“The Hôtel des Mille Collines, in the heart of the most affluent district in Kigali, has an easy andante to it, a Sunday-drive feel. I am greeted by a gracious, disproportionately large staff in a lobby that holds the footprints of Bill Clinton and the king of Belgium but also the hundreds and hundreds of desperates who in 1994 crammed into the cane-backed cushions of the sofas and stuffed the balconied rooms of the five-storey hotel. This address was UN-protected during the genocide, a safe haven, and is one of the only buildings in Kigali that remained intact. But the taste of aftermath is oddly absent here, and like so much else in the city except for the reminders from the limbless, the surface stains of recent history have been wiped over.”

—from Deborah Kirshner’s “A Pianist in Rwanda,” published in the May 2007 issue