Not resting. Not scrolling in bed. Not the exhausted collapse at the end of a week that took too much. Still. The kind of still where the noise in your chest actually stops for a moment and you remember, with something close to grief, that this is what you are supposed to feel like.

Kigali does not do quiet.

It is a city in a hurry — beautiful, deliberate, always becoming something newer than it was yesterday. The roads are clean. The buildings are going up. The agenda is full. There is an energy to living here that can feel like a privilege and, on certain weeks, like a slow emergency. You move fast because everything around you is moving fast. You fill the silence because silence starts to feel unfamiliar. And somewhere between the commute and the work and the noise of being a young person trying to build something in a city that is also trying to build something, you lose the thread of yourself without noticing it go.

Rwanda's Travel & Tourism sector contributed a record-breaking Fr1.9 trillion to the economy in 2024 — with domestic spending reaching Fr773 billion, nearly a third above pre-pandemic levels. Rwandans are moving. Spending. Going places. But the question this piece is asking is not where we are going. It is whether, when we get there, we are actually arriving — or just relocating the noise.

Because there is a difference between being somewhere and being somewhere. And most of us have forgotten what the second one feels like.