Drinking Games with Nuns

I AM a good host.

Being a good host is an important part of Rwandan culture, one I thought I had finally mastered during my parents’ stay, but with my brother George’s arrival two weeks ago it become clear that I still have much to learn.

My first mistake was taking George on a bus from Kigali to Save. It was a struggle getting his two huge bags up the very long hill to the street where the buses depart, but once we made it on the bus – and bought two extra seats for the bags – everything was a breeze. My bicycle taxi friends were thrilled to see another muzungu to pay them twice the normal rate for the trip to Save (200 Rwf instead of 100, a difference of about 20 cents) and practically fought each other to take us or the bags. By the time we made it to my house we were hot and tired, and George had experienced the highest and lowest levels of travel in Rwanda (the express bus being the nicest, and the bikes being the cheapest, though not necessarily the most uncomfortable).

And then we told the sisters. Their reaction would have been suitable (in my coarse American opinion) if I had tied the bags to George’s back and had him hike to Save, pulling me behind him in a cart. They scolded and yelled and shamed me for the first hour of our welcome tea and returned to the issue whenever I made the slightest slip for the next few days. These other mistakes – not peeling his orange for him, not refilling his beer after every sip – might have slipped by unnoticed if I hadn’t proved to be so in need of their correction.

For the first week we ate dinner with the sisters every night. So for two hours I was chided and reproached in French while George sat by unable to argue on my behalf. When he didn’t eat enough (basically every night, since ‘enough’ seems to be equivalent to about three servings at least), it was my fault for making him feel uncomfortable eating since I was eating so little myself. When I translated his insistence that he did like the food, and just felt very full, the sisters’ response was “Stop lying, we can see he is still hungry.” All of their persistence came from the best intentions and for the first few nights that was enough to keep me from getting really angry. But each night it wore me down more until I had to resort to the clownish antics that keep me sane in the classroom. I would pour George’s beer until it threatened to overflow and then keep pouring so he had to drink while I poured to prevent a mess. The sisters loved it! When I was told to offer him food I would bow down with exaggerated servitude. As I have found before, sarcasm is generally lost on people here, so the sisters were entertained and I was able to partially vent my anger. (This was a good quick fix, but after a full week, I finally convinced them to allow us to come only on weekends.)

With our newfound freedom, George and I have had the chance to make a huge breakthrough in low resource cooking: brownies! You start with some simple ingredients – aunt Jemima mix (an import, I admit), Cadbury’s cocoa powder, sugar, eggs and Blue Band imitation butter…

Mix it all up and cook it in your kids camping gear sourced solar over (basically a box with a clear plastic top and reflective fins making a big collar).

Et voila! Brownies!

NB: This may seem like one small step, but try going for six months without warm from the oven baked goods and you'll realize what a big deal this is.

Half-Time Recap

As I suddenly find myself tumbling into June, a full five months behind me and another, seemingly slighter, five in front, I realize some important events and milestones of my achievement have been left out of my public records.

Teddy's momentous first ride on a moto.

THINGS I FORGOT TO TELL YOU

Extreme Home Makeover: Rwanda Edition

While my parents were here they decided to support the local economy and redecorate my house (I bet you can guess which parent was most wholeheartedly behind this). This meant our entire day for exploring Butare was devoted to the arts cooperative store. In two trips we bought two arm chairs woven out of banana leaves, two round side tables also from banana leaves, three woven floor mats, and a few smaller baskets to hold teas, utensils, desk supplies and toiletries – not to mention the assorted souvenirs to send back (almost all woven as well). Three little boys were overjoyed when we let them carry our booty across the street to the car for a few hundred francs (maybe a dollar total). I wish I had a picture of the two with the chairs – almost twice their heights – balanced on their heads.

Back in Save my mother rearranged my house so the entry room is no longer where I do work and instead has a little sitting area with the two chairs, a rug and a table. She also cleaned and reorganized my kitchen, hung up a painting we got on the street so it would be more cheerful (it is an outdoor room, with bare brick walls, a precarious wooden bookcase and a concrete sink painted brown). Meanwhile my father unloaded all the goodies he brought for my school (see #2) and Teddy helped by burning all my garbage. Thanks to their efforts I can now entertain or just relax with my feet up!

My Father’s extended visit

My father, never being one to pass up an opportunity to try new technology in Africa, decided to extend his visit from one week to four. He came a week early while I was correcting exams and then stayed all the way through vacation and a few more days when we were starting term 2. Thanks to him my school now has a strong internet connection, about 20 computers* around the school that are connected to it (including 14 in the two computer rooms for the students) and a digital library called an eGranary that is connected via a network to all the other computers. Plus, with the added clout of his being there in all his generous American glory, I felt I had the power to demand to rearrange the computer room I generally teach in, taking out the broken computers, organizing all the wires and benches so I had a chance of walking around without snagging a computer’s power cord, and deleting all the files the students had saved over the years – most of these had less than five words in a document, the students just always save everything. My sanity has been much restored with these changes and I hope the teachers will learn to incorporate these new resources into their classes. (I would love to give some weekend classes on such possibilities, but for reasons that are too boring an predictable to be worth explaining – essentially, bureaucracy – it is not deemed worthwhile.

*He did NOT bring the computers, just helped check the connectivity.

Many More Views of Rwanda

First with my dad and then with our whole group, Claire and I got the chance over vacation to see (besides the gorillas) the well-known lakes towns of Gisenyi, Kibuye and Cyangugu. All on the shores of Lake Kivu, these are the vacation getaways for Rwandans and expats alike.

The view leaving Gisenyi was beautiful,

as we reentered the Ruhengeri area (with the volcanoes and gorillas)

Gisenyi was once considered the best of the three, mainly because of its proximity to Goma (in Congo) with its palatial houses and crazy night clubs, but thanks to the same relationship it now feels abandoned and neglected. Not to say that it’s empty – it was full of people and busy with the countless huge trucks coming back and forth over the border (which by the way is just a stone wall, on which people from both countries hang their laundry to dry). But the streets were in some of the worst condition I’ve seen (the worst until we went to Cyangugu) with huge pot holes in paved ones and dirt ones that had all but washed away, many hotels and fancy houses along the lakeside were abandoned , some even covered in big red X’s (reminiscent of Fern Gully) that we guessed showed intended demolition.

Kibuye was the complete opposite. Under-hyped for all its beauty, it is really the Lake Como of Africa. It still lacked a real tourist town with restaurants or bars – all we could find was a gas station and a bus ticket booth – but the hotels are removed from the town, high on a hill with panoramic views of the lake or down on the shore, complete with a beach and boat dock. Had I brought a bathing suit I would have jumped into the water without a second thought to bilharzias (a parasite found in just about all lakes and rivers in sub-saharan Africa that can cause multiple organ problems).

A solid patch of road as we drive down into Cyangugu

Cyangugu meanwhile really feels like a border town - not great for vacationing, but not abandoned in the least. The border crossing looks like a wider footbridge that connects to Bukavu, DRC. The lake is still beautiful, but the road is so bad that's it hard to appreciate anything. (Apparently, Cyangugu has not yet recovered from a rather serious earthquake about a year ago.) We only came down this far to the Southwest of Rwanda to get gas when we just about ran out in the middle of Nyungwe Rain Forest.

Despite our gas situation, I did insist on stopping for some pictures of the rainforest.

That was quite a little adventure. One of the car running boards was falling off so we couldn't go too fast over the potholes, but at the same time if we lost all momentum we'd have to rev the engine, costing us precious fuel. And when we finally got through the rainforest (full of towering green canopy, terrifyingly steep drop offs on on side of the road and rising cliffs on the other that spoke clearly of the fatal danger of landslides), we were faces with endless tea plantations and no towns or villages in sight.

Every time we stopped, people eager to help would just come forward and start fixing the car.

We stopped at the first planation, but after a lot of helpful smiles, it seemed they could not give us any fuel. Finally. we drove through some small roadside towns - at each we got about 5L and many eager offeres to help fix the car. So Cyangugu was a necessary detour before we turned around and drove the three hours back through the rainforst in the haze of dusk to Butare.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED

What lizards do for fun

A version of slip and slide down my corrugated roof until they plop with a thud on the ground. I'm happy to decide they are also the tenants responsible for all the scampering and crawling I hear above my head, between the roof and the ceiling (especailly when the alternative is some huge insect colony I have yet to meet). I think the lizards also help keep down the mosquito population, so as one by one my fellow volunteers seem to succumb to malaria, I'm glad to have my exuberant little friends.

How to teach ICT without doing anything

How did I learn about computers? By using them. Now when in doubt, I take my students to the computer lab - for quizes, for review, for wasting a period that I forgot to plan for. They love it and I'm happy to sit in front of the open window and day dream - coming to to answer questions of course. Ironically, they are all doing much worse grade-wise but seem thrilled to be getting so much time to practice. (This is largely in part to a practical quiz which many failed when they didn't save their document for me to see.)

I am quite possibly a brilliant cook

A two item repetoire has been expanded to lentils, shitake mushrooms in honey and soy sauce, french toast, egg salad, and candied bananas. Of course there were some grand failures too - mushroom soup that resembled java the hut in color, texture and taste (as I imagined it), and chocolate pudding that proved that if everythign comes from a powder, the results will not be the same. Still, I have great hopes for my continuing improvement.

Kurera Fund

Viateur, one of the Kurera Fund students, after I took his bio.
He wants to be a pilot or a math teacher.

So, while I have been reveling in rainfall and being dive-bombed by airborne termites, Claire, my good friend and fellow volunteer here, has started a non-profit. It is called the Kurera Fund (kurera means "to educate" in kinyarwanda) and matches American donors with secondary school students who need help paying their school fees (about $80 a trimester). It all started when some of her students could not come to classes in the beginning of the second term because they still had outstanding fees from first term and the grace period was over. Claire just wanted to get her students back into class (rather than having them stand around all day, unable to change their financial circumstances) and in her resulting frustration, with the help of some friends and her parents back in the US, came out with Kurera. For this term she is just working with 30 studetns at her school, but hopes to expand to other schools and more students as things get rolling.

I came up to visit her this weekend and help with the start up process. With her headmaster, Claire had already selected the students deemed most deserving. We met with them for the afternoon to take pictures, set up email addresses and write bios, so donors can 'get to know' the student they will be supporting. As the French speaker, bios were my job. "Why can't you pay for school?" is a little harsh for a conversation started, but that's basically what I was asking all of them. Most of the students come from single parent families, supporting many childern (average around 5) by susbsistence farming (cultivating just what you need to eat, with little or no extra to sell in the market). So $80 can seem laughinly impossible (these are families that really live on less than a dollar a day per person). And of course some students had even more difficult backgrounds - orphaned from the genocide, or leading a family because the parent is handicapped (physically or mentally) to the point where they cannot.

And still, after they told me about hardships that would crack most adults I know ("my mother has an illness from the war, so she cannot work... her hands were cut off by machete"), these students would light up talking about how they like to play football (that would be soccer) or sing or plan to be a doctor. It amazed me that they still had the strength and hope to have such ambitions, even when they were facing insurmountable obstacles - I even met a boy who wants to be president!

So this is my shameless plug. Contact me if you would like to participate. I hope I do not need to spell out the equivalencies of $80 in starbucks and movie tickets...

Agony in Countless Forms

Until now, I have consciously avoided the topic of genocide because, while it is the topic most widely associated with Rwanda, it has had minimal bearing on my experience here so far. The Rwanda I have been living in for the past four and a half months is trying very hard to move forward internally and to be seen in a new light externally (as the fourth safest country in Africa, for example). However, this past weekend I visited a memorial site with the teachers of my school, at their insistence that I am part of their community and would not be intruding. Unspoken was the fact that as an outsider, I am, in a way, the one most in need of the exposure. Our headmistress told us we were going to learn together, to see a true reminder of what had happened "rather than listening to the news or the radio". Armed with this firsthand knowledge we teachers would be expected to help the country move forward and simultaneously prevent the past from repeating itself yet again.

The site we went to is called Murambi. It was going to be a school, but before it had the chance to be, it became the site of 28,000 deaths - people from the nearby towns who were rounded up and brought there for safety. If you read the books on the genocide, you might come across the mention of French soldiers in the Zone Turquoise playing volley ball over a recent mass grave. That was here. They have sign indicating the exact spot (an otherwise ideal location, looking down over terraced hills and catching a breeze coming up from Burundi).

The site is on the side of a hill. So on three sides there are beautiful views of the endless green countryside, now covered in organized fields with the tiled roofs of houses tucked into banana tree groves overy once and a while. First there is the main adminitrative building, and then behind it, running perpendicularly down the hill, are rows of classroom buildings each with a few classrooms connected on one side by a covered hall that looks out on the view.

Inside the classrooms are wooden plank tables covered in bodies. They look like plaster models - white, powdery, shrunken and too small, too delicate to be real. But the smell and the dull buzzing of flies confirm the truth. The smell is not overpowering as it must have been 15 years ago, but it clings to you and in your memory, so even days after I am suddenly sure I can smell it again. In some ways the bodies just look like the replication of terror and pain that we associate with horror movies and halloween - your mind wants to see them that way. But each one is different, an individual experience frozen in time and space. Some are screaming, the shrunken tissue on the skull revealing the muscles and tendons contorting like the rest of the body. Some curl up to protect themselves, to hide, or to shelter someone else. Others twist away, frozen in their final attempt of escape. And many others are mangled, in impossible positions, limbs pointing in the wrong direction or ending without the neccesary appendage. A spine seem to twist up through a rib cage. An entire body folds in on itself. A skull is flat. Or not even there. I could go on...

Death is often described as a great equalizing force; everyone looks the same when they're dead and decayed. But the bodies I saw were totally foreign. It's true that their race or ethnicity, religion, politics, gender, etc could not be determined. But I did not look at them and recognize the same shapes in the live people I see around me, in myself. The connection was incomprehensible, the implication sent my brain reeling in disbelief.

And after we went through all the rooms, and saw the volley ball field, and where the French flag had flown, and an excavated mass grave (a pit so massive it required catipillars to dig it originally), and talked to the director of the site with people patiently translating for me the whole time, we left.

I had assumed that the drive home would lack the laughing conversations of the way there, of a group of collegues on a sunny Saturday morning drive, but after a few minutes I was the only one still silent. Everyone else was talking and laughing like it was a normal day, and for most of them it probably was.

"Let Us Go to See Our Cousins"

A close look at the head silverback of the group.

(NB: Title is a direct quote from our guide; no comment on my many, lovely, not too hairy, cousins.)

The Gorillas. The Mist. And (a few) references to Diane Fossey. It's so uncomplicated to be a tourist!

After a two days spent mostly in Save (first meeting the Sisters and touring the school, then giving my house a complete reworking). we drove through some real Rwandan rain (to Teddy's delight) from the nicely sloping hills of the south to the daringly carved, barely clingling roads of the northwest. After being stuffed by the Sisters' lunch of the day before (where Teddy tried everything and my mother impressed with her recollection of French) we were more than happy to skip lunch in lieu of bananas and peanuts, thus skipping Kigali and doing the whole drive straight through. My father had the good sense and gumption to rent a car, so we were the "very safety conscious white rav four" that swerved for pot holes and slowed for the impenetrable, aforementioned mist. We even stopped to take some landscape shots - all four of us on our own cameras, classic Americans and our gratuitous technology!

And as soon as we passed Kigali, even I was in new territory and could relish the scenery without thoughts to spotting my town or having correct change; for those few hours I could have been anywhere, on vacation with no worries except to getting that one great shot. It even looked like a new country. The mist was extreme, reducing approaching people to silhouettes mere feet from our car, and completely obscuring the periferal landscape with the exception of the closest trees. The roads were more challenging, real mountain roads that twist and switchback often with barely space for two cars (which made the endless stream of trucks harrowing). And the mountains were really mountains. Dark green and velvety, like jagged, moss covered rocks from an ant's perspective!


We met Claire and her mother, Vivien, at our guest house located just minutes away from the park entrance. The guest house had beautiful views (below) and apparently benefited genocide widows in the area, but otherwise had little to recommend it. So, moving on.The next morning, after some orientation at park headquarters, we set off to see the gorillas, the six of our party, two more visitors - a writer and her translator - and two guides. After a short drive that put our 4WD to the test, it was time to hike. Two trackers and some soldiers ("for buffalo") joined us, we all got our walking sticks (sounds kitchy, but they turned out to be instrumental for the steep and slippery mud paths) and headed off.

The rest is pretty hard to describe in a way that does it justice, so look at the pictures and hopefully I'll get some movies up sometime soon!


We walked and walked through the jungle, up steep and slippery trails that guides basically hacked out with machetes a few paces ahead of us.

And then suddenly, they were right there!

Real Post Coming Soon!

Hi. I'm half way through vacation and so not really feeling mentally up to writing a meaningful post full of entertaining stories of my family's escapades through Rwanda. BUT do not despair. These will come soon after my return to school and daily life, I promise. In the mean time, I uploaded some of my National Geographic worthy photos of the gorillas to facebook, so go take a look!