My morning conversation

I passed a little boy in a school uniform this morning, and had the following conversation, translated from kinyarwanda for your reading pleasure.

Me: good morning.
boy: eeh.
Me: are you going to school?
Boy. eeh.
Me: have a good day!
Boy: eeh?
Me: I said, 'have a good day."
Boy. eeh.

January, Part 2

I have pride. That is the main reason I try to hide my crazy cat-lady-ness. However, anyone who knows me probably picks up on the fact that I am really, really into animals. In my past life in DC, I lived three blocks from the National Zoo. It’s big, and cool, and free, and I went there at least once a week while I lived in the neighborhood. While it can be packed with families and kids and strollers, it can also be an almost-deserted wooded park in the middle of the city, where it’s just you and the tigers, and you can pretend that you and the hippos have a special connection, even though they would stomp you to death in a heartbeat if you were on the other side of the fence.

Living here is different, of course. I’ve seen few of the wild animals rumored to live around my site (caracals, servals, Mutwari the elephant), just mongooses and some gigantic rabbits, and maybe some monkeys at a distance. I see enough beautiful and/or weird birds that I got a birding guide to East Africa for Christmas, and I use it all the time. I say all this to underline how strange it is that I have not been to Rwanda’s game park, Akagera, until one full year in country. We’ve been talking about having “Safari Saturday” with other volunteers since we knew we would be posted in Eastern Province, but it required a little more coordination than I felt like putting in. But, January 29^th marked one year in Rwanda, so we made it happen.

On Saturday afternoon, Tom and I met up with friends from different parts of the country, and headed to the camp site. The landscape changed quickly, from green, densely populated hills to more open spaces, and scrubby, dusty landscape with fewer and fewer people. We paid our entry fees, collected our tent, and blessedly found a place to buy a crate of beer. After a brief stop to see the Akagera Game lodge (where we had the privilege of a gorgeous view of Lake ?, and of a guy at the pool having to chase a baboon away from his food), we went to our campsite and set up our tents and got a fire going. Luckily for us, we had perfect weather and a full moon so bright that Tom and I took a walk without flashlights, startling an antelope along the way.

The next morning, after watching the sunrise, our ride arrived (a sweet, open-top safari car), and we set out. We spent the next 6 hours driving through the park. Sightings included:

Mammals

· Baboons (including a baboon fight)

· Buffalo

· Plains zebras

· Impala

· Topi (a big antelope)

· Warthogs

· Hippos

Reptile

· Crocodiles

Birds

· Fish eagle

· Ibis and other shore birds

· Kingfishers

· Marabou storks

· Guinea fowl

· Yellow billed ox peckers (which eat bugs and parasites off the buffalo)

· Lilac-breasted roller

Oh, and tsetse flies, which bit us a lot, and which will hopefully not give us sleeping sickness.

I know that Rwanda is not the absolute best place to go on safari. We didn’t see elephants or lions, but seriously, I don’t actually care. I didn’t care that I looked like a gigantic dork with a broad brim hat, video camera, and bird book, and it was impossible not be goofy and giddy and thrilled when standing there looking at animals I’ve only seen in zoos and picture books.

Towards the end, we realized that we were headed back to the park entrance a little earlier than expected, and everyone had the same thought- - we have not seen giraffes yet. With a little cajoling, our guide (who honestly, seemed kind of bored and unhelpful throughout) reluctantly radioed in to see if anyone knew where the giraffes were, and we were off. We retraced our path from the morning, and stopped at the top of a tall hill. After a few minutes, our guide pointed, we squinted, and we saw giraffes, like tiny stick figures in the distance. When we finally got there, there were seven, some babies, and some gloriously tall, slender, and alien-looking. We watched them, they watched us with faint curiosity, then went back to eating leaves. Eventually the driver turned the engine back on, and we drove away.

That was it. We went home, looked at our pictures, and thought about how we were going to tell our friends and families about it. I found myself missing my cat.

The postscript to safari was that I left my phone in the car, and it ended up with another volunteer an hour away from my site. So, the next day, I had to go meet her. After I picked up my phone, I visited to other friends I hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving. We sat in Chrissy’s living room drinking coffee, eating chapati, and listening to Bob Dylan, while neighborhood kids colored at her table and climbed trees in her front yard. We compared safari stories, Christmas travel stories (they had opted for Ethiopia instead of Zanzibar), and laughed at the ridiculous parts of our lives. It was hot outside when I left, and I climbed into a hot, crowded minibus (the name for them in Kinyarwanda literally means “scoot over”) that took a long time, and somehow, it made me really happy. The baby on my left slept against my shoulder, the one on my right pressing buttons on my phone. I chatted with their mothers, and let what a good month (and year) I’d had sink in.

One thing more...

For the last few months, I've been trying to move to my own house in a village near where I work. When the coworker who has been helping me told me that the rennovations were starting last week, I wasn't holding my breath. But yesterday I stopped by, and I couldn't believe it! Things are moving at lightning speed! I need a bed! A chair! A crate of Primus to welcome everyone to my new home!




Of course, it's not completely done yet, but it's getting there.

January, Part 1

January is a difficult month. Back home in America—particularly way back home in Ohio—it is characterized by bitterly cold weather with no end in sight, sickness from all those people you hugged at Christmas, credit card bills from the presents, and darkness at five o’clock at night. My birthday is January 27th, and while I fancy myself an Aquarius and garnets look good on me, I do not like having a birthday in January.

A year ago, I met all my Peace Corps colleagues on my birthday. It is awkward to celebrate your birthday with people you’ve never met before. It is even more awkward to turn 30 with a bunch of strangers who are almost all way younger than you. The excitement and adventure carried me through, but this year I wanted to make sure that this was a really good January, to celebrate my year, warts and all.

Of course, the first day in January started well, on a beach in Zanzibar as we recovered from New Year’s Eve, and prepared to go back to Rwanda. After the ferry ride back to Dar es Salaam (where they managed to play Rocky 1-4 by fast forwarding the slow bits), we went to our first movie theater in a year, in the first mall (!) we had seen in a year. It was the calm before the storm of the 36-hour, bone rattling bus ride from hell that would start the next day.

The next weekend, a friend came to visit, and I always like entertaining people at site and introducing them to our friends here. It reminds me how far we’ve come, like how all the market ladies yell our names when they tell us to come buy their tomatoes. The next weekend I splurged and went to Kigali. While Tom came down with giardia, I had a pretty good time. We watched movies at a pretty outdoor restaurant, threw a dinner party at a friend’s place, did a little shopping, ate a croissant, etc.

The next weekend was a little further outside the comfort zone, visiting a friend in the Western Province. I honestly and genuinely like every volunteer in our cohort, so it makes me sad that I never see the people who live out west, just because they happen to be cut off by a giant rain forest. Also, all major roads are pretty much spokes that radiate from Kigali, so you have to get there first, then get on the 5+ hour bus that takes you through the forest to Cyangugu on Lake Kivu. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a gorgeous ride. Nyungwe is primeval and lovely, and you’re virtually guaranteed to see l’Hoest’s monkeys along the road. However, said road is in wretched condition, and it twists and turns so much that someone is vitually guaranteed to throw up en route. We got past biggest tea plantations, and got off the bus, and walked to our friend’s site in a small village with a District hospital. It was nice to get away from the heat here to visit somewhere to cool and rainy and green, even if it meant accumulating inches of mud on the bottoms of my shoes. We saw a new market, saw Lake Kivu and the DRC in the distance, saw some education PCVs, cooked together, drank tea together and talked. Tom would like you to know that he made chili over a wood fire and it was awesome. Peace Corps Rwanda Chili Cook-off 2010 is ON!

So, the middle of that week was my birthday. Since I was planning a big finish to the month, I wasn’t really paying attention to the day, I just hoped Tom would come, and someone might want to make popcorn and watch a movie or something. The day came, and it was nice because people wished me a happy birthday, even people who didn’t know me very well, even though I hadn’t really told people. Tom made it and took me out to one of the local bars, saying, “I really need a beer,” but when asked, he had no specific reason. It was just us for the most part, because other friends said they were working, or otherwise busy. Which is cool. People work a lot here. And then Tom started to get a lot of text messages, but he wouldn’t say who they were from. Then we got to the house, and just about every person in my organization was in the living room yelling “surprise. “ It was overwhelming how nice it was, and it took a lot of effort not to “happy cry,” because that would be weird. So, there was cake, there was a tower of crepes, there was wine and music, and pictures. I am really, really lucky to have such amazing friends and coworkers (and to live in a village where my birthday party is easily the best party in town).

So, I’m going to save the last weekend of the month for another day, because it was a great cap to the festivities, because this is already long, and because it deserves its own space, because it was really, really good. When I looked at the surprise party pictures, I realized that I was wearing the same outfit I had worn to my going away party in DC. So, I’ll be posting those before and after pictures soon. The other side of thirty is looking pretty good.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes via e-mail, facebook, texts, and calls. I’m so lucky to know all of you.

xoxo

Someone prodded me to update my blog, and since that reassured me that someone actually reads it, I thought I would oblige.




To recap, I got to Rwanda on January 29, 2009. I got to my first site in mid-April, and have been working at my second site since August. I am closing in on a year in Rwanda. Until December, I had not left the country, meaning I had not stepped outside one of the smallest countries in Africa for almost one year. I love Rwanda, and I am exceptionally lucky to be here, but it was definitely time for a change.

In mid-December, we left for a 2-week trip to neighboring Tanzania, more specifically, Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean. The process of getting there and back was somewhat less than fabulous. I went with Tom and three other PCVs, and another coworker. We left Kigali early Saturday morning, and basically descended from 5,140 feet (Denver is 5,280) to sea level over the course of 30 hours. It wasn’t bad at all, save for a 2-hour stretch of unpaved road at hour 10 (imagine off-roading on Greyhound). We even got to watch an early Jean Claude Van Damme film.



Observations: Tanzania is much more flat, much more sparsely populated, and way hotter than Rwanda. And also, lovely. I would love to spend more time there. But, we powered through to the coast. Possibly the only bad thing about the bus ride was getting out, sleepy, hot, and non-Swahili speaking at the bus station in Dar es Salaam. Even then, I don’t think the taxi drivers ripped us off too badly, and the subsequent 2-hour ferry to Zanzibar rocked me to sleep.



We landed a bit before sunset, and it was lovely – majestic old buildings on the seafront, and kids diving off the pier into the ocean. We were lucky enough to be hooked up with a friend living on the island for a year that was incredibly generous, and let us stay at his house, despite the fact that there was no power, and thus no running water (power plant problems have meant that there’s no power for a few months).

Over the next two weeks, we split our time between lounging on beaches and exploring Stonetown, with its old buildings and windy streets and amazing food.

It was nice to be in a place again that has been so connected to broader global trends for hundreds of years. The food has lots of Indian influence (Indian influence + lots of fresh seafood = happiness), the music was cool, the architecture is beautiful, and evidence that some money was seriously being made by the people who live in these stately, if currently decrepit, houses. A lot of that money was being made through the trade in spices grown on the island (cloves! Nutmeg! Cinnamon! Cardamom! Vanilla! I saw it all hanging on trees!). And also, slaves trafficked there from other parts of East and Central Africa.

For most of one week, Tom and I moved from our tent at our friend’s house to a room in a pretty, airy hotel in stonetown. Which happened to be built on the site of the world’s largest open slave market. You could pay to go into a passageway under the hotel, into a chamber where slaves were kept before being taken to the market. It was a tiny room with little ventilation, raised areas where 75 or more people would sit, in conditions that were intentionally bad to test the limits of their ability to survive. The reason our hotel (formerly, it was a hospital) was on that site was because it was run by the Anglican Church, which was a leader in the abolition movement in East Africa. They spearheaded the closing of the market, and built their cathedral on the spot. So, is it morbid that we stayed there? At a place where I can see a memorial from my airy little balcony?

As a side trip on our tour of a spice plantation, we went to a cave that had been used in the illegal slave trade after the main market was closed. Hundreds of people were lowered into this pit that was closed off, but which had, at low tide, a tunnel to the beach. The beach happens to be one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen.

So, I know that there are lots and lots of places that are beautiful because someone amassed wealth and power by stepping on the necks of the poor and oppressed (my 6th grade family vacation to Charleston South Carolina comes to mind, and, you know, the White House). I guess, I was so focused on getting away from the sadness that still affects day to day life in Rwanda, that I was struck by how much this much older suffering saddened me.

Of course, this didn't prevent us from having a really wonderful time. My friend, Emmett, has a pretty thorough description of our time there, so I’ll end here for now. I miss the ocean, I miss the food, but it’s nice to be back in Rwanda.