Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Akagera Safari Party


Ah fall.  The season of harvest and bounty - a time to connect with nature by killing animals and cooking their remains over an open grill.  Although we don’t get the change of seasons here in Rwanda, many expatriates still feel the pull of the outdoors and a fire pit.  In this spirit, the weekend before Thanksgiving, twenty or so of us headed out to Akagera National Park for a weekend of drinking, grilling, dancing, and general revelry.  Akagera is Rwanda’s version of the famously grand Masaai Mara game park in Kenya.  The number of animals doesn’t compare; many were either pushed out by agriculture or killed in the years following the genocide and the park is working to increase the animal count each year.  However, the park is still stunningly beautiful and worth supporting.  

I know the title of this blog would lead you to believe that my time in Rwanda is not about safaris, and I know that driving into Akagera National might also lead you believe that we did something close to a safari, but I can assure you that you’d be wrong.  We left Kigali early Saturday afternoon, packed into an SUV filled beyond capacity with pots and pans, food, blankets, clothes, tents, cameras, and what seemed like an entire mini-kitchen’s worth of seasonings, knives, olive oil and the like.  Some people brought entire mattresses to sleep on; my roommate Sasha and I stole the couch cushions.  The drive is about an hour and a half to the east, where the hills are softer than in Burera and the landscape is more savannah than purple misty mountains.  At the park entrance, the ranger demanded to see our car, because she didn’t believe that all of us fit into one vehicle.  We were eight, and there were three other cars equally packed with people and gear.
 
Our campsite was on the top a hill that overlooked a lake separating Rwanda and Tanzania – the view was spectacular.  We had a great time that night.  From an illegal walk through the park at sunset (we were discovered and chastised by a park ranger for not being in a car – “There are snakes and wildebeests,” he said) to a dance party on the roof of a colleague’s car, to the massive amount of food grilled over a huge fire, to the run-in with the stubborn old baboon the next morning, it was a blast.  I’ll let the pictures say the rest.

(As always, you can click the picture to see it full-size.)

The campsite.  Igloo cooler courtesy of two Marines and the U.S. Government.


View from the campsite.  Note my boss in white in the lower right hand corner.
Artsy shot!
Out on our illegal walk.
Love this shot - the people are dwarfed by the majesty of Akagera!
Jake fighting with our army-issue 'tent' we rented from the park.
Just before the booze-fueled insanity started.
Someone brought their large grate and threw it over the fire - steaks, fish, veggies abounded.
Jake is not impressed by the baboon.
And for that matter, neither is Cher-Wen.
 My apologies for not having pictures of the car roof dancing, Jager shots, and general silliness.  The pact we all made with each other was that what happened at the Akagera Safari Party....well, you know.

A night out in Kigali.

The website Xtranormal allows anyone to easily make videos by simply typing words into boxes for different characters.  Their motto is "If you can type, you can make movies".  I'd seen some pretty hilarious ones pop up onto people's facebook feeds - one was about a girl immediately turning into bridezilla after her boyfriend proposes, and another one showed an exchange between a bartender and a fussy client.  I decided to make my own about the expatriate hierarchy in Kigali and the video below is the result.  It's been viewed almost 500 times (as of me writing this), so people must think it's generally pretty funny.

There are a few Kigali inside jokes (for example, waraji is a cheap Ugandan gin that locals love - drinking it gets you street cred), but most of it should ring true for anyone who's ever worked in a place where your job determines 92% of who you are as a person and where you stand in the world (such as Washington DC).


Photo of the Week - Sinigurisha

Sinigurisha
Taken at the 'Burera Open Days', the nation's first expo on local NGOs operating in the district for the purpose of showing local people what organizations are working on in their community.  The dancer wears a shirt which translates as "I don't sell myself".  The Sinigurisha campaign is a local campaign by the international social marketing organization Population Services International (PSI).  It aims to address the issue of suga-daddies (and, to be gender equal, suga-mamis) by giving young people a positive, proud way to resist the advances of older people hoping to exploit them for sex.

Note: you can always click on the picture to view it full size.

You're not serious.


Think about the last time you really wanted to insult someone.  Not just a minor slap to the face, but really offend someone to their core.  What did you say?  My generation is so comfortable with foul words that the terms asshole, douchebag, dick, bastard, and whore barely merit an eye blink.  Young Americans curse so much that our insults have lost almost all sense of gravity and weight.  The term bitch now means so little, that I often use it as a term of endearment among young women my age.  I could call a friend a fucktard, fuckhead, or just plain fucker and they’d laugh; throwing the same insults at an enemy would probably elicit the same response.  In politics, ‘terrorist’, ‘Nazi’, and ‘communist’ still seem to invoke some indignation among the slurs’ recipients, but when they come from twenty-four hour news cycle commentators like Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann, they’re pretty hard to take as anything more than parody.

Over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about how we insult and compliment each other in the States, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with anything really “American” on either the positive or negative side of describing a person.  In my own family, I personally took the most affront at being called thoughtless or selfish (although ‘lazy’ was probably merited more than once), and really liked being described as driven.  But if you think about it, our insults and accolades reveal little about what we, as Americans, revile and value 

The Burera Team - both serious and organized.
In Rwanda, there are two insults and accolades that I hear used most often.  Whether there are others used commonly in Kinyarwanda, I can’t tell you, because I understand a total of perhaps twenty words in that language.  Again and again, all across the country, there are two concepts which people use –  especially when referring to those involved in any activity aimed at bettering the country  - to either praise or offend others: serious and organized.  For example, if I want to express that I think the staff at a particular restaurant provide high quality service, I might say, “This restaurant is really organized.”  This probably means that their servers are courteous, knowledgeable, attentive, and prompt – something you don’t often find here.  If I wanted to articulate my anger that someone showed up to an important meeting an hour late, I might say, “You know, this guy is really not serious.”  

On the other hand, to refer to someone as ‘serious’ is just about the highest compliment you can pay – Rwandans value the image that they are a country on the way up, dedicated to development and, well, serious about getting things done.  To describe a person as serious is, in many ways, to liken them to a patriot.  It’s the ‘serious’ people – from the president down to an accountant of a community-based cooperative – who are perceived as those that drive Rwanda towards success.  The superlative of ‘organized’ is one that I associate with Rwandans’ interpretation of the American workplace  – purposeful, on time, responsive, and prompt (of course, whether the American workplace actually  resembles this perception is another thing entirely).  Being organized refers to an approach or a method, namely efficiency.  Being serious refers to an ethic or a belief about one’s purpose in the overall framework of the country’s development and progress.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into all of this, but hearing these same descriptors over and over again seems to me to be an indication of what people in this country value.  To me, it’s clear that people who work hard to contribute something positive to development in an efficient, professional, and frankly, ‘American’ way are seen as beacons of progress.  Those who are not serious and are disorganized are seen as accomplices in preventing advancement – those who cling to old ways of doing things and who are more concerned with their own betterment than that of the nation.

The liberal artsy fartsy side of me would love to see a study done in lots of different countries and cultures on the biggest insults and compliments one can use to describe someone else.  I think the results would indirectly reveal a lot about what the people in that country or culture value and revile.  I’m not sure what researchers would find out about American culture, other than that we love potty humor and body parts.