And the impression the devil left is thus far indelible. Thoughts about the genocide are immediate, issues relating to it the subject of all initial conversations. On our first night with PSI staff members, at dinner by the lovely, palm-tree shaded pool of the Kigali Serena Hotel, we quickly learned the protocol for discussing the topic. One, make no mention in any conversation, ever, to Hutus or Tutsis; the operative philosophy here, at President Kagame's uncompromisingly enforced instruction, is "one Rwanda," and any comment drawing attention to ethnicity can be severely punished. (The enforcement methods are later described to me as sometimes "heavy-handed," and it reportedly doesn't take much to be accused of being a genocidaire—one who partakes of sectarian genocidal ideology.) Two, do not ask anyone what happened to them during the genocide. "However, if they initiate such a conversation, feel free to engage in it and ask whatever questions you wish. Consider the door to have been opened."

You refrain from asking, but you think about it nonetheless, every time you look at anyone older than a teenager. That waiter over there, the hotel manager, the barman—what did they do during the genocide?

Rwanda is now considered almost entirely crime-free. Jack Driscoll, a former New York City police officer in charge of security for the actress Ashley Judd (Judd, a PSI board member and spokesperson for its YouthAIDS program, is traveling with us for part of the time), tells us that "it's now the safest country in Africa," and he makes it his business to know. Yet the experience of violence here has spared no one: People had family members killed, or saw killings, or were killers themselves. The conditions created by this apocalypse are, of course, what makes Rwanda such needy ground for organizations like PSI. There was a massive brain drain in the genocide's wake, together with an almost total collapse of the country's infrastructure, an alarming rape-induced spread of HIV/AIDS (half a million women were infected 14 years ago, and their deaths are now creating a whole new population of orphans), and massive psycho-social trauma. A staggering number of households, some 42,000, are now headed by children. "Everything here is about figuring out how to deal with the genocide," observes Kate Roberts, vice president of PSI and founder of YouthAIDS and Five & Alive. "It made people crazy. Many people are crazy."

We have our own figuring out to do, our own coming to terms with where we are. The plan is to see the sites associated with the genocide, and then to move on—to observe, as we travel across the country, the progress being made, the signs and intimations of Rwanda's fast-developing and brighter future.

I get my first good look at Kigali in the morning, on the way to the Kigali Memorial Center, Rwanda's version of a Holocaust memorial. It is a picturesque city on hills, less city than large town, each hill densely covered with small, low dwellings, a few higher buildings visible here and there. There's a reddish tinge to everything from the clay soil; many secondary roads and paths are unpaved, but the streets are trash free. Plastic bags have been banned (you may have yours confiscated upon arrival at the airport). Safety rules are strict—seat belts are mandatory, as are helmets, worn by the drivers of all of Kigali's ubiquitous, smartly painted green-and-yellow motorcycle taxis. Many people are carrying the yellow plastic jerry cans for water that we will later see everywhere in the countryside—even here in the capital, many residents do not have running water in their homes.