Which, in an infinitely more complex sense, can be said of Rwanda itself.

Most travelers to Rwanda these days are adventure tourists, the majority of them from the United States, followed by Canadians and Australians. Nigel Arensen, general manager of the Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, where we stayed for our gorilla trek (see "Hot List," May 2008), told me that they come for Rwanda's outdoor beauties—the volcanic northern province of Musanze, Nyungwe Forest National Park, Akagera National Park. Certainly, Rwanda is a naturalist's paradise. But we were here for different reasons, at the invitation of Population Services International (PSI). One of the largest international nonprofit organizations—it employs some 8,000 people worldwide—it is dedicated, among other health- and family-planning goals, to the eradication of water-borne diseases, AIDS/HIV, and malaria. Except for the gorilla interlude, our goal was not standard travel fare: We'd come here to get an up-close look at the programs PSI runs, most specifically the Five & Alive Fund, dedicated to saving the lives of the world's most vulnerable children—those between birth and the age of five. This magazine had partnered last year with PSI, establishing the Condé Nast Traveler Five & Alive Fund, and we were here to assess how the money we had raised with the help of our readers and members of the travel industry was being spent. My traveling companions included Gregg Michel and Gary Hunter of Crystal Cruises, and several private donors to PSI, including Marcelle Cooper, wife of Ritz-Carlton CEO Simon Cooper.

Night had fallen by the time we landed in Kigali, and the capital's weak power grid did little to dispel the darkness. (Only five percent of Rwandans, we would learn, have access to a steady source of electricity.) A few dim fluorescent street lamps barely lit the parking lot outside the small airport. As we drove, our headlights picked out people walking along the shoulders of the hilly roads, a steady stream of humanity that we would notice everywhere we traveled. Rwanda, a country the size of Massachusetts, is Africa's most densely populated—with 500 inhabitants per square mile and a total population of 10.2 million.

This was April, the fourteenth anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Looking at those shadowy figures in the night, it struck me that during the killing there must have been nowhere to hide. The exact number of genocide victims is disputed. Half a million, a million? The most frequently quoted statistic more or less splits the difference: 800,000—mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic group as well as moderate Hutus opposed to the dictatorial, anti-democratic Hutu Power regime of the country's then strongman, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death in an airplane shoot-down on April 6, 1994, triggered the bloodshed. Whatever the exact number of corpses that piled up in the 100 days of shocking violence—remains are being found all over Rwanda to this day as perpetrators confess and identify mass graves in exchange for a measure of clemency—it is "proof enough," wrote journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in his book on Africa The Shadow of the Sun, "that the devil is among us, and that in the spring of 1994 he just happened to be in Rwanda."