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.
