22 march 2010
i'm so tired, i'm going to try and type this entire thing with my eyes closed. surly i'll have more spelling errors than usual,not that having my eyes closed prevents me from knowing - wait, not that having my eyes open prevents me from making mistakes (lord knows I can't spell). we'll see how it goes.
i was set on going to town today. i had a couple of letters to drop at the post and my banana supply was running all too low (zero) so I asked Jean Paul to call the bike taxi drivers. I went and waited in my assigned waiting spot. After 20 minutes or so when he was a no-show, and after being bombarded by primary school children all looking sharp in their blue school uniforms, (what's your name? how are you? what time is it?) I gave up and decided to foot it.
You know my Rwandan name, really the name I go by most of the time these days (at least at school) is Umunezero - happiness. Somedays though, I feel like a hypocrite for having this name. Somedays I'm not happy. Somedays I'd prefer to walk alone in my own mind, just left to be without needing to greet every single person I pass on the way. Today was one of those days. Just lost in my own thoughts and heart afloat somewhere at sea, i walked among a group of women - also on their way to town. I felt like the black sheep - ironic. just not in the mood to talk, and the whole crowd was hushed in my presence. i found the lull in conversation awkward, but I was too lost in my own thoughts to really be bothered by it.
Thankgoodness that eventually my bike driver showed up. He swept me off my feet and we made our way to the main road. I've befriended the girl who sells bus tickets to musanze at Kidaho (the main road). She's 23, small spects sit on her nose and her sassy personality suits her and her cute afro well. We laugh and joke and she spots my American name on the envelopes I'm about to send at the post. Calls me a liar "You told me your name was Umunezero!" (not sure what language she actually said it in, but I doubt it was English - no, I know for certain it wasn't English, so either Kinyarwanda or French I suppose). We laugh and some more and she expresses her desire to study but explains that her job only pays her enough to really cover he housing/food and whatnot. Not enough for school (University) fees as well. Then she asks if I have an umukoze (a house girl) and I tell her no. She said that she wants to come work for me. I contemplate the idea (I did allow my dirty dishes to sit for nearly 4 or 5 days last week - eating dinner (beans and potatoes almost every night) with the teachers just to avoid having to wash them) because I really, really don't like doing the dishes. But to me, the idea of having Chantel, this 23 year old girl come and work for me - I'd rather see us as equals, and I feel like if I paid her to do housework that I'm perfectly capable of doing, I don't know. I guess I'd rather have her come to my house as a friend, not as a worker is all I'm trying to say. Much in the way that Adeline comes to my house to laugh and spend time together (not only because I usually give her a chocolate as well). So I tell her that I can try and set her up with Leopold, one of the cute teaches at our school who's apparently a "rich man". (he has the cellphone to prove it - fancy, plays music, color screen - much nicer than my durable little MTN number). She finds this hysterical, the thought of me trying to set her up with a "Sugar Daddy" (who's also younger than her) and we laugh, give high five/hand shakes some more until the bus comes.
After going to the post and laughing with the poor guy who had to give me nearly $4 worth of stamps (literally covering the envelope), I figured I'd just swing by the market, get my bare necessities and go back to my village. Earlier in the week though - or actually, last weekend, I was shocked to see another Muzungu at my school. (I am embarrassed to say I even called him a muzungu when I spotted him from a distance. turns out I'm quite ... territorial). We introduced ourselves to one another.
Alberto - white, but not American.
Italian.
We exchanged numbers, he told me to call if I like when I happen to be in town in the future (he works in Musanze for an organization that helps to cover school fees for orphans of the Genocide - he was at my school visiting the students his organization helps). So I don't know. Here sometimes you exchange numbers with people, seemingly more to be polite than due to actual intentions to visit with that person again, but there was something about him. Alberto.
So as I was walking away from the post, the thought crossed my mind to give him a call, just to see if I could stop by his office when all of the sudden, coming around the corner to the post is shoot - Alberto himself!
We were excited and greeted each other with a hug, then a couple of air-bisous (Italian) and then a handshake (the Rwandan habit I've become all too accustomed to). He asked what I was doing in town, told him I needed to go to the market, he asked if I wanted to get lunch I said yes. While he was sending his letters, I checked my wallet just to be sure I could actually afford to go to lunch and I decided I'd sacrifice picking up extra phone credit or unnecessary veggies to make it happen - i didn't realize what Alberto meant when he offered a lunch date.
Next thing I know, I'm sitting in a small kitchen, something that looks much more European than African (it even had a fridge and running water - and a stove!!) as Alberto and I discuss cultural differences and challenges, dreams to find a way to be absolutely passionate about our work (which ever careers we end up pursuing) - because "you have to love what you do. the passion! You must have passion!!" and his fingers worked away tediously chopping up egg plants "oh yes, you're a vegetarian" he says, remembering that for one reason or another the subject had come up and I'd mentioned that last Saturday when we first met.
Food.
Dreams.
Taboos.
Age.
Religion.
Sexuality.
Everything. We talked about it all.
Do you have any idea how refreshing that is?
To be able to talk to someone without worrying about what their bible tells them about the subject?
Without worrying if you'll be excommunicated from your village for being so open minded.
Turns out Alberto was also a swim teacher.
Grew up in a Catholic family - but is uncertain about religion.
AND is a registered couchsurfer.
We snacked on PARMESAN CHEESE cubes from Italy while he prepared our meal using olive oil and unprocessed herbs, one you pick off of a stem, not ones that come in a spice jar.
When all was ready, we unfolded lounge chairs and sat outside, in his back patio where we split a Primus and talked even more - about what it's like to be a white person in Africa.
What it's like to be completely isolated - yet never actually alone here.
About the kind of physical loneliness you experience when everyone brushes up against your skin (children tend to to do this - sometimes trying to make it appear as an accident - but really just to have the thrill of the chalk tones under their fingers) but no one to actually hold you.
About how here I am asked every single day to find an American wife for one of the teachers - it doesn't matter who she is, what she stands for, if she has a good heart, what she looks like - just so long as she's American.
How it would be easier - it is easier - to actually befriend people here of higher social class because they don't just immediately see you as someone who can give them something much the way that many of the villagers generally do. White is money. And they usually want it - and aren't shy to ask for it!
And how in America or Europe - money, if someone makes more than you or less, it's not a defining factor in a relationship the way it is here.
About how in America and other countries there's the idea of "keeping up with the Johnsons" - if your neighbor has a cow, in his village in Italy, he tells me, then you want two cows. If he has tow, then you want three. But here, in Rwanda, he goes on, if your neighbor has a cow and you don't - they are likely to kill the neighbors cow to regain equality once again.
Here, it seems, it's not an idea of working hard to bring yourself up, it's using different means (sometimes violence, poison - which apparently is a common thing around certain parts of the country) to bring others down.
such a strange way to look at the world .
I also confessed my dream of living in a tree,
that's when Alberto told me about a community in Tuscany - a whole community of tree houses.
He said that he knows a woman, an illustrator, who lives there.
I found it hard to believe that tree houses and Tuscany would go hand in hand like that - have you seen "under the Tuscan sun"?
First time I saw that movie I said - I am going to live that.
Who knows? :)
So after our delicious pasta, Alberto asked if I'd take a coffee - telling him I don't drink coffee, he offered chocolate.
Of course. I love chocolate.
Then, to top it all off and wash it all down, what else other than a sip of limoncello - hand made by his mother in Italy using lemons that grow on the lemon trees in their very own village.
HOly COW. I miss Europe.
Alberto reminds me so much of my friend, French brother, Fabrice. Just really bubbly, open, honest. It was comforting to experience such hospitality with someone who seemed so familiar.
So after lunch, Alberto had to go with one of his colleges to visit a site where their organization (which takes homeless boys in from off the street - as long as they are willing to follow some rules - and covers their school fees, teaches them a trade and then works to reintegrate them into families - if it's possible) is building houses for some of the boys who have absolutely no family left - all killed in the war. I decided to tag along, interested in learning more about their work and seeing more of my region that otherwise, I'd never venture to.
Off the beaten track, we took motos to the construction site. Two houses, (maybe three?) were in the process of being completed. One of them, the "mama house" is where 3 boys from their program will move in just a couple of weeks. Here they will live with a man who will serve as their father figure - helping to keep an eye on them and teach them how to be responsible adults, both learning how to live in a family like setting while becoming autonomous people themselves (these children - some 20 years old, so not even children, have never lived in a family environment - and these, it seems to be, are a couple of the organizations main goals - to help socialize these psychologically traumatized boys while molding them into self-sufficient individuals). So 3 boys will move into the mama house and after 1 month, a boy who shows strong progress and maturity will be moved into his own house, sharing a wall with the mama house - where he will have all of his own living space and be able to come and go to work (these boys have been trained by the organization in a particular skill - one boy learned masonry and was actually there putting the finishing layers of earth on the house he'll one day call home) as they need and please.
I felt so impressed, telling Gilbert, Alberto's college, that he was a father to thirty children - as the words of my father rang in my mind. "We want to help you kids grow into self-sufficient, productive members of society". The idea of weening children off of the support of parental care and helping them to become their own person, someone who can support his/herself - that's what my dad has always said he wants to see for all of us in this life. And here, an organization dedicated to doing the same thing my father wishes so badly for his own children. I feel like Alberto and Gilbert have their hearts in the right places - working to promote sustainable change by integrating otherwise homeless, outcasts, back into society. - giving them a sense of home and community.
When Alberto had finished inspecting the construction progress, we walked back to the main road, boarded bike taxis and traveled a bit back towards town. I knew that we were going to stop to visit a family, but I didn't know who or why. Alberto explained that only the day before, a boy had died. He had been a really sweet kid, I think someone that they wanted to help support through their organization. Unfortunately the boy suffered from a mental illness - and without much if anything to call mental health care or disabled persons' support in the country, this boy's hands and feet were shackled. Apparently, as we found out, arriving to the family's home - where not even 24 hours before, the boy had perished, they had locked him in a room and for a week, leaving him to die? I don't have full details on the story, but sitting in a chair outside of their home, while Gilbert spoke to the mother in Kinyarwanda, and then to Alberto in French, I found myself distracted staring back at all of the children who'd gathered on mats in front of the house, starring back at us.
Actually, most of the kids were distracted playing with a plastic syringe. Giving each other fake injections of some lifesaving medicine. I don't know, it reminded me of when I was little and my brother, sister and I would baptize one another in our hot-tub by pouring handfulls of bubbles on each other's heads - it felt like it offered a kind of protection, and that's what my mind wandered to seeing these children, so exposed to disease here, and thought maybe their fake immunizations brought them a similar kind of comfort. Well anyway, while most of these children were entertaining one another playing doctor, one boy sat in the back corner of the mat. His face in his hands, his elbows on his knees. His fingers cradled his big cheeks but his eyes told me that unlike his fellow neighbors, this little boy was not present. His blank stare through us, into the walls of the house, the room where the day before a boy had passed, his gaze told me that he was deeply affected by this loss. Even at such a young age, this little boy had more pain in his face than the old woman who was supposedly the boy's mother - or the others, quite possibly some form of extended family.
sure enough, the little boy tucked away in his own world was the little brother. A young boy, whom I imagined years from now, will have to tell someone when asked about his family, "we were 8 in my family, but my brother, they locked him up and allowed him to die". My heart went out to him but in a way that I couldn't express. I couldn't offer it to him the way I gave my hand to his mother and spoke words of strength in her native tongue - while at the same time wondering my own sincerity of it all - how could I say these things to a woman whom I suspected of systematically killing her own son - or if not rightfully killing, then at least not preventing his death - which maybe one equals the other.
but who am I to judge.
There's only one who has the right to judge us all and that's neither here nor there.
(I think I've been going to church too much lately).
So on our way out, back to the main road, we passed a girl, whom Alberto had told me, after greeting her way on the way in, told me that she'd won a gold medal in the China special Olympics for running - and I don't doubt it. Never having had the privilege of shaking hands with an Olympic gold medal winner before, I made sure to greet her on the way out if possible - and it was. Hard to believe that a little girl, looking like any other Rwandan teenage girl in second hand clothes from the West could actually have her very own Olympic gold medal - but, as I said, I don't doubt the story for a moment.
Life's funny that way, isn't it?
The haves and the have nots.
The haves are never happy, always wanting to have more.
The have nots constantly wanting what they may never obtain.
And then there's some of us who are privileged enough to have,
but chose to not - at least for a while.
of course there's still that safety net, American citizenship, family and friends who could help if my feet fall out below me.
But for the have nots though - it's not choice.
it's a life they may have (all too often) been born into.
is it fair? is it realistic to spread or share an American dream on a continent living in some ways, centuries behind the rest of the world?
Should kigali some day resemble the skyline (plus mountains) of chicago?
is that how we measure progress, in buildings? in dollars and sense?
what about education, human rights, equality of men and women, bridging the gap between village and city in terms of opportunities for all?
isn't that another form of development?
isn't it the people who are the heart and soul of a society, a country - and not the height or shininess of the buildings they live and work in?
as i've said,
I don't have all the answers, just lots of questions.
okay - open your eyes. time to spell check this bad boy.
