Storm's Coming

A Love Letter

Dear Rwanda,

Baby, I love you, you're the best.  Your president is brilliant, a visionary who is proving the world and history wrong.  When a policeman stops my company's car, it's not to demand a bribe but to check that our seat belts are on.  The soldiers that purposefully walk the streets are polite and say, "Good evening, ma'am" when I pass.  I'm not afraid they'll hassle me or give me a hard time.  When I email someone at the Ministry of Health - Pharmacy Division, he emails me back with the information I need in ten minutes.  In a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the MOH, she puts two NGO people in their place, is tough as nails, keeps the meeting on track, and ends on time.  When I go to run at the national stadium, the elderly guard asks me what I need and I tell him I'd like to "faire l'exercise".  I'm afraid he'll send me away (it is the national stadium after all), but he breaks into a smile and says, "Of course!  The stadium exists for that - run until you get tired.  Spend the night if you like."  The next week, I go again, but this time there's a game going on.  A different guard says, "No problem, I can keep your bag safe for you.  Feel free to run."  More than an hour later, the game is over and thousands of people have exited the stadium gates.  When I ask the guard for my bag, he retrieves it from inside his own bag and everything is exactly as I left it.  At the bank, I stand in line for no more than two minutes before the teller happily greets me.  I'm in and out in five minutes.

I know I had that small dalliance with Burundi but baby, I swear it meant nothing to me.  It was a one-time weekend thing.  You have no idea how happy I was to be back on your clean, well-lit streets on a sidewalk with working traffic lights.  Where I can go running at night through the local neighborhood and not worry for a second about whether I'll make it home.  There are no barbed wire police checkpoints here, because when the cops say stop, people stop.  They calmly ask for my ID, and would never ask if I'm an Arab.  I don't know why they asked that in Burundi, baby, I really don't.

Sometimes, my love for you scares me.  No one else can compare to you, baby, and what will happen when I have to go out into the world without you?  Say you'll always be mine and won't ever leave me, baby.

Love,
ali

Must-Read : Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)

This is a new recurring feature I'll be posting every so often and which I hope the literary-types out there will enjoy and possibly find useful.  Since I'm in a car so much, I try to always keep a book around to pass the time.  The roads are usually too rough to try to get work done on a laptop, and if I stare too long out into the endless distance, I generally starting thinking about home and then can't stop.  So, I try to stay mentally busy.  In general, I read books that are in some way pertinent to my work, development, Africa, etc.  There are exceptions, most recently Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", an excessively long novel about a girl from backwoods mountains North Carolina who gets a full scholarship to the fictitious Dupont University (which seems highly based on Duke) and proceeds to get sucked into a world of athletes, frat boys, and general college unsavoriness.  I wouldn't particularly recommend it, but did find amusement in how accurate a lot of it seemed. 

Anyway, carrying on.  I'm currently reading a supremely fascinating book told from the varying perspectives of three expatriates in the early 1990's working for the UN and the Red Cross.

'Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)' begins in the months leading up to the first democratic elections in Cambodia after the rule of Pol Pot and his horrific genocide.  The main characters are real - Heidi, a woman running from her failed marriage and trying to score fast money by doing secretary work for the UN; Andrew, a doctor from New Zealand who seems to be running from life in general; and Ken, a law school graduate running from a slow death in corporate law who wants to do something 'meaningful'.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the juxtaposition of the pampered, excessive expatriate lifestyle with the usually-scary, often life-threatening work each of the characters carries out.  In the first post of this blog, I wrote about a personal internal discussion which attempts to reconcile my life on the weekends dancing in clubs and talking to my family on wireless internet with the poverty I see everywhere around me during the week.  In 'Emergency Sex', the heights to which the expatriate lifestyle can grow are written about in frank detail.  From massive colonial houses with gleaming wood floors, to a private generator that powers a blender for mango daiquiris, to kiddie pools on the roof filled with water from the sink, to cavorting with a Masai tribesmen for three days in a sex-filled, joint-smoking bender that ends with Heidi paying him $200, the excess is a bit breathtaking.  I don't live an impoverished life in Kigali, but I certainly don't live like that.  In addition to a $40,000 salary for six months (in a country where the cost of living is likely 1/10th that sum), Heidi earned an extra $140 per day just for expenses.  Incredible.  At the same time, the three main characters constantly live in a state of alert - a UN volunteer is brutally murdered during their time in Cambodia, gunfire is always just around the corner, and their work automatically makes them target of rebel groups with something real to prove.

I'm only about 1/3 through the book, but the back cover tells me that after Cambodia, the three continue their work in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti.  After a little investigation on Wikipedia, I learned that Andrew, the doctor, was fired from the UN after the book was published and that then-Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan himself tried to stop its release.  With this in mind, I'm exceedingly interested to read what Andrew has to say about the UN's infamous role in the Rwandan genocide.  This is something I'll write about in more detail later, but in short, the UN knew what was coming ahead of time, actively ignored pleas from General Dallaire (commander of the mission to Rwanda at the time) for extra peace-keeping troops, forbade him from authorizing any kind of action (not even to confiscate the thousands of machetes the French were flying into the country), and then refused to recognize the genocide as a state-sponsored campaign (which would have compelled them take some action), even though Dallaire had plenty of documents to prove it was.  In short, the UN could have prevented the genocide, and didn't. 

I love reading uplifting stories of successes in the developing world, but I think I like reading about the failures even more.  For far too long, those of us doing the 'developing' have done a piss-poor job and have reaped the spoils of obscene salaries and a lavish lifestyle while accomplishing embarrassingly little.  (Just for the record, I don't have an obscene salary.  I think the technical term is 'stipend'.)  Stories like this provide a great opportunity to think about where and why past attempts have failed in light of the work we're currently doing. 

So, in closing, if you're interested in how the UN operates from the inside, what the expatriate lifestyle can look like when allowed run amok, want more insight on how complicated 'development' work is, or just like a well-written story, check this book out. 

But don't take my word for it.

Shout-out of the Week

I've managed to keep up pretty well with my feature "Photo of the Week", but slacked off on the Shout-Out of the Week.  So let's try a reboot. 

This week's shout-out goes to my mom, Victoria.  In addition to being a complete badass (she broke her foot and then managed to organize and coordinate my cousin Nathan's wedding less than a week later all while wearing a boot on her foot), she's really been great at staying in touch with me while I've been so far away. 

As someone who could generally care less about the latest iPhone or the newest internet phenomenon, I've been really impressed and grateful with how she's started using Gchat to keep in touch and just check in on a regular basis.  She keeps me updated on everything that's happening at home and really makes an effort to make sure that even though I'm far away, I'm still in her thoughts.  When she took my brother Blake and some of his friends to a UNC basketball game last weekend, she made sure that they called me and sang the UNC fight song to me, with an emphasis on the "Go to hell Duke!" part.  One day, when I was feeling a bit homesick and sentimental, I put my status message as "Gone to Carolina in my mind", a reference to the famous James Taylor song.  That night, I received an email from her that contained a collage of images from UNC's campus and a really sweet message from her.

While all of that is great, there's something that makes my mom even cooler.  In March, she'll be taking her spring break (and the week after) to fly across the Atlantic to visit me.  Even better, her oldest sister, my Aunt Joan will be coming as well.  This is a HUGE deal for me, especially since the plane tickets alone cost well above $1000.  I am so excited and grateful that she's taking the time, money, and effort to come visit me on the other side of the world.  We traveled throughout Italy earlier this year and had a blast as she showed me around a country she had known 30 years ago.  I can only imagine the fun we'll have as we explore this little country I've come to love so much.

Three cheers for my mom!  Love you!

Mom at WCHS homecoming 2010.

A trip to Burundi - Rwanda's dysfunctional twin.

Long, long post ahead.  But fun!

A few weekends ago, Global Health Corps - Rwanda packed up and headed to visit our neighbors to the south - Burundi.  Almost every person in the GHC-RWA contingent (and some random friends and co-workers who came along for the ride) boarded a bus at 8am for the eight-hour trip to Bujumbura, Burundi's capital.

I won't go into a detailed history of Burundi, partially because I'm not fully familiar with it, and partially because it's not really necessary to appreciate our adventurous weekend.  I'll just hit the highlights.  Burundi and Rwanda were, in the past, essentially the same country - same ethnic groups, virtually identical language and traditions, same system of rule.  Germany won most of East Africa during the Berlin Conference  of 1884, which formally divided up the continent into colonial territories, and Ruanda-Urundi was part of their spoils.  The ownership of these twin countries was transferred to Belgium in the 1920's, and the Belgians proceeded to inflict all kinds of colonial horrors upon both.  The most significant of these was the solidification and stratification of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic identities, whereby people were given identity cards and highly differing life opportunities depending on which they were.  The last 60 years in both countries have been wrought with violence and horrors as the two 'ethnicities' have battled for control and equal opportunity.  The most famous was, of course, the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda.  Rwanda has bounced back brilliantly in the wake of the genocide, and is everyone's favorite little African country that could.  Burundi, however, has continued to struggle with a civil war, rebel groups, and governmental instability as recently as 2006.  This is important because it explains, at least in part, why Bujumbura seemed to be so different from its fraternal twin, Kigali.

So, after shamefully summarizing hundreds of years of history of Burundi and Rwanda, let's get to the story.

During our Global Health Corps training in Stanford in July, everyone headed to Rwanda made a pact that we would travel to our fellow corps member's- Gerard's - wedding in Burundi in October.  We took a bus on Friday morning from Kigali at 8am.  The cost of the ticket was 6,000 Rwandan francs, or about $11.

Ever the organizer, I was the last person to get on the bus and was consigned to the front of the bus - which made it much easier to see just how often we almost got into accidents.  After a few hours of traveling, we made a pit stop at a small roadside store.  I bought a few hard boiled eggs and a some roasted corn.  The bathrooms were behind the back of the store and I needed to pee badly enough to brave them.  Squat toilets - not exactly clean, but not dirty either, with jugs of water you poured around the hole.  The smell of ammonia was incredibly strong, but you'll encounter much worse in Africa.  Outside the bathrooms, I found this:

That's hundreds, maybe thousands of empty and cleaned cooking oil jugs.  They went back for probably a hundred feet.  People often use these jugs to carry water between public sources and their homes, but that didn't explain to me what so many were doing at the back of this African-style truck stop.  I learned when we got back on the bus that bottles were for milk - the people who owned the truck stop also ran a business selling milk to travelers.  Perhaps not up to strident US health code, but a brilliant bit of entrepreneurship nonetheless.

At the border, we quickly passed through the Rwandan side of immigration where the men behind the window grilled me on why I'd put my country of residence as 'Rwanda' when I couldn't show them a green card to prove my foreign resident status.  I told them that I had applied for one and was waiting on Immigration to get back to me.  They grilled me some more, just for fun, and then let me pass to the Burundi side.  Chaos immediately commenced.  The windows for entering and exiting Burundi were side by side and were crowded with many people, all trying to push their way to the windows, which were manned by exactly two people - one for entries, one for exits.  Here's a surreptitiously taken photograph (military people don't appreciate it when you take pictures on government property) of all of us standing in 'line'.  You can't see the other twenty or so people crowded around the same small window.

Americans LOVE hiking backpacks

The experience of getting visas and passing through immigration into Burundi was like a perfect metaphor for the difference between Rwanda and Burundi.  Our bus load of people passed through Rwandan immigration in about 20 minutes.  It took about an hour and a half on the Burundi side.  Also, at the immigration window on the Burundi side, when we asked how much the visa for Americans was, the guy behind the window said "How much do you think it is?"  Our representative Cher-Wen (who took all the Americans' passports to the window, where they processed them without ever looking at the people whose passports they belonged to) said, "It's twenty dollars."  The man behind the window said, "No, it's eighty dollars per person."  Cher-Wen said, "No, it's twenty."  The man behind the window said, "Ok, it's twenty."

Burundian Border.  The billboard says "Welcome to our place."

Finally back on the bus, we headed into the heart of Burundi, which looks almost exactly like the heart of Rwanda, with perhaps slightly less agriculture.  About a half hour outside of Bujumbura, Burundi's capital and our destination for the weekend, we came across this fantastic scene:

What you're seeing here is not only seven men hanging off the back of the bus, but THREE layers of animals in the truck.  At the bottom are cows, which are a bit hard to see.  On the upper layer are goats and sheep, and on the top left hand corner of the truck is a row of chickens.  I was highly impressed with the do-it-yourself construction style of the bed of the truck, although a bit concerned that the top row of goats might come crashing down on the cows below.  About fifteen minutes after this picture was taken, we came half a second away from a head-on collision with a car.  It was bad enough that even the Rwandans looked shaken.

We were greeted once we got off the bus (about eight hours after we'd begun) by Chandler, Simone, and Liana, Global Health Corps - Burundi fellows.  We chanced money, a simple exchange rate of 2:1, Burundi to Rwanda francs and got coffee and snacks at a hip little coffee shop downtown.   Chandler was gracious enough to let me and two other GHC girls crash at her house for the weekend.  I got to sleep in the room on the back porch of the house usually reserved for house help!  There were around 25 of us who met up for dinner and then we went out drinking and dancing afterwards.

Dinner!

Burundi apparently has a 0% import tax on liquor.  It was painfully, sadly cheap compared to Kigali.  We wend to this super swanky place called Havana - overstuffed leather couches, well-framed photographs of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on the wall, really nice golden wood tables.  We don't have anything like that in Kigali. I drank a moderately decent margarita for about $7!  This would have cost at least $12 in Kigali.  One of the things I found most interesting about Bujumbura was the noticeably greater disparity between 'normal' folks and the elite.  At one of Kigali's most popular spots - Papyrus - you'll see a broad spectrum of folks including well-to-do Rwandans, expatriates, prostitutes, and generally middle class people.  It's not exclusive, but it's not ghetto either.  This place Havana in Buj was SWANKY and full of sketchy-looking Italian men in really nice clothes.  It felt pretty strange to me.  Anyway, carrying on.  Our night ended in a super-local, packed, sweat-drenched club that was actually nothing more than a wooden platform outside covered by a tin roof - no walls.  Mostly Congolese music (similar to the Youtube video below) and it was so hot and I was so tired that I thought I might pass out.  That was my cue to call it a night.

I woke up about five hours later because it was so hot I had woken myself up with sweat.  Because Bujumbura's elevation is so much closer to sea level, it's HOT.  Seemingly always.  Some ladies and I hit up a courtyard garden brunch.  We ate cereal, fruit salad, pastries, and more underneath the dappled light of a vine-covered trellis.  Very lovely.  From there we headed to the famous and fabulous 'Bora Bora' on Lake Tanganyika.  I'd heard of this lake before, but never realized it's the second largest and deepest in the world.  The shores were almost white and went on forever!  I guess that's what you get with so much wave action.  The only sandy shoreline we have on Lake Kivu in Rwanda is at the Serena hotel in Gisenyi - they brought it in on trucks.  Bora Bora was essentially an outdoor club with a huge white deck, white furniture, royal blue pillows everywhere, and bartenders and waiters at your every beck and call.  Absolutely nothing like this in Rwanda, but I can't say I complained.  The swimming was superb and although there were no fences on the shore to keep the 'riff raff' away, the whole place made it clear that if you weren't white or fabulous, you stay stay away.

Fabulous dahling.

My partner Alain called ahead to make sure he planned his wardrobe accordingly.

I swear I washed my hair before the wedding.  Grease monkey.

We even managed a little physical activity.

The girls and I left Bora Bora in time to run to Chandler's house to take showers before getting ready for the wedding.  As we walked down the road looking for a cab (which were about 1/4 the cost of cabs in Kigali), I was struck by the parade of amusing things carried on bicycles.

Big water barrels on bike.

Firewood on bike.

Tik-tik from India.

We headed back to Chandler's in a tik-tik, which we don't have in Kigali, but I wish to God we did.  More fun than a regular cab, less exposed than a moto.  All the GHC girls - both in Burundi and Rwanda - had agreed to wear umushanana, the traditional dress of the two countries.  We prayed that they'd choose something that looked good on pale skin.  We ended up with white accented with red.  It ended up surprisingly less hideous than I thought.  We all got dressed at GHC fellow Simone's house in an old-fashioned gaggle of women-stye gathering.

The goal was to ADD to the hips as much as possible.

Chandler - beautiful as always.

I called ahead so I could match my earrings to the outfit.  Of course.

Not everyone, but you get the idea.

We were about an hour late to the wedding ceremony, but that was ok, because there was still another hour to go.  We were surprised to learn that it was a quadruple-header.  Four couples married at the same time!  Apparently there's a dearth of respectable churches to get married in, and they stay constantly booked.  The church was filled to about capacity, and we caused quite the stir coming in.  Some people laughed because they thought we were cute, some people laughed because they thought were hilariously inappropriate.  Most of the people with their camera phones out were men.  Just sayin'.

Packed house.

Four veils.

It was actually a little eerie seeing four bridal veils all diaphanous and lit up in a row.  It reminded several of us of the P-Square video, "No One Like You" I posted about in October which also features four brides.  Gerard was a stunna in a white suite, and his new wife Olive was beautiful.

Moment of truth.

After the wedding, we all packed into a minibus and drove to the reception - speeches, sodas (no alcohol), and general funny banter between the families.  Everyone was seated.  Here's a video of the bride's choir coming into the reception hall.

The bride's aunt or mother (can't remember which) made a speech wherein, at the end, she thanked Gerard for all the blessings he had brought to them.  My coworker Jacques translated the last part of her speech as "You have brought us so many blessings - I am even seeing many white people who have traveled far to be here."  And it was true - we really were rolling deep.  Typically, you have a token mzungu or two at African weddings, but we were almost ten.  My fav Emily even flew all the way from MALAWI!

After the reception, we all headed over to a local joint to grab some food.  They graciously converted the dance hall section of the restaurant into a dining room for us.  It was, let's just say, colorful.  I heard everyone else had an amazing night of dancing that night, but everyone staying at Chandler's house went home and passed out.  In the morning, we packed up our bags and headed out to hopefully find a taxi to take back to the bus station.  It started to pour before we did and we arrived at the bus stop completely soaked.

The ride home was long but quiet.  The Rwandan border men didn't give me any trouble coming back.  I was famished by the time we got back, and I was extraordinarily glad to hit Kigali's clean, sidewalked, well-lit streets.

Many thanks to everyone who uploaded pictures to the Picasa album so that I could steal them for this post!

Photo of the Week

Virginal.

 

 

Taken outside of Bungwe Health Center, a facility near the Ugandan border managed by a Canadian sister who has been there since 1974, fled with the local people in 1994, and who speaks fluent Kinyarwanda.

Baby Pictures

Taken outside a health center as I waited for my colleague to finish his supervision visit.

Janvier

Bug Invasion

The rainy season brings about some pretty interesting sights when in full swing - fields virtually submerged, muddy waterfalls that seem to spring out of nowhere, roads reduced to muddy messes. The most bizarre by far, however, is the periodic sudden onslaught of bugs. I've had this experience twice now. At the very beginning of the rainy season, after the first rain that soaked the ground, our house was suddenly ambushed by thousands of horrifying, huge bugs that I had never seen before. One was so large - about two of my thumbs put together side by side - that it had the ability to move and turn its head independent of its body. I think I almost cried. The second bizarre bug invasion happened a few weeks ago, when a rain somehow catalyzed the hatching of an army of winged insects from the ground.

My coworkers and I were sitting in our living room in Burera when we started to notice a few flying bugs. Within five minutes, there were about thirty darting throughout the living room. By the time we figured out where they were coming from - under the front door, drawn to the light from the living room - there were even more. We plugged the space under the front door with a bath towel and set about killing the ones who had made it into the house. Well, other people set about killing them, I essentially ran around screeching like girl and swatting at them when they flew toward me. Our living room was a massacre scene of disembodied wings and thrashing little bodies. The video below shows the horror that we managed to avoid on the front porch.