For a recent story I was driving through Soweto, the sprawling township that's home to some 4 million people on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Over the course of a couple hours, I encountered the extremes of modern township life here in South Africa. It was a vivid reminder that this country is second only to Brazil in its enormous economic gap between rich and poor.

At one point, many of the houses we were passing had newly built extensions on them. Four-room homes with concrete walls and a tin roof had been transformed into a six- or eight-room virtual palaces. "Look at that one," my tour guide, Willy Ngobeni, would exclaim with glee. He explained that during the later stages of apartheid, the government allowed Sowetans to own their houses, but not the land underneath. That meant at any time, the government could - and did - order the house removed from the land. So people rarely added to their houses.

But in the new South Africa, Sowetans own that land. So, Mr. Ngobeni explained, "It's no longer a matter of one day maybe they'll get kicked out." This has sparked a boom in house additions that might make Home Depot execs salivate.

In fact, parts of Soweto are amazingly affluent. "Millionaire's Row," with its manicured lawns and BMWs in the driveways, rivals any upscale American suburb.

But just a few steps away are the slums. In one squatter camp that's home to 20,000 people, the “houses” are home-made shacks with tin walls and roofs. There’s one water spigot – and one bathroom – for every 200 people. And there’s no electricity. People use paraffin gas for cooking. Many have two or three car batteries in their houses. These are the power sources for their TVs and stereos. One battery will power a TV for a whole week. When it runs out, folks get it recharged for about $1 at a local recharging shop.

It was in Rwanda, of all places, where I discovered the wonderful world of wireless Internet surfing.

I was there earlier this month covering the 10th anniversary of the genocide. One afternoon I was sitting in the business center of the swank new InterContinental Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. It’s a $40-million, four-star palace with marble floors and exquisite wood-paneled walls. (Because outsiders still see Rwanda as an unstable country, apparently the government had to build the hotel – and only then would the InterContinental company agree to manage it.)

Anyway, deadline was approaching, and I was waiting my turn for a computer. But soon the helpful attendant came over and said, “I think your laptop probably has a wireless modem in it.” I was pretty sure it didn’t. But sure enough, he clicked a few buttons, and suddenly I had the web right there on my laptop. “And there’s a wireless network all throughout the hotel,” he told me proudly.

So soon I was sitting in the café downstairs filing my story – and instant-messaging with my editor. I had never enjoyed wireless Internet service in the US, but there I was: Wireless in Rwanda.

Too bad I wasn’t staying at the InterContinental or I could have sat by the pool to file my next story!

Given the scope and brutality of the ethnic cleansing ten years ago in Rwanda, I was a bit surprised to find that people here are unfailingly nice and polite. Drivers rarely honk their horns. I never saw anyone argue. In fact, one reporter who’s been covering Rwanda for three years said to me, “I’ve only seen one fight the whole time I’ve been here - and that was between two prostitutes over a man.” In day-to-day life, there doesn't seem to be half as much visible violence or anger here as there is in many other places I've been.

It makes it hard to imagine how the genocide happened. One reason I heard for the discrepancy: Rwandans have gotten very good over the years at hiding what they’re really thinking. A string of authoritarian governments have controlled just about every aspect of citizens’ lives. Until recently, for instance, families had to apply for a permit to move to another village. And military men had to have their choice of a wife approved by their superior before the wedding. (In fact, these and other elements of Rwandan life sounded to me like Cuba or North Korea.) With the state dictating nearly every activity, the only thing people have had control over is their thoughts. “It’s the only private space left,” one observer told me. And they tend to keep their real thoughts quite hidden.

In fact, out of all my conversations with Rwandans over the past week, only two have felt like they were really about what the people were thinking. Both conversations - about the various ways Rwandans have found to indentify each other in ethnic terms despite the government ban on words and actions thought to promote ethnicity - were carried out in hushed tones. It makes getting down to the real story - the real truth - quite tricky.

Ten years after genocide, things seem serene on the surface. But it’s hard to tell how calm they are underneath.

Perhaps never in history has Rwanda been filled with so many foreign journalists as in the past week. Some 500 of us from as far away as Japan descended on the country for the 10th anniversary of the genocide. One Rwandan reporter, observing the influx, said to me, “You should have been here in 1994. You’re more powerful than a whole battalion of UN peacekeepers. You could have stopped the genocide.”

As I arrived at one genocide site, a school where 50,000 people were killed and where preserved bones are still on display, my reaction was, “What am I doing here? I’m 10 years too late.”

So why weren’t all of us here 10 years ago? Well, I was still an intern at the Monitor. But people tell me one reason was that South Africa’s first democratic elections were going on at the same time. It was a rare case of the good news – Nelson Mandela’s ascendance to the presidency and the end of apartheid – overshadowing the bad. April 1994 was also the height of the O. J. Simpson trial. So the global media was otherwise occupied.

Even now, by being in Rwanda, we all may be missing a crucial story: "Ethnic cleansing" (as one UN official calls it) in western Sudan.

I’ve already asked my editors if I can go. They've agreed. So my next big trip will be to try to get a closer look at the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. If my colleagues join me, maybe we’ll be in the right place at the right time to help highlight a current conflict that needs the world’s attention.