Mr. President, Baby Gorillas, and the Battle of Free Lunch

Yesterday I spent the day at Rwanda's Kwita Izina festival. I'll just say it was a day filled with interesting juxtaposition.

I ate lunch at the table next to Don Cheadle's. I was hugged by a man in a gorilla costume. I met a bunch of chain smoking Peace Corps volunteers. I narrowly escaped participating in a small riot. I have witnessed - and am powerless to describe - an angry Chinese man trying to speak in Kinyarwanda. I shook the hand of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. He is 6'5'' and lanky, and had a band-aid on his thumb.

But why, out of a sea of 15,000 screaming Rwandans, was I standing comfortably in the presidential receiving line? Well, in a way that was the day's central question. I feel a little guilty about it. For one thing, I was lucky to have wandered my way in the right direction. Right place, right time. But to be completely honest, I was there because I had white skin and a camera. I let myself into the press section. I was uninvited, but not unwelcome. Unqualified to enter, but not unable.

Let me set the scene a little:

Every year Rwanda holds a special celebration called Kwita Izina, a ceremony where names are given to the newest Rwandan baby gorillas. There are only about 700 of these mountain gorillas left in the world, so a birth of twenty babies makes for a pretty special occasion. Dignitaries from all over the world that have done something special for Rwanda are dressed in traditional robes and allowed to name baby gorillas. It sounds cute. They gave a weird variety of names, from "Wakka Wakka" to "Celebrity", although some of them were in Kinyarwanda and did have poignant meaning attached. (The catch - you don't actually get to see any baby gorillas. The catch to the catch - there are a bunch of kids dressed in gorilla costumes that crawl on stage during the ceremony. Cuteness recovered.)

Anyway, that’s not the most important part of the day's events - just the excuse for the occasion. Rwandan pop artists sing and dance. Traditional dance groups perform and play the drums. Honored guests - this year, the one and only Don Cheadle - give speeches in English to scattered, unenthusiastic applause. See, most of the crowd only speaks Kinyarwanda. The general admission crowd - the hoards, throngs, masses of packed brown bodies - came to see the President, Paul Kagame, really an incredible man and the leader of an incredible national recovery, called by Philip Gourevich “one of the most formidable political figures of our age.”

Bamboo poles and school desks stood as barricades to hold back the crowd. Police guards were peppered throughout. When the crowd packed in too close, the police guards beat them back with black batons.

The ceremony is held in Parc National des Volcanes, close to the habitat of the gorillas. It's not anywhere near Shyira - way up in the rural mountains, where I'm staying this week (with Logan Mauney - great to have a travel buddy). To get to the ceremony we had to ride on the back of moto taxis for an hour and a half. I know its not the safest way to travel, but they do give you a helmet. And you feel pretty damn cool speeding along dirt roads through banana groves and dusty markets. Grandma, I don't know if you know what a blog is, but I didn't mean to use the word damn.

Cue arrival at the front gate of the Kwita Izina ceremony. Cars were slowed to a crawl for the closest few miles. Public buses, pickup trucks packed with people, NGO Land Rovers - this seemed to be the hottest party in Rwanda. Both sides of the street were packed with people moving our direction, a veritable pilgrimage to this yearly Rwandan celebration. Agile on our motos, we weaved in and out of the waiting cars, got to the gate and hopped out at the "visitor" entrance. Quickly we realized that we were the only people in line without tickets in the form of personalized invitations, but we blended in in one very important way. This was the VIP line for international guests. We fell in line with some Peace Corps volunteers, and decided to give it a go anyway.

"Hi, sir, we don't actually have tickets right now, but -"
"Sorry. You cannot enter."
"Ok, but do you think we can get tickets somewhere around here, or maybe wait in a different line somewhere..."
(very nice Peace corps vol, Annie) "Sir, my ticket says 'plus guest', so maybe they can come in with me."
"Yes, but this is meant for plus one, not plus four."

Then, a pause. He looked at us and said, "Okay, yes, you can enter. But just this once."

We were gatecrashers. I did not feel proud about the privilege so freely thrown our way. But in our defense, the 'invitations' were free. The government wanted international guests in the country to come, to show off their ceremony, and I could have gotten a ticket had I known they were needed beforehand. Looking a half-mile to our right, I saw masses of Rwandans funneling through the general admission entrance.

On stage a Bob Marley cover band was playing a song called "Crazy Baldheads."

"I and I build a cabin
I and I plant the corn
Didn't my people before me
Slave for this country?
Now you look at me with scorn.

We've got to chase those crazy baldheads,
Chase those crazy baldheads out of town."

A sea of Africans --- a wall --- a group of outsiders in chairs in a fancy tent. We were in the fancy tent.

In seats around me I saw the Peace Corps crowd, the NGO workers, the lonely planet crew, the foreign dignitaries or heads of German telecommunications companies or Japanese construction companies who were invited for starting contracts in Rwanda. On our side of the fence, it was an interesting mix.

As I said before, soon a couple of us left the stuffy tent and found our way to the press section. From the press section, after the ceremony on stage, we were led to a free buffet lunch, complete with white tablecloths and - literally - silver platters at each place. I was sitting next to a man whose wife works at the American embassy, the guys I came with (Logan and Boyd), and a few Peace Corps volunteers. When we sat down the tables were filled with drinks. Fanta, Coke, juices, bottles of wine and dozens of beers. Rather than serving drinks they just left them lying everywhere. It was a Thanksgiving of excess. To our right, Don and the Prez seemed to be having a serious conversation.

We all ate, then the president got up to leave, we all rose and applauded, and he was escorted out by men in black suits who occasionally touched their curlicue ear pieces and spoke into their wrists.

Then came the interesting part. Somehow the floodgate opened up. The masses found their way to the VIP tent, and they rushed the place. We were still sitting quietly at our table, finishing our beef and plantains, as Rwandans stormed the tent. Mostly young men and boys. It was like the starting wave of the Boston Marathon coming toward our table. A sea of brown engulfed us. We were surrounded by people grabbing plates of food, upending empty chairs, ripping off beer tops with the leverage of their molars, tossing away corks and chugging red wine. The caterers were not happy. Then the police came with batons, and they were not happy. We stayed mostly out of the fray - a little island of muzungus sipping Coca-cola in the middle of police officers and caterers beating hungry locals with sticks and batons.

"Well," said the Peace Corps volunteer next to me, "Drink up."

Eventually the uninvited crowd was chased out of our tent. The battle moved outside. It was raining. Event staff started breaking branches off of decorative bamboo poles, then a few minutes later moved to breaking off the poles themselves. It was like a free-for-all Rwandan mass of American summer camp freeze tag. Except instead of getting tagged you get beat with stick. At this point I had followed the exodus outside to witness the action, and the game continued around me. Only one man approached me, grinning widely, offering me an unopened Hieneken.

I moved forward across the crowded lawn towards a knee-high pile of trash the event staff had just dumped at the edge of the compound. Children swarmed the pile, tearing at each other, stuffing empty plastic bottles into coat pockets or clutching armfulls to their chests like frantic little running backs. I have had kids ask me for plastic bottles - 'agachupa' - many times. I knew they would reuse the bottles or sell them later for a few cents. Soon the pile was reduced to half its size. The kids moved on to scavenge elsewhere.

I walked on and passed a small tailgating tent set up with a man underneath - European of some variety, I hypothesized - sitting on a folding chair next to a pile of beer bottles. He was talking really slowly and loudly, in the usual manner of people trying to help foreigners understand their English. I only caught the tail end of what he was saying. "... TEN BEERS. FORRRR MEEEEE, TENNN BEEERS."

Soon we had to leave. We were some of the last 'international visitors' out of there. Without a transportation plan for getting back to the nearest city, we started walking, hoping to find a ride along the way. Within five minutes, a Rwandan man pulled over his pickup truck next to us - this is me, Logan, Boyd, and a Peace Corps volunteer - and we jumped in the bed, along with 6 or 7 other Rwandan guys who had been walking near us.


And so we sped off into the sunset. At the time it felt like a pretty picturesque and metaphorical end to the adventure. Misty mountains behind us, open road ahead. There we were in the pickup, thanks to the kindness of a Rwandan stranger, huddled into the laps of the same public we had spent the day forced to avoid. We all smiled and relaxed, let the wind dry our sweat, laughed through some communication in a funny mix of English and Kinyarwanda. We even made it back to the city before the rain started again.