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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.