oblivion as music is piped soothingly into speakers mounted above their enclosures? What about the freshly dug foundations on the top of one hill, intended to anchor a tower– inspired by Sina’s visit to New York — from which, he dreams, tourists will pay to come catch a glimpse of the whole of Rwanda? Several hillsides seemed to be one large outdoor experimental laboratory, with apple trees growing next to rows of pineapple next to avocados next to pili pili chillies. Sina even started cultivating grapevines to challenge the conventional wisdom that Rwanda’s geography is not suited to producing wine — although the only fruit of the vine I could see being produced was banana wine, an intoxicatingly sweet concoction that I have no doubt would have rendered me hopelessly silly and helpless had I imbibed much more than Sina’s assistants insisted on pouring into my glass, before Sina mercifully called an end to our repast.

But all of this might only be a testament to the wild machinations of the human mind if it weren’t for Sina’s rather disarming humble origins and unassuming manner. I certainly would never have picked him out from a crowd. He was born and raised, illiterate, in the district in which he based his operations and, unlike members of the Rwandan elite who can generally hold forth impressively in English or French (and sometimes both), Sina could effectively communicate only in Kinyarwanda, and perhaps the Swahili that most Rwandans seem to pick up naturally. He had built an impressive rural enterprise, but at the same time took care to build tuition-free schools for local children. The importance of Sina’s story to Rwanda became all the more clear as our visit progressed — enough so that, as Sina motioned frantically for Alan to slow down as he barreled down a precipitous slope leaving villagers cowering in our wake, I experienced pangs of anxiety not out of fear for my life, but that our names would live on in infamy if our jeep hurtled off a cliff carrying Rwanda’s miracle showcase entrepreneur. Certainly I returned to Kigali feeling much more optimistic and hopeful about Rwanda’s future than I had before the visit.