Goodbye Kiss
This is probably my last blog entry from Rwanda. Wow. How strange. I’m both anxious to be home, with all of its comforts and familiar faces, but am somehow dragging my heels at the thought of leaving Kigali, probably for good.
But they say you should bow out of a relationship when it first starts to sour, before things get so bad as to ruin your good memories of time spent together…so maybe it’s time for Rwanda and I to part ways. The past two weeks have been tough – I’ve been less dazzled by Rwanda’s physical beauty, perhaps more aware than ever of its fault-lines.
On Sunday morning Tanya, Chantaie and I woke up at 4 am for our day-safari in Akagera National Park in the Eastern Province. We met our driver, Bosco, outside our house at 5, bleary-eyed but excited.
What struck me most about the drive to Akagera was the dust. As we neared the park’s Southern entrance, the air became throat-scratchingly dry and our 4 x 4 kicked up swirling clouds of copper dust that heartlessly enveloped those walking on the side of the road.
We arrived at the park entrance shortly after 7, paid our (hefty) entrance fees and were assigned a guide for the day, Samuel. Samuel was a character straight out of an adventure film, dressed head-to-toe in park-ranger green, with basset hound, red-rimmed eyes and a goitre jutting out of his right cheek. He looked appropriately tough and was incredibly knowledgeable about the park’s wildlife, which worried us for a moment, because he introduced himself by gesturing listlessly at a park map and telling us that since it was the dry season…we probably wouldn’t see much in the southern half of the park. Not what three sleep-deprived tourists want to hear after paying an exorbitant amount for entrance to a game reserve.
Luckily, Samuel’s warnings proved to be unjustified. He had told us, for example, the park’s giraffes were all to the north, which is more savannah-like than the park’s southern-most point (“so why aren’t we starting out from the park’s northern entrance?” we asked, a logical question, we thought, but we never got an answer), but after excitedly spotting a group of beautiful, delicate impala, Tanya somehow picked out the heads of two giraffes blending perfectly with the bare, gnarled trees to our right. Safari success!
Bosco changed course, and suddenly we were ridiculously close to two adolescent male giraffes. It was another one of those surreal Rwandan moments. I mean, I’ve seen giraffes in zoos before…but to be sitting in a jeep feet away from them in an environment that was entirely theirs felt, well, wondrous. Because giraffes close up aren’t like in pictures. They’re dinosaurs (we agreed that the valid comparison to the magic of the moment was that scene in Jurassic Park when the music swells and suddenly the group sees brontosaurus for the first time); they look like they shouldn’t even exist. The way they move is alien – graceful despite everything I learned in high-school physics class. I remember a moment when one of the giraffes passed behind our car and all I could see out the back window was its legs and haunches, which filled it. I was awed, and for a moment, a bit frightened, so that my breath caught in my throat.
The rest of the day didn’t disappoint. We saw warthogs (accompanied by a three-part harmony of “Hakuna Matata,” ‘cause who could resist that?), buffalo, hippopotamuses (who broke the surface of lakes to exhale after minutes spent underwater, almost like whales,) gazelle, water bucks, monkeys, baboons (their butts are way more amusing than I thought they would be – we must have sounded like a group of schoolgirls to our driver and guide, giggling anytime a member of the primate family turned its back to us) and…zebras! Everyone has that animal they most look forward to seeing (Chantaie freaked out, like, absolutely freaked out, when we stumbled upon the giraffes), and mine was the zebra. We would see many many of them over the course of the day, and I was absolutely enamoured with them. They’re stockier than you think, lower to the ground, and their pattern extends up to their manes and down to their tails. When they move together, they blend into one another and you feel slightly nauseated by the optical illusion.
Could I look any more thrilled? (Or sunburned!)
They're like the three musketeers!
It was an amazing trip, but, of course, it had its disturbing moments. Those moments always seem to lurk beneath the surface here. Moments like when Samuel told us an elephant had been spotted (news that thrilled us!), but the lone creature turned out to be one that was domesticated years ago when its family abandoned it. We found it leaning its head heavily against the graffiti’ed concrete wall of an empty building by one of the park’s lakes. Apparently people live on the reserve and fish from its waters. Seeing the make-shift fishing village on the water’s edge, strewn with garbage and looking downright derelict, left me with a bad feeling in my stomach. This was supposed to be a nature reserve. And here was this trash town, complete with a listless, lone elephant who literally, as we watched, hit its head gently against a wall. We asked Samuel to leave almost immediately, to his consternation (“but you wanted elephants!”), and quickly forgot the depressing scene as we found more giraffes, more zebras, and more baboon butts.
Akagera is no Tanzania, no Serengeti. Most of its animals were decimated by the civil war and the influx of refugees back into the country following its conclusion. But the park definitely satisfied my stereotypical, school-girl vision of Africa. It’s a world away from Rwanda’s rolling green hills. It’s flat and dry, dotted with twisted, stumpy trees and watering holes. It gave me a craving to watch The Lion King, which I’ll have to satisfy as soon as I’m home.
It was an incredible trip, a fantastic goodbye kiss to this beautiful country.
Since then life has been much busier, but probably less exciting to anyone but me. I’ve been working like a mad person to finish my documentaries and…drum-roll please…today typed .final on the last one! The documentaries have aired one a day following the afternoon football match (prime-time, baby!) since Monday, with the final story to air this afternoon. (Unfortunately Jean Bosco of the Barefoot Artists cancelled on me for a third time, so his organization’s story will not be told by me this time around, which is a real shame, both for me and for him.) I am so grateful to be done. I feel a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. To have been working on four documentaries of such scope at a time was, in retrospect, a bit much for me. Couple the stress of struggling to finish them not only to deadline but to my satisfaction with the general lack of support in my newsroom (did I mention that the French news was completely cancelled last week, because I was the only one producing original content for the program?) – the favourite activity of some of my co-workers this week seemed to be to lean in between me and my laptop and say, “what? Not finished yet?” or to crowd into the studio to boisterously discuss football whilst I was trying to record my scripts – and, well, let’s just say I’m glad to be done.
And maybe I should, but even after all that, I don’t resent my co-workers. They’re just a group of young guys, and ultimately I can’t fault them for behaving like young guys do. Of course, there’s a time and a place to act like a group of young guys, and the newsroom probably isn’t one of them!
But in any case, I’m done now. With the French news cancelled and my docs wrapped, I literally have nothing else to contribute to City Radio. So yesterday afternoon I lounged with the girls by the oasis-like pool of the Hôtel des Mille Collines (yes, I was struck by the oddness of sunbathing at the site of one of the best-known survival stories of the genocide; I was temporarily overwhelmed by guilt at the thought, and still more when I didn’t let it stop me from closing my eyes and napping in one of the poolside hammocks) and then moto’ed to the Restoration Evangelical Church, which has a youth program designed to get orphans and street kids off the streets and into group homes, as well as expose them, especially those whose families have been affected by the genocide or by family deaths due to AIDS, to mental health services. The young man in charge of the church’s developmental programs took me into his office to show me colourful architectural plans of the church’s upcoming projects – a new church in Kigali, a school in Nyanza and a youth wellness centre, complete with counselling services and YMCA-style activities, also in Kigali – and led me around the church, one of several around the country. He was animated and said over and over how pleased he was to welcome me. “You are welcome! You are welcome!”
On the walk home a group of school children ran up to me and, as they often do here, demanded chocolate. After assuring them that if I had chocolate I’d probably vacuum it up, they accompanied me home, striking up silly conversation along the way.
This morning I went downtown to shop for some last-minute souvenirs (my family and friends are going to love me!) and some chocolates for the house staff, a thank-you gift for their care these last two months, and am now at work one last time, using the Internet and saying goodbye to my co-workers. They are saying very sweet things to me, asking me to stay, to come back, to take photos with them, to write them once I’m home… After all of the ups and down here at City, I am honestly sad to leave.
There are things I won’t miss here. Things I’ll forget, some on purpose, to protect myself, others accidentally, due to their un-extraordinary nature. But simple moments like these, moments spent with some of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever met…I hope to carry them from the land of a thousand hills the thousands of miles home with me.
The City Radio crew!
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One of Sekajugo's works, on-display at the gallery show.
I was supposed to attend primarily to talk to Sekajugo about organizing the aforementioned sound bites but he was in full-on “artiste” mode, so the girls and I left after an hour or so.
The show was a pretty chic shindig!
On Thursday I travelled for the last time to Butare to see the Inzozi Nziza ice cream shop in all of its officially-opened glory. And it does look glorious, as though it’s been plopped down in Rwanda’s southern province from some chic Manhattan neighbourhood. It’s all sleek wooden surfaces, warm colouring, coconut lighting fixtures and spectacular views. And the strawberry ice cream with local fruits, warm bagel with honey and glass of warm milk I ordered were all superb. The shop is definitely on to something!
If my interviews with three different sets of patrons were any indication, it’ll be a huge success. And I hope it is; I felt genuinely sad to bid a final farewell to the people who have become characters in my documentary; the women of Sweet Dreams are downright inspiring.
While in Butare I visited the Murambi genocide memorial, which I now regret. Not because it took nearly three hours just to get there and back to Butare; not because I nearly missed my bus home due to the trip; not because I didn’t know what I was getting myself in to. But because I’ll never be able to forget what I saw there, which I guess is the point of places like Murambi – that no one ever forget what happened here sixteen years ago.
What makes Murambi different from other memorials is that at the former technical school hundreds of bodies have been dug up from impersonal mass graves, dipped in Lyme for preservation and set out in the school’s classrooms to decay. The story of the massacre at Murambi is similar to so many others: Tutsis were told they would be protected there, when really they were being led to a tidy, contained place for slaughter. Thousands were murdered.
Today the memorial is classroom after classroom after classroom of white, chalky, mummified bodies twisted into horrific poses. Their hands are still clenched into fists, their eyes are still wide in terror, their mouths are still screaming. There are holes in their heads. Their limbs are missing.
The classrooms filled with the bodies of murdered Tutsis at Murambi. The windows are covered with black tarps. The surrounding beauty of the hills was shocking compared to the starkness of the memorial.
They looked unreal, like props from a bad horror film. And maybe I could have written the whole place off as something horrible but not quite real had it not been for the details that stuck so firmly in my mind: the bodies that still had tufts of hair on their heads, the miniscule body of a round baby to my immediate right upon entering the third classroom, a jaw lying pêle-mêle in one classroom on a table, far from any body, and above it all, the smell. I will never forget that smell, although I desperately want to. The smell shocked my brain into acknowledging that this was not a horror movie…this was real life, sometimes far more horrible than anything Hollywood can dare to dream up.
The woman who led me, the only visitor to the memorial that early afternoon, around the school, seemed tired, which I guess is the only way to seem when it’s your job to lead tourists through those rooms, and through that smell. She opened the first classroom, explained to me the significance of what I was seeing, then for dozens more rooms simply said, “It is the same.” “This too is the same.” “Same.” “More bodies.” “The same.” Room after room after room.
The French are disliked here, and it's really no wonder. Although the Zone Turquoise saved many Tutsis at the end of the war, they backed Hutu Power for most of the conflict. Here the troops played volleyball on mass graves after "liberating" Murambi.
There was a man there too. A man with a gaunt face and a hole in his forehead. I spoke to him amicably and introduced myself, but would only learn after my visit that he survived the Murambi massacre, escaping to Burundi with a bullet in his head and his whole family dead. Apparently he comes to the memorial every single day. Apparently he is often drunk. I wish I had known all of this when speaking to him, though I doubt it would have given me any idea of what to say in order to express how sorry I am for something that had nothing to do with me and that I can’t do anything about.
The view from the moto on the way back to Butare.
I was glad return to Inzozi Nziza after my trip to Murambi. The nice thing about the smell of death in Rwanda is that it always seems to be followed by a fresh breeze and bursts of undeniable life. Rebirth.
The shop's snazzy new sign!
Inside Inzozi Nziza.
The women of the shop, Nikki and the translators have a staff meeting.
Today I went back to Ivuka to interview another up-and-coming artist, this one new to the cooperative, who was able to speak very well about what joining the cooperative has meant for his art and for his life, and to record the sounds of the children’s traditional dance group associated with the co-op. The afternoon was great fun. I sat with neighbourhood children watching the group drum, sing and dance as well as any of the grown performers I’ve seen here and spent time perusing the co-op’s gallery and chatting with whatever artists happened to be hanging around. I chose a painting for myself. It’s beautiful, full of bright colours and texture that begs to be touched (I know that’s a no-no, but it’s mine, so it’s allowed) and looks vaguely Spanish, Picasso-esque, but is somehow resoundingly African at the same time. I’m very pleased with it!
On weekends neighbourhood kids gather in the co-op's courtyard to play.
Some of the children of the Africa Horns dance troupe.
And that brings us to now. Now, Saturday evening, when I will go straight to bed after posting this entry, because tomorrow, dear readers, we leave for a day-safari in Akagera National Park! At 5 am. Yikes! Hopefully zebras, giraffes and hippos counteract any group grumpiness at that hour!
Inzozi nziza!
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The beginning of the end
It’s getting down to the wire here in Rwanda. It seems downright unbelievable to me that I only have ten days left in this country.
Don’t get me wrong: I miss home like crazy, and to touch down at YOW and be able to hug my family and regale them with stories of Africa and shower them with gifts is going to be a wonderful thing indeed.
The past six weeks have been hard. They’ve been crazy hard. And contrary to logic, coming home and starting my cushy job in the film industry is going to seem like a vacation compared to some of the stresses of being here.
But this country has been very good to me, and for every moment I’ve felt overwhelmed or close-to-tears or wanted to hop on the next Rwandair flight home, there has been an incredible, life-changing, beautiful experience lived here.
Friday was one such incredible, life-changing, beautiful experience. On Thursday afternoon I frustratingly produced a few script stories for Martine (frustratingly because our work Internet has been out for days, and I had lent out my phone’s USB cable to a co-worker, who accidentally walked off with it, meaning that my phone modem was useless) and then, finally it seemed, boarded a bus from Kigali to Ruhengari, officially off on my adventure to visit Rwanda’s endangered mountain gorillas.
By the time I got to Ruhengari, that wild west Ugandan border town, it was dark and most public transit had stopped running for the day, so with help from a local I negotiated a decent moto price to get me from there to Kinigi, the small town that serves as “base camp” for gorilla treks in Volcanoes National Park. That moto ride is something I never want to repeat. 12 km, in the dark, in the cold, on a winding dirt road, badly balanced on the bike due to the weight of my trekking backpack. The moto’s headlights were weak, so the entire ride became something like a videogame. Figures of people riding bikes and balancing baskets on their heads would emerge on the side of the road mere seconds before we were to plough into them, leading the moto driver to swerve repeatedly in a fashion that would have been comical, had it not been so frightening.
Eventually, though, we arrived (alive) at the Kinigi Guest House, operated by a woman’s cooperative and conveniently located a mere five minutes from Kinigi’s tourism office, where tomorrow’s trek was to begin.
I paid 5000 RWF for a bed in one of the shared dormitories, but lucked out and wound up with the dorm to myself. This would become a mixed blessing, however, for apparently it is Scary-Huge-Wasps-with-Stingers-the-Size-of-Pencils season in Kinigi, and apparently they really liked my dorm room. I slept the entire night with my head under the covers and found myself praying that if I was stung in my sleep, some random hostel worker would hear my anaphylactic shock death throes and have the good sense to administer my Epipen. Luckily, I made it through to morning.
Now, by morning I mean the wee hours of the morning. I was up and raring to go at 5 am, gobbled down breakfast at 6, and had arrived at the tourism office with a group of Americans from Utah who ever-so-kindly let me hop a ride in their truck, by 7.
At the tourism office the conglomeration of muzungus who would be tracking gorillas that morning were divided into groups of eight. Mine consisted of the five tourists from Utah – two commercial pilots who had been kind enough to eat breakfast with me, who must have looked slightly pathetic sitting alone in her big black backpack and khakis, and a mother and daughter who had arrived on the same plane as them – and a family of three from (I believe) Colorado, who are involved in opening up a fantastic-sounding medical clinic specializing in pre-natal and mental health just outside of Kigali. We were informed that we would be tracking the Hirwa or “lucky” family of gorillas, so-named, our fearless guide told us, because its “big boss” silverback had stolen six lady gorillas from various other families, way above the norm for a new family leader.
So we set off.
The first part of the trek was fairly straightforward. We walked for just under an hour from base camp to the outskirts of the park, marked by a hip-high stone wall, “to keep in the elephants and buffalo,” our guide told us. (“Yeah, right,” says I. I’d like to see an elephant go up or down the trail we were about the nearly kill ourselves on.) At this point in time, I was a bit worried about what I was getting myself into. Kinigi is considered, compared to Kenya and Kigali and certainly to Ottawa, a high-altitude town. And I felt it. Even though the trail thus far had been fairly level, I was having trouble catching my breath. I felt that no matter how deeply I breathed, I just wasn’t getting enough air. And things were only about to get worse, our guide cheerfully informed us.
On the other side of the stone wall was a mountain, one of the Virungas, and from there, the trail became almost impossibly steep. It was beautiful to walk in the shadow of towering bamboo trees, which felt pleasantly cool against the palms of my hands when I had grab on to them for support, but within minutes the steepness of the trail and my shallow breathing had drenched me in so much sweat that my hair dripped with it. Just under an hour later, I was breathing so shallowly I felt as though I were hyperventilating. Our guide insisted I pay one of the porters who had tagged along with us to carry my backpack, a decision I was initially embarrassed by, but later extremely grateful to have made.
Bamboo forest in Volcanoes National Park.
I felt weak, to be the person in our group having the most difficulty with the climb, but my travel companions were wonderful, informing me that I only looked the way they all felt.
Had to record the mud, the sweat and the (near) tears for posterity. This is about an hour up the first ascent.
Now usually it takes anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to find one’s gorilla family. The guides are constantly in touch via walkie-talkie with trackers who stay all day with the gorillas and message their location to the trekking groups. But nothing is guaranteed. Groups visiting the gorillas are ultimately at their whim.
After two hours, our guide abruptly changed our direction. Now we were no longer climbing, but descending another side of our volcano. I was quite grateful to no longer have to climb, but that gratitude didn’t last long. Our descent was steep. Crazy steep.
Suddenly, we found ourselves no longer in the shadow of the mountain forest, but presented with a spectacular view. We were standing on the side of one mountain, facing the rising slope of its neighbour. Both slopes dropped vertically, literally at ninety degrees, and were completely covered in trees. Looking straight ahead to the other slope was green, green, green, and to the right seemed to stretch, thousands of feet below us, all of Rwanda, dipping and rising in countless green hills, touching the light blue of the sky. That view was a head-rush. It was too beautiful. So beautiful I felt surreal, somehow outside of my body, or at least very close to tears.
As we began our descent down our mountain-face, a mist began to roll in, hovering at the peaks of the two volcanoes.
“I feel like Sigourney Weaver,” I said.
“Muzungus in the Mist,” our guide concurred.
Descending that mountain-face was, in a word, ridiculous. At times we weren’t even standing on ground, but were walking in the tree tops of the foliage hugging the mountain’s face. At times we fell through the trees, up to our ankles, knees, hips, so that our guide or one of the porters had to pull us back up. At times the descent was so steep I made the choice of sliding down it on my behind, opting for a muddy butt over another fall. At times the descent was so steep we had no choice but to fall, and to grab at vines and branches as we did to soften our inevitable landing.
Our fearless guide slash me trying to establish how steep descending the mountains was - believe me, way steeper than this photo establishes.
Three, four, five hours passed. We completed our descent and started our second ascent, up the new mountain-face. I felt invigorated, challenged to have to actively think of which branch would be steady enough to pull me up the next few inches of incline, to have to climb and crawl on hands and knees, to have to stifle feelings of vertigo that overwhelmed me anytime I looked away from what was immediately in front of me and took stock of what I was actually doing, and where.
Eventually that invigoration gave out. We were exhausted and discouraged. Our guide kept promising us he “smelled the gorillas,” but he also told us he couldn’t tell us exactly where they were, or how long in distance or time it would take us to get there. There came a point when the only reason I continued climbing was because my porter was holding my hand and pulling me steadily uphill, then because trackers were pulling me up a muddy drop from under my arms.
And then I saw her. A female gorilla. Sitting maybe four, five metres in front of me, munching at greenery, watching me watching her. To her right were two adolescents, roughing and tumbling, biting one another playfully, beating at their chests. We were soon joined by the “big boss” himself, who well-deserves that title. The group’s silverback was large, no huge, no massive. A single hand or foot of his could have engulfed my head. His forearms seemed as big as me.
He was intimidating. He rose from the brush and lurched (not threateningly, but purposely) toward us, where we were stationed on the muddy hill. One of the trackers instantly clacked two machetes together and the boss quickly retreated, eventually lying on his back with his arms crossed over his massive chest and falling asleep. Three adolescents emerged from the brush and began to play around him, occasionally getting so close as to wake him and earn an irritated brush of his hand.
It’s clichéd, maybe, but the family seemed so…human. Dad was resting, Mom was watching the activities of the others and of us somewhat worriedly and the kids were rough-housing, completely oblivious to everything else.
(In typical fashion my camera decided to run out of batteries just before we reached the gorillas but my travel companions have promised to send me photos of the family when they return home, something I desperately hope they remember to do! I’ll upload those photos when I have them!)
After a completely surreal hour spent with the family, it was time to descend the second volcano. It was just as steep and just as treacherous as our previous descent, and a bad fall had led me to land uncomfortably on my left knee and ankle, so it was wince-filled on my part.
After about two hours the terrain levelled, we had climbed back over the stone park barrier and were walking across flat farmland to re-join our trucks. At the end of the trek we were rewarded with official certificates of trek completion from the Rwanda Development Board, but the real reward, for me anyway, was knowing that I had done something so outside of my comfort zone. (Did I mention that many of the plants we grabbed on to were covered in stinging nettles? Or that I experienced my first fire ant bite on the final descent? Think of the Michelle you know. That would have been enough for her to turn back two months ago!)
The other travellers and I hugged. I felt as though, eight hours after meeting them, I had known them forever. Something about complaining, falling down and completing so monumental a physical task with complete strangers makes them feel much less strange!
The tourists from Utah even let me bum a ride with them from Kinigi back to Kigali, for which I was immensely grateful. I can’t imagine having had to drag my muddy, sweaty, cut-up self back to the capital on a bus.
The rest of the weekend was much less physically demanding, but no less fun. On Saturday night Allie, Andréanne, two of Andréanne’s (super-stylish) friends from Radio 10 and I travelled to Nyamata to watch a fashion show at the small town’s one hot-spot.
The fashion show in Nyamata.
The show was…how shall I put it? Typically Rwandan. The big screen intended to broadcast close-ups from the outdoor runway to the audience was a jumping, twitching, star-wiping mess. Halfway through the show the technicians operating it seemed to give up and broadcasted the US-UK football match on mute instead.
The models – male and female – were all stunning and can’t be faulted for their performance (except the odd model who looked inexplicably angry, a strange take on Tyra Banks’ “intense eyes”) but their clothing – mostly suede dresses and ill-fitting suits – looked vaguely Value Village-esque, especially considering the fact that they still bore price tags, which sometimes hung from female models’ hats in their faces, to allow the show’s organizers to return the clothing after use.
Still, it was all great fun. Rwandan pop stars The Ben (he must think we three muzungus are stalking him) and Uncle Austin performed following the show; I was especially enamoured with a twelve-year old singer and dancer who is apparently Rwanda’s answer to the Justin Bieber phenomenon; he has way more style and rhythm than I ever hope to have.
After the show ended the place magically morphed from a garden bar to a nightclub. We didn’t stay long, but we did squeeze in amazing dances to both official World Cup songs (was way way way too excited to actually have danced to “Waka Waka” in Africa) and I was (unsuccessfully, but props that he tried) charmed on the dance floor by the twelve-year-old pop phenom.
I like dancing here. I am arguably the world’s worst dancer, but here, no matter what I do is, by virtue of my difference, automatically amusing. So I might as well throw embarrassment to the wind and single-handedly perpetuate the “white girl can’t dance” stereotype into the next decade, right? Right!
This woman was positively fierce.
The male models strike a pose.
On Sunday morning I was woken, as I usually am on Sunday mornings here, by the sound of clapping, whooping and a choir singing at the church next door. On a whim I got up, got dressed and, even though I was an hour-or-so late, drifted over the church and took a seat inside. I’m very glad I did. It was a beautiful service. A very kind woman named Mary seated next to me translated the service from Kinyarwanda to English, and my arriving late was not at all a problem – the service went on for another three hours after I arrived! Thank goodness for the fans spinning lazily on the ceiling! Because this wasn’t your average service. It was practically throbbing with energy as the congregation danced, sang along with choir after choir, lifted their palms to the heavens in praise of God and interjected the pastor’s words with the occasional, deeply-felt “HALLELUJAH!”
Again I found myself astounded by not only the resilience, but the deep faith of Rwandans. That building hummed with energy and joy, when every logical fibre of my being insisted that after what the people of that congregation lived through, they have every right to turn their backs on one another and that sort of exuberant JOY. It was inspiring to witness the opposite.
That evening Andréanne, Allie, Adam and I went to the local hangout, Carwash, for goat brochette and to witness a religion of a different sort: football; the Australia-Germany match-up. Apparently most of Germany’s ex-pat population is here, in Kigali, because German supporters were out in droves. It made for a lively, fun atmosphere in which to watch the game on the big screen (even if my poor Australia was trounced).
It was quite the weekend. If my departure from here is imminent, I may as well make the most of my time remaining! Right? Right!
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Culture Shock
I don’t even know where to begin. I guess beginning at the beginning would be the best course of action. I have so much to write about I only hope I can do everything I’ve experienced in the past few days justice.
THURSDAY
Thursday morning I was eating breakfast with Yvonne and was jealous of the way her day were shaping up versus mine: she was going to the International Conference on Biodiversity organized by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) at the gorgeous Serena Hotel and I was preparing for another day of sitting in the newsroom looking like an eager puppy, just praying to get assigned to something exciting, but ultimately trolling the news wires for script stories and half-heartedly working on my docs (which wouldn’t have been so bad, because I definitely need to be working on them as much as possible!)
Then it occurred to me that there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t attend the conference too. I called Oswald, easily the station’s most organized journalist, asking him if anyone was attending on behalf of City. He re-directed me to Anjali, who is apparently the head of the French news desk and therefore responsible for French news programming, which was honestly, over a month into this program, news to me. I asked him if anyone was attending the conference; he said no; I asked if he’d like me to attend; he said yes, and would I please collect clips in Kinyarwanda, French and English? Wait a minute…this was starting to sound like a legitimate assignment!
I wolfed down my breakfast, showered, changed into a suit (!), then moto’ed happily off to the Serena Hotel, which is like a tropical oasis that’s been helicopter-ed into the downtown core. To give you an idea of just how five-star it is, it actually has air conditioning, which let me tell you, not many places here do. (This is why I don’t post many pictures of myself here Mom – I’d rather the Internet not become acquainted with the sweaty, sunburned, bug-bitten version of myself that lives and works in Rwanda.)
The conference was what these sorts of conferences so often are – interesting, but ultimately little more than a big pat-on-the-back for environmental advocacy professionals. We heard speakers talk about using the conservation of national parks to boost GDPs, about how Africa would suffer most as a result of climate change, when it had contributed the least to it, and about how Costa Rica’s model of government had allowed the country to recover from massive deforestation to become one of the top eco-tourism destinations in the world. For all its faults, Rwanda is a worthy host of such a conference – its eco-tourism industry (namely, gorilla tracking in the Virunga Mountains) is one of the best in the world, and Kigali is one of the cleanest cities on the continent. A few years ago the use of plastic bags in the country was banned completely; you can actually be arrested for carrying one in public now.
Anyway, after the conference broke up into smaller industry workshops, I sought out the executive director of the Rwandan Environment Management Authority (REMA) with Yvonne and Andréanne – a master’s student who participated in this program last year and has returned to produce her master’s research project on Rwanda’s pioneering role in environmental sustainability. Soon enough, several other reporters had joined our mini-scrum; we kept the poor woman talking for nearly a half hour due to the fact that she had to repeat her answers in three different languages. For the sake of my assignment, though, to get all of my clips for all of our broadcasts in one go was golden.
Afterward we headed out onto the beautiful grounds of the hotel for a free lunch (hey, I don’t accept monetary bribes to attend conferences like the other journalists here do, so you’ll forgive for me indulging in a free meal, ok? Starving student here!) of Fanta Citron, fish and chicken that weren’t, for once, cooked so as to be completely devoid of flavour and texture, and fresh fruits. Divine. Absolutely divine.
After lunch it started to rain – the sort that sounds like someone is hurling buckets of water against the walls of whatever structure you’re caught within – so while Yvonne had to go back to the conference with one of her colleagues, Andréanne and I shrugged and wound up at the hotel’s swanky bar to wait out the storm. Over African tea (mmm) I asked her what she had missed most about Rwanda upon her return home. Her answer didn’t surprise me. The staggering beauty of the country, the people she met and grew close to while living here, and the slower pace of life; the fact that your story for the nightly news could completely fall apart with absolutely no repercussions. Listening to her answer I realized that as much as I miss home and as much as I have found it hard to adjust to life here…I am going to miss many things about Rwanda. Those hills, those people, what I can only call “laid-back-ness.” Andréanne said that something about Rwanda gets under your skin and can call you back after you’ve left. I believe it – look at the founder of the Rwanda Initiative himself, Allan Thompson; his love affair with Rwanda has brought him back time and time again, and by extension, us.
After our tea, the buckets of rain having been emptied from the clouds, I returned to the station to edit my clips and package a story for the French news. I handed off my Kinyarwanda clips to that news desk (much to the joy of the journalist working it that day, who I believe was lacking in news) and recorded a voicer in-studio using English clips from my REMA source with my own French voiceover. I was quite proud of the final product, and even more so when Dodos said it was such good work that I could head home early, having done more than my share. It felt nice to have shown my co-workers what I’m capable of when I’m informed about where to go to gather news; I hope something will click in their minds along the lines of “if we tell her where to go, and when, she will do good work. We should therefore tell her about press conferences and the like, instead of not mentioning them, meaning no one attends them at all.” A novel idea!
That night Adam, Andréanne, Allie and I went to Papyrus for some Mutzig and Waragi, a frightening Ugandan gin made from bananas. We couldn’t stay long, because Allie and I had a very early bus to catch in the morning…
Governmental and UN officials at the International Conference on Biodiversity here in Kigali.
FRIDAY
On Friday I was due back in Butare to gather the sound of the women of Inzozi Nziza making ice-cream in preparation for the shop’s opening the next day, which I would miss for the Kwita Izina gorilla-naming ceremony. Allie decided to tag-along; company is always nice! By now the trip to Butare is familiar to me, though I doubt I’ll ever get used to the spectacular views from the bus as it hurtles up and down hills and hugs the side of mountains.
I don’t know why I continue to bother making plans here, because I was informed after having arrived in Butare that the women had had their production training the previous day, and were today making cakes. Let me tell you, though delicious, that doesn’t have quite the sound effect I had imagined gurgling, bubbling cream to have. Still, it was nice to see the women and to ask them and Nikki about their feelings regarding the impending opening – whether they were excited, felt prepared, were nervous or not. I didn’t stay long because everyone looked as though they hadn’t slept for days (some admitted they hadn’t), and I felt that me, my microphone and my eager questions were more of a hindrance than anything else. So I contented myself with recording my interviews and the sound of the soft-serve machine newly-installed in the shop whirring away (and making an ominous beeping sound when the power went out – something Nikki admitted is a unique challenge when trying to keep cold food at a healthy temperature), and the promise from the American filmmakers that they would share sounds from the previous day with me via e-mail (note to self: follow up on that!). Allie and I also got to sample the shop’s ice-cream. It was simply delicious! Milk here has a distinctly sour aftertaste, and so too did this vanilla ice-cream. It was light, fresh and distinctly Rwandan. I can’t wait to go back to the shop next week to see how people in Butare are responding to it!
Allie and I then went for a beer and lunch at the nearby Ibis Hotel. We decided that although we very much wanted to visit the nearby Murambi genocide memorial, we would leave for Kigali straight away because we planned on attending the Salax Awards, Rwanda’s answer to the Juno Awards, with Andréanne that night and wanted time to gussy ourselves up for Rwandan pop stars Meddy and Miss Jojo. We didn’t take into account that half the population of Butare – which is, after all, a university town – would be trying to board buses to Kigali as well in order to visit their families for the weekend. So instead of leaving at 2 pm, we boarded a bus at 4.
When we finally did pull into Kigali’s Sotra bus station, the downtown core appeared to have gone completely mad. It was teeming with people and there wasn’t a free moto to be found anywhere, when usually you can’t walk down a city block without shoo’ing away five drivers eager for a fare. When I eventually did find a free driver, he informed me there was some sort of moto-driver union meeting happening that evening, meaning that everyone was trapped downtown due to the lack of available bikes. This was aggravated by the fact that an emergency community work holiday had been called to clean up the capital in preparation for the arrival of foreign tourists and media for the naming ceremony. These factors, my driver informed me, were why he was charging me the exorbitant price of 800 RWF for the drive home. Shrewd.
Allie and I changed as quickly as we could, but by the time we got to the Petit Stade at Amahoro Stadium we were more than two hours late. This of course meant that things were just starting to pick up. I am going to be really bad at being on time when I return home!
Getting into the concert was a tense experience. Allie and I were separated during the moto ride from Kimihurura to Amahoro and when I arrived at the stadium without her I found myself outside of a gate with a crush of people without tickets, hoping to get inside. Andréanne was already at the concert and had our tickets, so for a moment I had no way to get inside the gate, and was meanwhile being grabbed at by the crowd, jostled, repeatedly asked for the 3000 RWF needed to buy a ticket at the gate, gawked at and generally hassled. Luckily I was able to convince the guard that my friend was indeed waiting for me inside, and sure enough, Andréanne was. ¨Phew. Allie had a similarly rattling experience when she showed up at the stadium five minutes later, but a young man informed her that he had seen her “muzungu friend” and would lead her to me, so shortly enough we were reunited and took our seats on the stadium’s concrete benches for the rest of the awards show.
Andréanne, myself and Allie proving we're indeed hardcore enough for a world-class event like the Salax Awards.
How to describe the Salax Awards? “Something just short of utter chaos” would be a good start. The stadium was divided into a public seating area, where we were, and a “VIP” area on the floor of the pitch where the nominated entertainers were also seated. At one end of the stadium was a stage crowded with sponsorship posters and cut-outs. Behind that stage was a screen which was in theory supposed to magnify the action on-stage, but was instead flashing at a speed that could trigger an epileptic episode in no-time flat. Whoever was in charge of the camera-feed really liked his star wipes and seemed to be running out of batteries, because occasionally the image would flicker and disappear altogether, only to be replaced by gigantic Word documents, presumably from the technician’s personal desktop. When the nominees for a category were being read, often the winner of the award would flash across the screen prematurely so that the names of the nominees were drowned out by the screaming crowd, or else the nominees would continue to flash across the screen long after the winner took to the stage and started his or her victory speech.
Despite the hiccups, the show was great fun. Working at an entertainment radio station I’ve become fairly familiar with some of the big names in the Rwandan music industry: King James, Miss Jojo and Meddy among them. Meddy was the primary reason we were there – he’s young, with a very charming smile and his song, “Igipimo,” plays non-stop on the radio and during long bus rides. The crowd was obviously there for Meddy as well – anytime another performer was called to the stage, they would scream for him. But in a shocking upset (for us three, anyway) – performer The Ben took away the Best Male Entertainer of 2009 (Africa time at its finest) award. Well-deserved, we quickly learned. The Ben took to the stage in a pimped-out white suit, wearing green lit-up wrap-around glasses. He and his entourage were the definition of ballin’.
The Ben and his crew, being awesome on-stage during the Salax Awards.
After the ceremony wound down we were informed that the official after-party would be at the New Cadillac nightclub, so we hopped into a taxi car and made our way there. The parking lot was swamped with people, including some of the award winners (we randomly got to hold a Salax outside the taxi window – a thrill, to be sure!), and there came another tense moment when a group of spectators realized that we were white. They hit their hands against the car trunk, hood and windows and shouted at the driver to “let the muzungu out!” We think they just wanted to get in the taxi, which were in short supply, but it was still a relief when our driver rolled up the windows and drove steadily on through the crowd.
We arrived at the New Cadillac shortly after nine, expecting the place to be happening, but instead it was quite dead. The DJ was in full-swing and the dance-floor was flashing with disco-ball light, but no one was on it. We sat down with our drinks and talked about very cool, club-appropriate things like our futures in journalism and what this experience would mean for them. Eventually the dance floor did fill up, although our hopes of seeing either The Ben or Meddy in-person were dashed. After a few songs we decided to pack it in, knowing we were expected at the Rwanda Development Board to catch a bus to the Northern Province for Kwita Izina at 6 am the next morning. Can I get a “yikes?”
SATURDAY
All six of us headed out the next morning to the RDB head offices. Adam, Tanya and Yvonne had been invited by their respective news organizations, Allie and I had received invites from the editor of the New Times, Collin Haba, and Andréanne had secured a pass as a foreign freelancer.
We all crammed onto the press buses and, without quite knowing what to expect, headed off for the base of the Virunga Mountains, where the ceremony would take place. The ceremony is an annual celebration of mountain gorilla conservation in Volcanoes National Park; it officially names the baby gorillas born in the last year, a ceremony that is very important any time a child is born in Rwanda. This year the ceremony was celebrated in conjunction with UNEP’s World Environment Day, which promotes environmental protection and getting world leaders involved in fighting climate change and biodiversity loss.
The event had been hugely promoted in Rwanda and everyone seemed fully aware that on June 5th, the eyes of the world would be on the country. Like so many things here, the ceremony was beautiful, but at times, confusing and upsetting.
When we stepped off our bus we were informed that since President Paul Kagame would be delivering a speech at the ceremony and accepting an environmental award on behalf of Rwanda’s conservationist and environmental achievement, we would have to give up our cell phones to the bus driver, something that made all of us nervous. We were then brought through an airport-worthy security checkpoint. To our right we noticed police dogs sniffing at the award that would later be presented to Kagame. Presumably to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Or full of drugs? It all seemed a bit ridiculous…especially when upwards of 5000 Rwandans were allowed entrance into the public viewing area all at once, without going through any sort of security clearance. Couldn’t they have had cell phone bombs on them too? But anyway…
Eventually we were admitted into the media (“VIP”) viewing section, where we had access to toilets, buses with wireless Internet access and free Bourbon coffee. It was like Bluesfest had been flown in from Ottawa for the day. We were thrilled with the excellent treatment, and I for one didn’t think much of it at first because it’s quite common for events here to have a “public” and “VIP” seating section. But over the course of the ceremony, we would be made to feel more and more uncomfortable with the class division. This was, after all, a Rwandan ceremony. A UN ceremony. And yet the stage, and therefore the performers and speech-givers, faced a few hundred members of the media while the public got a nice view of the backs of their pop stars, ambassadors and president. We had white tents to sit under and chairs to sit on. The public was crammed together, standing pushed up against the back of the stage or sitting on the ground in the sun.
The crew, hunkered down, waiting for the ceremony to start.
It was easy to forget my discomfort, though. The ceremony was overwhelming in its extravagance. The Ben performed the same set he had at the Salax Awards the night before (I got a picture with him before he returned to his seat in one of the tents and congratulated him on “his win last night” – goodness I’m cool!), we watched a parade of speakers from UNEP talk about the importance of environmental conservation, and then the naming ceremony itself started. This year eleven baby gorillas were named; various governmental and activist representatives, as well as the public, through online polls, were awarded the great honour of choosing and announcing their names. (My personal favourite was the name chosen by children in an online vote – WAKA WAKA – announced by an Asian environmentalist who was so excited to reveal the children’s’ choice that he practically screamed the name into his microphone, to amused applause. Very cute.) The speeches given by the name-givers were touching, especially those delivered by people who have spent their lives working to conserve the endangered species, but they were slightly out-shadowed by what is apparently a custom at the ceremony: the entrance of people dressed in gorilla suits onto the grassy area in front of the stage, to raucous laughter and applause. These then proceeded to do gorilla-like things during those speeches, such as whoop, holler, fight, thump their chests and sprawl out asleep. Sometimes being here and witnessing aspects of Rwandan culture are downright surreal. This was definitely one of those moments.
Mmm. The Ben sings at Kwita Izina.
Traditional dancers perform at Kwita Izina - the same ones I saw at the City FM concert last month.
One of the "gorillas" frolicking during the naming ceremony.
The climax of the ceremony for me came when Don Cheadle, UNEP goodwill ambassador for the environment, took to the stage and delivered a highly personal speech about our need to fight climate change, comparing the human race to a frog placed in a pot of water boiling by increments, lulled into security by the slowly rising temperature until his ultimate death. It was incredibly easy for us, the media, to get clear shots and sound recordings of his speech, which he delivered in traditional male Rwandan garb, although, again, all the public got was his back and a speech in a language many of them don’t speak.
Don Cheadle, in traditional Rwandan garb, delivers his speech as UNEP ambassador to the environment.
When President Kagame took to the stage to accept his award, I again had to remove myself mentally from the surrealness of being metres away from a man who, although his “goodness” is debatable, has achieved so much great things. Several things about him surprised me. I had heard that Kagame, first as a general for the RPF, later as vice-president and now as president, had the power to incite absolute loyalty from his soldiers, so much so that they would and did die for him. But in-person he seemed small – not short, but diminished. He struggled somewhat with his speech in English, leading us to believe that maybe he was translating it from Kinyarwanda on the spot, because his English during a media scrum a few moments later was impeccable. He spoke softly and hesitantly, perhaps due to the language-barrier, and the thumb of his right hand is white, a tiny, insignificant detail that rendered this man – one who will go down in the history of the continent, although the tone of his chapter in that history book remains to be seen – very human.
I admire Kagame for turning to face his public after addressing the media, and delivering an address to them in Kinyarwanda. He was the only one who did so.
Kagame delivers his speech to the media and other "VIPs."
After his speech we were invited to the meal tents set up a few metres away from the stage for lunch. On the way there I noticed a group of media clamouring around Kagame in a scrum. Although I wasn’t able to ask him a question (he was pulled away by security before I could think of an intelligent one), I managed to press my microphone right to his lips, gathering decent sound and snapping a pretty solid profile shot of him.
Kagame again, this time in the media scrum - look at how close I got!
Needless to say, I was in a good mood as I skipped to the meal tent for an absolutely sublime buffet lunch complete with white wine and sugared strawberries for desert. I am actually salivating as I recall it now, although that might have to do with the fact that I’m due for lunch soon…
The gang in the meal tent during Kwita Izina, with our feast spread before them.
My excitement was further compounded by the fact that as Cheadle was leaving the meal tent, I accosted him for a photograph! Our magical twenty-second dialogue went like this:
Me: Excuse me, would it be possible to get a photo with you?
Don Cheadle: Possible, but not probable.
Me: (deflated) Oh, ok. Thanks!
Don Cheadle: Just kidding. Make it quick!
THE MAN, random girl who ruined our shot, Allie, Andréanne's head, Yvonne and myself.
As we were finishing up our lunch, we were rudely reminded of the inequalities rampant during the ceremony. The police suddenly allowed the thousands of spectators still watching the performances on stage (apparently I missed Meddy’s performance during the Kagame scrum – nooo! He didn’t perform at the Salax Awards either, presumably in a huff about not winning best performer) to enter the VIP area and tents to grab whatever food and beverages were left.
Hey, this is much better than letting good food go to waste, but nothing makes you feel more disgusted with yourself or downright colonial than to be eating éclairs and sipping wine as hundreds of people swarm around you, fighting one another for unopened bottles of beer and Fanta and spooning bananas and salads into their mouths as though they might never eat again. I can’t speak for the others, but I was exactly that – disgusted, especially since we had put a few beverages into our bags for later before our privilege smacked us in the face in the form of stampeding Rwandans.
As we were heading back to our bus we watched as the police began to round up the mass of people so the catering staff could begin their clean-up. They hit at men and children with their batons to make them move quicker, and while these seemed to find the abuse amusing, we did not. It all left me with an acrid, sick feeling in my stomach.
The rugged, lonely beauty of the Virunga Mountains in Volcanoes National Park.
When we got back to the main road and attempted to find the same bus we had arrived on so that the driver could give us back our cell phones, we discovered that it was nowhere to be found. Eventually we managed to hop onto another bus bound for Kigali, hardly wanting to get stuck in the park for the night, but we were convinced that our fears about leaving our phones with a stranger had been realized. Forty minutes later, in Ruhengari, near the Ugandan border, Yvonne’s co-worker from Contact FM, Claude, informed us that if we disembarked we would be picked up in twenty minutes by our original driver in our original bus. Twenty minutes became nearly an hour, and as we waited in the miniscule border-town, the grey skies opened and began to pour rain.
A lone soldier walks the streets of border-town Ruhengeri.
Cue the single most terrifying bus ride of my life. The road from Kigali to the Northern Province is already treacherous, all sharp turns, walls of rock and steep cliffs, but in the rain and with a driver who had little qualms about answering his cell phone while driving, I felt the need to send up a few prayers into the dark. To make the ride even more stressful, the RDB workers on the bus with us were celebrating a successful ceremony and were heavily intoxicated. They swayed and drank and yelled to the driver to turn up the music and laughed like hyenas anytime we took a turn too quickly. About an hour into the trip, the girls and I did the only thing we could think of to make the trip bearable – we accepted both beers from the men and the fact that we were stuck there for three hours. Might as well make the best of such a situation, right?
During that ride I made friends with the man beside me, whose name I’ll refrain from using. For the first few hours of the trip, he and his friend, an intern from Libya, were your typical intoxicated young men: ridiculous, loud and slightly obnoxious. My new friend told me he was a DJ and asked me if I thought he was good-looking, claiming his stage name was “Mr. Sexy.”
Suddenly a song came on the radio in Kinyarwanda and his whole demeanour changed. He said it was a song about the genocide, about remembering those who were lost during it and the way that life once was – simple and sweet – before. That song changed something in him. Gone were his guffaws and incredible volume. He grew quiet and pensive, holding onto his beer as though he were nursing it.
He asked me if I knew what it was like to watch my family and friends killed in front of me. I said I did not. He told me he had watched his mother killed with a machete. The worst part was that he held his hands in front of him and let them fall in quick diagonal swipes, mimicking the motion of the blade hitting her body.
He told me he was Tutsi (the first time anyone here has declared their tribe to me) and that he lived today, 16 years later, with his brother and two Hutus. He said that he was a strong, young man and that he could exact revenge on them for what their people did to his if he chose to, but that he was a Rastafarian and that his beliefs promoted peace and forgiveness, not violence or revenge. He asked me what I knew about being a Rasta, so I said honestly, “Bob Marley and marijuana.” He then spent the rest of the trip telling me that being Rasta was about so much more than that – about brotherhood, forgiveness, peace and respecting everyone as coming from the same place – Africa. He said it was this belief that kept him from hurting those Hutu men he lives with.
He then apologized for burdening me with all that he had said. He said there was something about my facial expression that made him feel that he could keep talking, and that I would listen. I said that, as a journalist, I was good at listening, but hardly knew what to say after all that he had told me.
He then informed me he would set up an interview with Meddy for me, and he had magically returned to his young, cocky self.
When we got home I locked myself in my room and cried.
SUNDAY
On Sunday the girls returned to the Northern Province and Volcanoes National Park for a gorilla-tracking safari, so Adam, Allie and I, along with a friend of hers from Burundi, Bryce, went back to Amahoro Stadium for the Tanzania-Rwanda football match.
I’ve never been a soccer fan (except during the World Cup), but it was hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the crowd at this game. I can hardly wait to see how this country reacts to World Cup fever this weekend.
Bryce before the game - note the sweet Team Rwanda jersey! I fully want one!
A police officer in the stands before the game, with the teams on the pitch behind him.
We made the decision, despite the previous day’s uncomfortableness, to shell out 3000 RWF for the “semi-VIP” section of the stadium, knowing that the previous game against the Congo had ended with the opposing team being arrested for beating on a referee, which had led to a small riot in the stands. We rightly assumed that the VIP seats would be less crowded, and therefore safer, but they were also much less fun. Whereas the free seats were a gyrating, undulating mass of blue, green and yellow, our section was quiet and reserved. In the “super-VIP” section next to us, President Kagame and his wife watched the game with absolute seriousness.
The teams (Rwanda on the right, Tanzania on the left) line up for the national anthems.
Rwanda won the match 1-0, meaning the national team has officially qualified for the Africa Cup (though sadly not for the World). The victory was followed by much dancing in the crowd. We were grateful that Bryce had a car and offered to drive us to the Executive Carwash near our house for celebratory goat brochette; otherwise flagging motos or cramming into a bus would have proven extremely difficult.
MONDAY
Monday was spent recording a voicer about the Kwita Izina ceremony, seeing as how our station doesn’t broadcast the news on the weekend. The production of the piece took hours longer than it should have because my French-speaking co-workers all insisted they were too shy to voiceover English clips from Kagame and Cheadle in French. It was frustrating to spend all day on a two-minute story, but hanging out in the studio with the guys was, for the first time, easy and fun, rather than forced or awkward. They told me they had seen me on national television at both the football match and gorilla-naming ceremony, which made me laugh, because I was hardly what was newsworthy at either event. My favourite co-worker, Pedro, returned for the first time since having broken his leg playing soccer, which means I will again have someone willing to help me with translating Kinyarwanda interviews! Hurrah! I left work after wrapping up on the voicer, which Dodos said was another fine example of good journalism. A’thank’you!
TUESDAY
Yesterday I felt sick (hot, then cold, and exhausted – I’ve been having strange dreams again, ones that keep me awake or make me feel like I haven’t slept at all), so went home at noon, intending to work on my personal docs but instead falling asleep for four hours, which frustrated me. I still got work done on them in the evening but I hate feeling unproductive, and I hate not being at 100%.
Luckily I feel much better today. It’s a slow news day, but I’m grateful, because I have a lot of work on my projects to complete in 16 days (!). At around 6 I’ll switch gears to help Martine by banging out a few international script stories and then…BAM! It’ll be a wrap on another day working for City Radio in Kigali!
Tonight Yvonne and Allie and I are going out to dinner to celebrate what would have been our convocation if we had been home. It’s bittersweet to not be in Ottawa with the j-schoolers I love and miss, but frankly, I wouldn’t trade being here for the world!
-30-
NEW GOAL (REVIVED); LEARN ONE KINYARWANDA PHRASE PER DAY.
TODAY’S PHRASE(S):
ICUPA RYA’AMAZI AKONJE (A BOTTLE OF COLD WATER)
ICUPA RYA’AMAZI ASHYUSHYE (A BOTTLE OF WARM WATER)
What a language!
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So I don’t have a whole lot to report on from here in Rwanda this time around. Not from a work perspective, anyway. Things have sort of ground to a halt there. I’m experiencing writer’s block (or whatever the equivalent in radio is) working on each of my documentaries; I’ve literally spent hours staring at the blinking cursor in various drafts of various scripts and can’t seem to choose which clips from my hours of audio recordings to edit. Perhaps I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, or maybe I’m starting to feel the stress of having only 20 days during which to make five docs materialize, or maybe I’m in a funk. Whatever the case, I need to snap out of it, and fast!
At the same time, I’m going to fight doubly hard from now on to be told when press conferences are happening, and where, because I haven’t been told about anything needing to be covered in over a week. Obviously things are happening somewhere, because my co-workers are returning to the station at night with daily stories in Kinyarwanda. If they would just tell me where they’re going in advance, I could produce similar stories in French, rather than translating copy from the newswires, which hardly makes for a dynamic broadcast! Anyway…I’m pushing to be kept in the loop more effectively as of tomorrow! And that’s my rant about that!
So what is new? Well, Allie – in the same year as Yvonne and I, i.e. a recent undergrad graduate – has arrived from London! Her program has changed, so while we originally expected her to stay with us for only a week, she’ll be here for a whole month before she moves on to Gisenyi to teach journalism to the youth there. Fresh blood! I spent the morning with her, showing her the bus route into town, taking her to Bourbon Café so she could check her e-mail and then passed her off to Andrea after a typical Rwandan buffet lunch for further orientation. Looks like she’ll be helping American company IREX with media surveys to figure out who’s the audience of what media here, and what those audiences expect out of those media outlets.
The other big news is that Adam had a malaria scare yesterday. He started feeling sick Monday night, but up until about 5 pm yesterday, felt gross but in control. At about that time we found him more or less curled into a fetal position on the cool of the concrete floor near the living room. So we decided for him that an immediate trip to the clinic was required. Julius and I crammed into a taxi car with him and drove to the Plateau Polyclinique downtown, where Andrea had saved his place in line.
The whole clinic experience was slightly comical. The facilities were bright, clean and smelled vaguely of vomit. Obviously Adam wasn’t at his most lucid, which seemed to insult the doctor who came to take his temperature in the waiting room, because he literally slapped him to attention before leading him into a dermatology examination room. An injection (presumably of ibuprofen) broke Adam’s fever fairly quickly and while hanging out with him in the skin-care clinic (?) waiting for him to feel well enough to walk up the street so we could catch our cab back home, Andrea, Julius and I were in silly spirits, giggling over nothing and listening to Avril Lavigne on Andrea’s iPhone. Maybe it was the combination of lack of sleep and empty stomachs, or a strange reaction to being in what could have become an uncomfortable or even dangerous situation, but the few hours we spent at the clinic were fairly jovial.
I sobered up a bit when I went on a quest to find a washroom and stumbled across a mother with her two miserable children, both very feverish, one daughter so much so that I could feel the heat radiating off of her as I passed them in the hallway. The thing with malaria is that it’s very treatable if you’re administered an anti-malarial in the early stages of fever, so I have to content myself with hoping that an injection-later they were feeling as fine as Adam is today.
The doctor never actually told us what was wrong with Adam. He was given a prescription of generic fever meds, so it very well could have been malaria, but it also could have been a cold. The point is that here, it’s safest not to take any chances. Even Rwandans go to the hospital at the drop of a hat.
Now since I don’t have anything else of interest to report about the past few days (ok, so I guess finding a housemate passed out on the floor isn’t something that happens every day, even here!) I’m going to offer up some random observations about life in Rwanda, and my list of things that I plan to do when I return to business-as-usual in North America.
Michelle Anne Olsen’s Random Observations re: Life in Rwanda
-When you ask for pain in small Rwandan cities, you will sometimes be given hot dog buns, even though there is only one place in the country I know of that serves hot dogs.
-Fanta Fiesta is really just purple cream soda. (!)
-I am very much in awe of Rwandan women who are able to wear not only heels, but three-inch heels, here. I have been known to fall flat on my behind down slippery, muddy hills or trip over uneven cobblestone in my beat-up, super-comfortable flats!
-It’s amazing what you can get used to in a very short time. Yesterday it occurred to me that the police and army here carry semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, a sight visible on most street corners, something that no one seems to think twice about, myself included, when to see the same thing in Ottawa would be completely unusual and downright frightening.
-Another shout-out to the poise of Rwandan women: I cannot fathom how they are able to balance everything from huge yellow jugs of water to baskets piled high with limes or bananas upon their heads so perfectly, often while simultaneously carrying a baby hung low on their backs, wrapped in fabric. I tried balancing two paper bags of groceries in either arm on a moto this weekend and on several occasions during the ride home almost lost the groceries, my purse or my balance on the bike. I would pay someone to teach me how to balance things on my head!
Michelle Anne Olsen’s List of Things To-Do When Back in Ottawa
-Eat a brick of cheese.
-Sit on a patio in the market with a pint of beer and an appetizer of something greasy.
-Wear a dress that (gasp!) bares my shoulders in public.
-Wear heels (without the risk of killing myself).
-Watch all the movies and television episodes I’m out of the loop on in rapid succession.
And obviously I’ll be spending lots of time with the family and friends who I miss terribly. Duh!
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To Gisenyi, Masaka and back
If Rwanda as a country is a billion variations of the colour green, two days in Gisenyi have led me to reconsider my understanding of the colour blue.
Gisenyi is a strange little town, but a beautiful one. It lies to the northwest of the country, on the banks of Lake Kivu, the vastness of which surprised me. Three-plus hours of green-capped hill-tops give way most unexpectedly to the choppy flatness of the lake, which seemed ocean-like after a month of nothing but green, green, green, brown, brown, brown land.
I say “strange” because Gisenyi is like two different places stitched sloppily together. There’s the lake and the lushness of palm trees and banana plants crowding its sandy shore; along the lake are the sort of high-end hotels that cater to the tourists willing to shell out the $500 USD required to secure a gorilla-tracking permit and garden-oasis restaurants. Away from the lake, though, Gisenyi looks like the set of a John Wayne movie. It’s very small. Its clay structures all have the same faded beige exterior. It’s hot, and dusty.
I arrived in Gisenyi on Friday afternoon, disembarked from my hot, sweaty, cramped taxi-bus and immediately, wearing hiking shoes and jeans and carrying my heavy black back-pack (in other words, the very picture of a muzungu trying to find herself in Africa), hiked through the dusty market and residential areas of the city down to the waterfront. It was a windy day, and the waves of Lake Kivu were huge.
“There is trouble on the water,” a young man told me as I climbed the concrete steps of the pier and set my backpack down on it, getting ready to remove my sneakers and dip my feet into the deep, dark blue of the water. He was right, of course, and I was behaving foolishly. I hadn’t been standing on the pier for five seconds when a giant wave crashed into it and up over my head.
Silly muzungu! A nearby boy collapsed into giggles, openly pointing at me, to which I could do nothing but give him the thumbs-up that’s so popular here and shake his hand in embarrassed acknowledgement of my fool-hardiness.
So, as quickly as I had come, I left the lake to seek out lodging for the night, i.e. somewhere I could change out of my dripping clothes.
My guide-book recommended lodging next to the city’s Presbyterian Church for a price that I could afford, so I set off with the intention of finding it. Turns out there are two hostels next to this particular church in Gisenyi, and that I chose the wrong one. I guess that I can’t have expected much more than what I got for 5000 RWF (about $10 USD), but my night at the Logement au village was not pleasantly spent.
The hostel was dingy. The water didn’t work. The one toilet used by all guests hardly flushed and reeked. The bathroom it was in was occupied by a gigantic gecko that always seemed to be stationed right beside the toilet, at about eye-level if one was seated, which one tends to be in washrooms. The doors to each of the rooms jammed and stuck, meaning they made a deafening noise every time they were opened or shut. The hostel’s courtyard seemed to be some sort of meeting place after-hours, because there were bad nineties music and voices blasting from just outside my window throughout the night. I checked in at 1 pm; most other guests after 11 pm. They were a seedy bunch, to be perfectly honest, and very noisy. I never felt unsafe…just very uncomfortable throughout my stay. I was grateful to be in a private room, with a door that locked.
This photo really doesn't do justice to this room; guess dirt doesn't register on camera as well as I thought!
Anyway, I checked in to the Logement Friday afternoon, changed my clothes, emptied my backpack of everything but the essentials and trekked back down to the lake. I decided to drift by way of the city’s swankiest hotel, the Serena, and concluded that I would make up for my crappy hotel situation by splurging a bit on lunch there. Their buffet was divine (my mouth rejoiced at their dessert bar – I haven’t had proper bread in a month (the stuff here is very hard, almost like a biscuit), so I just about died of happiness to be eating an honest-to-goodness, fluffy-light fruit pastry ), if not overpriced. I then headed down to the hotel pool and portion of the Lake Kivu beach (paying about $5 for the rights to use both) and spent a good portion of the afternoon reading a novel in the sun and swimming.
The view from the beach is indescribably beautiful. The water that day was a deep, dark blue, although on the next it would be all Easter egg-pastels, and on the horizon, on the other side of the lake which serves as a border, rose the darker blue of the mountains in the Congo. To the left Rwanda’s green hills descended steeply to the steely blue of the lake; to the right lay the vaguely Spanish-inspired architecture of the seaside homes of the rich in Goma, oft-conflict-stricken city in the DRC; behind me, across the border, was Nyiragongo volcano, active, immense and belching steam clouds into the sky, which hung low, obscuring its glowing crater.
The view of Lake Kivu from the Serena Hotel
Sitting in a beach chair, taking in my surroundings, I was overcome for a moment by the surrealism of being where I was. I was lying on a beach. In Rwanda. 2.5 km away from the Congo. In Africa. You have to understand that I’ve never been off of my home-continent before this particular adventure. For a moment, the realization of being where I was made me dizzy.
Lake Kivu on Saturday morning
In the evening I returned to my ghetto-fabulous hotel room to change, then headed back down to the water, attempting to find a good restaurant and bar recommended in my guidebook. It’s ludicrously easy to meet people in Gisenyi, all of whom give off a slightly beach-bum vibe, and a man had invited me to the local cultural house for a music performance at 7 pm. Of course, as they often seem to do here, my well-formulated plans fell apart. This restaurant was nowhere to be found and eventually, although the moon was huge and round and the water beautiful bathed in its light, I got frustrated with walking aimlessly along the road by the water and so ducked into a garden bar decked out in Christmas lights. I ordered a Primus, took a seat with my book, and was soon joined by a Congolese man working as a translator for the UN mission to that country. He proved very interesting, and by the time he left to return to Goma, I was tired and had missed a fair bit of the concert, so simply moto’ed back to my hideous hotel.
I hardly slept and so checked out much earlier than I intended to the next morning, at around 8 am. I was supposed to meet my source from the Barefoot Artists initiative in the afternoon, when I was also supposed to be joined by Tanya and Yvonne. Of course, no one told us about the half-day holiday that occurs in Rwanda on the last Saturday of every month, when every able Rwandan does community clean-up until noon. So while I wandered the deserted streets of Gisenyi, hopelessly looking for somewhere that would serve me breakfast (or at least a Fanta Orange), Yvonne and Tanya were being told that no busses would leave Kigali until at least noon. They decided that to arrive so late wasn’t worth it, so I decided in turn to cut my trip short, unwilling to spend another night alone at the Logement.
Eventually I discovered that another hostel in town was serving breakfast (victory!), and then returned to the lakefront, since everything else still appeared closed. This was totally fine by me, let me assure you. A good book, the sun, palm trees, the sound of water lapping against sand and the occasional interruption in the form of a stranger introducing themselves was a perfectly wonderful way to spend a Saturday morning.
I'm grateful this photo was taken from so far away - that way you can't see my unshowered hair, bags under my eyes and major bug bites; attractive!
Bathers in Lake Kivu
That afternoon I met up with Jean-Bosco of Barefoot Artists, who drove me in a Red Cross rover to the nearby village of genocide survivors that has been rejuvenated through the artistic work of the organization (through the construction of an actual genocide memorial, designed and built by the villagers, replacing the original concrete slab and sticks covering mass graves; through the rebuilding and painting of homes; through the education of local children in the arts, which they have used to decorate their school and their homes; through teaching widows and children to weave intricate baskets in the Rwandan style and sew truly beautiful clothing). It was a very rewarding visit. It doesn’t sound like much, but the difference made by supplying the town with practical utilities (proper latrines, solar-powered flashlights) and the means to beautify what was, just four years ago, a stark place filled with bad memories, has been huge.
I don’t mean to sound condescending in writing this. The last image I want to portray is one of white people bringing good to a suffering or “backward” Africa; rather, what excites me here is that it’s through the arts that changes in this village are coming about.
The children of the village I met during my short stay were adorable. They were way too excited to see a muzungu, and immediately ran to me, all clamouring to be the ones to hold my hands. They slowed me down considerably as I tried to keep pace with Jean-Bosco’s excited tour through the village, and he laughed when he stopped to listen to their chatter.
“They are pretending to be muzungu,” he informed me. I laughed in my turn, asking why they would pretend to be something that seems to have such a silly, if not downright negative, connotation. He explained that the word also implies a certain class of person, which made me feel simultaneously flattered and uncomfortable.
Near the survivor’s village is a small settlement of Twa. Barefoot Artists is now working to help them build a functional kiln so they can produce their distinctive style of clay pottery in enough quantity so as to sell it for profit. I saw the site of the future oven and met some of the villagers, who were very shy around me.
There is a reticence here regarding the media that doesn’t exist in Canada, and this can make getting interviews difficult. People are understandably hesitant to talk on the record about anything critical of the government or life in Rwanda, but even when the subject being discussed is as neutral as the use of art to promote healing and economic sustainability, there is a tendency for Rwandans to clam up as soon as one produces a camera or microphone. Even when someone does agree to an interview, I’m lucky to get anything more than a mono-syllabic response to my questions. I’m learning how to avoid this – by asking many more questions than I usually would, and by trying to find the right questions to ask, the magical ones that will get a source to drop their defences and really answer. Jean-Bosco informed everyone he introduced me to that I would be coming back to speak to them sometime in June. He said with that warning, and having met me once before, my sources would feel comfortable being interviewed when I return to Gisenyi.
Jean-Bosco dropped me off back in town, I bought my bus ticket home (it’s very strange, but I felt very relieved to arrive back in Kigali, and back at our house…both felt surprisingly familiar and comfortable, which I never expected to happen) and went to a nearby cafe to wait for my departure time. I ordered a Fanta Orange and samosa, but noticed that the house specialty seemed to be a huge glass of milk and two small cakes. I’ve come to distrust the milk here, which comes in paper bags and is often served warm. It tastes…powdery and salty. But these tall glasses, which were obviously chilled, looked too good to pass up.
How to describe drinking that tall glass of unpasteurized milk? It was thick. And sour. It went down a bit like plain yogurt. Chunky-style. It wasn’t all bad, but for this skim-milk addict, it was quite the experience. One that I more-or-less immediately regretted when I found myself crammed in the hot, sweaty, crowded bus home. Ha-ha…not the best decision I’ve made!
Needless to say, I arrived back in Kigali without incident, although the young girl next to me, ironically given how my stomach was feeling as we navigated hairpin turns and unpaved roads, vomited into a cloth bag repeatedly during the trip, which wasn’t the most appetizing way to spend three-plus hours. But I believe she had it a lot worse than me!
Yesterday the girls and I went to town to grab ingredients for dinner from the Simba Supermarket (which has the most eclectic things for sale – like giant conch shells and fake orange trees) and to visit an artisan’s cooperative near the city centre. Their wares were beautiful – dark, smooth wooden sculptures, intricate weaving, colourful beaded necklaces, brightly-dyed fabrics… I purchased a few gifts for folks back home, and for myself, something that’s traditionally Rwandan and much less smelly than it sounds: two cow-dung geometric paintings which are boldly coloured and wonderfully textured.
Who knew dung could look so good?
“How will you feel about having cow dung hanging on your wall?” the vendor asked me after I made the purchase. I guess we’ll have to wait and see!
Mask purchased for Annyen at the Rwanda-Congo border
This morning it was back to work, which was both satisfying and frustrating. I don’t like feeling idle, and even though I travelled to Butare and Gisenyi for research and interviews, both trips felt a lot like mini-vacations. But I hadn’t been in the office two seconds when Pacifique demanded to know where my so-called documentaries were. Andrea and I had this discussion last week: there are no long-term projects in newsrooms here. If a story can’t be produced for the night-time news, it isn’t produced at all. I tried to explain to Pacifique that I have tons and tons of information and audio, but that I don’t feel comfortable bringing it to air just yet, as there’s still more of both that I need for each documentary, but he just smirked and walked away. I would understand this attitude if I weren’t also contributing daily news to the French broadcast, but I am! And I started these projects a month ago…it’s not my fault my interviews are continually re-scheduled or cancelled altogether by my sources. So, um, ARG.
I’m hoping that when I can finally present the final products to Remy and Kelvin, they’ll speak for themselves and all of the work that’s going into them.
This morning I travelled to the township of Masaka, which my co-workers said was “nearby,” a 300 RWF moto-taxi ride away. What they forgot to mention was that that’s after an hour-plus-long, two-vehicle bus trip. So, needless to say, I was very very late for my interviews at the Masaka Resource Centre for the Blind. Luckily, everyone was very forgiving.
The centre is wonderful. It teaches blind Rwandans basic skills which allow them to escape the isolation, stigma and idleness that accompany vision loss here; agriculture, tending livestock, preparing meals, mobility, reading and writing Braille. The director of the centre, Frederico, showed me around the centre’s facilities, talking about the work they do there twitchily, leading me in and out of gardens, chicken coops and stables. I later interviewed two students about their lives before and after their training at the centre, and again my heart broke a little.
A young woman told me her family had abused her before she came to the centre four months ago, believing her useless, and that once her six months at the centre are up, she hopes to prove them wrong. A young man told me he hopes to use his newfound literacy in Braille to continue his education after he leaves the centre, but admitted that he’d be just as happy to raise cattle and farm, if this proves too difficult, which he suspects it will. Frederico admitted that most of the students don’t ever want to leave the centre; some believed themselves the only blind people in the country before coming to Masaka.
The centre does unimaginable good. Everyone in the classes I visited was bright and smiling. But Masaka can only accommodate so many students, and for only so long. Frederico, like Donatilla of the Rwandese Union for the Blind, said that change must come about through increased public funding and the reversal of stigmas regarding disability that pervade all levels of Rwandan society.
It’s times like these I find myself wondering if reporting on such an issue will actually do anything to improve it, and when I find myself most hoping it will.
So that’s that! That brings us to today, to now, Monday afternoon, when I really ought to sign off on this entry and get to editing hours and hours and hours of audio recordings. Yikes! Michelle, out!
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TIA
I learned a new expression the other night. Andrea brought it up during our Second Weekly Taco Tuesday: TIA. “This is Africa.” It’s used to explain or justify when things go wrong here. Usually accompanied by an apologetic shrug and a look that says, “well, what do you expect?” it typically follows a complaint about the Internet or electricity being out. In my case it was said after I lamented that my perfect plans for the weekend had more or less unravelled.
Ice-cream production training won’t happen until next week.
Jean-Bosco can’t accommodate me in Gisenyi until Saturday.
We can’t climb the volcano this weekend, perhaps not at all, because it’s ludicrously expensive for a small group like ours.
Boo and poo and other such expressions of defeat.
“TIA.”
Of course, something happened yesterday which put all of these complaints in the proper perspective. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Today, since I was supposed to be in Gisenyi with Jean-Bosco and wasn’t expected at the station, I spent the day at home and in various coffee shops (in the vain hope that at least one wireless hotspot in the city would be working to-speed) editing the nearly four hours of raw audio I’ve collected for my various doc projects in the past two weeks. (I see green Adobe Audition sound waves when I close my eyes, no doubt an indication that I should give it a rest for the time being.)
Late this afternoon I moto’ed to the neighbourhood of Kiyovu to meet with a Rwandan filmmaker now based in London for an ongoing story about Rwanda’s burgeoning film industry. Leave it to me to be in a country rife with “hard” journalism opportunities and still somehow manage to spend my time talking about movies!
Tuesday night I found myself again at Bralirwa headquarters for a press conference, this one less like the Twilight Zone and more like a recurring dream because I now recognize the principle players. I was there this time for the introduction of a “surprising” new flavour of Fanta to the Rwandan market, Fanta Fiesta, which is apparently a more marketable way of saying “blackcurrant.”
I know, I know, I know. This is not newsworthy news. Actually, it’s not news at all. Like the Mutzig Tombola press conference, this was an opportunity for Bralirwa to use the Rwandan media as free advertisers. But there was nothing else going on at the local level that I could see myself covering, and to be perfectly honest, I quite wanted to be “one of the first to try this exciting new flavour!!!” as the press release exclaimed, even as it promised that as a journalist attending the conference I would be given a special tour of the bottling factory! So surely my lapse in news judgement can be forgiven, with all of that fun to be had? Or should I bow my head in journalistic shame?
The conference was as deluded as the other I attended. The journalists assembled asked inane questions with a graveness that is incomprehensible to me. “Is Fanta Fiesta purple? The liquid looks purple to me, from this vantage point. Why purple? WHY?!”
To be fair, there were quite good questions asked as well, such as whether or not the introduction of the new flavour was in response to Pepsi drinks having recently entered the market? And didn’t Koch (the financial director of the brewery) worry that the introduction of a third Fanta flavour would cannibalize the market? And what if the flavour was unsuccessful, like a short-lived passion fruit-flavour introduced a few years ago?
These are good, business-minded questions. But they were overwhelmed by the downright silliness of the overall conference. At one point one of the brewery’s executives cranked up a Michael Jackson track and implored the assembled media to stand up, dance and join the “fiesta” (that wasn’t happening). At another Koch, handsome and charismatic, but of a certain age, tried to explain that the new drink is targeted at Rwandan youth, thus the “grab the new flava” campaign that will be launched alongside the drink nation-wide tomorrow, but mispronounced “flava,” to comical effect. (“At first I thought it was misspelt,” he admitted endearingly.)
All said and done, it was interesting to see the drink being bottled, and the sounds of glass bottles on the production line clanking together and of liquid being dispensed into them lent themselves well to recording. And the experience wasn’t a total bust; it has inspired another project, one which I probably won’t be able to publish here, but which I might try to freelance back home. This one’s meant to examine the absolute obsession (I mean, OBSESSION) with Bralirwa drinks here. A bottle of Coke or Fanta or Primus isn’t just that, you see. It’s an event, a phenomenon, a social interaction. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I’d like to find out.
Yesterday, even though production training had been postponed, I journeyed again to Butare to interview Alexis, the co-owner of Blue Marble Ice-Cream in New York and co-founder of the Blue Marble Dreams initiative, which is making the Sweet Dreams ice-cream parlour a possibility, and to sit in on one of the cooperative’s English lessons, which provided fantastic background sound.
The experience was unnecessarily frustrating due to the hovering presence of a brother-sister filmmaking duo from the States who have come to Rwanda to film a documentary about the project. They are a big deal, respectively, in documentary and feature film, and I found that I and my dinky recording equipment were continuously shooed out of this or that shot.
It’s paramount when gathering sound that you hold the microphone up to the lips of whoever’s speaking, but this proved impossible with the siblings constantly hissing at me to get out of the way. I’m not proud of it, but I got so frustrated with them I walked away to get some lunch, and came back when I was able to get to Nikki and Alexis one-on-one. It didn’t help that I had an allergic reaction to a series of bug bites on my hand during the announcement of which ten women out of those who have been taking the English and business classes would staff the shop, one that required a dose of Benadryl to ease. All these factors combined, I missed out on capturing the sound of the women chosen rejoicing and the disappointment of those who were not, which I am kicking myself for now.
My interview with Nikki and Alexis in the space which will become Sweet Dreams on June 5 cheered me – it’s hard not to get caught up in their sheer optimism as to what this project will do to improve the lives of the women involved in it – as did the walk to it, past spectacular, hilly views and the lush green campus of the National University, which I hadn’t seen during my previous visit to Butare, but I was still a bit grumpy as I boarded the bus back to Kigali.
That’s when the universe saw fit to put my pouting into rather sharp perspective. Allan and my travel books all spoke of the moment when the veil would be lifted off of our experience of Rwanda, when the honeymoon phase of being in a new, exciting place would give way to a tough period of understanding what it’s really like not just to visit, but to live here.
At every bus station, and every time a bus stops to get gas or to let a passenger on or off, it is swarmed by people. By people selling snacks and water and juice, conveniently enough, but also by people with nothing to offer but their outstretched hands. As in any place, there are beggars here, but their appearance is sometimes shocking. On the streets of Kigali there are women whose legs and feet are so emaciated or twisted that they wear shoes on the hands, propelling themselves forward on the sidewalk with their arms. A man outside the Volcano bus station yesterday morning sat on the underside of his knees because his legs, spindly and knotted, rose straight into the air, his feet splayed.
I’ve seen these men and women since my arrival, but I don’t think I understood anything about the reality of their lives until yesterday afternoon. I was sitting in the bus, waiting for it to fill with people so it could depart, when a blind man began to walk around it, feeling his way from window to window, and where one was open, extending his hand to the empty air inside. I dropped a coin into his hand when he passed and as he walked away remembered what the director of the Rwandese Union for the Blind had told me the day before: that the visually impaired here live like ghosts. There is little-to-no education or job training available to them and often the stigma surrounding their disability is so great they are encouraged to keep themselves hidden. I thought of all this and saw the man stumble on the sudden drop of the curb, and my heart broke, because I had no real means to help him. Not him, or the teenage boy who came to my window next, one hand outstretched, the other missing, nothing more than a stump at the wrist, or the young boy after him, who was wearing tattered clothing and whose stomach protruded, doubtfully from over-indulgence.
I’ve never felt more aware of my not wanting for anything, or more guilty of it.
Coming here has been difficult for me; there have been moments when I’ve wanted nothing more than to board a flight back home and resume living my North American life. But that’s just the point. My “hardships” here have an expiration date. Yesterday evening I knocked at the door to my gated house, where there was hot dinner and a comfortable bed waiting for me, and at the end of June I’ll board my flight home, where there’s a life of wealth and (hopefully) success waiting for me.
I’ve found it so frustrating that Rwandans should constantly point out my difference. But I am different, and I’m staring at this blinking cursor trying to explain how simultaneously grateful for and horrified by it I am.
This is Africa.
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Awesome, just awesome!
I’m on fire!
-Interview this morning with the head of the Rwandese Union for the Blind for my mini-doc about living with vision loss in Rwanda – a very poignant interview; got borderline emotional during
-Set up a visit on Monday morning at 10h00 to the Masaka Resource Centre for the Blind to interview Rwandans living with vision loss about their experiences and the teachers at the centre, who teach basic skills such as navigation and agriculture to the visually-impaired
-Leaving early in the morning for Butare for the day tomorrow to attend ice-cream production training with the women of the Sweet Dreams ice-cream shop!
-Leaving Thursday for Gisenyi, a lake-side town to the West, to see first-hand the work being done in a village of genocide survivors and a village of Batwa by the Barefoot Artists; Tanya and Yvonne will join me there Friday night and we’ll spend the weekend relaxing by Lake Kivu and climbing a volcano! What-what!
Awesome. All of it.
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Nyamata
Yesterday the girls and I headed out to Nyamata, about 40 minutes outside of Kigali by bus, to visit one of Rwanda’s largest memorial sites. This is the one that probably comes to mind when you think of the genocide. In 1994 thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus fled to the church in Nyamata, thinking they could claim sanctuary there. This was not the case – nearly 10 000 people were killed in and around the Catholic church. Today it is a stark memorial, one that confronts the massacre head-on.
I don’t think we quite knew what to expect as we moto’ed to the Sotra bus station in Kigali, procured juice and water and candy for the trip and piled into the most ghetto-fabulous bus I’ve ever seen: rusted floors, linoleum ceiling, with shag-carpet trim. Just when we thought that surely the bus could not fit any more people, at least ten more squeezed their way inside, so that we practically had to take turns exhaling. Tanya was half out the window for most of the trip. Still, we were in high spirits as we spilled out onto the street (singular) of Nyamata. The sky was impossibly blue and filled with children’s storybook clouds; there was a refreshing lack of motos in the street. Things moved slowly on this particular Sunday afternoon in Nyamata, and a refreshingly cool breeze blew through the trees on the side of the bronze-coloured road.
Tanya and Yvonne pose prettily in front of the bus we thought would be taking us to Nyamata
This is the bus we actually rode in - crammed with people and ghetto-fabulous; notice the linoleum and shag carpet ceiling
Tanya and Yvonne know how to travel in style
Nyamata, with its Wild West feel, is basically one-road-big
As we turned off the main street toward the church, the breeze seemed to change. I’ve become an increasingly superstitious person since making it one of my jobs to verse myself in ghost stories, and I definitely read too much into a lot of perfectly explainable phenomena when I’m on the job, but this was hard to ignore. As we approached the church, the breeze no longer seemed to blow, but rather, whistle at a high pitch, and whisper through the leaves.
We decided upon entering the memorial that we would prefer to visit it alone, rather than with a guide. We were the only ones there.
I can’t hope to do that place justice with my words, so in a moment I’ll try to let the pictures I took speak for themselves. The clothes the victims of the massacre died in are heaped on the church’s rotting wooden pews, covered in years of dust. At the back of the church are bags of bones – new corpses are discovered regularly and await interment in the mass graves behind the church. The cloth covering the alter is stained in faded blood. Atop it lie two machetes and a rosary. In the crypt and in the mass graves shelves are piled high with skulls and bones.
More-so than these undeniable signs of bloodshed, what struck me most was how it felt to walk into the church. It was quiet, so that our footsteps echoed loudly, making me very aware of where I was stepping. But at the same time, it wasn’t silent. Birds have made their nests in the rafters; the ruffling of their wings echoed as loudly as our footsteps. Sunlight streamed through bullet-holes in the ceiling, evidence of the militia’s initial storming of the building, although most inside were killed by machete. And that wind. It was enough to make me believe in ghosts. We were alone, but we weren’t. Every article of clothing – a man’s fedora, a little girl’s pink undergarments – every skull in the crypt – many bashed in – whispered a story. One of pain and fear and loss, but there was also something very profound, and almost beautiful, although I hesitate to use that word in this context, about standing there.
After maybe a half hour we left. We stepped back out into the sunlight, watched a few bikes whiz lazily by and were almost immediately surrounded by a group of smiling, teasing children who said, “give me my money!” and followed us all the way back to the bus station, touching our clothes and hair.
This is not 1994. This is a very different Rwanda. Thank God.
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Michelle riding a moto in a zebra-print dress, but we’ll get to that.
Friday was a day of extreme dichotomies. I tried to explain as much to Sam, the Brit who works at Kigali’s genocide memorial to help develop their programs for young people, last night, but after my 17-hour workday and a single Mutzig, I’m not sure he got my meaning. Let me try again here.
Thursday was a wholly uneventful day. I wrote two international script stories (about Pakistan’s decision to bar national access to Youtube and Facebook due to their “blasphemous” content and South Korea’s official accusation that it was North Korean forces that sank one of its naval ships in March) and read them on the air, then turned in at a lamely early hour in preparation for what would turn out to be an utterly epic Friday.
I woke bright and early – 5:30 am – because I had been asked to be at the station for 7 am to travel with Ramesh to the eastern province for Taxpayer’s Day. I’m going to be honest – until about 10 am I was not at all a pleasure to be around. There was the fact that I had woken up at 5:30, the fact that, of course, the Rwanda Revenue Authority taxi bus that drove us to the district of Gatsibo was over an hour late, and the fact that, upon reading the press release the RRA supplied us, I was absolutely convinced that there was nothing newsworthy about the event.
What is Taxpayer’s Day? It is the day on which the RRA celebrates Rwandan businesses that actually pay their taxes. Apparently there is a problem in the country of a certain number of small businesses failing to declare themselves and not paying their civic dues – the RRA puts this number at 30% of business owners – and so the holiday is designed to honour those who fulfill the duty and to convince those who do not of its importance. Which is fine. But certain aspects of the excursion put me immediately on guard: like the fact that the RRA was paying for the transportation of the media to this event (I would later learn that our lunch was covered as well, and had to refuse my first “gift” of 5000 RWF upon our return to Kigali, a typical exchange here, but one that I did not feel ethically equipped to deal in), which meant we were being treated as little more than governmental message disseminators, and the fact that the motto of this year’s celebrations is “CHOOSE DEVELOPMENT, BE COMPLIANT.” I don’t quite feel comfortable elaborating the “why” right now (ask me when I’m back home), but something about that phrasing didn’t sit in my stomach well.
My mood did improve, though, as we drove the two hours to Gatsibo. This country is astonishingly beautiful. It’s not only its hills – which rise into mist and fall into lush valleys. It’s that it gives new meaning to colour. You haven’t seen blue until you’ve seen the Rwandan sky. And green. I never understood what green was and could be until I saw its every-possible manifestation in the foliage and forestry bordering Rwanda’s roads. Yvonne had it right when she described that greenery on a phone call home as “prehistoric” – some of these trees have leaves so large it’s not hard to imagine them as a prop in the Land of the Lost.
It takes travelling outside of Kigali to understand that the capital is a sterilized version of the rest of the country. It’s loud and crowded and hot, but it’s also home to five-star hotels with air conditioning, embassies, gated brick houses and working stiffs in suits. Travel twenty minutes outside of the city and things change drastically. Women in brightly coloured wrap-dresses balance water jugs on their heads, babies slung low over their backs in cloth wrappings. Homes are low and made of clay. Kigali’s roundabouts give way to wild farmland, dotted with goats and cattle and dairy cows.
I feel horrifically North American to say this, but Gatsibo was by far the most “African” place I’ve visited in the past three weeks. I think we all have certain pre-conceptions about what Africa is, regardless of whether or not we’d like to. (I feel justified, a bit, in saying this, by the fact that one of the RRA guys kept leaning in close to me and saying, “THIS IS AFRICA” at random intervals. Thanks. Got it!)
The RRA had erected a gateway on the road heading to the town of Kiziguro, wrapped in blue, green and yellow cloth, the colours of the Rwandan flag. The Taxpayer’s Day ceremonies took place outside of the town’s church. White tents had been erected with shaded seating for visiting dignitaries and the media. On a nearby patch of grass and trees were gathered the villagers to watch the festivities. I’m cursing myself for not remembering to bring my camera, because they were dressed in the most memorable fashion: all bright, patterned dresses, elaborate fabric head coverings and, in the case of one heavily-wrinkled gentleman, a tattered top hat and cane.
The ceremonies kicked off with a traditional dance performed by a group from a rice-farming cooperative. I was lucky enough to take in two traditional dance performances on Friday, and doubt that I’ve ever seen such energy and fluidity of movement. I could move like these dancers too, if only I didn’t have bones in my arms and legs. It was incredible. Music was supplied by a choir and the rhythm created by the bells attached to the dancers’ ankles. This was a radio reporter’s dream – the chanting and shuffling of the troupe became the background sound of the voicer I later produced about the ceremony.
Then came the speeches. So many speeches. In Kinyarwanda. I obviously understood very little of them, but Ramesh explained the gist of the message. The RRA uses taxes to help small business enterprises in Rwanda grow, which then pay their taxes, which are in turn invested in the country’s infrastructure – healthcare, roads, education – which in turn makes doing business easier in Rwanda, which lowers costs and makes all Rwandans more prosperous. That’s all very well and good, but like any good journalist, Ramesh wasn’t going to record the official take on things only. So we walked out of our white tent, across the clearing and over the barrier to where the local spectators were. Ramesh quickly found a man and woman willing to talk to him about their take on the celebrations and the work of the RRA. Dutifully, although I’m lucky to understand one word out of a thousand in Kinyarwanda, I too recorded the interviews.
Our sources had nothing bad to say about the RRA and in fact praised the fact that the authority has helped several small businesses in the area and that day had given 1000 health insurance cards out to “vulnerable” individuals. But for some reason our holding microphones up to interview them attracted a fair bit of negative attention. Suddenly we were surrounded by a large crowd, who seemed completely engrossed by what we were doing. Eventually a police officer in a bright blue uniform noticed the crowd and then us and ambled over. He started to talk irritably in Kinyarwanda to Ramesh, who very quickly grew equally irritated and shot obviously angry words back at him. I didn’t understand what was being said exactly, but could understand the gist of it. Eventually an employee of the RRA who had ridden with us on the bus noticed the scuffle and the fact that the officer was reaching threateningly for his baton, and said to Ramesh that we had better return to the white tents. Ramesh was furious and complained loudly to other journalists about this obvious infringement of freedom of the press. It would seem that we were allowed to speak only to business owners handpicked by the RRA to speak to the media. We did so, interviewing a member of the rice-growing cooperative and the owner of a banana wine production business, and later, the CEO of the RRA herself, Mary Baine, who I was very grateful to learn, spoke English.
And amidst all this, the stares. The stares of every single spectator on me. Before I left, children at a nearby school would approach me to touch the white of my arms. I didn’t mind, but definitely did when I had to use the local toilets – a series of holes in the ground more or less open to the outside, and had to ask another group of curious children to please let me pee in peace!
The RRA supplied everyone gathered with Coke, Fanta and African maize – fried on open stovetops and surprisingly chewy. Then it was time to return to Kigali to package our stories for the evening broadcasts. But first the RRA employees insisted on a pit-stop to feed us a lunch of mushy peas and grilled meat and potatoes, which I accepted warily, telling myself I’ve accepted food at press conferences in Canada, and that this was therefore within my ethical boundaries. The “gift” of 5000 RWF for my “trouble” that an RRA employee tried to slip me once we were dropped back off at the station, however, I flat-out refused. The practice is common here – it’s one way to ensure your event is covered; it’s gotten so bad that journalists here sometimes won’t attend a conference or event without that little reward for their trouble and travel costs.
We got back to the station after 3 pm. I rushed through the production of a voicer, creating my own voiceover in French for Baine’s English clip and utilizing the fantastic background sound of the dancers’ song throughout. Then it was time to rush home to change for the City Radio Talent Show and VIP Concert. I hadn’t been aware of the concert before Thursday due to my absence from work, but apparently it was a huge deal. Scheduled at the Laico Hotel, one of Kigali’s swankiest, the 10 000 RWF spectacular was a combination of dance talent show and mega-watt concert featuring a who’s who of East African music stars. I had been informed by Remy that I would be ushering and was encouraged to wear a black dress and heels to represent the station to the best of my ability. By “black dress and heels” he must have meant “zebra-print dress and black flats,” the most formal clothing I brought with me, which is what I wore.
This brings us to my lame joke. Turns out that an afternoon spent in a clearing on a sweltering summer’s day in Rwanda’s eastern province is enough to burn this muzungu to an absolute crisp. People were pointing and yelling at me as I whizzed by on my moto on the way to the concert. I can only assume they were saying, “look mummy! A lobster riding a moto!” Sexy.
After the usual initial confusion about what it was I would be doing exactly, Remy informed me that I would be helping Oswald sell tickets to the concert in the hotel lobby. This was good fun, except that the power went out for over an hour, causing the concert to start late, and although people were paying nearly $20 USD for “VIP” seating, more tickets than seats were sold, so the room ended up incredibly crowded and sweltering. Being front-line, Oswald and I received a good deal of the abuse doled out because of the oversight.
Still, when I was able to enter the concert space and watch the performers, I saw that people were having a great time, and I would call the event a success despite its bumpy patches. Among the most memorable acts were a hip-hop dance group called Modern Dance, which had absolutely astounding rhythm, and a traditional dance group called Inganzo Ngali, voted the best traditional dance group in the world in 2009. That title was well-deserved. From the moment the dancers emerged as moving traditional huts and burst out from within them, the crowd was won, whooping and clapping and swaying to the rhythm of the group’s choir. As a writer there are times when you must admit that your words can not do a person, event or feeling justice. I think this is one of those times. Needless to say, the dancers were dynamic and energetic; their faces stretched into the broadest smiles; their costumes were beautiful, shiny, colourful; their every movement a story of a time, a place, an animal or a tradition.
Eventually the concert space got to be too sweltering for me, so I ducked out for a Fanta Citron and to join my co-workers working security at the doors. Pedro led me backstage at one point, where I met music stars Miss Jojo and King James. I watched the latter’s’ performance from the side of the stage with Chantal, the station’s receptionist, arms around one another. He was a pleasure to watch, with a sweet voice and tons of movement in his performance; he occasionally burst from the stage to dance with children in the front row and down the aisle.
I left before the concert ended, unable to keep my feet dancing and my eyes open, and went to meet Andrea and Sam for a beer at Mama Africa, a chic karaoke bar near the New Cadillac nightclub, but bowed out before they could drag me out dancing all over again.
Yesterday, Saturday, was spent lounging around in bed and reading “Pride and Prejudice” on the porch in the sun before my housemates and I cooked a dinner of pasta and make-shift garlic bread that was in fact hot dog buns dipped in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and shredded garlic.
“Why do they have hot dog buns in a country that has no hot dogs?” we wondered aloud. Truth be told, there are a lot of things that don’t make sense to us here. You’ve gotta learn to ask the question and not expect an answer. Like why would a lobster be riding a moto in a zebra-print dress?
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