My grandparents are Holocaust survivors. I’ve heard their stories, of course. I’ve spent hours listening and even recording their tales of suffering and survival. But the Holocaust happened a long time ago. I’m sure that doesn’t make the memories any less painful or real for my grandparents. But for me, their American granddaughter, listening to their stories in their posh southern Florida apartment, spoken in their imperfect, accented English, I find it hard to imagine them ever being anything but my grandparents. What I hear and learn from their stories is unimaginable. I am unable to imagine it. So I wonder. What will I see in Rwanda? Not much, I know. I spent two hours at the airport waiting for the producer and cameraman to arrive on a different flight. And we will drive a few hours through the countryside to reach the Congolese border. In about five weeks, I’ll do the reverse. Nothing but a stopover. But I can’t stop looking for the traces. I talk to the driver who will take us to the border. We chat, and then I can’t help asking. “Were you here during the war?” He was. “What was it like?”, I said. He says it was very hard, but it’s clear he doesn’t want to talk about it. He changes the subject to all the development that has happened in Rwanda in the last decade. The genocide is in the past. And, suddenly shy, I can’t ask more. I want to know if his ethnic background is Hutu, or Tutsi. If he lost family members in the war. Or if his family members were on the other side. If they killed. If he did. As a journalist, we get sort of a free pass to ask prying questions of strangers. But we’re here for a story about gorillas and a national park. Of course there are connections. The park, and the gorilla habitat, stretches across borders into Uganda and Rwanda. And one of the main threats to the park, and so to the gorillas, is the ongoing conflict that has followed the genocide in Rwanda. Perpetrators of the genocide roam in rebel bands through Congolese forest. Villagers who have fled from these rebel groups and the others that formed to fight them live in camps on the edges of the national park. Goma has grown exponentially in the last decade, in part from people fleeing fighting, and the demand on natural resources has increased as well. This will be part of our film. We will meet refugees from the ongoing conflicts. We will talk to rebel leaders. We will learn about the how the daily struggle for food and fuel challenges the ecosystem. But my curiosity, here, now, feels like so much rubbernecking. I don’t need to know this man’s train wreck. And so I let it lie.