At the memorial, which opened in 2004, we absorb the impact of the genocide—time lines, objects, photographs, clothing, filmed interviews with survivors. "Imagine people dying minute by minute. No one said anything," one young woman recounts for the camera, her Kinyarwanda subtitled in French and English. "The whole country was silent. It was as if we had moved to another planet." Some 258,000 bodies are buried under smooth, austerely unmarked stone slabs covering mass graves within the memorial grounds, on which visitors can place bouquets of flowers, and families discovering remains have the option of reburying them here.

After lunch in Kigali, we drive to Nyamata, where the Catholic church was the site of a massacre. The two-lane highway is lined with people walking—the unending processions we see everywhere, men, women, and, predominantly, children. (Sixty-seven percent of Rwandans are under the age of 25, and women have an average of six children each, a massive overpopulation problem that the government is aggressively trying to tackle.)

Ten thousand people in the area, including thousands who had taken refuge in the church, were slaughtered. What had seemed a safe haven proved to be just the opposite—here and in a number of other churches and places of public assembly throughout Rwanda. Because of the well-documented instances of the Catholic Church's complicity in the genocide, church membership has fallen from 85 percent before 1994 to 56 percent today.

The bodies in the church had been allowed to dry up, the bones had been removed and "buried" on shelves and in coffins in catacomblike structures dug below ground at the rear of the building, which some of us descend to inspect—stacks of bones, rows upon rows of neatly arranged skulls, many of them of children, many with entire sections missing, sliced off by machetes. But the articles of clothing remain in the church proper, thousands upon thousands of them, piled on the pews—shredded, blood-stained reminders of what occurred here and what the regime does not want Rwandans ever to forget. "This is what happened to our country," says a Rwandan who accompanied us on the church tour, to no one in particular.

On the way back to town, we're focusing on the positive. Like the road, for instance—new, smooth, bordered on both sides along its entire length by carefully constructed water-runoff troughs attractively paved with stones. I can't think of when I've seen a road so manicured. "This is so much better than in other African countries," Guillaume Bonn, the photographer and Africa hand traveling with us, tells me. "So much has been done in so little time, starting from zero. You sense a willingness here."

That night, we're somewhere in a field on the outskirts of Kigali, to witness a PSI Cinemobile presentation—the screening of a short film to an audience with no access to radio, television, or newspapers. "Edu-tainment," the PSI staff call it. It feels like we're in the middle of nowhere, but we are assured that this is actually a football field and that there are dwellings near here, invisible in the profound darkness. Loud music is blasting from speakers that have been set up on either side of the mobile screen, and the kids are dancing, are being put in a party mood by a "facilitator," Bosco, a PSI employee. Hands are in the air, feet are pounding, stirring up the dry dirt. I am quickly transported and relieved by the joy and excitement of this young crowd. They are having fun; everyone else today seemed so sad. The Cinemobile message is about the need to administer the anti-malarial medication coertem (marketed here as Primo) to children under the age of five within 24 hours of their developing a fever. Wait longer than that and the malaria can become fatal. Why the young, overwhelmingly male audience? "Because all the women are at home taking care of babies and young children," a PSI staffer explains, "or else their husbands did not give them permission to go out at night. That's how life is here. And remember, some of these kids may in fact be heads of families." Whatever the case may be, for these young boys—some, I notice, with babies strapped to their backs—the PSI-sponsored "happening" is the coolest thing around. "They will be talking about this at home for the next two weeks," Yves Cyaka, head of PSI's Five & Alive program in Rwanda, assures me. "They will spread the message."