My Final ORI Blog

One of my largest projects for ORI was to organize a week of orientation programming for our newest class of scholarship recipients. Here's what I wrote about it. The blog is also up on the ORI homepage with a picture of some of the students...

Two weeks ago, the ORI staff here in Kigali made our favorite phone calls of the year. The calls went out to 47 students across Rwanda to let them know that, from a pool of over 1,400 applicants, they had been selected to receive an ORI scholarship. Like those that have come before them, the students in this year’s class are exceedingly bright, having performed at the highest levels on Rwanda’s national exam. Some plan to study medicine, others journalism or engineering—they all have big goals and they know that success at university is the first step toward achieving them.

When new student Seraphine Habimana was asked in her application interview why she should receive an ORI scholarship, she responded with an emphatic declaration: “Because I am the one who will change Rwanda!” After seeing Seraphine and the rest of the new class come together for an orientation week, it’s clear that she’ll have plenty of help from her fellow ORI students. Over the course of five days, the students learned about the ORI program, got to know their individual staff advisors, and participated in a variety of skill-building workshops. They were charismatic, energized, and ready with questions all week long.

The week’s highlights included question and answer sessions with older ORI students, presentations on sexual and reproductive health and gender awareness, and a workshop on financial management given by ORI student Janvier Kwihangana (who came prepared with his own PowerPoint presentation!). But the energy level really jumped when, after showing a film about the importance of being assertive and speaking your mind, the staff moderated an impromptu debate session. After taking positions on a series of issues related to human rights, gender norms, and racial equality, each student had the chance to defend his or her position. They argued forcefully and effectively; a few students even switched sides after hearing from the group’s most persuasive members. To say the debate was lively would be a serious understatement!

The week finished with an all-student meeting, where the older classes had their first opportunity to meet the new members of the ORI family. The room was full of hugs and smiling faces as the students caught up with old friends and greeted new ones. The meeting started with a boisterous round of introductions and applause for each student. When SGA President Julliet Busingye took the floor to welcome the new students she encouraged them to take the concept of an ORI family literally. By loving and supporting one another as brothers and sisters, Julliet said, the students will be better able to overcome the challenges they face and find success at university.

After a day off, the students embarked on a ten-week language and computer training schedule to prepare them for the start of the academic year. Be sure to check back in with us when school starts in January to see how they’re doing!

Heading home

I have less than two weeks left in Rwanda before I head to North Carolina to help put an end to this "the election is too close to call" garbage. I've been experiencing a whole range of emotions. As I pass my evenings in my temporary digs, watching European soccer via satellite TV, some of me feels very ready to get home, eat a good hamburger, and talk to friends and family on the phone without having the call drop. But then there's the rest of me, and the rest of me feels very sad to be leaving a place that has given me so much in exchange for so little.

One of my friends and favorite people, Jacob Moore, spent the last couple years working in Guatemala as a Peace Corps volunteer. As far as I know, Jacob didn’t blog while he was there, but instead sent incredibly entertaining emails with lists of things that had caught his eye, made him laugh, or that were far too strange to NOT tell his friends about. Recently, as he’s now almost ready to head home, Jacob sent a list of the things he’s going to miss, and the things he won't, about his life in Guatemala. So, with a tip of my hat to Jacob, I give you my own “Things I’m going to miss” list (undoubtedly incomplete and in no particular order):

Things I’m definitely going to miss:

- Conversations with my students that begin as follows:
Me: “What’s up?”
Student: “Cool”
Me: “Great. So what’s been going on?”
Student: “Fine”
- the sunshine
- the rainstorms
- the coffee
- the dancing
- drinking on the porch in Kimihurura
- Larry London, Ray McDonald and the “World’s Best Variety” on Voice of America radio. (Larry London may be the greatest radio DJ ever: imagine a guy whose voice and personality belong on the local soft rock station, but whose job requires that he sound really excited about the latest song from a band like Plain White Tees. The results include awkward non-sequitors and hilarious transitions. He once introduced a song from Ruben Studdard by saying “And now we hear from another big man, Ruben Studdard, he’s a REALLY big man, over three hundred pounds!...and, wait till you hear this...he just got married!!” Maybe you had to be there...)
- The population’s general appreciation for the musical gifts of Akon, Rihanna, Sean Kingston, and Chris Brown.
- The T-Shirts: It would be impossible to list all of the out-of-place and hilarious shirts that I’ve spotted since being here, but the best-of list includes “Yanni: Live at the Acropolis”, “Yes, despite this look on my face, you’re still talking”, and, my all time favorite, seen on a woman in a village outside Kigali: “Work Sucks – I’m going golfing”
- Rwandan mini-bananas
- Primus, Mutzig, and the concept of ordering a “big” beer
- matooke, chapatti, and the rest of the lunch buffet at Africa Bite
- Coca-Cola out of the bottle
- the culture of shaking everyone’s hand when you enter a room
- getting to know Rwandans and their stories
- and, most importantly, ORI: the students, my wonderful co-workers, and the "easy" button we imported from Staples.

Things I’m not sure I’m going to miss:

- having one of my main modes of transport be this city's fleet of motos, 90% of which have broken speedometers AND gas gauges
- negotiating with moto drivers and indignantly holding my ground when they try to charge me even 100 francs more than what I think is fair (100 francs being the equivalent of about $0.20)
- pili pili
- fries at every meal
- when I order beer, having to specify that I want it cold
- driving the ORI car and wondering how many seconds I have left before the wheels fall off
- staring back at people who stare
- Umuganda – a half-day of state-mandated public works projects that happens on the last Saturday of every month
- relying only on landmarks and hand motions to explain any given location to another person

Things I definitely won’t miss:

- the staring, accompanied by calls of “mzungu,” everywhere I go
- having rocks thrown at the car (only happened once, but I wasn’t a huge fan)
- having people, kids and adults, jog along behind me when I go for a run
- the roads and the way people drive on them


More thoughts, and maybe some additions to the list, before I go...

Gorillas!

This weekend was our gorilla weekend and I think I speak for both of us when I say it was in the top five experiences either of us has ever had.

We left Kigali on a Friday afternoon bus to Ruhengeri, the town at the base of Mount Bisoke and Karisimbi. The bus was packed, and as we swerved around on Rwanda’s windy roads, our fellow passengers were busy singing religious songs in Kinyarwanda. A guy sitting next to us explained that, thanks to the songs, the whole bus would be saved. Given how close we were coming to the edge of the road, I was happy to hear that. I hadn’t yet been to eastern Rwanda and I didn’t realize how beautiful it would be. The volcanic mountains tower over the villages and at dusk a bluish orange glow sits over the foothills where they layer the horizon. From Ruhengeri we took another local bus up to Kinigi, a village at the edge of Volcanoes National Park, which is where the gorilla trekking happens. After getting off the bus we needed to find our way to Kinigi Guest House, a small hotel up the road from the village and just across the street from the government office where we would gather for the trek. Just as we were asking a police officer for directions, a car pulled up behind us and asked if we needed any help. I turned around to find Lisa, a girl I met at Canada Day, and her friend Ian, who also happened to be on their way to the same hotel. At the guest house, we also ran into Betsy, a public health student I know here in Kigali. Two quick reminders that Rwanda, and especially the ex-pat community, really isn’t all that big.

We were up early the next morning and by seven we were at the office, where we learned that we’d be seeing the Umubano group of gorillas. As the guide started to tell us about the group—their names, behavior patterns, etc—it really started to hit me that I was about to be face to face with the animals. I’d been excited all week, but this was the point when I started smiling and couldn’t stop. We met the rest of our human group, three tourists/consultants from Minneapolis, and then we were on our way to the base of the mountain. After a twenty minute African massage (our driver’s euphemism for the bumpy roads), we parked, received our walking sticks and armed escorts, and hit the trail into the park.

The climb is steep and constant as soon as you enter the park. Over the course of a couple hours, we ascended about 1,800 meters. The trail was narrow, slippery, and scattered with low-hanging branches and stinging nettles. As we went higher and higher, the view grew more and more spectacular, and the lingering clouds made it easy to understand why the movie was called Gorillas in the Mist. Professional trackers, some of whom were former poachers, spend the day on the mountain and they radio directions back to the guides. When we reached the trackers, we were asked to put down our bags and walking sticks. We then crossed the final thirty yards of hillside, trying our best not to slip, and all of a sudden we were face to face with the gorillas.

I was in awe.

Within seconds of entering the area, one of the young gorillas scampered over to the group and touched Betsy’s leg. Charles, the silverback gorilla, was sitting about ten meters away. The others in the group played around, groomed one another, wrestled, beat their chests, and stared back at us as we looked on. Whenever they came too close, the guides would grunt at them to signal them to move away but they didn’t always listen. There was an eleven-month-old baby in the group who was, of course, adorable to watch as she played around. She did her best Sisyphus impression, running up the hillside over and over, only to be knocked down by her sibling as soon as she reached the top. The entire group seemed relaxed, happy, and completely at ease in the presence of the guides. Each group of visitors gets a maximum of one hour with the gorillas, and I don’t think sixty minutes has ever gone by so fast.

Probably the most remarkable thing about the experience was how natural it all felt. None of it felt produced, altered, or artificial, and I left feeling that we’d treaded as lightly as possible.

The rest of the photos are up on Picasa.

Mambo....Poa....Poa kichizi kama ndizi

Picking up where I left off after the safari post...

To get to Zanzibar from Dar Es Salaam, you can head to the airport and pay for a quick flight on a puddle jumper, or you can take a cab to the harbor, fight off aggressive touts, try your best not to get hosed on the price of a ferry ticket, and then push your way onto a crowded ferry that may (Rose) or may not (me, but I was close) make you sea sick. Needless to say, our budget required that we choose the latter.

The ferry deposited us in Stone Town, and after going through the motions at immigration (a useless and merely ceremonial puffing of the chest to remind tourists that Zanzibar was once independent from Tanzania), we made our way to St. Monica’s hostel. The location of St. Monica’s—adjacent to an Anglican church, abutting a former slave market, and within earshot of the local mosque’s early morning call to prayer—is symbolic of Zanzibar’s fascinating mélange of African, Middle Eastern, and colonial culture and history. Labyrinthine is probably over used as a descriptor of Stone Town’s tiny streets, but there’s no better way to describe the winding, bending hallways where Burqa-clad women glide past Indian shop owners selling their wares to Western tourists who have to jump to avoid the local children’s speeding bicycles.

It was dark when we arrived, so we took all of the next day to explore. We took our first walk on the beach, did some souvenir shopping, and ate a lunch of Zanzibari pizza (half Spanish omelet, half chapatti quesadilla) at a food stand where the most competent employee kept track of our tab in his head, spoke three languages, and had at most 11 candles on his last birthday cake. Before all of that, though, we stopped by a restaurant called Sambusa Two Tables to check on a dinner reservation Rose had made the week before over the phone. The thing about this restaurant is that it’s not really a restaurant, it’s a family’s home. The reason it’s called Sambusa Two Tables is that there are only two tables. When we rang the doorbell, a boy stuck his head out of the window on the floor above us and quietly waited for us to explain why we’d bothered him. He told us that, yes, we were welcome back later for dinner and that we should show up around seven. When we came back that night, we entered into a quiet, dusty sitting room where one other party (table number two) was already waiting. The room was painted light blue and decorated with a collection of old American album covers. When the owner/cook/waiter/father/host invited us to sit down, we went up a flight of stairs, through his family’s living room, and settled in for an incredible meal. There’s no menu, so we just sat back and watched as platters of spiced beef, curried lentils, sweet bread, vegetable soup, and a perfectly soft dessert plantains were brought to the table. The whole experience was one of the biggest highlights of our trip.

To the right is the entryway to the restaurant:

From Stone Town, we went north to a beach called Kendwa. By this point our group had expanded to include three of Ben’s friends who also had been traveling, and at Kendwa we were fortunate to get three rooms at a tiny hostel-like place on the beach. The rooms were basic, but we were literally steps from the sand and we had a clear view of the water. Each morning we were served chapatti, mango, and coffee for breakfast as we stared at the vibrantly turquoise Indian Ocean. While our temporary home was only steps away, watching the locals push their boats along the shoreline and wade out into the water to collect seaweed tended to remind me of just how far away from home I really was. Here's my favorite shot from Kendwa, which I took from the breakfast table:

On the second day of beach time, Rose and I went farther north to a resort called Ras Nungwi, where I’d read online that there was a surfable wave breaking off the coast. The owner of the resort was friendly enough to lend me his board and by about 10:30 I was ready to paddle out. The problem was that the wave was about a kilometer offshore, and I haven’t surfed or done any swimming since I was last in San Diego. By the time I made it out to the wave, I was pretty beat, and the conditions had deteriorated a bit. The sandbar that causes the break proved a really helpful resting place. After some time, I did manage to catch a couple waves and being completely alone in the water added to the peacefulness that I always feel when I’m out in the ocean.

Me getting ready to paddle out:

The rest of the week was glorious for its repetition: wake up, coffee and chapatti on the beach, read my book, go in the water, play cribbage, have a beer, and eat dinner. The title of this post is a Swahili exchange we heard over and over again. Mamba (what’s up), Poa (cool), Poa kichizi kama ndizi (cool like a crazy banana). And one other unexpected bonus from the trip: a crab, banana, and avocado sandwich. It’s incredibly tasty.

More BBQ's

I had some students over to my house for a BBQ this weekend and Rose wrote a great post about it here.

Moto Polo

My friend Katherine came by the house yesterday and mentioned that she'd spent the day watching a Moto Polo match. When I ride around on motos here, I usually think "wow, I really wish I had good health insurance", not "wow, wouldn't it be fun to ride around a field on these things and hit a small ball into a goal." Apparently, the guys in this video DO think that.

"Matches" occur somewhat regularly here in town and I definitely need to make it to one before I go.

T 2000

Rose is blogging too (www.roseleda.blogspot.com) and she was able to add photos directly to her posts. Sooo, I thought I would try again after I wasn't able to do so way back when I started this thing. Here's my practice photo, which we took at a store called T 2000 on Rose's first day here.

What, your local store doesn't have foam animal hats right next to the vinegar and powdered milk?

Get your safari on

Last week Rose and I returned from a 10-day trip to Tanzania. It’s taken me some time to get back into the flow of things here in Kigali, catch up on email, and generally readjust to a life that doesn’t involve sleeping five feet from the beach. In short, the trip was amazing. We spent three days on safari in Tanzania’s Northern Circuit, took a 9-hour bus ride across the country to Dar Es Salaam, ferried over to Zanzibar, and then hung out on the beach for seven days. As we like to say in Rwanda: nice time.

After catching an early morning flight from Kigali, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro on our descent into Tanzania but the cloud cover was too thick. The safari company’s Land Cruiser was there to pick us up when we landed at Kilimanjaro (the driver was even holding a nice hand-written sign that said “Nicholas Cain X 2”). Our first stop was the city of Arusha, where we met up with our friend Ben Lawless, a fellow former paralegal from DC who was wrapping up a 4-month-long pre-law school jaunt around the world. After collecting Ben we were on our way to our first safari stop: Lake Maynara National Park. Over the next two and a half days, we meandered through Lake Maynara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire National Park. Elephants plodded, rhinos lumbered, lions dozed, giraffes postured, and hippos harrumphed as we bounced along in our car, amazed at how close we were able to get to the animals. The animals were always framed by stunning vistas of the surrounding landscape. The crater—savannah on the floor, jungle-like near the rim—was particularly special, and it was where I had most of my “I feel really lucky to be doing this” moments. Our driver usually turned off the engine when we approached a group of animals, and when other vehicles weren’t around, the only sound would be the breeze and an elephant swinging its trunk, a wildebeest grunting, or a zebra clopping along in the grass.

In addition to the obvious perk of seeing wildlife in their natural habitat, being “on safari” provides some interesting people watching, too As often happens when you take Westerners out of their natural habitat, our fellow safari goers wore some absolutely outrageous clothing. Apparently, when people come to Africa to look at animals from the comfort of a car, in parks where you aren’t allowed to get out of the vehicle, they think they have to stop at REI and buy mounds of khaki vests, ridiculous hats, and convertible pants. When we saw one especially colonial troupe, Ben said it looked like the people raided the basement of the British Field Museum to come up with their outfits. Probably not too far from the truth. Not surprisingly, there was a direct correlation between the absurdity of a group’s get-up and the luxuriousness of their safari vehicle. Pay more for your trip, look more like a fool.

Because the crater and the rest of Tanzania’s Northern Circuit are such popular destinations, there were lots of other people driving around with their heads sticking out of their cars. In the crater especially, each time we stopped in front of a rare animal, we would inevitably joined by as many as seven other vehicles. This didn’t bother me nearly as much as I expected it to and I spent a lot of time pondering the sociological implications of the whole safari experience. We came across families, groups of students, older folks, almost all of them white (I only saw one African family in a safari vehicle during the whole three-day trip). Some people spent most of their time with their camera in front of their faces, while others chatted away loudly every time their car stopped in front of a group of animals, tainting otherwise peaceful moments of immersion in the natural world. Allusions to Thoreau aside, the people watching was often as interesting as the animals themselves.

Zanzibar deserves its own blog entry, and I hope I’ll have time to get to that soon.

You can see all of the pictures from the trip on my Picasa page. I made a separate album for the Tanzania trip.

Inshuti Mu Buzima

A few years ago, my friend Sloan gave me a copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains for my birthday. For anyone who hasn’t read it, the book tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, an MD and anthropologist who has dedicated his life to revolutionizing the way health care is delivered to the world’s poorest populations. Dr. Farmer began his work in Haiti, and Partners In Health, the organization he co-founded with some less-heralded but equally genius colleagues, has since expanded its reach Russia, Peru, Malawi, Lesotho, and Rwanda. In addition to convincing me of the saintliness of Paul Farmer, the book inspired and motivated me to serve abroad. Without it, I’m not sure I would have ended up in Rwanda.

Last Sunday, Julie and I drove out to visit the Inshuti Mu Buzima (Partners In Health in Kinyarwanda) hospital in Rwinkwavu, a rural sector about two hours outside of Kigali. The drive was familiar—on the roadside children lug small water jugs to or from the pump, miniature versions of the adults who carry larger jugs two at a time or push them slowly uphill on bicycles. The road passes through village after village, each with a handful of mud-brick facades nearly flush with the highway, most looking strangely stagnant, but not quite lifeless, as if everyone was just out on lunch break. I am often struck by how normal this has become for me to see, and how ridiculously cushy life is for me and most of my fellow Kigali-based ex-pats. We may have to filter our water, but it comes out of the faucet. In the house.

The point, though, is that PIH works where people are poor and access to services is limited—Rwinkwavu fits the bill. We were shown around the hospital and the rest of the campus by the assistant to the site director. We visited all of the hospital’s wards, saw doctors doing their rounds, and heard about the way PIH trains community health workers to monitor patients in their homes and spread health information. From my limited knowledge of public health, these trainings are what make PIH’s approach to rural health care so different, and, many might say, groundbreaking. The hospital currently has 800 trained health workers out in the district, each of whom is responsible for visiting 3 – 6 patients or families a day to ensure that prescribed meds are being taken, and to monitor the numerous variables that can affect a family’s well-being: food security, safe shelter, access to education for the children, etc. The hospital also has a pharmacy, operating room, a lab where they run tests for TB and HIV, and a set of its own ambulances. You don’t have to look at the before and after photos that are posted on the walls to know that the hospital and the system of health care outreach that its staff directs are immeasurable improvements over the services that existed before PIH’s arrival.

All over the PIH campus, I was struck by how appealing the physical space was. Not only were the grounds well maintained and clean, a concerted effort had clearly been made to add colorful, visually appealing vines, flowerbeds, and other greenery. According to the PIH employees who showed us around, this, like so many other aspects of PIH’s work, is a direct result of Paul Farmer’s unflagging commitment to the dignity of the individual: being poor, he says, shouldn’t condemn you to abysmal medical care provided in an equally abysmal setting. The result is a hospital with gardens like this one. Again, saintly.

Most satisfying about the trip was the realization that something that had so inspired me in print was even more inspirational in person. The story told in Mountains Beyond Mountains is so moving because Paul Farmer is portrayed trying to beat the odds, tirelessly serving a people the world had decided to ignore. In the book, Farmer and his small staff are on a shoestring budget, walking miles to visit their patients (the beginnings of the outreach program I just mentioned), begging donors in the US to pay for equipment and supplies for their new hospital, and constantly looking for ways to improve their new model of health care. Walking around the site at Rwinkwavu, in another country the world once ignored, the inspiration comes from knowing that PIH beat the odds, and that despite its increased global stature and budget, the essence and spirit of its remarkable original mission have not gotten lost in the shuffle at all.

______________________________________________________________________

This was drawn in chalk on the patio at one of the staff houses.

Another good read in the NY Times

My mom sent me a link to Nicholas Kristof's most recent column, in which he writes about a young woman from Uganda whose family was able to send her to school with the income generated by a goat from Heifer International. It's an uplifting read.

I'm also proud to say that, in the accompanying blog entry, Kristof mentions Orphans of Rwanda as a worthwhile cause for interested readers to give their money.

Blog to Blog 2

Here's another blog post I wrote for the ORI site. This time about one of my favorite students, Janvier, who took me on the trip to the market I mentioned a few posts ago.

IMDB.com, Here I come

A few weeks ago my roommate Nichola received an email looking for white guys in Kigali who would be willing to dress up as Belgian UN soldiers for a movie about the genocide. It sounded like fun, so I told him to count me in. I met the director a week later and he said that as long as I was willing to let them cut my hair, they'd be glad to use me in the film. Nothing wrong with a free haircut.

The movie is being produced by a Belgian company, and the director is French. The story is about a woman who is working as a nanny for a Belgian family in Kigali. When the genocide starts, the family evacuates from the country, and the movie then follows the story of the nanny as she flees Kigali and tries to survive. The soldiers show up to help the family evacuate the house and then drive them away to safety.

The film set was a house in a neigborhood called Kiyovu, which is close to the city center. After we arrived and got into costume, the director assigned us to various spots on the street, which we were supposed to be guarding from the interhamwe militia while the family exited the house. Initially the director placed me in the back, facing away from the center of the action. The scene called for a militia member to threaten the family with a gun as they exit the gate and get into the convoy of waiting vehicles. One of the soldiers was then supposed to aim his weapon at the guy. Apparently the director didn't like the way the first looked when he held up his gun. He told me to try it, decided I could get the job done, and moved me into the other guy's spot. This meant that I was in the middle of the whole shot, and meant that I actually got to move around a bit. Way more fun than just standing around.

After we filmed the scene with the militia member (who was only a teenager), we filmed the convoy of cars leaving the house. I had to sit in the back of a pickup truck and keep my eye on the kid who had been pointing his gun at the family. Residential roads here are really awful, so when the truck took off and starting rattling over potholes and rocks, I came really close to falling out! But since they weren't about to offer me a stunt double, I held on a little tighter for the next few takes, and managed to make it through without serious injury.

All in all, I had a great time pretending like I was a real actor for a day. Here's me with my most convincing soldier face. There are a few other shots in the photo album.

Rwanda 3 - Mauritania 0

Soccer matches on foreign soil are really fun to be a part of. Because we Americans live in the only land on earth where the sight of raucous fans cheering for men playing football with their feet is a novelty, not only do we get to enjoy the game, we get to tell ourselves that we're having a true "cultural experience."

The handful of futbol matches I attended when I was in Spain, and the many more I watched at a bar over Cruzcampo and olives, still rank as some of the fondest memories I have from my semester there. Since being here in Rwanda, I've made a point of watching as much football as I can. I watched one European match with some friends at a hotel bar (boring game, sleepy atmosphere), another match at a dark, spartan "bar" called VIP where I was one of just a handful of mzungus staring at a the game as it was projected on a wall (great game, even better atmosphere), and I caught the European Champions League final with a Rwandan friend at another bar where the game was projected onto a screen that was propped up in the middle of the crowd. Jean Paul and I sat behind the screen, so we watched a mirror image of the game that was actually being played. It wasn't until I saw a replay two days later that I realized Ronaldo's incredible goal-scoring header had come from a pass from the teammate on his right, not his left. The two teams vying for the championship, Chelsea and Manchester United, are English, but both have huge fan bases here in Rwanda, so there was plenty of euphoria and hand wringing going on as the teams traded goals, squandered their opportunities in overtime, and eventually settled the score with penalty kicks. (Man U brought home the hardware)

Last weekend the Rwandan national team, known here as the Amavubi Stars, played their first qualifying match for the 2010 World Cup, which will be hosted by South Africa. We went over to the stadium in Nyamirambo to check it out. Of course, the ticket buying process lacks any semblance of order. Imagine if the scalpers we know just had stacks of tickets in their hands and the only way to be sure you got into the game was to mob around the ticket seller, shove money in front of his face, and hope he takes it from you and not the guy next to you before the tickets run out. And you thought hitting refresh on the TicketMaster website was annoying. The stands were full, so some people took seating matters into their own hands. Though Rwanda's team isn't supposed to make it to the World Cup, they looked good in their opening match against Mauritania. They scored a beautiful goal early, then again on a penalty kick, and a third time late in the game. The celebrations in the stands were especially fun to watch (again, totally normal to everyone but Americans). We'll see if the team can keep it up this Saturday against Ethiopia.

Akagera...Like the San Diego Wild Animal Park, Minus the Tram and the Strollers

Last weekend I took a camping trip to Akagera, one of Rwanda's two national parks. My roommate Nicholas organized the trip, and our group included his girlfriend Mallorie, roommates Pascaline and Laura, our recent house guest Fannie, and another Belgian named Astrit. Despite the risk of French-language over-saturation, I was excited to be joining them for the trip. Nicholas likes to remind everyone that he was a boy scout, and I have a history of being a somewhat useless camper, so I figured I should take advantage of the opportunity to see the park with someone who knew what he was doing.

We left Friday afternoon from Kigali and arrived at the gate of the park by about 6:30, which was 30 minutes after it had closed. Oops. Fortunately, things aren’t always all that official in Rwanda, so after trying to explain ourselves to the guard, who spoke only Kinyarwanda (“camping!”…hand motions...“camping!”) and a brief wait while he checked with someone via radio, we were allowed to enter. It was already completely dark when we arrived at our campsite, so Nicholas and I set out right away to round up some firewood. We had headlamps, but we still lost our way a couple times, stumbled into thorny bushes, and slipped around on the grass, which was wet from the recent rain. Eventually we gathered enough wood and after a few tries Nicholas and Mallorie got the fire going. We put a grill over the fire and had a solid camping dinner of brochettes (meat on a stick) and pasta salad. After dinner I pulled out the marshmallows, chocolate, and biscuits I’d brought (sadly, graham crackers weren’t an option) and proceeded to make my greatest contribution to the trip: these poor folks had never eaten a s’mores.

The next morning we rose before dawn. As the sun rose behind the clouds and the park’s features took shape in the morning glow, I started to realize how expansive and visually stunning Akagera is. For me, the aesthetic beauty of the park would prove to be the dominant theme of the weekend. At the time, though, I was groggy from a restless night of sleep and was working hard to summon the energy to stuff our gear and our bodies back into the 4X4 we rented for the weekend. But pile in we did, and after picking up our guide, we started our mini-safari. Within fifteen minutes, we were spotting antelope, zebra, and an occasional warthog. Without fail, the warthog cameos prompted the Belgians to reference Pumba and The Lion King. If you’re ever interested in having the soundtrack sung to you in French, I’ll happily put you in touch with my friends, as they belted out Just Can’t Wait to Be King at least eight times over the course of the weekend.

As the day progressed, we made our way down to the lake shore to see some hippos. According to my Kenyan friend Victoria, hippos are like white people: they burn easily in the sun. So, as we stood by the lake, the hippos surfaced, flapped their ears, and stared back at us, but none of them bothered to get any farther out of the water.

Our objective was to make it to a more remote campsite in the park by mid-afternoon, so from the lake, we got back in the truck and bumped along a dirt path full of holes, rocks, and patches of mud. This stretch of road was also surrounded by heavy brush on both sides. After about forty five minutes of hot, uncomfortable driving, the brush on our right cleared just a bit and we found ourselves in close quarters with a couple of elephants. Needless to say, they were incredible to watch. I was driving at the time, and our guide quickly told me not to turn off the engine because you never know when the elephants might decide to charge the car.

After navigating the road for another thirty minutes or so, and making our way around a tree recently knocked into the road by an elephant, we began to head up into the hills toward our campsite. It was up in the hills that we spotted our first group of giraffes. The giraffes were easily the most stunning animals we saw. This time we did turn off the engine, and as we stood on the hillside, with the expanse of the park as a backdrop, the wind and the soft thumps of one giraffe’s gallop were the only sources of noise. Pretty mesmerizing.

We set up camp, had lunch, and headed out to see more animals (where I took my favorite picture of the weekend), but soon it started to rain. Realizing we needed to collect dry firewood, we cut our drive short and gathered a big bundle of wood. We had a problem, though, in that there was no way to fit the wood in the car. So we wrapped it in a blanket, threw it on top, and Nicholas and I served as human tie-downs by sitting on the back-seat window sills and holding down the bundle as we drove back to camp. The drive lasted a good twenty minutes, and it rained for most of it, but riding in the open air, looking out over the hills, and watching antelope bounce along next to us as we drove was something I won’t soon forget.

Feeling very much in the wilderness, we had another fun night at the campsite. This time when it was time to sing, the francophone contingent made drunken attempts to harmonize their way through The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

We had another half day of animal viewing, the highlight of which was driving alongside a herd of giraffe as they ran through a small valley. We also saw some buffalo and a large herd of topi.

By late afternoon we were back at the house in Kigali, where there aren’t any giraffes, but because we’d called ahead and asked our roommate to turn on the boiler, there were much-needed hot showers for all.

Women and the Rwandan Economy

The Washington Post ran this article about the role women have played in Rwanda's post-genocide economy. It's definitely worth a read.

Sigourney Weaver Filmed a Movie in Rwanda...And It Wasn't "Ghostbusters"

Just thought I'd share that today I bought permits for Rose and me to go gorilla trekking in August. The gorilla families here in Rwanda, of Dian Fossey and Gorillas In The Mist fame, are some of the last in the world, and are stars of the country's tourism industry. We were lucky enough to get some of the last permits available for the month of August. Here's a Flikr album of photos taken by other travelers.

Stick Shifts and Safety Belts

ORI has a car that the employees get to share and use to get around town. Since the current program managers will be leaving ORI in the coming weeks (in one case) and a couple months (in another case) we all decided that I should dust off my non-existent stick shift driving skills. The first and only time I'd driven a stick shift, it was the middle of the night in Colorado Springs, the streets were clear, my aunt Olivia was offering me encouragement, and the driver's seat was on the left-hand side of the car. Yesterday I had three incredibly patient passengers, Kigali's evening traffic, a traffic circle full of motos, and a seating assignment on the right side of the car. I'm happy to report that I didn't stall, didn't crash, and only made ugly gear crunching sounds once! Christine even eased her death grip on the ceiling handle well before we reached our destination. Overall I'd call it a huge success.

Blog to Blog

Here's a link to something I wrote for the ORI blog about one of our students:

http://orphansofrwanda.org/blog/?p=45

City Mouse

As Carol commented on a recent post, I just hit the one month mark on my time here. I didn't intend for it to work out this way, but I guess you could say I celebrated the occasion with a trip to Kampala, Uganda. I traveled with Lauren, my fellow ORI intern, and Elisa, who works for a public health organization here in Kigali and who's also a fellow Columbia grad.

Thursday was a holiday here (May Day/International Labor Day/way too socialist of a holiday for the US) so we started the 8-hour bus ride as early as we could. In a word, the bus ride was rough. Including the time we spent at the border, the trip took about 9.5 hours. It was crowded, incredibly bumpy, and made all sorts of random stops. At each stop there were always people trying to sell goods through the bus windows. The TV on the bus had a steady stream of entertainment, though. We started with the movie Tremors, which might have been fine, but it was dubbed into Luganda, and there was one man voicing every character. At least we still got to see some classic Kevin Bacon hair. After the movie they showed a variety of local soap operas, including an episode called "Stolen Bible 2." I was hoping the subtitle would be "Gideon's Revenge"...

By the time we arrived in Kampala and made it to our hostel, we were desperate to get some food. Compared to Kigali, Kampala is very much an international city, and we'd been told ahead of time to take advantage of the opportunity to have some good food while there. We took a cab to a Chinese restaurant and had a solid meal full of familiar tastes. Our post-dinner plan was to try to catch some live local music, but when we got to Club Obligato we found out they were hosting a special concert, which carried a hefty cover charge. We were in a pretty desolate, industrial area, but I had spotted a tiny bar on the road to the club, so we walked a ways and ended up at Paradise Club. We hung around, drank some beer, and played pool while the locals laughed at us. Definitely a good time.

After getting some rest and enjoying some coffee at the hostel, we were off to explore Kampala. I took a liking to the city right away, and I think that was mostly because of its size. Beyond the fact that big cities have always fascinated me, while the three of us still received plenty of stares and mzungu calls, it seemed like we were a little more anonymous in Kampala than we are when we walk around here in Kigali. The city was lively and chaotic, and while poverty seemed just as prevalent as it is in Kigali, it felt like there was a broader base of economic activity holding the city up. Our first stop in town was as a ticket vendor to see if there were any more tickets for the Akon concert. There weren't, but apparently he ended up canceling the show anyway. Someone forgot to tell him that you can't make it to Texas for a show the day after you perform in Uganda.

A walk through one of the city's parks was next. One of the first things I noticed, and lamented, about Kigali is that there aren't any parks available for people to sit and enjoy the country's beautiful weather. Kampala doesn't have as many as some of my other favorite big cities but I was happy to find at least one. We spent the rest of Friday walking through the city, having a cup of Ugandan coffee, wading our way through the market and taxi park, and being American. By evening we’d come across another park, called Centenary Park, where there were a number of outdoor restaurants. We had a couple drinks and let the afternoon cool into evening, then headed over to a bar called Kasalina’s to give our previously-stymied live music goals another try. We found a fun band playing local music and a tourist-free crowd, which was surprising given how close the bar was to a couple of major hotels.

We rose early the next morning to embark on the part of the trip that I'd been most excited about: white-water rafting on the Nile. The rafting company picked us up at the hostel and we made our way out to Jinja, a town situated right at the source of the Nile. I only have one photo of us so far, but I should get the rest from the company soon. Here's something I found on Google that should give you a pretty good idea of what it was like. I'd always been told that rafting was something I needed to try, and the experience at Jinja definitely didn't disappoint. Just being out on the river was an experience in itself. The sky was a pure blue, and the horizon seemed to extend for miles. The banks of the river were lush, and there were families and children washing clothes and minding cattle along the way. Occasionally we had to paddle around fishermen who were at work in their dug-out canoes. Hitting the rapids was a huge rush. Our guide kept us from flipping, which was actually a bit disappointing, but we still charged hard at all four different class 5 rapids, some with Hemingway-esque names like The Cuban, The Bad Place, and my favorite, The Other Place. The sun was hot, and the paddling was hard work, but we were treated to lunch on a small island halfway through the day, and there was cold beer waiting for us at the end. I'm definitely hooked.

We finished the weekend with a day trip to Entebbe, the former capital of Uganda. Entebbe is located right next to Lake Victoria, and we chose to spend the whole afternoon at the botanical gardens there. We saw monkeys, enjoyed a lunch of fresh tilapia, did some people watching, and plenty of walking. It was the perfect way to end a rewarding trip.

After another 8 hour overnight bus ride, we were back in Kigali by mid-morning today.

I'll be sure to add an update when there are more rafting pictures and when I've had a chance to add photos that the girls took.

In Case You Were Wondering, It's Pretty Hard to Fit Two Goats in Your Fridge

I had a late night on Saturday and was hoping to sleep in a bit on Sunday. I found that rather challenging, though, when I awoke around 8:30 to the sound of my roommate Nicholas yelling to another roommate, Thomas:

"Hey, you are ready for both goats, yeah?"

"Yeah, bring them out...and can you bring me a beer?"

Thus began Goat Roast 2008.

By the time I emerged the cooking was well under way, and the guys had even figured out a way to protect the grill from the morning's intermittent rain. Side dishes were prepared in the kitchen, and by 2 we were ready for guests to show. The guests, mostly Rwandan and Belgian, spoke a lot of French but there was enough English being thrown around that I wasn't completely lost. I met a Rwandan rastafarian who was gearing up for his first trip to the US, and another Rwandan who wanted to hear all about ORI. The weather cleared up, too, and left us with a beautiful, lazy afternoon of food, sports (sort of), and music.

There are a few more pictures in the album.

Getting Out of the City...With the Camera

My main project right now at work is to evaluate the language and computer training schools that are available to our students so that ORI can select the best ones to use. While most of our students receive their instruction in Kigali during orientation, others do so in Butare, which is where the National University of Rwanda is located.

Yesterday I took a drive to Butare with a couple members of the staff, and in addition to evaluating a couple schools, we stopped at two of ORI's partner organizations to pick up applications for this year's class of scholarship recipients. I've already commented about how the hills here in Kigali make for amazing views from most anywhere in town. The landscape outside of the city is even more stunning. While many of the hillsides have been sectioned into individual tracts for farming, much of the land is untouched, and, thanks to daily rainshowers, the unfarmed land is a lush, vibrant green.

The drive took about two and a half hours along a windy but well-paved two-lane road. There were people walking along side the road for most of the trip. Some were carrying jugs of clean water from a pump, others had large bunches of branches or fruit on their heads, and there were lots of kids playing and running around.

Our first stop was an orphanage called JAM, where we picked up about 70 applications. One of the social workers there gave us a tour of the grounds and I was impressed to see that the kids there have access to an excellent computer lab. I didn't really feel comfortable pulling out my camera as we walked around, so I only took a photo of the grounds from the road.

When we arrived in Butare, we stopped in at the men's group house and chatted with the guys who live there. Like the guys at the house here in Kigali, the students were very welcoming, and all ten of them came out to sit around the table and talk. Charles suggested that I introduce myself, so I told the students to tell me what they wanted to know:

Question 1: "Where are you from?"
California, New York, and DC all received knowing nods.

Question 2: "What is your marital status?"
Wasn't expecting that one...

I'm not sure, but I think when we left the house I made some sort of promise to come back soon and dance. I didn't tell them that they were letting me off easy. (Here's one more shot of two of the students at the house)

We also stopped by a couple of the women's houses. Most of them were off studying on the university campus, but I did get to meet a few of them, and a couple I knew already from the SGA meeting. Here are a couple shots of the path that leads from the main road down to the houses.

Probably the highlight of the day was driving from Butare to S.O.S. Orphanage in Gikongoro to pick up one more batch of applications. An ORI student named Eric accompanied us and was a generous guide. He pointed out sets of trees along the road that were planted to encourage re-forestation, told me about prisoner work projects in the area, and explained that in the years before the genocide, the government mostly neglected the area of Gikongoro, and because of that the area is still underdeveloped. S.O.S is perched at the top of the hill, and from there Eric pointed out a genocide memorial located at a site called Murambi. He told me the story of the massacre that occurred there, and then told me that, during the genocide, his family tried to protect him by dressing him as a girl. I didn't pry for anything more than that.

Here I am at S.O.S.

Now I'm off to have one of the students show me around one of Kigai's open-air markets...

SGA Meeting

Change of plans for ORI Blog, so I thought I'd just share what I wrote about the student meeting here:

If you read our post on the recent ORI student government elections, you may have been wondering what the newly elected leaders have been up to since assuming their posts.

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to sit in on the SGA’s April meeting—they’ve clearly been up to quite a bit.

First on the agenda was a report from SGA President Julliet Busingye on her experience at a recent youth conference for students from Rwanda, Kenya, Namibia, Burundi, Uganda, and United States. The conference focused on training young people to become leaders and to take ownership in the futures of their countries (does that mission sound familiar?). Juliett said she especially enjoyed the workshops she attended on innovative and entrepreneurial projects for young people and she came home inspired to develop a project with her colleagues on the SGA. Julliet was also touched by the conversations she had with her Kenyan peers because “they almost had the same thing happen there as happened here.”

The students then moved on to a lively discussion about what role the SGA should play in assisting and improving their fellow students’ knowledge about strong self-esteem, healthy relationships and safe sex. University Representative Simon Mvunabandi suggested that students be reminded of and encouraged to take advantage of the counseling services that ORI makes available. Janvier Kwihangana, a big believer in goal-setting, reminded the group of the importance of understanding one’s “target” in life. He also offered to reprise his secondary school role as peer educator by giving a twenty minute presentation on self-reliance and motivation to the entire ORI student body at the next student meeting. After each student shared his or her opinion, the group concluded that they would arrange for informal student-to-student visits at each other’s homes to encourage open dialogue about these issues.

One of the best moments of the meeting came when a student announced that one of ORI’s students based in Butare (a city about a two hour drive south of Kigali) had recently gotten married. This was exciting news in itself, but the group’s enthusiasm and applause grew when it was also reported that the other students in Butare took up a collection to support the student’s wedding, and were able to contribute 75,000 FRW (about $150). In Rwanda, as in many other countries, it is traditionally the duty of the parents or family to pay for a wedding ceremony. ORI students often step in to play the role of family in one another’s lives, so to hear that so many had given up some of their own money to help a fellow student celebrate her marriage was at once quite touching and yet completely unsurprising.

Next month, the students will begin the process of creating an SGA constitution and by-laws…

No One Leaves Without Dancing

Last Saturday, after I attended my first Student Government Association meeting (I wrote something up about that too but it hasn't gone up on the ORI blog yet), Jackson, the SGA Secretary, invited Julie, Lauren, and me to the house that he shares with four other ORI students. About half of ORI's scholarship recipients live in group house settings that are arranged and paid for by ORI. This group had just moved to their new house a couple weeks prior and they wanted us to join them for a small housewarming.

Jackson and his housemates were excellent hosts, serving us Fanta and snacks, and it was really fun for me to get to know the guys a little better. Conversation ranged from US politics, to the career ambitions of the guys in the house (i.e. which one of them would become a senator first), to their opinions and impressions of some of ORI's programming. Charles, the elder statesmen of the house, made a point of letting us know that the students are always willing to give back to ORI staff because they know we're volunteers. He told us to never pay for a guide or tourist information about the country, but to instead rely on the students. I've already seen that magnanimous spirit in action, as two different students have independently offered to accompany me as a narrator on a trip to a genocide memorial. In the same speech, though, Charles also let us know that guests at his house don't get to leave without dancing first. I gave Julie a "did you know this was coming?" look, and she just started laughing. Sure enough, the roommates started moving the furniture, pulled out a couple huge speakers, and started dancing. The results weren't pretty for me, and were far better for graceful guys like Nicholas, but I had a blast.

Same Title...Different Blog...Maybe a Few More Readers

ORI Board Member Josh Ruxin is occasionally given the opportunity to post on Nicholas Kristof's NY Times Blog. His post on his experience during genocide memorial week is very compelling, and it includes a moving story from the Orphans of Rwanda County Director, Jean Baptiste Ntakirutimana. His experience was something I'd refrained from sharing here, because I thought it would be inappropriate to blog about something so personal. But, since he seems to have given Mr. Ruxin permission to write about it, I'll share my impressions too.

Jean Baptiste (JB) recently went to a prison in southern Rwanda to meet the man who killed his mother. This trip occurred at the end of my first week at ORI, and JB asked all of us to say a prayer for him as he sought strength to go through with the visit. When I left work last Friday, I shook JB's hand, wished him luck, and told him that I would be thinking of him. He seemed emotionally fragile, but I was impressed by his composure. I didn't see him again until Tuesday, the day after I attended the memorial service. With the experience at Gisozi fresh in my mind, I was even more impressed by JB's willingness to confront his mother's killer, but I was also uncertain how to approach the subject with JB. He relates his experience in his own words in the email that Mr. Ruxin posted on the Times site, but before he sent that email around to us he had already stopped by my desk to thank me and Lauren for our support and to tell us how things went. JB described the feeling of relief that washed over him after he wept for his mother and he seemed to still be surprised that he, not his mother's killer, had been the greatest benefactor of his courageous act of forgiveness.

Here's the NY Times post.

14 Years Later

April 7th is the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. The date marks the beginning of the massacres of Rwanda's Tutsi population--100 days of horror in 1994 that saw the loss of around 800,000 lives.

I'm still learning about the role the genocide plays in the daily lives of the Rwandans I encounter in my newly-established routine. Because its legacy provides the main context for ORI's mission, I've likely engaged with it a little more directly than most would in their first 10 days in the country. Knowing the anniversary was approaching, I was curious to see how, if at all, the general atmosphere of Kigali would change, and was uncertain what the best way would be for me, as an outsider, to recognize the day's significance. I tried to give myself work background understanding by delving into Samantha Power's book A Problem From Hell earlier this weekend, but because information on city events is sometimes hard to come by, until this morning I wasn't certain how or if I would get the chance to commemorate it in person.

The city held its official remembrance ceremony at the permanent memorial grounds in Gisozi. When my housemate Gina and I arrived, many people were already lined up to enter the grounds, while others were gathered around a group of pick-up trucks that were parked near the gate. Soon I learned that the trucks were carrying coffins, draped in regal purple, of the remains of victims whose graves were discovered this past year (either by chance or by a tip from imprisoned genocidaires) and who were being transferred to the mass grave located at the memorial site.

My housemate and I were two of a handful of foreigners at the event, and from the outset it was hard to escape the feeling that we were intruding on something that wasn’t ours. The long stares I have come to expect on the street (always persistent but never hostile) seemed to linger even longer as we filed in to take our seats. The ceremony, conducted entirely in Kinyarwanda, began as one might expect: introductory remarks, a prayer, and a choral performance. The language barrier was frustrating, though, because words and images are what facilitate one’s ability to empathize with the story of someone else’s tragedy. With neither at my disposal, I was having a hard time generating the emotional connection that the event deserved. That changed quickly.

After a woman stepped up to the lectern and began to speak, I noticed that a number of people were starting to weep. It was clear that we were listening to a survivor’s story. The weeping gradually began to crescendo, and soon one woman began wailing uncontrollably. As she was helped from her seat by a Red Cross volunteer, others also started to shriek. Soon the most gut-wrenching, painful screams I’ve ever heard arose from every area of the crowd. This continued as speaker after speaker came up to share his or her story. Some people fainted, and some were so overcome with grief that they had to be carried, writhing and kicking, from their seats to a designated area staffed with volunteers. In the face of such visceral anguish, intense empathy was unavoidable. I was overcome with emotion. As I worked to hold back tears of my own, I came to what will likely be the most important realization of my time here: while the experience of this genocide and the subsequent healing process are both uniquely Rwandan, the pain they produce is universally human. For a couple moments, I felt like less of an outsider.

When I came home this afternoon and returned to A Problem From Hell, I was struck by a quote from Raphael Lemkin, the 20^th century’s first human rights lawyer and inventor of the word ‘genocide.’ As he prepared to flee Poland to escape the Nazis, Lemkin found that he could not convince his family to leave with him. Confident his family had condemned themselves to death, Lemkin wrote that “The best of me was dying with the full cruelty of consciousness.” In a way, I think that cruelty is what I witnessed today. The genocidaires of 1994 have forced Rwandans to confront evil, year after year, and to keep it in the forefront of their individual and national conscience. It is an injury entirely different from the one exacted upon those who lost their lives, but it is inextricably linked to the physical suffering of the genocide, and on days like today, it seems equally cruel.

One evening last week, I was sitting on the porch reading when I noticed the sound of dogs barking up and down my street. It reminded me of a story that Phillip Gourevitch tells in his book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families. As he traveled the country in 1995 to report on the genocide, Gourevitch realized that, aside from a couple lap dogs being toted around by foreigners, he had not seen or heard a single dog during his time in Rwanda. They had all been shot; many, in a case of utterly tragic irony, by the very UN peacekeepers whose "mission" kept them from using force to protect Tutsis, but left them free to kill the stray dogs who scavenged among the corpses. At the time, hearing the dogs bark on my street, and seeing our dog Beaubie laying next me, seemed symbolic of some measure of progress in Rwanda’s healing process. My experience today literally screamed the message that there is a tremendous amount of healing still left to be done.

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Here's a picture of the memorial site, with people walking to visit the mass grave below and the rest of the ceremony going on above.