Overdue Thoughts on Rwanda

We crossed the border into Rwanda and Milton – our driver who made the trip from Kabale, just over the Ugandan side of the border, to Kigali a few times a week to deliver stacks of Uganda's New Vision and Daily Monitor newspapers – swung the car from the left to the right lane, from British to Belgian. On a giant billboard, the words 'Welcome to My Country' soared over a bottle of Primus beer. The tarmac was smooth and flat and noticeably free of Ugandan-style potholes; it wound around the bases of green hills, between them, over them: the land of mille collines, truth in nicknaming.

The three of us sat in the back seat of the blue Toyota Corolla. In front with Milton was [I forgot his name], who was traveling to Kigali for the presentation of his football team's Rwandan league championship. He split most of the trip between his touchscreen smartphone and his only-slightly-larger tablet computer. We dozed and stared out the windows and checked for service on our blocky, black-and-gray Nokias.

It was less than an hour before we saw Kigali: a cluster of hills in the distance came into focus through the overcast midday sky, buildings tumbling up and down between the greenness, stretching skyward, too. The road widened: a median soon split the two sides, manicured grass and squat palm trees planted at equal intervals; white painted lines halved the road on both sides of the median and – gasp! – cars stayed in their lanes: traffic moved like it did in – I swear! – America. The boda-bodas – motos, as they're called in Rwanda – all carried only one passenger behind the driver, instead of the two or three plus matooke or luggage in Uganda; the driver had his license number stenciled on the back of his helmet and his teal-colored vest; even the passengers were given helmets. There were no holes in the roads, no massive open sewage pits in the sidewalks, there wasn't even any garbage. Plastic bags were outlawed in Rwanda a year or two ago, and the last Saturday of every month is Umuganda – Community Day – where shops and businesses close and moto drivers switch off their engines and everyone stays home and cleans their yard or neighborhood or whatever until at least noon (and police roadblocks make sure you're not out before that). Kigali was beautiful, clean, orderly. It was, in short, not Kampala.

We laughed about the juxtaposition between Kigali and Kampala and, on the larger scale as we left the city, between Rwanda and Uganda; we marveled at it, basked in it. But at the same time, there was some niggling sense of unease that went along with it. It's just not possible (nor should it be, really) to spend time in Rwanda and not wonder: How much of this was here before? What was it like before? How much of everything – the cleanliness, the order, the semi-forced community days – is a result, directly intentional or not, of what happened here?

It was only eighteen years ago, after all, 1994, when the country exploded into genocide.

Walking down the street, handing a few francs to the woman at the supermarket after she packed our bread and cheese (yes, cheese: on more than one occasion we wished, as awful as it is to be wishful towards any aspect of colonialism, that Uganda had been a French or Belgian colony, for the breads and cheeses, instead of a British one, for the … fish and chips, I guess) in a brown paper sack, butchering our (very) limited French or speaking in a ridiculously affected French accent when trying to get directions from someone we passed on the street, drinking a draft beer (yes, a draft beer: one more point for Rwanda) on a sunlit restaurant patio – doing anything, really, it was impossible to keep out of my mind for any extended period of time thoughts about the genocide and how everyone over the age of twenty saw and experienced and remembers. But you don't talk about the genocide. That's what we were told before we went: No one talks about the genocide. So we'd drop it from conversations, like a curse word, just to be safe, or polite: “I read that during the [dropping voice to a whisper] genocide...” But I couldn't help but want to ask about it, to hear stories and learn things and be brought into it and by being brought into it be relieved of that still-niggling unease that I felt and forgot and felt and forgot the entire time, the unease that comes with tourism in former war-zones. (The feeling went from niggling to full-blown when we sat by the pool at the Hotel Milles Collines, the “Hotel Rwanda” from the movie, and drank a beer and there was nothing there, no reminders or memorials, just a classy, upscale hotel.) It was hard, almost, not to have conversations with everyone in my head.

You, moto driver, you saw a thousand million horrific things.

I did. Sometimes I still do.

And you, woman packing our breads and cheeses, you ran for your life or hid quietly, holding your breath and your children.

I did. I ran. I dragged my children with me. I bruised their wrists because I wouldn't let go, and I didn't let go, not once. And then we hid. I covered their mouths and held my breath. We lived.

And your husband?

He is dead.

I'm sorry.

That doesn't matter.

I know.

Maybe you saved people, man pouring my beer, maybe you allowed Tutsis to hide in your home even though you are Hutu.

I didn't. No. There are times when I wish I had, but I didn't. They would have found them anyway, they would have killed me then, and my family, so I didn't.

I understand.

I had to protect my family first, and I do not regret this, though sometimes I do.

I understand.

And you, smiling on homemade crutches, is that why you're missing your leg from the knee down?

Yes. But my arms are strong now.

You look happy.

I am, again.

You lost a husband, you lost a wife, you lost sons and daughters.

We did.

And you, did you kill someone?

No.

Do you know someone who did?

Yes.

Did you forgive them, any of you, they who killed your friends and family and who would've killed you?

I did.

I did not.

I cannot.

I won't.

I will. But not yet.

Do you forget sometimes?

Sometimes we forget how they died, our loved ones. Many times we try to forget how they died. But we will never forget them. And we will never really forget how they died.

There were all of these questions that I wanted to ask, but couldn't and certainly wouldn't. If I had experienced what everyone over twenty years old in Rwanda experienced, it's unlikely that I would want to talk about it either. Instead, we spent most of our first afternoon there at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. It's very well done and very powerful. It takes you through a history of the buildup to the genocide, the events during it, and the aftermath. There were video testimonies from people who'd hidden others in their homes or gardens – including one old woman who was able to hide a number of people because everyone in her village thought she was a witchdoctor so even the genocidaires avoided her home – and news footage of everything; glass cases filled with machetes and clubs that had been used; a children's wing where photographs of children who were killed (sometimes the only remaining photograph the family had) were hung on the walls above plaques that gave their names and ages (a few months old or five or twelve) and a few facts, their favorite foods (matooke or beans and rice or passionfruit juice) or favorite toys (a football or a bicycle or a doll), and how they were killed (hacked with a machete or stabbed in the face and eyes or smashed against a wall); outside, a series of eleven concrete slabs mark mass graves, concrete crypts stacked with coffins that, in some cases, contain fifty bodies in a single one as it was sometimes impossible to extricate one body from the rest, and that, in an area less than half the size of a football field, holds the remains of 250,000 people. We walked past these graves, sporadic bouquets of flowers on top, and were knocked down into silence just by the size of them, the area that they covered. Then we walked up a small flight of stairs and saw the sign that said just how many bodies were there and my skin crawled and my throat grew tight and it all just became very, very real. If it had been this unspoken, historical event, ghost-like, if you'll allow that word-choice, existing just on the edge of everything, like a speck in our peripheral vision, it wasn't anymore. If people don't want to talk about the genocide, and understandably so, then it's a very, very good thing that the Memorial exists. Things like that shouldn't be allowed to be forgotten, even if so many people wish that it would be, and the Memorial ensures that people will remember.

We digested it all over dinner later, brouchettes and chips and 750mL bottles of Primus. Or tried to anyway. It, the genocide, was horrific, disgusting, tragic – the adjectives go on and are all, each one of them, insufficient. We wondered, like everyone else, how it could happen. How people could do such things, how they could be convinced to do such things by propaganda and radio broadcasts and identity cards, how so many people could be convinced to do such things – all of the questions that are always asked about genocide, all of them unanswerable by anyone who wasn't there. That's my conclusion. I can judge the actions, the acts of violence and brutality and hatred and evil. It is easy and just and fair to judge those things. But I can't judge the people who carried out those acts because I wasn't there so what do I know? I did not grow up in a poor, third-world country. I was not oppressed, nor were my friends and family, by a government and a political system – colonial and post-colonial – set up for oppression. I did not come of age in a generation that was hungry and impoverished and jobless and, because they were all of these things and saw the future continuing on the same path, frustrated and angry. I was not uneducated, nor was I educated in a school system that – and I admit I'm making the assumption that the Rwandan school system is similar to the Ugandan one – does not teach or encourage creative or critical thought, that emphasizes listening to the authority figures and repeating and obeying the things that the authority figures say, a school system that, in short, sets people up to buy into propaganda, no matter how evil it may be. So I can't judge the people. I can, and probably will, sit here and say that I would never do those things, even if I had grown up in those conditions. But that's meaningless and empty because I didn't grow up in those conditions. The argument can be made – and rightfully so – that no matter the conditions in which someone grows up or lives, evil is evil, especially when it's so blatantly, deplorably evil. And it is. But people are also people. Another argument can be made then that some people are, simply, evil. Whether or not you or I agree or disagree with that statement is irrelevant because it should be obvious that Rwanda was not filled with thousands or tens of thousands of inherently evil people. It was filled with regular, average people who were poor and hungry and oppressed and uneducated or poorly educated and taken advantage of and who fell victim to the machinations of a handful of manipulative and hateful authority figures. Is that wrong, to say that most of the people who were committing the genocide were also victims (though certainly in a different way than those they victimized)? I don't know. Now I'm running out of coherent argument and into inchoate philosophical ramblings. I judge the actions, and I feel that I'm right in doing so. I don't judge the people because I have never been in their situation and I feel right in that, too.

Anyway.

If that sounds like the most depressing vacation of all time, it wasn't all like that. Because we put all of that aside when it was time (because you get really good at compartmentalizing when you live in Africa or you leave) and we had fun. We had a good time out on the town (though Kampala has Kigali beat in its nightlife scene, at least as far as we could find, which leaves the score at Rwanda: 129, Uganda: eh, let's say 4) with some PC Rwanda volunteers, and we left Kigali after two days to head up to Gisenyi, a sleepy little beach town on the shores of Lake Kivu and just a couple short kilometers from the border with the DRC. We hung out at the lake, went on a long, meandering, rainy pseudo-hike up to the top of a hill, ate good steak and good cheese, though not together. Rwanda is just pretty incredibly beautiful, if you're into the whole hills thing. And after the sun had set over the lake on our last night there, we turned and walked back into town, the sky turning black except in the near distance, just above town, where the lava of the active Nyiragongo volcano – just across the border in the DRC – glowed orange, like a little sliver of sunset that refused to go away or the fires of Mount Doom.

When we got to the border crossing the next morning, we were met by a lack of forms and some head-scratching bureaucracy and then, just as we stepped across back into Uganda, by a somewhat disheveled man with a cardboard box full of sachets (little plastic bags) of waragi (Uganda's local gin) that seemed to be for sale (as he asked us if we wanted to buy some) and also for his own personal consumption (as he was sucking the last drops from one while he talked), a fleet of ragtag boda-boda drivers yelling at us to hop on (we didn't), and discarded plastic bags and garbage along the roadside.

Home sweet home.

Turkey Time, Part One

In the last post, which, I know, was a long time ago, I mentioned a turkey project. It was an idea and plan that came from Okwakol John Michael, one of the volunteers I trained as a home-based HIV/AIDS counselor last year. He gathered a group of ten individuals from his village, Odwarat, some ten or fifteen kilometres from town, all of them living with HIV or AIDS, that would raise turkeys, keeping and feeding and breeding them to expand their flock, as an IGA, a way to make money to pay for antiretroviral treatment, or school fees for their children, or food, or whatever, along with more turkeys. A month or two after he first came to me with the idea, and after a lot of support from some wonderful people (you know who you are; embrace that warm-and-fuzziness that you're more than welcome to feel), we bought the first group of turkeys, seven females, and made plans to buy three males when I got back from a trip to Rwanda I had planned (which means we should be able to buy them this week, and stories from Rwanda will come shortly). We went together to Odwarat, north out of town and then east well off the main road down a narrow rutted dirt track, flooded over with massive puddles where it wasn't covered with five or six inches of loose sandy dirt, to where there was nothing to be seen but the occasional handful of huts interspersed between fields of sorghum and millet and cassava, to the home of the woman whose name I forgot who had turkeys for sale, stopping on the way to meet one of the group members and its treasurer. She showed us into the small hut, barely seven feet across, where she kept seven turkeys. They negotiated over the price, agreed on four of them, then we went back outside where they herded together three more from between the legs of a handful of cows and the trunks of orange trees. The sale complete, Okwakol took me down another narrower dirt path to his home, a couple huts of and a small, not-yet-finished square brick house and a mango tree in the middle of the compound under which his white-haired and smiling mother sat on a mat shelling a pile of groundnuts, to show me the turkey house the group had constructed, another small hut, the door latched and bolted with a shiny new gold padlock. He smiled and laughed and talked to me in way more Ateso than I could understand, but it was obvious --as it already was in the fact that he was wearing his best, shirt buttoned up to the collar, trousers pressed, grey blazer clean and smart-- that he was happy and grateful and hopeful and proud and the feeling was mutual.

Okwakol, checking out the turkeys.

Four of the birds he decided on.

Price negotiations.

Rounding up the other three turkeys.

Our turkey lady. (She was smiling and gregarious the whole time, Ugandans just don't smile for pictures.)

Okwakol, outside of the newly constructed turkey house, at his home. (He wasn't ready for the picture, so I was able to catch a smile.)

Okwakol and his mother, because she asked.





So, there it is, part one. It made for a pretty great morning, and hopefully it'll make for a pretty great, and long-lasting, source of income for the group, thanks again to some awesome people. Another update, more pictures, when we get the last three turkeys, hopefully in the next few days.

Less Serious, Probably More Boring

The last two posts were serious, and had little to do with what I've actually been up to, so here are a few random, short, potentially funny stories and updates.

1: I recently survived a crocodile attack. True story. More or less. True, it was only a baby crocodile, only about ten inches long, and it 'attacked' me only when I picked it up: it twisted its head back around, hissing, to bite me on the back of the hand between my thumb and index finger, and held on for a good ninety seconds before finally giving up its grip. And true, it didn't actually really break the skin much, but there were definitely teeth marks, and it was bruised for a few days. And that's how I survived a crocodile attack. It's actually not quite as cool as another time when we went to see the baby crocodile (it's in this little concrete pit enclosure down the hill from a place we stay in Jinja; I don't know why, but it is) and a friend of mine picked it up, it bit him on the finger, and his first instinct was to get it out of his hand. By throwing it. Right into someone's chest. So he actually wins, I think, as the only person (probably) ever to throw a crocodile at someone else. (I also got a pretty gnarly spider bite recently, which was much worse than the crocodile bite, and is probably actually going to be a nice scar. Uganda is apparently trying to eat me.)

2: Here's a list of some of the things that I've eaten recently, between various things trying to eat me–

• Cow shin: I've had this several times now, though it made me a little bit nauseous the first time. I ate it first when I went to my counterpart's home and she assured me that 'the part that presses the ground is the sweetest part.' It's not. I ate it for a second time when I was at the ajon circle (the local-beer-drinking place) and they had started serving food now, and I was told I had the choice between goat and cow, and I chose cow, for some reason, as if either would actually be a decent cut of meat, and it turned out to be the 'part that presses the ground' again. I'm pretty used to it now, though, and actually just order it willingly – when the choices are limited, that is.
• Goat pancreas: I've had this a few times, too. And it's actually good. They serve it dried, so it's kind of like if you were to make jerky out of liver and salt it. That sounds like something you'd want to eat, right?
• Goat tongue: The last time I was at the ajon circle and ordered the cow shin, I ate all of the meat –read: skin and gristle and fat– off the bone. I thought. Because there's not much there, so it's hard not to eat it all. I thought. The next time, though, we ordered food and my friend Martin turned back from the lady who makes the food to me, and said 'She is wanting to know if you would like the tongue of the goat.' I wanted to make sure I had heard correctly, and pointed inside my mouth: 'The tongue?' The laughter died down, and Martin said, 'Yes.' And I said, '...Sure.' She went off to serve up the food –the meat, or 'meat', comes with katogo, which is bananas boiled in a savory broth, and is one of my favorite foods here– and Martin leaned it and said, 'She is fearing that you don't like the molokon [cow shin] because you did not eat all of it last time.' Apparently, cleaning a quarter-inch of skin and gristle and fat off the six-inch-long, inch-and-a-half-diameter bone is not enough. I must have left an eighth of an inch of fat on there. Silly me. So I ate the goat tongue instead. Which was fine – I've eaten the entire face of a goat before anyway, in South Africa. No big deal.

3: There are a handful of work things that could keep me relatively busy for the last six months of my service, which makes me happy–

• The HIV counselor project is continuing and we've had good success with that; I'm going to try to go out with some of the counselors and collect first-hand (well, translated-first-hand) some of the success stories, which I think will be cool to see and meet these people and hear and record their stories directly.
• One of the counselors has created a group of people living with HIV/AIDS in his community who want to start a turkey-keeping project as an IGA (Income-Generating Activity). This comes after the handful of turkeys he already owned were stolen in the middle of the night, and the seedlings for the citrus-growing project that was supposed to start in their community were also stolen. But they put together an outline with a significant community-contribution and sustainability plan, which is always a good sign that it's going to be taken seriously, and so I'm going to be working with them to try to make that happen.
• Another counselor has people in his community saving money or pooling money together to buy seeds for keyhole gardens. I had told all of the counselors to encourage keyhole gardens (the mound-of-dirt style garden I planted –there are pictures on the blog, somewhere– which is good for people with HIV/AIDS as it allows you to grow the same amount of produce without having to move up and down rows in the garden), and they did, which was great – except that they all came back and said people needed seeds. I told them that people could mobilize –a favorite word in development-project-speak– for seeds, and I would love to help construct and plant the gardens. This was six months ago. I'd heard nothing back, other than that people wanted keyhole gardens and needed seeds, until a week or two ago. Finally.
• I'm going to get the life-skills club up and going again at the secondary school.
• I'm also going to try and start a football –soccer– league for kids who aren't in school, with a life-skills component, and I'm looking forward to that, if we can make it happen.

4: I killed my first chicken a couple weekends ago, a milestone moment in any white-guy-in-Africa story, and the only time I've ever killed anything but insects and spiders. I had gone to church with Mr Olinga, the security guard from my organization, because they were doing a fundraising auction to raise money for an event celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Diocese. People brought in g-nuts, cassava, chickens, goats, flour, among other things, and everything was auctioned off. I bought about seven pounds of g-nuts, which is awesome, and should last me probably until the end of my service. I was also given a chicken to auction. I awkwardly stammered through my Ateso numbers and the word chicken and the phrases 'Who wants?' and 'Any more?' until finally the bidding ended. I went to give the winner their brownish-red new chicken, its feet tied together with string, when they told me they had actually bought it for me. Someone I'd never met, and actually didn't end up meeting at all, spent 10,000 shillings on a chicken for me. Really nice of them, and it led to, later, after the auction was finished and we were clearing out, a sentence I'd never thought I'd hear in church: 'Daniel,' someone called out. 'Where is your cock?' I assured them I knew exactly where it was. When we left the church, we stopped first for lunch at the primary school across from the church, and then Mr Olinga and I went on to his place, walking between and over giant boulders, thin threads of pathways through tall grass, hot and bright sun, through homesteads of huts built up against the walls of rock, nothing else in sight but more rocks and grass and brush, me with a chicken in one hand –holding it by its feet, it hung upside down with splayed wings and flitting eyes– and a black plastic bag full of g-nuts in the other, and Mr Olinga with three more chickens and his wooden folding chair that he'd brought with him to church, and it was possibly one of the most visually 'African' experiences I've had, and then we were at his place, four or five huts and a mango tree for shade, the last homestead before the swamp. He showed me how to kill the chicken, then, after sharpening the knife on a rock. I yanked out a handful of feathers from the throat and, standing on the feet, took the head in my left hand and drew the knife across and back and across, and I must have done something not quite right, because blood sprayed out and speckled my pants and feet, hands and arms, but I finished and ten or fifteen seconds later, the chicken was finished writhing around, too. We put it in a pot of hot water, which makes it easier to pull the feathers out, and easier to strip the skin off the legs and feet. Mr Olinga's son and granddaughter finished cleaning and gutting it, and I walked home through the village with a whole raw chicken in a black plastic sack, salmonella probably festering in the 95 degree heat. I boiled the entire thing with I got home, for about an hour, and was proud while I ate an animal that had been alive an hour earlier and that I'd killed with my own hands (and a knife).

5: We're supposed to be at the tail-end of dry season right now, but it feels like we're still just right in the middle of it. It's been unbearably hot the last week or two, mid-nineties during the day, and not a whole lot cooler at night. My tap ran dry a few weeks ago, and stayed dry for about a week. I'd recently gotten an accidental buzzcut, though, and it proved to be the best accidental haircut I've ever gotten. It's much harder to tell that I haven't bathed in six days when my hair is only half-an-inch long. The smell is probably still there, but, hey, you get used to that. They've also started load-shedding again, which means they shut off power for any seemingly-random number of hours. This means that, without the fan on at night, I've taken to sleeping on my concrete floor. It's the only way that I can get moderately cool enough to actually get some sleep. We've been teased with rain over and over again, but I don't think it's rained for more than three hours total so far this year. I can't wait, though. It's like this, actually:

Sweet summer night and I'm stripped to my sheets, my forehead is leaking, the [fan] squeaks. A voice from the clock says 'You're not gonna get tired,' my bed is a pool, and the wall's on fire. Soak my head in the [basin] for a while, chills on my neck and it makes me smile, but my bones have to move and my skin's gotta breathe. Slide down the stairs to the heated street and the sun has left us with slippery feet. Rip off your sleeves, and I'll ditch my socks. We'll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass, weave through the cardboard, smell that trash. Walking around in our summertime clothes, nowhere to go while our bodies glow. And we'll greet the dawn in its morning blues, with purple yawn we'll be sleeping soon. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again … Let's leave the sound of the heat for the sound of the rain. It's easy to sleep when it wets my brain. It covers my rest with a saccharine sheen, kissing the wind through my window screen.

6: I also recently saw a baby monkey drink beer out of a guy's mouth. Africa!