The Terraces, The Work Crew

I was back in the Northern province this weekend, in a part of the country called Rulindo district. At dinner Friday night I happened to sit near the mayor of Rulindo district, a very friendly guy, and he came over and started talking to the visitors like a good politician would. I told him I thought his district was beautiful, but he assured me I hadn't seen the most beautiful parts, so he invited me to accompany him and his assistant - whose title is "Coordinator of Good Governance in Rulindo District" - on a scenic tour of the district on Saturday. Of course I agreed.

They kept talking about the terraces. They wanted to show me the terraces. We would turn a corner on a mountain road and see some sort of pretty, orderly, cultivated plot, and I would say ahhhh terraces, and they would say nooooo not yet! and so we kept climbing higher and higher around these bends.

I've always felt Rwanda to be crowded. There are so many people, so many huts, so many footpaths and pedestrians even deep into rural country. But up here - high in the mountains - when we finally found THE terraces, I saw an openness, an emptiness, for the first time here. They were right. It was beautiful. Check out the pictures.


















And so we continued from our first panorama on our way to the next, and I saw the group of workers that had been building these thousands of terraces and the roads in the area. A hundred guys at the side of the road with pickaxes and shovels, mostly dusty and grumpy-looking in their blue dungaree jumpsuits. The mayor and posse told me that these guys - these hundred-odd, normalish dudes - had confessed and been convicted of genocide crimes. They had served their few years in jail and now were being put to work as a way to pay back their country.

And turns out our next panorama was right by that work crew. So I got to step out of the pickup and walk through this crowd of killers (and yet normal Rwandan men) who simultaneously stopped working, stood up, leaned on their pickaxes and stared at me.













Because I knew what they had done, I guess I expected them to be like ghost men. Vacant, haunted stares. Angry and wrinkled, oozing hatred - I don't know. But what really surprised me were the ones who smiled and waved and cheerily said "Good afternoon!" or the ones with those goofy, floppy felt caps some men here wear.

They all have probably killed a lot of people. They are also in a lot of ways the average Rwandan man - one of a certain background and age bracket. If it shocks you that these men convicted of genocide are paying their debt to society by building roads with shovels, remember that at one point in the late nineties Rwanda had over 92,000 people awaiting trial for genocide crimes. It is not a stretch to see why they have abolished the death penalty. And why Rwanda has such good roads.

My Handy-dandy Notebook

It was one of my gap year resolutions to never let a good thought get away from me, so at all times I keep a little mini-notebook in my back left pocket. My handy-dandy notebook. My most recent one I made by chopping one of those flimsy moleskins in thirds, and viola – the perfect size for a butt pocket.

It’s maybe my most important travel habit. You never know when you’ll need to copy down a bus schedule, or see a scene that strikes you as important to remember, or meet an interesting person in a market and need to jot down an email.

And because these fleeting scenes and impromptu meetings are in my opinion the heart and bones of good rolling-with-the-punches traveling, my little notebook is the best snapshot of my time. It’s like a journal from concentrate, everything distilled down to bare bones, a few words here and there scribbled on the move.

Some examples of recent notes, from a quick flip through its pages:

- Chinese construction boss
- Saloons – HOPE
- Rooster cut (le coq?)
- National Flying Squirrel Association
- Lemon jooeeeseeee / tree tea?
- Maibobo

Explanations:
1) Chinese construction boss – I used to wonder why people often point to buildings or roads under construction and say, ahh, the Chinese. Well now I know. It’s because the Chinese government sends construction equipment to African nations like Rwanda, where roads and buildings are badly in need of being built, and offers to get to work. From what I’ve heard, the exchange goes something like this:

Hey, you want us to build you a road?
Yeah. How much?
How much you got?

And so on. So all over the country you see Rwandan work crews digging ditches or climbing scaffolding or driving backhoes while a single Chinese man stands nearby wearing one of those wide and conical, straw and comical, awesomely-stereotypical Chinese hats. They stand near the workers, somehow giving orders.

2) Saloon – a mistranslation of “salon” that has stuck. It’s what they call almost all of the haircut places. They mostly have funny names like “Hope Saloon” and “Small price Saloon!”

3) Rooster cut – I went to a saloon just to see what would happen. You should have seen the look on the guys’ faces when a white guy walked it. He obviously didn’t know what to do but was not about to turn away a paying customer. He kept his composure very well, faking it with a straight face. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time looking in the mirror. Basically he buzzed the sides and then chickened out on the top, kind of picked at it with scissors and then called it a day. It was worth it. I ended up with a do that’s passably European, Vanilla Ice-ish, Fresh Prince-ish, Italian soccer player-ish. I described it as a "rooster cut" and then my host family when I got home said, yeah, actually it’s kinda like a Rwandan style called “Le Coq”. So I’m cutting edge.

4) National Flying Squirrel Association – met a guy from New York on a bus – really cool guy – who keeps a pet flying squirrel in his closet at college. How did he find a flying squirrel? Well, he stumbled upon the NFSA on an internet search when he was fifteen. He says the dues-paying members are mostly very nice old ladies. So, yes, he met an old lady on a message board online, planned a rendezvous at a Cracker Barrel and was given his squirrel. I forgot what its name is – sorry.

5) Lemon joooeeseee and tree tea – A couple weeks ago I had a bad chest cough and my host mom insisted on giving me “African medicine”, which consisted of her saying, I’ll be right back, going out into the yard for a while, coming back inside, banging around in the kitchen, and finally emerging with some kind of bitter brown tea. Then she made me chug a glass of straight lemon juice. And yes, my cough is now gone.

6) Maibobo – apparently means something like “urchin” or “street child” in Swahili. It’s what my host family calls me. Lovingly, of course. There you are maibobo! Where have you been?

Rwandan politics! ... (a bus backfires and I walk through a work crew)

I’m leaving Rwanda a little bit early. I’m fine, not in danger. If anything at all, I might be in danger of being in danger. At risk of being at risk, maybe, but that’s all. And the same could probably be said for little old High Point, NC, not to mention most of Africa most of the time, but anyway. A little explanation.

A couple of weeks ago it looked like the excrement was really hitting the A/C here, politics-wise. Presidential elections are on August 9th, and the president has no intention of losing. It’ll be a “selection”, not an “election”, as I’ve heard some people laugh about it.

But the ones who laugh about it are in the minority. At times you feel the uneasy tension, everyone talking in whispers, everyone seeming to be waiting for something to happen. Soldiers line the streets of Kigali. Even if you were oblivious to any tension before, after getting an eyeful of AK-47s at every street corner, you have to start wondering what you’re being protected from.

The other day I heard a big bus backfire in the city. A big, sudden, exploding pop. I was in downtown Kigali, right by the main roundabout. Kigali is not normally a quiet city by any comparison, but the shocking snap of a bus backfiring can pierce through any city noise. And it sounds a lot like a gun blast. That was an interesting experience, how the crowd around me ducked and gasped, the electric terror, the looks on faces that said, finally, it’s happening.

Would I have seen this same reaction in New York, in Chicago? In Kampala? I don’t know. Maybe I’m finding evidence because I’m looking for it, but I don’t think so. It’s hard not to feel that events like that are little windows into the nervous national psyche.


(I’ve often wondered, if you came to Rwanda without any knowledge of its violent history, would you notice something different about the mood of the people? Is there really something in the air – a shell-shocked reticence, a scarred psyche – even though the physical scars of the country have healed? It’s either really obvious and unmistakable and true, or it’s impossible not to imagine it. And people who have been here a long time, even other East Africans, talk about Rwandans as a very reserved and guarded people. Strangely secretive, somehow. And on the street you see an unusual amount of missing limbs and eerie scars – machete marks, you have to guess. I stand by my observation that there’s something different, something still wounded, about the people as a whole. After all, the rate of PTSD once reached 40%. Deep wounds like that heal slowly.)

So what’s making people nervous this month? To give the long story short of it, the summarized version: a former Rwandan general narrowly survived an attempted assassination. He claimed it was the government out to get him, and then a journalist was assassinated who was investigating the government’s role in the shooting of the general. His newspaper was closed down – a couple of other papers have been closed down – a couple of opposition political parties have been shut down leading up to the elections, one candidate was jailed for “promoting the genocide ideology”, which unfortunately seems to be the catch-all accusation for anyone the government wants to snuff, and this candidate’s American lawyer was jailed under the same pretense when he came here to defend her. Also, there have been a couple of deadly grenade attacks on city crowds by some opposition groups who disapprove of the gov’t’s attempts to crack down on, say, freedoms of press and speech and assembly.

(No first amendment in Rwanda. It’s a pseudo-democracy, at best – but maybe for the best. It’s a police state, no way around it, no doubt about it. But it’s a police state that the vast majority of people approve of – here’s an obvious difference between American and Rwandan priorities – after seeing what they’ve seen, as a rule, they know that peace is fragile and they’re more than eager to give up a few civil liberties to ensure security. I wish I had as much time to write about it as I've had to think about it.)

So maybe there is something to worry about. But, the last couple of weeks have been pretty calm. Sometimes it feels like there’s a volcano boiling up right under the surface – and there’s plenty of nervous folks here more than willing to tell you so, and why – but other times it feels like there couldn’t be a more quaint and quiet place than this hilly green country the size of West Virginia.

Anyway, the powers that be at UNC have decided that it’s probably not best to wait around until August 9th to see which one of these impressions is true. Better safe than sorry, and I have to admit they are probably right.

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And now a little uniquely-Rwandan story for you all:

I was back in the Northern province this weekend, in a part of the country called Rulindo district. At dinner Friday night I happened to sit near the mayor of Rulindo district, a very friendly guy, and he came over and started talking to the visitors like a good politician would. I told him I thought his district was beautiful, but he assured me I hadn't seen the most beautiful parts, so he invited me to accompany him and his assistant - whose title is "Coordinator of Good Governance in Rulindo District" - on a scenic tour of the district on Saturday. Of course I agreed.

They kept talking about the terraces. They wanted to show me the terraces. We would turn a corner on a mountain road and see some sort of pretty, orderly, cultivated plot, and I would say ahhhh terraces, and they would say nooooo not yet! and so we kept climbing higher and higher around these bends.

I've always felt Rwanda to be crowded. There are so many people, so many huts, so many footpaths and pedestrians even deep into rural country. But up here - high in the mountains - when we finally found THE terraces, I saw an openness, an emptiness, for the first time here. They were right. It was beautiful. Check out the pictures.

























And so we continued from our first panorama on our way to the next, and I saw the group of workers that had been building these thousands of terraces and the roads in the area. A hundred guys at the side of the road with pickaxes and shovels, mostly dusty and grumpy-looking in their blue dungaree jumpsuits. The mayor and posse told me that these guys - these hundred-odd, normalish dudes - had confessed and been convicted of genocide crimes. They had served their few years in jail and now were being put to work as a way to pay back their country.

And turns out our next panorama was right by that work crew. So I got to step out of the pickup and walk through this crowd of killers (and yet normal Rwandan men) who simultaneously stopped working, stood up, leaned on their pickaxes and stared at me.













Because I knew what they had done, I guess I expected them to be like ghost men. Vacant, haunted stares. Angry and wrinkled, oozing hatred - I don't know. But what really surprised me were the ones who smiled and waved and cheerily said "Good afternoon!" or the ones with those goofy, floppy felt caps some men here wear.

They all have probably killed a lot of people. They are also in a lot of ways the average Rwandan man - one of a certain background and age bracket. If it shocks you that these men convicted of genocide are paying their debt to society by building roads with shovels, remember that at one point in the late nineties Rwanda had over 92,000 people awaiting trial for genocide crimes. It is not a stretch to see why they have abolished the death penalty. And why Rwanda has such good roads.

A Thousand Hills, A Thousand Valleys

Rwanda is often called “The Land of a Thousand Hills”, or “Le Pays des Mille Collines.” It’s a majestic title, and fitting. I just revisited the North of the country, and it is pretty majestic. As you travel farther north, the lush, green hills get thicker and taller, and the morning air has that foggy chill that reminds me of so many Boy Scout mornings, of unzipping the tent to the mist of the quiet Appalachians.

Ahhh, The Land of a Thousand Hills. The Rwandans have another phrase for it. Imisoze igihumba, Ibibaze igihumba, they say with a smile and a shake of the head. A thousand hills, a thousand problems. Except it’s more poetic than that. It means something like A thousand hills, a thousand valleys.














This weekend we took our show on the road. We traveled to a school in the North of the country in a little town called Buberuka. We found a welcome audience of about 400 students for our dual curriculum of peace/music and peace/football, honed by 3 weeks of lessons in our home school in Kigali.

I’ve been in Kigali so long now, I forgot how much I love the mountainous northern province. Kigali is hilly, too, but much less dramatically. And there’s nothing green in the city. Plenty of brown, though. Everything seems covered by a constant carpet of honks and dust.

An attentive bus ride spent at a window seat might be my favorite way to get to know a country, or, in this case, to reintroduce myself. In Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa, there’s no real countryside to speak of, just house after sporadic house dotting the mountain road at every turn.














The brown, mud huts slouch into brown, dirt yards. Grandpas sit under a rusted tin awning next to a walking stick, next to a bright blue sign advertising Primus beer. I passed a group of bus passengers crowded around their broken down bus that looks exactly like mine, sweating in the sun and leaning over each other in the crowd to watch their driver change their flat. I saw a group of shirtless little boys throwing sticks up into an avocado tree.

The school in Buberuka was another 15-minute motorcycle ride past the closest bus stop. It sits in the middle of a huge field of tea bushes. The vast expanse of tea bushes is so pretty, I started to try to think of a good comparison – like a green shag carpet filling in the valleys! But really they just look like miles and miles of identical little bushes.

Imisoze igihumba, Ibibaze igihumba. A thousand hills, a thousand valleys. I recognized this same attitude after Friday night’s Shakespearian loss by Ghana, which I witnessed with a group of Rwandans from Buberuka. Ghana almost made it farther in the World Cup than any African nation ever had – almost – before crumbling in the final minutes. The questionable fouls, the last minute penalty kick misses… to the one billion Africans watching, I understood how this match was never just about football. Even one of the most prosperous and promising of African nations, even with their imported European coaches, Ghana couldn’t quite beat the odds against it. It was a cruel metaphor.














45% of Rwanda’s national budget comes from international aid. The president, Paul Kagame, is a tireless advocate of self-sufficiency and Rwandan entrepreneurship, and in the coming years he wants to decrease this percentage of dependency. But right now, if USAID were found written on any more things around here, it would start to look like an occupied territory.

Someone this weekend told me about Paul Kagame that he is the only thing – the only thing – keeping this place together. You get these flashes of Rwandan honesty sometimes when you least expect them. “He must win the election in August,” this person told me, “or else these people will go right back to killing each other.” This was the first time I’ve heard that one put so bluntly.

This is one thing I love about Rwanda. A trip to a school is never just a trip to a school. The real gold of experiences seem to be found on the way and in between. Little exchanges, little impressions here and there. Maybe this is true of every place. Simple images, short quotes, these things that stick with me. I'll leave you with a few. Mini-stories. Harper's Index style.

- The way my host mom calls me for fresh juice in the morning. “Josephuuuuuu, joo-eeeeee-seeeee!!”

- When I asked my boss at a restaurant how to say ‘tip’ in French, he thought for a moment, gave up, and then said, “Probably they don’t have. You know, language is related to culture.”

- This oh-so-close attempt at hip-hope culture in a land learning English: the "Nigger Boy Saloon", a haircut place I pass on the way to work.

- Signs in Kigali: "Speak, Write, and Read Engrish in three months"
- "Saloon: We cut hair on small price"

-Tthe American embassy had a 4th of July party complete with face-painting, games of cornhole, glow-in-the-dark USA tattoos, mediocre hot dogs, and grass that was actually imported from Kentucky.

- The Kinyarwanda name one of my neighbors gave me: Kuberuka. I still have no idea what it means.

- The big brother billboard on the way to town that says, "Important date to remember, August 9th, 2010. I cannot wait to elect my president. Vote Wisely."

- The roadside goat brochettes: 20 cents.

The Mzungu and The Power and The Glory, For Ever and Ever Amen

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." – Heart of Darkness

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Mzungu Curuju is a Rwandan phrase I’ve learned and learned to love. I love it for all its messy implications, for the hints of insight it just might give into the complicated mind of this tiny African country I’m currently calling home.














Mzungu Curuju. I’ll break it down: Mzungu means white person, or more generally, someone American or of European descent – any kind of outsider, really. You can find the word throughout the Bantu family of languages in East an Central Africa. I’ve heard it plenty in Uganda and Tanzania, too, enough to get curious about the etymology, so I looked it up. Apparently, translated literally from the original Swahili, mzungu means not white or foreigner but "one who wanders aimlessly", maybe a reminder of a time when the Africans couldn’t figure out what these strange-looking colonizers and missionaries were doing wandering around so far from home, a time a hundred years or so ago when the whole wide white world showed up on this continent and fell on Africa with all its weight.

Anyway, uruju means skin. It conveniently rhymes with mzungu, making the combination an interesting little catchphrase in modern Rwanda. Mzungu Curuju means something like "a mzungu only skin deep". It can be used to describe a poor white person or one who just isn’t acting as a proper white person should act, as in me, most of the time – for example, when I am dirty and wandering around in a market, the kids all scream mzungu curuju! Mzungu curuju! Alternately, it can be used to describe a rich African, or one who otherwise acts too much like a white person – for example, I‘ve heard the phrase when a black person is behind the wheel of one of those NGO Land Rovers that speeds through the village dirt roads – mzungu curuju! – or, more generally, if an African is known for being punctual. Seriously, that part is true. (A note about those common NGO Land Rovers: my boss calls them "health clinics", as in, "Look at that smart new car! They're driving around in our health clinic!")

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On Sunday I found myself sitting front row center in another pentecostal church service. I tried to choose a less conspicous seat this time, somewhere tucked in the back, but they were not having it. Some sort of assistant pastor came back to me, grabbed my wrist, and led me to what must be the honored guest pew. Front row center. I acted honored. It’s not that I mind the attention – as I’ve said before, it can be a lot of fun – but in church, I tend not to want my presence to be such a distraction, since staring at the back of a mzungu’s head isn’t what I imagine these people walked all the way to church for. Or so I thought. More on that in a minute.

The pew was wooden and hard, and soon I was sweating through my fishing shirt. The service started with music, continued with music, and besides a few impressively explosive 5 minute sermons sprinkled throughout, was made up mostly of music. So you can imagine how happy that made me. I love the music. I love the choirs. And I don't just love them because they tickle my traveler’s adventure bone, as I might love some mundane African things just because they remind me I'm in mother Africa – no, no no, I love the choirs because they’re really good. There’s something about the warmth and fullness of African church choir harmony that hits the soul just right.

Jubilation! Joyful noise! I never enjoy church quite so much as this. It's great - you don't even have to understand the words. One of my favorite parts of the pentecostal festivities is that every congregation seems to have a few token members with holy spirit Tourette‘s. It's not my personal style of worship, but hey - I enjoy the atmosphere. They punctuate the joyful songs with the occasional burst of Hallelujah! or Yesu! or, my favorite, this crazy high-pitched ululating bird song thing. I couldn’t even mimic it with my mouth, so its definitely hard to write it.

But I’ve never had one of these Holy Spirit Tourette’s people right behind me. This was a different experience. Every few minutes, at some point during every song, the woman seated directly behind me screamed, "HALLELUJAH!" Her mouth was about 6 inches behind my ears. These bursts were hard to get used to. I tried to figure out their approximate frequency so I could prepare myself for the sudden, ear-splitting screams, but I had no luck. She was unpredictable. Every single time – HALLELUJAH! – I was shocked forward in surprise. God, the sheer volume and force of them was enough to make me almost – oh good god jesus – almost jump out of my seat. HALLELUJAH! My neighbors must have really thought I was catching the holy spirit.

I didn’t understand the words of the songs, of course, but luckily I had a friend right next to me who was doing his best to translate for me into English the basic thesis of each tune, screaming his nice and concise summaries right into my left ear over the noise of the choir and jubilant congregation. I really appreciated his efforts, though, because they started to show me a theme running through the songs, for the most part. Here are some examples:

“This song says, One day we will be with no problems!... no troubles!... no sadness!”

“This song says, Soon we will be to heaven!”

“This song is about Job – you know Job? – from the Bible? – about how he had a problem!” (Yes, a big problem, I agreed.)

“OK, (he had to pause to think about this one) this one says that human beings are composed… composed of three things: spirit, and blood – you know, blood (he tapped his wrist to illustrate) – and muscles. And air!” ... I never did figure that one out.

After the song about muscles and air a woman came to the front and took the microphone. Her sermon didn’t start slow and then crescendo, as I’ve known many sermons to do. This woman took a different approach. She started her sermon at a shrieking climax and just rode along that plateau for about the next 10 minutes. It was impressive. Screeeaaammming into the microphone. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I cringed at every syllable. Couldn’t help it. I don't know how no one else around me was shocked by the violent decibels ricocheting off the concrete walls and bare tin roof, as if her shrieks were exorcising the sin right out through my eardrums.

HALLELUJAH! The woman behind me yelled. I felt like I was in a war zone.

I didn’t understand the words of the woman’s sermon, but someone behind me thrust me an English Bible and fingered the verse she was preaching on. It was Matthew 24:9, and I kid you not:

“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…

I was reading the words as everyone else was hearing them. I was covered in a carpet of excited yells. Hallelujah! Yesu!

"…Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.

I realized this was not at all the sermon I expected to hear in a church out in the boondocks of Rwanda. Either that or it is exactly the sermon I should have expected to hear in a church out in the boondocks of Rwanda. I was silent. The passage continued…

“…At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.”

I was reading this passage in kind of a trance of disbelief. Remember, this wasn’t a quiet reading and reflection time; I was a lone island of calm on a rumbling pew surrounded by all the aural fireworks of Sodom and Gomorrah and weeping and moaning and wailing and HALLELUJAH on all sides.

“…For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again… How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!”

I was still reading the passage, the noise around me showing no signs of stopping, the woman with the microphone still on a roll, and then I heard the one thing that could have pulled me out of my trance. I heard the woman say the word mzungu (yes, I’m bringing this article full circle). I heard it a number of times – mzungu...! – and it was surrounded by a flood of other words I didn’t understand, of course, but I was sure of this one, because at the same time as one of the mzungus she gestured to me, the deer in headlights on the front row, thus calling the crowd into cheers and grateful stares in my direction. I reflexively smiled and waved back at the congregation, but I had no idea what was going on. No idea.

Just then my neighbor leaned over and found my ear and explained that the woman was telling the crowd that they should be so honored to have a white man join them for worship today because it reminds us of how Jesus was a white man and how at the end times of the destruction of the world when Jesus comes back we will all be turned into white men when we are saved and taken to heaven.

Wow.

Wow. If you're not feeling the shock that I felt after hearing this, any further reflection on my part's not going to mean much. Fascination kinda stopped me in my tracks - dropped jaw - and whoops - guilt - the realization that as the congregation heard (and enthusiastically accepted) this particular end-times theory they got to look at a mzungu in person who was goofily smiling and nodding his head. Well, I've seen a lot of African church services - Quaker, Anglican, Pentecostal, and more - in three different countries, but this particular Revelations revelation shook me something special.

There are some things that are OK everywhere, there are some things that are OK nowhere, and there seem to be a class of things that are OK only in Africa. Call them what you will - the continent provides its share of unique joys and frustrations. And I think the tendency for an open-minded, adventurous-spirited, culturally-awed traveler can sometimes be to root for that last category, to try to excuse things as "cultural" or to gloss over the messy parts with adjectives like fascinating. But let us remember, and let me remind myself, that some things are OK nowhere.

I can't help but pity a group of people who don't recognize their own deep Sunday morning self-loathing. Is it some kind of culture-wide"identifying with the aggressor"? Deep colonial wounds healing slowly? At the same time, these people had walked or bused their way to church from who-knows-how-far from the boonies/bush/banana groves, and aside from any mentally corrosive, wacko beliefs, I felt them huddle together for community and celebrate in joyful song - for whatever reason, they did it.

I know I've got you right where I want you, if you've made it through this marathon post, to lay down my own sweeping thesis statement to summarize the event. But I don't have one yet. Let me know if any of you out there have thoughts about it. I'd love to hear. Religion in Rwanda!

And now for more pictures of a sunset soccer match.

The Chinese Are Coming

I can do many things in Africa, but one thing I can’t do is blend in. Comes with the territory, and for the most part, I’m used to it.

Entering my second month in Rwanda – 4th month, cumulatively, counting last year – I’m in the weird gray area between ‘traveling’ and ‘living’ in Rwanda, between making first impressions and really getting to know her. I’m not living out of my backpack anymore. For the most part, I have a handle on the geography of the country and the city, and for the most part, I can make my way around. I know how to haggle with a taxi man. I can gnaw a hunk of sugar cane with the best of them. Maybe I should say I’m traveling deep rather than wide. But again, no matter how long I stay here, no matter how comfortable I feel here, I’m going to be obvious in a crowd.

I have a blast with neighborhood kids who seem to think my presence is just the most hilarious novelty of the season. I don’t think I’ve ever been so entertaining as when I get to show off my limited Kinyarwanda skills to the kids here around Ndera. I’m talking shrieks of joy, all their munchkin jaws unhinged with awe. It’s rare to be such the king of the show like that, so that’s fun. And on the more professional side of things, my fascinating presence – especially accompanied by a guitar – can pave the way for some great teachable moments to a rapt classroom audience. So that’s good too.

Of course there’s a dark side of always being so inescapably obvious. As I get more comfortable with the country, I would like to expect a respectful reciprocation from the country, some sort of sign, a tip of the hat, something simple – anything, really – to show that yes, we, too, are getting more comfortable with you, you strange-looking outsider. And you’re not so bad after all! But it doesn’t happen like that. Sometimes I’m frustrated at my unending power to distract (and this is true more in rural areas than the more cosmopolitan Kigali). Sometimes I feel like I'm not really experiencing the bustling bus park of Kigali as much as I'm experiencing a version of the bus park where I'm a little asterisk, where the crowd parts around me like a stream around a rock. Sometimes I’d just rather just exist and observe, a body among the bodies. But instead I’m a big, white sore thumb, and, you know, c’est la vie.

Anyway, I am many things here, but so far inconspicuous has not been one of those things.

The other night I sat down for a goat brochette during the Japan-Denmark match at a loud bar down the road. It was loud because its World Cup season. In World Cup season, places with TVs are always loud and fun. Looking for some characters, looking for some action, looking for some stories, I'm drawn to these matches like a bug to a porch light, not so much for the football as for all the richness of atmosphere and encounters that surround it. And for the football. I'm growing used to the frustrating 90 minute matches.

Now, anyway, why were a bunch of Rwandans sitting around watching Japan and Denmark kick a ball around? I can understand the continental pride in rooting for Cameroon or Ghana, but why Denmark? The easy answer is that during World Cup season, they will watch anybody kick a ball around. While a very small representation of the population makes actually playing football the national sport, the rest of the people earn their stripes by yelling at a TV with a beer in their hand. It' no less a national pasttime for lacking a ball.

The perhaps deeper answer to this question is that Rwanda is a country pretty focused on their own population, their own heroic rebuilding efforts, their own divisive differences – ethnic and political – right here in their own country. And even though Rwanda is a patchwork society made up of many East African cultures and tongues – Swahili, Lingala, and Kirundi, not to mention two colonial languages still vying for the top spot – brought in and out largely by the past half century of movement by refugees… and even though you can’t throw a rock in Kigali without hitting a Land Rover with USAID or AUSAID or some foreign NGOs logo stuck to the door… and even though, for the record, no one would dare to throw a rock in Kigali for fear of being confused as a political dissident and thrown in jail for a very long time, or at least until after election season… still, the point is, most of their international attention is E.Africa-focused, and they generally have enough drama at home to keep them engaged inwardly. The World Cup, however, gives Rwandans a rare excuse to really focus outward and beyond their borders. And as the obvious outsider, the resident authority on the American promised land of Kenny Rogers (he’s really popular, I swear), Michael Jackson, Obama, and the LA Lakers, I find myself the subject of some really good questions.

Watching the Japanese players, the man next to me observed, “They are so little! But so fast. Yes, very fast.” This seemed to get him thinking. He yelled in my ear, over the din of the crowd, “In your country, do the Chinese have the supermarkets?”

It’s a shame sometimes, but I’ve learned to recognize the situations where, due to limited English, its futile to start to explain subjects like American population demographics or something called a Harris Teeter, and, in a loud bar buzzing with grunts and vuvuzelas (*), this was definitely one of those times, so after a pause I decided on a simple ‘no’ to answer his question.

(*Here’s a test: you know you’re in America if you haven’t heard the word “vuvuzela” this month)

The stranger smirked and settled back into his chair. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they will come.”

P.S. I went to a Quaker church service today and a Pentecostal one yesterday. Interesting in many ways in both cases... stay tuned.

You can’t not talk about the Genocide: A long post about The Ellipsis, accidental cynicism, and occasional American Arrogance (also accidental)

I caught myself in a moment of cynicism. In a recent post I said that Rwanda is a place that “shouldn’t be able to produce idealists.” I shouldn’t say that. I’ll try to explain what I meant.

One of my current duties for Shalom, the NGO I’m working with, is to help compose a speech that my boss has been invited to give at an international conference in October. The topic is the role of religion in healing Rwanda after the genocide. (An overwhelming number of church institutions were complicit in the genocide of almost one million Rwandans in 1994. Many bishops and pastors simply stepped aside, or used their clout to flee the country. The Pope refused to officially condemn the massacres. The shepherds failed to protect their flock. But somehow, after the genocide, instead of asking Where Was God? they asked Which Way to Church? 97% of the country now belongs to an organized church or mosque). These’ll be his ideas, organized and hopefully eloquentized by my native English. (I tried to explain that being a Religious Studies major doesn’t really give me the authority to write about it, but he was excited anyway).

So I’ve spent a few hours interviewing him about the details of his Genocide experience – he was 20 at the time. I have, I admit, been blown away by his somehow level-headed optimism. We are humans. This thing happened. But this is community. This is how we heal. I won’t tell his story, but I’ll tell my own. Living in Rwanda, you can’t not think about the genocide.

First, there is an important and obvious note about living in Rwanda: genocide becomes the backdrop with which to compare everything. There is a time called ‘before’ and a time called ‘after’. Any unremarkable statement about the place seems to end with an ellipsis, a dramatic pause before someone says the G word that everyone is thinking. This constant comparison gives you kind of an awful and skewed scale of judgment, but you can’t help it. As I’ve said before, I’ve been lucky to have had Rwandan friends open up to me and tell me their stories – you never pry for them, of course, but you know they’re valuable and incredible – and important – and also dripping with ooohs and ahhhs, and they’re always just below the surface like a precious jewel you’re not allowed to dig for. So when someone opens up, you listen. You lean in and quiet down, your eyes get wide. I remember in great detail some stories I’ve been told – among them Jean de Dieu’s, one of a teacher in the Shyira primary school, and one of a guide I had in the national park last summer.

I don’t have the right to share these stories in detail, but I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. Just two days ago I was at lunch with a Rwandan man, enjoying tea in a suburb of Kigali, sitting at a table next to a semi-rural dirt street. A worker walked by with a bundled swath of long grass balanced on his head – feed for cows. One of his hands helped balance the grass. The other hung by his side, holding a machete. My Rwandan friend did a double-take and kind of shuddered. His face flashed something that I might describe as a pained grimace – I noticed it – and then he caught himself, came back to his senses, and gave a weird, over-compensating laugh. “Sometimes, still,” he laughed, “when I see a machete…”

And there was The Ellipsis. He didn’t finish his thought, but obviously I knew exactly what he meant. And I wasn’t laughing.

Once your catalogue of shocking personal stories begins to grow, you realize something even more disturbing: these stories aren’t uncommon at all. They’re very, very common, maybe the most common thing of all. In some ways they are the only common thing that matters – these shared memories of trauma just might be the fragile thread that holds this whole darn place together. And they are as mundane to them as they are powerful to us. To a Rwandan, they are the banal fabric of everyday life.

But I’m not a Rwandan, so they take some getting used to. And here’s another thing: I’ve hung out with enough travelers and ex-pats here to notice patterns in the accepted vocabulary of in-the-know outsiders – the parlance of our times, if you catch my drift. Just like in any place, there’s an in crowd here, and it’s in among the outsider in crowd to comment on the broken soul of Rwanda. This is going to be really cynical of me, again, but you’ll have to excuse me. I have to be honest. I’ve too many times been out at a restaurant with other outsiders when some white guy – probably a really nice guy, a traveler, let’s say – ends his rumination by sighing, looking off into the distance, and saying something like “… but in Rwanda…” Or some well-meaning white girl – a really nice girl, a missionary, maybe – furrows her brow, shakes her head, and says in a tone of genuine concern – and I have no reason to think it’s anything but genuine – “yes…especially in Rwanda.”

In some ways I much prefer the jaded aid worker to these sometimes self-important Lonely Planet types. I know, I know – I’ve certainly been that person before. Or I still am. And maybe this blog is just as guilty as their sighs and ellipses, and maybe we are all just a bunch of people who have been earnestly impacted by a shared experience in the emotional weight of Rwanda, and we’re all expressing it in different ways, so who am I to judge? I know, I know. In some ways Rwanda now belongs to all of us – it is a story for all of humanity – but I can’t help but be embarrassed on behalf of these outsiders who pretend that they really get the emotional plight of Rwanda. What would my Rwandan friends say if they saw us talking, musing about genocide, sighing into the distance, unphased by the sight of machetes?

We should learn the history, we should listen to the stories, we should take from them the lessons we can learn – but we must also know when to tread lightly on other people’s sacred ground. Sometimes during these ex-pat dinners I end up being the quiet one in the room just because I’m afraid if I say anything it’s going to be along the lines of Go back to America.

And I apologize, but I had to get that out. My judgmental flights of cynicism are very much the exception in my time in Rwanda, not the rule. But I’ve realized that I could easily go through a whole summer of blogging by highlighting only the wonderful experiences of picturesque travel in Mother Africa. And there will be many of those. Sunsets over banana trees, passion fruit (!), playing guitar in a Pentecostal church, the unexpected kindness of strangers… but what would real, adventurous travel be without, say, persistent diarrhea? Traveling gives you plenty of these less picturesque moments, and any amount of time spent in a place as fascinating and deeply conflicted as Rwanda is going to give you conflicted thoughts and feelings, too – guilt and shame, curiosity and awe.

I’ve described traveling as the art of rolling with the punches. I’ll stand by that, and I’ll try to keep this blog an honest account of all the best punches.