First Few Days

Wed. 8/12/2010

I got on the plane for Rwanda, where I will be volunteering for the year at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in the Eastern Province, right next to a town called Rabona.

On my first day, I get to the Kigali National Airport, find out they lost my suitcase, and say, “whatever” because I was way more stressed about finding out that I forgot something than finding out someone else forgot something. I have called three times yesterday to check if they found my bag, and once today. The guy who answers the phone said, “ah, Mollie, how are you?” this morning, because now he remembers me. It was the morning and my voice was still scratchy, so he also threw in, “oh, are you ok? You sound sick!” It was 8:00am, which is practically mid-day in Rwanda, where people get up before 6:00am and where the school I will be working in starts at 7:15am.

When I left the airport I got into a “bus” which is actually a monit sheirut if you live in Israel or a mini-bus perhaps in English, but without laws limiting the number that can fit in. Developed countries have this to, but the squishing is in the standing room – the New York Subway, the Underground, Israel’s Egged Buses at 8:00am and 18:00. In Rwanda it is mini-buses with special fold-up seats in the isle, so squished sitting can be maximized, because mini-buses are too short to stand in.

Has anyone ever read the piece by the Cell Phone Anthropologist? In it, he talks about how money remittances are done over cellphones through talk-as-you-go calling cards in much of the developing world. You just buy the cards and send the number over to another stall anywhere in the world, and they re-sell the cards to someone else who needs a calling card and give the money gotten for the card to the receiver of the remittance, with a commission. So they do that with internet in Kigali, to – you find an “MTN Hotspot” (MTN is one of the cell phone providers) and you send a text with your password from your cell phone to MTN, and MTN can see the calling-card number you have, and re-sell the time from the number in proportion to how much time you spend (or how much you download) from the internet . So you sign into the internet with your cellphone number and the password you sent them. I am not sure this is exactly the same thing, but the fact that it is done through a cell phone, rather than a credit card, is pretty cool.

People dress well here, which is exciting, because I really think people should dress well everywhere. Suits, nice shoes, the works. An occasionally tasteful traditional dress, usually tailored with fabulous shoes. This fact has slightly increased my frustration of not having found got my suitcase yet, because I am finally going to a country where dressing nicely is ok. I do realize that haggling will be even more difficult if I dress well – if being white makes things 500% more expensive (I’m not exaggerating – I spent 500% more on carrots than I do in Israel, so I was probably spending at least 1000% or much, much more on the market price) then dressing well may make things even more expensive.

My Israeli phone can’t change a sim-card because it is locked. I went to a cell-phone store owner, who has prices on the cellphones he sells. At first, I thought maybe I am not getting ripped off as much as in the market. But there just aren’t enough non-Rwandese in Kigali for me to think that the prices listed are only for tourists and do not serve some sort of initial negotiating start-off point for the store-owner when haggling with Rwandese. I was like, there is just no way that the initial stance is 1,000% above the market rate every time a Rwandese walks into the store, that would just take too much time to get to an agreed upon price. But my phone, a “Rwandatel” phone, cost me 11,000 frances, which is around $23, and that’s how much I pay in New York – no way that the cheapest phone in New York is the same as the cheapest phone in Kigali, right?

The only two countries I have lived in at the United States and Israel, which are number #1 and number #2 when it comes to massive income differences. So if you come from a middle-class family in the US or Israel, and you don’t mind going where the very-much-lower-class shop, you can buy things at developing-country prices. You can find good jeans for $5, t-shirts for $1, etc. In Rwanda, I can’t do this because of the lack of written prices. I went to the one western grocery store - I don’t know who really shops there, I suppose tourists or wealthier Rwandese. It is open 24 hours a day, which is very, I don’t know, New York? Apple Store in New York?

There are tall shiny window buildings going up everywhere. Kigali is absolutely stunning – really stunning. It is a proper city but without too many high buildings, which means it is still very very green and has lots of roofed houses, but still very urban. I wonder if the urban planning can keep any of this beauty as it develops. In general, I am for lots and lots of tall building at the expense of scenery, because that’s how you can keep housing prices lower and because the taller the building, the less transport is needing, saving time and environmental damage – if you need to take a car for ten kilometers away, it becomes just five kilometers if each tenth of the kilometer has a building that is a tenth of a kilometer tall. I think. Not the best at math. But you get the idea.

Saturday, 11 December 2010

I moved into Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village which is in the Eastern Province near Rabona, where I will volunteer for a year.

Yesterday, I went to the funeral of the daughter of one of the staff members at the school I will be working in in the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. There were at least a hundred people, perhaps more, at the site. In Rwanda, four out of every ten babies die at childbirth - I do not know if the death was caused by the same medical conditions that lead to a high rate or infant mortality, but I imagine it is not totally unrelated. The director is at least middle-class for Rwanda, so this surprised me. At the funeral, all the women sing songs, and the nurse from the hospital is one of the speakers that explains what happens – an interesting tradition. I can’t imagine living in a country where, upon becoming pregnant, there is an almost 50-50 chance the baby will die after you give birth to it.

The funeral reminded me of some habits I see in Israel. One man answered his cell phone in the middle. Another woman was pressing cell phone buttons and some were chatting. It was not so disrespectful because of the many, many people at the funeral. Everyone was dressed immaculately, as everyone seems to be dressed in Rwanda who is not in the middle of manual labor – and even then, buttoned down collared shirts are common. Stilettos clicked against the rocky, stony rode going through the cemetery.

After the funeral, chicken food was picked up for the chickens. Ilan, the director of the village, asked Solomon, who heads the farm “How many eggs do you get per day?” and they had a discussion about the kilograms of eggs per day, per week, expected in the future, how much each egg would sell for, and how cost-affective it would be to transport all the eggs to Kigali to sell. Ilan had bought a pinapple at a grocery store, which was 700 Rwandan Frances (around $1.25 or around 5 NIS), very overpriced. Solomon said he sold the pineapples at the village for 250 Frances (around 50 cents?) and Ilan said that was under-priced. Ilan emphasized the need for planning and training in business, so that Solomon and others on the farm could make enough money to not depend on others, such as donors, which the eventual goal.

The youth village does its own farming and the goal is to eventually not be dependent on any donors. This would be a huge challenge – it would not only mean having enough to live off of, but also having enough extra profit to pay for teachers, administration, maintenance, etc.

My suitcase, according to Simon’s computer (Simon is the man in Kigali International Airport that is in charge of my lost suitcase), has changed its tag number and is waiting in Adis Abbaba, Ethiopia, where I flew through. Every day Simon says it will be on the next plain, and every plain that comes in does not have my suitcase, which is filled with all my clothes, bras, contact lenses, etc. The bras and underwear are the most annoying part. I used to think it was so awesome that there was an entire second-hand clothing industry in African countries, and I thinks it is absolutely fine that a market can be built on something someone else doesn’t want as much on the other side of the world. But bras second hand? No. Just No. So I may have to pay a fortune for new ones that probably won’t have underwire, because bras don’t seem to come with underwire here. I’ve already splurged on new underwear.

If there is one country to give you perspective about the tininess of importance of a lost suitcase with all your practically and emotionally necessitous items in the world, it is probably Rwanda. This is partly because of the history (the obvious), the present (I went to a funeral of a baby of a middle class family my second day here for the death of an infant that is a normal, four-out-of-ten-babies-born occurrence). It is also because the view at AGYV and Kigali are absolutely, incredibly, oh my god stunningly beautiful. . And the weather to support the perfect greenery is the occasionally heavily shower that lasts for a convenient twenty-to-thirty-minutes, waters everything in site to make it green, then stops, proceeded by a breezy sunniness. So past and present tragedy combined with perfect view and weather is helping me not be to obsessed about the lost suitcase, though the number of sentences I am devoting to it in this post suggests the opposite.

Uuuuuuuurgh !@#$%#% Ethiopian Airlines!!!!

We had a discussion today with Elaine, the deputy director of the youth village. Elaine was born to a Rwandan mother and a Belgium father. He basically told us the history of Rwanda through his family, which included members responsible for what occurred under Belgium colonization. Elaine moved from Congo to Canada at, I think, age 15. We had a very frank discussion with him about the different opinions in the village staff regarding the teenagers dating. Because Elaine lived in both worlds, he was very good at answering questions.

The issue of dating which we discussed invariably includes the issue of what to teach the kids. I won’t get into this now, but, in general, the students have clear access to condoms outside the – this has nothing to do with village, just the general policy of the Rwandan government. There are billboards all over Kigali (well, not all over Kilagi, but y’know) with big condoms to promote the use of protection. It’s like, your driving down the street and then suddenly – wham – two big condoms in your face.

Smoking is non-existent here – I have yet to see someone smoke. No money, I guess. It’s very refreshing.

Monday, Dec. 13^th

Today was the first day of the Rwandan Staff-organized seminar. You could tell they were trying really hard to make it more “engaging and participatory” as probably recommended by participants of the last two years. Most of the seminar was – and there really is no other way to say it – incredibly, well, you needed a lot of patience. Not patience, maybe maturity? It was long speeches interspersed with open-ended questions whose answers were so incredibly non-controversial as to make them, well…. Like, we gathered into groups to answer the question, “How can you assure education at Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village?” or something of the sort. The answers were around the lines of “being a good role-model” and “teaching them to be polite.” When listing values of education, the answers tended to emphasize everything not connected to critique or asking questions, or debate. In fact, they called the discussion a “debate” even though not a single person disagreed with anything anyone said, or said anything that anyone could possible disagree with. Except – and this was actually really exciting for me – one councilor asked a question I had been dying to ask but just could not as an outsider: “There is a rumor”, she began, “that Agahozo-Shalom’s school puts greater emphasis on exact sciences. But what if everyone is not good at exact sciences?” The principle answered, “That is not a rumor, it is true, but Agahazo Shalom is part of the larger picture of Rwanda today.” He said that science and technology were the most important factor in developing Rwanda. Ah, and then he said that other subjects were available for those who “were not strong in the sciences.” You would think that, fifteen years after a genocide, subjects like history and literature and philosophy and psychology would be as important as exact sciences for Rwanda, and not only subjects for those who were bad in Sciences. The national policy seems to run along the same lines – university scholarships, I was told, are given in the sciences, but not in history or literature – though as of a few weeks ago, those are no longer available either. I was happy that Agahozo-Shalom has councilors (or at least one) that raised these questions and have successfully studied non-sciences and are just really smart people. Who did not study engineering or math or physics.

The day before we did a walking tour around Kigali, taking a fifteen minute walk from the slums to the area around the president’s house. The university we passed is open to poorer residents of the area, which is better than Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which does not give automatic access to residents of Isawia in East Jerusalem.

At the seminar, the principle of the high school gave a two and a half-hour speech which was very dramatic, though the translation did not seem quite to express the drama. The many “ts…ts…ts….” were heard when something sad was said, which I liked, it added a bit of character to the whole room. It was not the “ts” that Israelis say when they are pissed off, it was more like a shake of the head and many, many closely strung together “ts”s to indicate “shame, shame.”

One of the house mothers explained the role of the family in promoting education for the children in traditional Rwandan society. The mother was described as someone who taught the girls to clean and take care of the house, and the father teaches the son how to “be a man” and protect the house. The aunt was the one children go to in order to discuss issues they do not feel comfortable speaking with their parents. I was not sure if she was saying that this was why the family was important. It bothered me a bit, but I just sort of wrote it down as something vaguely interesting and – at last – something I could cling to as slightly more controversial, and therefore interesting, compared to the oft-repeated “we must be role models to the children.” Plus the woman who said this seemed like a very strong, dominant mother, not passive at all – these mamas make motherhood look like the height of feminism. She emphasized the need to make sure that girls were not submissive to their husbands and the housemothers in the village are very strong, opinionated women. And they all play soccer and dance really, really well.

We also had a getting-to-know you game, the kind where you randomly talk to people you otherwise would not have talked to. We were told to say two things we liked and two things we did not. All the Rwandans said they liked things like “peace” and “love” and hated “war” and “anger.” The Israelis and Americans said they liked “chocolate” and “dogs.” And maybe “I hate broccoli.”

After this we did a walking tour of the village. It started to rain. We ran through the rain to the nearest shelter, with the Rwandan women in their fancy beautiful stilettos and very smart suits and other outfits, all of which remained perfectly creased and clean and white, somehow, even though I was a mess.

When we got to the farm, the women seemed excited to see the cows eat and so many baby chickens at once, which made me feel a lot less pathetic about getting giddy at seeing the animals. Lots of “Ish! Ish! Ish!” were called to the cows, which is what you say to cows in Rwanda to get them to come to you. Not exactly sure this works, but they told me it did. They seemed to wander over to us. One female cow gave a bull a shove with her head when the bull came over to us, even as the female cow was backing up, afraid and suspicious. Cows are just so cute.

And then at night – this was beyond awesome – we had a mingling thing from 8-10. It started out with everyone awkwardly sitting around the room, each person sitting on a chair pushed up against the wall. People made small talk to the people next to them, and I chatted with the councilors, who are all around the volunteers’ age, about Kinyarwanda questions. I also skimmed a Kinyarwanda phrase book and was really happy to learn that work for “bad” is “Bibi.” The only word I won’t forgot. That and “Ikawa” for coffee, because I really miss my mourning coffee. (breakfast is delicious porridge and the occasional deep-fried muffin thingy whose name I forgot. My phrase book says, “Amandazi.”) So donuts for breakfast is awesome. Anyway, suddenly, they put music on. We still continued to sit around, some people getting drowsy. Some nice speeches are made. And then, music again, and then, suddenly people start dancing. Actually, Jasmine, a volunteer from Israel starts to dance, and then an older house-mother gets up and starts dancing to. Soon, everyone is dancing to hip-hop, including the older house mothers, who can dance to modern hip-hop as well as the younger councilors and volunteers because, well, this is Africa. Or just Rwanda, but I think this may be the case in many countries in Africa. What is awesome is that everyone dances and feels comfortable, including people who were not exactly star dancers of the life of the party. There was no feeling of awkwardness.

So here I am, in my room, with my suitcase. Yep, got it from the airport. I thought I had loads of clothes that would make me look as together and smart as Rwandans, but I don’t come even close. Oh well. Interestingly, and this is sort of off-topic, the women I see on the street are way more curvy than their husbands, who are way skinnier than what I see in the US and part of Israel. Being curvy for women is in here and tailoring is really good here, so curvy women with well-tailored clothes are to be found everywhere, and they are pretty toned and in shape from bringing water back and forth from their houses. I suppose this will change if food becomes more plentiful and being slightly larger is not an indication of wealth? Trends in trendy weights is not exactly a pressing topic – about as pressing as my lost suitcase was – but of course this interests me because, well, it’s related to fashion.

I will, perhaps, make a “fashion in Rwanda” blog. We shall see.

In all, it is inspiring/sad/I don’t know to speak to Rwandans my age, who have also sort of recently finished university, who also like to buy nice shoes, and who have had both their parents and siblings killed in the genocide. This is not something that happened a generation ago, in happened to them just fifteen years ago. I don’t really know what I can write here. It is just, well, you don’t think about how there are girls who care about university, their careers, boys, clothes, not getting wet in the rain and who maybe regret wearing stilettos on the mud roars, have also, by the way, survived genocide and had their families killed fifteen years ago. And have that mentioned in the conversation a few minutes after talking about the stilettos in the mud getting ruined and what they studied in uni.

Ok, off to sleep. I will get up at 6:30, probably, just because that’s when I naturally get up now. It’s kind of awesome. I got up at 6:00am the first day I was here, and there is no time difference with Israel. Crazy. There is something about perfect silence at night, followed by slight chirping at 5:00am, followed by a gradual increase in hundreds of bird species chirping, that luls you to get up gently and nicely. Now I know how humans did this for thousands of years before urbanization (which I am grateful for, but wow, you sure don’t get a good nights sleep with all the cars…).