Letter from Kigali: If you happen to be carrying a plastic bag while walking through customs when you arrive at Kigali's calm and clean city airport, it will be taken from you.
No plastic bags are allowed in Rwanda. This is my first glimpse of the way things work here: sweeping decisions, which often come into effect overnight, are followed by tight control.
Rwandan president Paul Kagame doesn't do things in half-measures. Last November all French diplomats and their families were given 48 hours to leave the country after a political row with the French government over responsibility for events that sparked the 1994 genocide.
Kigali, the capital, with a population of 851,024, prides itself obeing the exception to the rule that states African cities must be disorderly, struggling places full of chickens and people shouting in dusty crowded bazaars selling recycled western clothes. The main roads from the airport and throughout this sprawling hilly city are newly surfaced, with a bank of well-kept grass and trees. SUVs, their sides proclaiming one international development organisation or another, abound.
Development aid is very visible here, but so too is the growth of the Rwandan middle class. A new coffee shop, Bourbon Cafe, opened a few weeks before I got here. As you lounge with your latte on Bourbon's Starbucks-like sofas, surrounded by well-to-do members of both the expatriate and local communities, you might wonder if coming to central Africa is going to be as tough as anticipated, or if you'll ever muddy the brand-new khaki trousers and hiking boots in which you fancied yourself as a bit of a Dian Fossey.
Rwanda is being driven forward under the ambitious goals of the government's Vision 2020, the country's road map into the future. And, as my very smart young friend who follows me everywhere as soon as I step outside my house says, "Poverty will be eradicated and there will be no barefooted people and Rwanda will be known for its advancement."
The 18-hole golf course right in the middle of the city (imagine a golf course off Middle Abbey Street) and the luxurious Serena Hotel are good examples. Visitors can spend days in Kigali, eating brochettes at fantastic restaurants, drinking $10 cocktails beside hotel swimming pools and catching up on e-mails in the various cafes throughout town that offer unlimited wireless connection for the price of a cup of coffee.
Just a small distance outside the city, however, off the beautifully manicured roads, the Africa of a thousand news stories finally dirties my boots. On the side of a hill, tucked away from the view of the rest of Kigali, is a community known as an umudugadu. It means "little village". I'm here with a group of photographers to work on a small media and education project with the villagers, most of whom were orphaned during the genocide, others subsequently through Aids.
These children live in two-room, mud-floor cottages, all built in orderly fashion by the government. There are 47 such dwellings, each home to around eight orphans. There is no running water or electricity. Each home has a head, usually a young man, around 17 years of age. Education levels vary from no formal education whatsoever to a couple of boys who were sponsored to go to the local college. The majority have not advanced beyond low grades in primary school.
But school is not the priority - food is, which is available in fits and starts. None of the kids knows for sure if they will eat the next day.
Our team arrives with cameras to teach photography to interested participants, and the whole village turns out for the classes. Everyone I meet shares a politeness, intelligence and sensitivity. The children's most admirable quality is the way they look after and take responsibility for each other.
After class, we are invited to the cottages. We sit in these very basic but well-kept homes, listening to descriptions, with unwavering conviction, of their hopes, plans and ambitions for the village. It is hard to look them in the eye, knowing the scant help we can provide, and remembering that, at their age, all we had to tackle was acne and getting over Keanu Reeves. As we head back to Kigali's city centre, exhausted and dusty, I realise that to pick apart Rwanda's glaring discrepancies is far too easy. The rapidly increasing divisions I have seen are due to the speed at which Kigali is developing as an economic success story. It's unsettling to realise that to succeed and attract foreign investment, image is paramount, and that the umudugadu orphans and shanty dwellings don't play into that.
At the same time, given Rwanda's recent history, the growth of Kigali city is nothing short of miraculous. All hats off to Kagame.
But let's pray that this miracle blossoming in the very centre of Africa, already hitting international economic radars, soon reaches its own dusty hills outside the city.
Mory Cunningham works for Youth Employment Summit Rwanda, a local NGO in Kigali.