When Hollywood actress Kristin Davis visited Gihembe refugees

“You mean a porn movie star is in Rwanda to meet refugees?” asked a visibly scandalized TV 10 journalist in the press van on our way to Gihembe Refugee Camp. And he had good reason to be scandalized. That reason was the press release that had been issued earlier before the trip. The press release had read; “Kristin Davis (Sex and the City actress) is in Rwanda to meet refugees and to understand better their situation and make a short film for fundraising purposes. She will therefore have a press conference in the camp.” Davis has acted in a couple of Hollywood movies but all of them pale in comparison to her role in the 2008 feature film, Sex in the City. And you would surely forgive anyone for linking such a movie title as Sex in the City to porn, hence the scandalized look on the TV 10 journalists’ face. But far from it, Sex and the City is an American romantic comedy that was broadcast between 1998 and 2004. It was set and filmed in New York, based on the 1997 book, Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell. The show followed the lives of a group of four women who, despite their different natures and ever-changing sex lives, remain inseparable and confide in each other. The series’ multiple storylines tackled such modern day social issues as sexuality, safe sex, femininity, and promiscuity, among others. It spawned two feature films, Sex and the City (2008) and its sequel Sex and the City 2 (2010). It also won seven of its 54 Emmy Award nominations, eight of its 24 Golden Globe Award nominations, and three of its 11 Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Sex and the City still airs in syndication worldwide and is listed as one of Time magazine›s 100 Best TV Shows of all time. A day with refugees: Davis is not only an actress but also a celebrity activist and goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), under whose auspices she travelled to Rwanda. She first made her Rwandan trip known to the public via a tweet on Monday morning; In it she posted a picture from her first visit to Rwanda in 2010, with the caption; “#Monday Motivation. This is from my first trip to Rwanda. So excited to be back with @ Refugees to this beautiful country.” Davis adresses the press at Gihembe Refugee camp. Left is Jean Claude Rwahama, director of refugee affairs at MIDIMAR, and right is UNHCR country representative Saber Azam. / Moses Opobo Between this time and Wednesday when she headed to Gihembe Refugee Camp, Davis paid disaster preparedness minister Seraphine Mukantabana a courtesy visit, met with community leaders of the over 30,000 urban refugees living in Kigali, and visited Burundian refugees in Mahama Refugee Camp in Kirehe District, Eastern Province. “Thank you for your hospitality + sharing your inspiring vision for @ Refugees in Rwanda” she tweeted after meeting the minister on Monday. We arrived at Gihembe at about 3:00 pm, under a slight drizzle. It was freezing cold but that seemed to bother only us the visitors from Kigali. For camp dwellers, it was business as usual. A makeshift shelter was quickly erected for the impending press briefing. Davis arrived shortly after, flanked by the UNHCR country representative in Rwanda, Saber Azam. When the time came, Azam set the ball rolling by way of his candid introductory remarks: “I would like to introduce to you Ms. Kristin Davis who is a very well-known award nominee actress in the United States of America. She’s a very great friend of refugees and UNHCR, and she is assisting UNHCR worldwide to generate interest and awareness about the plight of refugees. It is really our great pleasure to see her here,’ he said. “It’s wonderful to be here. I love Rwanda and I’ve been here before, in 2010, it’s the most beautiful country I know, and on this particular trip with UNHCR, I’ve learnt that it’s also one of the warmest and most empathetic and humanitarian-based countries that I’ve been to,” Davis remarked shortly after. Then it was time for her to field quick questions from journalists; I asked about the fundraising film she intended to make and Davis retorted; “Well it’s not really a film. I know why you’re talking about this because someone tweeted that they saw us filming something and I believe that she described it as a film. But it’s not really a film like a feature-length film. Instead, she talked of “capturing moments” and making “short little films that we can then use on social media”. “We find that films are just a very powerful way to communicate to other people who really have no idea what’s going on. They might read it in the newspapers and talk about the number of people that have to run from their homes, but you don’t really understand what those people are going through. So when we come here we try to make short films and focus on certain stories, and one of the stories we are focusing on here at Gihembe are the people who’ve been here for such a long time. It’s a really rare situation where people have been in the camp for twenty years, and a lot of those people want to be resettled to America, frankly.” Brenda, a journalist from Kigali Today wanted to know the rationale for the timing of the visit; “Is it about making the camp dwellers to celebrate Christmas in another way?” she posed; Azam, the UNHCR country representative offered an explanation; “The timing is so crucial for us because tomorrow (Thursday, December 15) the national dialogue (Umushyikirano) starts in Rwanda, and this is the time that all Rwandans will be listening to the radio and reading the newspaper …” Signing off after the visit. / Moses Opobo Brenda has another question; “Many people who visit the refugees are globally known. But I doubt if the people here in the camp know that you are a celebrity as we know you. How do you reconcile the two?” “Well, it’s great that people don’t know us because it’s wonderful to be successful at your job and we have such a wonderful job, but sometimes you just want to deal on a human and personal basis, and when you’re in these situations you get to do that,” Davis explained. “You’re just a person who’s coming in, who’s trying to help the best way that you can. The reason I’m here in Rwanda is because Rwanda is not a big country but you have over 165,000 refugees which is really impressive and amazing. Because I think we have so much global conflict that a lot of the news has been taken over by the other conflicts, and I think that sometimes the conflicts in Central Africa don’t get enough attention and the people here don’t get enough attention. And I love Africa in general. Eastern Africa in particular so I’m always super happy to come. Because of the Burundian crisis, there are so many people coming in so quickly and it’s such a new conflict yet you as a country are handling it so brilliantly and in such a different way than a lot of countries handle such a big influx of people without fear. We wanted to shine a light on that and say thank you and make an example to other countries of how it should be done. I’ve been to other countries before, working with other organizations and it’s not a friendly atmosphere that refugees find. They might feel safety but the countries around them might not be as welcoming.” Another journalist asked why Davis has opted for the film medium to highlight the plight of refugees; “I think cinema is a way for people to see inside someone else’s life. The thing that’s great about the world right now in terms of media in general is that you can make your own media and put it out on social media or Youtube and that’s so powerful. I implore all of you to really think about what sort of stories you’d like people to know about and you can do something even on your iPhone and it can look amazing. So I think it’s an exciting time in terms of the ability to tell stories in your own way.” Elisee Mpirwa from Izuba Rirashe, a sister newspaper had a tough question for the actress; “You said earlier that Rwandan filmmakers are awesome, but have you met some of them?” “No, I haven’t.” “You haven’t watched any Rwandan movies?” “Name one. Name one. I’m thinking. I’m trying to think …” Davis retorted, almost with a tinge of embarrassment. “I saw a beautiful one about a cyclist in Rwanda. It was a wonderful movie. It was a really wonderful movie,” Azam interjected. He was talking of the short film, Rayisi, by Patrick Nsabimana, about a young man who lost a leg to a landmine in the 1994 genocide but that defied all odds to become a national cycling champion. Mpirwa then asked Davis to critic the film: “I wouldn’t criticize it. I think that the entertainment industry in America is a huge machine. It is overwhelming and we are tiny cogs in a wheel. So I think for a country like Rwanda to make a film with a beautiful story is a win and I would never criticize. I think there’re so many critics out there, too many critics. We need more filmmakers and less critics. So I think you’ve got to go out there and make it, and don’t over think it. Don’t worry about your mistakes because everybody makes mistakes. We make mistakes with 100 million dollar budgets, so just do it. Just do it.” Azam then put Davis’s visit in perspective; “The outcome of such visits is very important in terms of creating awareness at a time when the world is becoming more and more restrictive and people are becoming more and more centered around themselves. So we need people of Kristin’s stature to come up and speak about refugees, because refugees are like you and I. they have abilities, they have talents. In the US, 45 billionaires have refugee origins. It’s this kind of message we’d like to convey to the world.” editorial@newtimes.co.rw

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When Hollywood actress Kristin Davis visited Gihembe refugees