By Heidi Kingstone
April is a month of remembrance. Nightclubs close and there is no music from the evening the massacre started, April 6 and 7, for a week. It is then the country feels the pain, and hears the screams of traumatised survivors.
April, as TS Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, is the cruelest month. But, there is good news from Africa.
It is not modern-day Rwanda's way to dwell on the past, but the past is inevitably always there, in the land of a thousand hills.
Under president Paul Kagame, the philosophy has been national reconciliation, not retaliation. Rwandans today think of themselves as Rwandan, not Hutu or Tutsi, because they fear if they don't, genocide could happen again.
Inevitably, controversy surrounds the policy of forgiveness, and oneness, but compared to other African countries, especially its next door neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda looks like it is on the right path.
It is too soon to tell if the changes are real and sustainable, and that enough is trickling down to the vast majority, who remain extremely poor and rural.
Only on June 23 did the Gacaca courts - the modernised traditional systems of justice used to deal with these crimes - start to hear the testimony of the genocide's worst perpetrators, the planners, rapists and mass murderers.
By 2009 Rwanda intends to have tried the remaining 10 000 cases.
In Kigali, on the drive from the airport, the buildings, the rolling hills, the scenery seem eerily familiar. The road goes to the Hotel des Mille Collines, made famous in the Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda.
Here hotelier Paul Rusesabagina opened the grounds to allow terrified citizens to escape the murderous militia, the Interahamwe.
Some, especially those close to the president, say the story is more complicated, and that rather than helping the fleeing mobs he insisted on being paid.
Today it is a busy hotel once again in need of refurbishment, the restaurant around the pool hums with the sound of French aid workers, and tourists en route to see the gorillas.
Rwanda has one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, with an improved business climate and open economy.
Rwanda Vision 2020 is a result of a national consultative process in 1998-99 that defined the future path the country should take.
Rwandans, too, have returned for those opportunities, as well as to make a contribution. The suburbs are rapidly expanding, with big houses being constructed and a golf course, and five-star hotel on the way.
Shopping malls pop up around the city, full of Rwanda's elite. They congregate at Rue Bourbon, a cafe that aspires to make people feel they are back in the US.
At another restaurant, Republika, sophisticated by any standard, Rwandan doctors, judges, businessmen and women, many of whom have decided to return recently, bounce from table to table socialising with friends and colleagues.
From here, Rwanda seems like Africa's model society. It is ranked No 1 in the world for an important indicator of gender equity: it has the highest percentage of female parliamentarians of any country.
There is a sense of order, a clear vision, and a determination. You can safely walk the streets, which have pavements - more than can be said for Nairobi.
Implementing the plan is more difficult. "We know what we want for our people and how to achieve it," says ambassador Joseph Mutaboba, secretary-general of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "We may not have the means, but we need a break."
Ordinary people come out every month and plant a tree or clean up the rubbish. In 1999 Kigali was a mess, not so anymore.
In Rwanda you will not find those thin plastic bags that pollute the landscape of too many other African countries, as they have been banned.
National ID cards were scrapped after the genocide: they identified people as Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, and the reason - for Mutaboba - is obvious.
"It was to remind Rwandans we were one nation," in order to try to put the past at the back of people's minds.
Rwanda feels inspirational. "We spoke the same language, lived together, had the same culture and the same god. We have to get the same message from schools and leadership, and to get back to the values we had originally."
Rwanda's attempt at dealing with the genocide has much to offer, and Mutaboba has talked to Israelis and Palestinians about ways of moving forward.
Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, executive secretary of the National Jurisdiction for Gacaca Services, has been part of that process from its pilot phase in 2002.
Gacaca means "little grass", the place on which the trial takes place. There are three categories, the ones being tried as of June, are the first and most serious category, the planners and perpetrators of sexual violence; the second category are the killers, and the third the people who committed crimes against property.
"We weren't competent to try the first category until now," says Mukantaganzwa, adding that "this kind of justice was the peoples' choice, and we don't regret it.
"The genocide was committed by relatives. Husbands killed their wives. Now we are seeing those men accused by their children. We are seeing the children who survived, marrying the children of their parents' killers.
A woman has married the man who killed her husband. We don't understand. We asked the survivors of genocide: "What was it between you and your neighbour."
They said there was nothing. "We did this because the authorities asked us to."
"I have seen everything," says Mukantaganzwa, who was in the country from 1990, when the civil war began.
"It's traumatising, and we are doing our best, but it's very difficult and sensitive work. In the beginning prisoners didn't believe survivors could forgive them, survivors didn't believe in gacaca. We made everyone participate."
According to a 2007 Human Rights Watch report, "the Rwandan government is particularly eager to demonstrate its high standards in the field of justice".
Some leaders are concerned with showing a level of judicial competence and impartiality that will encourage greater investments of capital.
In a country as religious as Rwanda, the backlash against the Catholic Church continues. Within these supposedly sanctified walls, people took refuge only to be massacred by active and complicit Hutu priests.
"The leadership," says Mutaboba, Rwanda's former ambassador to the UN, "tries to contain it so it doesn't slide into violence, but the church has not made amends. Instead of taking responsibility they excuse it by saying it was individual priests."
At the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Serge points out the graves of 258 000 bodies recovered and buried; 2 000 names are engraved on the stone wall, with more to follow.
Serge, who works at the museum, was only 13 when the genocide began, and took refuge with his mother in a church.
Before the descent into madness, he remembers his Hutu classmates taunting him, and his waiting with his family for bad things to happen, but no one imagined what it would be like.
Today he feels most Rwandans don't go to the museum for one of two reasons: either they are trying to forget or they don't want to confront their guilty past.
The country can't cope with the magnitude of orphans, So there has been a return to an old tradition where children belong to everyone.
Along the route from Kigali to Lake Kivu, about a four-hour drive, there is much activity.
In a country with very low capacity, boys carry crafted tables and stools on roads that wrap round the hills of this tropical paradise. The country seems to be pulsating to a better future.
But border issues remain. Many who committed genocide crossed into the DRC, and questions remain on when, how or whether they will return.
At the Genocide Museum a female survivor, in a film, discusses forgiveness. Her words are haunting, like the past. "The dead are at least silent."