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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: Rwanda’s strengths and challenges

By Sue Horton

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Sue Horton, Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor of The Times, is in Rwanda on a two-week Gatekeeper Editor fact-finding trip organized by the International Reporting Project. She is chronicling her trip on the Opinion L.A. blog.

Friday, Nov. 11: Our drive north to where the gorillas live, which included a long detour, took us through spectacularly beautiful scenery. It also revealed many of Rwanda’s strengths, and its challenges.

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The roads are in excellent condition, even the parts that aren’t paved. There are work crews everywhere, digging culverts so the roads won’t flood and making improvements on the sections that need them.

You also see the population pressure. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. But only a small portion of the population lives in cities. Most people live in rural areas and do subsistence farming. The country we passed through has been almost entirely deforested (though non-native eucalyptus trees have been planted, which people like because they grow fast but which drive out native species). The villages we passed through were lively but clearly very poor.

Reminders of the genocide are constant. Several times on the road, we passed work crews dressed in blue. They are genocidaires, convicted of participating in the genocide and sentenced to community service.

They’re a chilling sight, but we also saw one of the more encouraging things that’s happening in Rwanda: a huge improvement in rural and village healthcare. Stay tuned.

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PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, Nov. 6: Journey to Rwanda

Sunday, Nov. 6/Monday, Nov. 7: Two views of President Kagame

Monday night, Nov. 7: First impressions

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Tuesday, Nov. 8: Law of the land in Kigali

Tuesday, Nov. 8: Capital growth, for good and ill

Wednesday, Nov. 9: The master plan in action

Wednesday, Nov. 9: Genocide Memorial: Encountering the dead

Wednesday, Nov. 9: Rwanda’s take on the Conrad Murray trial

Thursday, Nov. 10: Genocide survivors’ testimony

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--Sue Horton

Opinion L.A.
Sue Horton

Sue Horton returned to the Los Angeles Times as Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor in December 2018, then moved to a senior editor role before leaving the newsroom in July 2021. For four years before that, she was a Top News editor and West Coast bureau chief at Reuters. She held a variety of editing jobs at the Los Angeles Times between 2001 and 2014, including Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor and deputy California editor. Before her first stint at The Times, she was editor-in-chief of the L.A. Weekly for six years. Prior to that, she was a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. Horton started her journalism career working for Community Information Project, an investigative reporting nonprofit that did stories on contract with public television, “60 Minutes,” and a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is the author of a nonfiction book, “The Billionaire Boys Club,” which was the basis for an NBC miniseries. Horton has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Redlands and a master’s in journalism from USC.

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