Running “for fun”, enjoying the view, skinniness, one kid, and other trends in transition

It’s strange being in a country that is developing very quickly. Things that are trendy in developed countries – like running for fun, trying to be skinny, having only one or two kids – are clearly popular among some people, especially those from Kigali, and unheard of among others. Well, not unheard of, and that’s the point – they are things people know about and like or know about and don’t really like, depending on, partly, from what I gather, if you live in a rural area and how much money you have. This creates an uneasy curiosity on the side of the people who have not yet started running for fun (is running ever fun?), or having fewer kids, or trying to be skinny. These people know the word “sport” and they know what a runway model looks like and the ideal city folk are trying to imitate. They just think it’s funny.

At “family time” (when all of our adopted families meet) one of the kids – they are teenagers so I don’t know if that counts as kids – was trying on a tiny backpack. One of the other kids said, “you are big.” The girl modeling the backpack immediately asked me, “how can I lose weight?” I don’t know if the first girl thought the comment “you are big” was especially mean. The girl who asked me how to lose weight has flawless English and she absolutely loves romance novels, so we have a lot to chat about. I had given her The English Patient for her birthday. I didn’t know how to answer her question, so I gave that answer that adults always give to high-schoolers to make sure they do not become anorexic: “um, you look find, but just eat lots of healthy food, like vegetables.” “I don’t like vegetables,” she answered. That answer made sense from both a human perspective – does anyone really like vegetables? I mean, I like vegetables, but I like chocolate more – and also from a Rwandan perspective, as veggies here are cooked and drowned in sauce to the point where they are not really vegetables. “Well, get lots of exercise” I mumbled, hoping we could return to the subject of romance novels.

So far, I’ve heard three different people make the passing comment, “you are big” to people who did not want to be big. I asked one such honest person, “is it good to be big in Rwanda?” “No,” she answered, “It isn’t.” She was a city girl, from Kigali, who liked to go running. For fun. Apparently, not being big is already a trend that is spreading, as food security is rising, yet stopping one’s self from mentioning that a person is big has not yet caught on, including from people who do not think being big is a good thing. I thought this was interesting. Rwanda is not a country where people are especially blunt and forward and don’t filter – after Israel, no country is quite as blunt. But people still mention other people’s weight, as a passing comment, even when this weight is something that is not considered attractive. I imagine that, if food security continues to rise, and if the economy continues to improve, eventually people think twice before mentioning other people’s weight.

And then there’s running. In Kigali, I sometimes see someone running. In Rubona I never do, until I saw Agahozo Shalom students, trying out for one of the sports teams, dash out the front gate onto the sandy road leading to Rubona’s village center. It was all boys. “Aren’t there girls who run?” the secretary at the school asked me a few weeks ago, as we were making tea. There are some girls who run, I’ve seen them running around Agahozo-Shalom, but there are more boys who run. I mean, outside of ASYV people run, but it’s to catch up with a friend, or to catch up with me, or to run away from police who want to arrest them for selling veggies without prior authorization.

People never run to catch a bus. Here’s how the bus system works: Buses go from station to station, and wait until the bus is completely filled up, so that there is never a moment on the road where there is centimeter of space along the seats. So you never need to run to catch it, because it’s always waiting for you.

And taking a walk to enjoy the view and nature – that’s sort of weird here. A bit developed-countryish, maybe. I think. At least if you are from a rural area with an absolute stunning view. I just cannot put myself in their shoes – I cannot imagine that the view I see when I go outside is the view that they have seen their entire lives. You walk down the road, and there are mountains with fifty different shades of green, and massive sunflowers shadowed by perfect palm trees filled with birds the color of florescent high-lighters. I saw one tiny bird that was bright, bright, absurdly florescent orange. And then a lake in the distance. And, at times, a double rainbow reflected off the lake and the fifty shades of green. And a light brown path which weaves in and out of the dark, medium, turquoise, and yellow patches along the mountains, which are the fields for farming that don’t generate that much food, but look really, really amazing. And I’m asked why I’m walking, and I understand why I’m asked that, because this view does not generate so much food, so better to save one’s energy, unless one has a good reason to be using any energy and so needs to walk But I look at these people who ask me, “where are you going?” “Why are you going by foot?” “Why don’t you take a bike, or ride on the back of my bike?” “Do you want me to call a moto-taxi?” And then I look at this view. And I want to laugh. It is perfection in its perfection. Except for the limited food and education thing. But physically, wow.

Sometimes, English teachers run after me. They see I am white, and are eager to practice their English. One once said, “You are here to see the view, right?” understanding that I saw the area different than the way he saw it, in terms of how unique it was. I answered, “yes!” relieved that someone understood this. He said, “yes, we have a lot of nature” and pointed to some ferns and flowers. And I wanted to say, “I have seen nature, and ‘nature’ is an understatement. This is better than any postcard I have ever seen” but thought the ‘postcard’ reference might not translate.

Today, a woman laughed at me walking up the hill with my backpack. She put her arms up as if to make a muscle, the way wrestlers do when they want to show off their muscles, and she smiled and said something in Kinyarwanda that had the words “feet” in it and “walking.” I think she got the whole exercise thing. She was older, and traditionally dressed, so I was surprised. But trends spread fast here.

Lack of lots of books, not culture, is reason for lack of reading

A lot of people have murmured statements to me along the lines of, “Rwanda does not have a reading culture. It is an oral culture. You really have to find a way to get kids to read.” This is perhaps said because it is difficult to find a book store in Rwanda and, at times, difficult to get the kids in the village to read whole English books, cover to cover. I always reply, “we just have to find the best, junkiest, risqué/action-packed/girly/exciting/y’know books out there so the kids feel like reading is as fun as watching television.” And then I get the same, “yes, but remember that there is no culture of reading.”

This annoys me. When I walk around outside of the ASYV village with a book, there are always boys and girls and women and men coming up to me to read over my shoulder. They get next to no practice reading, so they cannot read as well, so reading an entire book is more challenging.

I gave one girl from a surrounding village, around five or six kilometers away, a comic book to read – a pretty-hard-to-read batman comic book – and she was reading as she walked, just like New Yorkers on the subway reading as they travel. This particular girl, who was twenty years old, did not have enough money to attend secondary school, though her English was very good – that was the only reason I could speak with her. The fees for secondary school were around $60, which was at least three or four months pay for her.

Instead, she was learning how to be a mason and hopefully ill wmake enough money, one day, to attend secondary school. Though perhaps not soon enough, before she gets married. I mention this because the only reason she was not reading much, much more was because of lack of funds to buy books and buy the education that would allow her to improve her reading and make it worthwhile. It was a a "lack of culture in reading."

If the kids at ASYV need encouragement reading, it is no more encouragement then kids in any country need at age, say, eight, when they are know how to read but not quite. So I want to make it really clear to all who say, “there is no culture of reading” in Rwanda, or other East African countries: “You cannot say people are not reading due to lack of reading culture if people do not have the money to buy books or, growing up, could not buy books and practice reading." Find a control group of kids that had easy access to books at an early age, and whose parents also had easy, cheap book access at an early age, and then figure out if it’s about the “reading culture.” And please don’t try to sound culturally-sensitive by saying, “oh, it’s because they have a strong oral tradition” as if a strong oral tradition is at all mutually exclusive with a strong reading culture - if anything, the two compliment each other. Jews had a very strong oral tradition and an almost zero literacy rate for thousands of years, save for the few people who would read out loud for the community, yet picked up reading fairly quickly when they started getting access to libraries and schools stalked with books. Stalked with books is the key – you cannot expect people, including you or me, to learn how to read if the books are not catchy enough to get you into the habit of reading in the first place. And the more books you have, the easier it is to find the types of books that get you into that habit.

In the butter milk café I always bring an extra magazine with me to give to others to read, because it is a bit unnerving to have something peer over your shoulder as you are reading a book. I have noticed that they read moving their lips, quietly stating the words, and put their fingers on each word as they read it, like you might have done when you first learn how to read in any language. I asked if they had access to a dictionary, and was told that there were only four dictionaries in the whole school, which did not surprise me too much. I was told that they did not really have access to them, that the teachers held them.

It’s not that a person can’t learn to be a perfect reading and love books in that kind of environment. I am sure the kids can go to the teacher with a list of words, the teacher will look them up, and they will continue reading until they come up with a new list of words they do not understand, and slowly but surely it is possible to learn how to read – really read, not fingers-on-words and whispering-out-loud reading. But how many of us have the patience to look up words in our own dictionary, let alone someone else’s you occasionally see, and how much patience would you have to do this if you were also learning how to read to begin with?

At Agahozo-Shalom there are dictionaries and, bless American donors cleaning out their basements, there are lots of fun, movie-inspired, junky romances, mysteries, thrillers, etc. I hope they are read up by the types of people who would not have the patience to read otherwise. Because I do think you need those junky books to get into reading enough to read the classics. And these fun books tend to have happy endings, which these kids, perhaps, need. And the good junk has happy endings that are unexpected and therefore, somehow, believable.

Some at Agahozo-Shalom emphasize the messages the kids take from the books, encouraging the kids to be reflective about the books and see how they can be relevant for their own lives. I guess that’s…nice. But I did not learn how to read, or get into the habit of reading in middle school, by seeing how Sweet Valley High was relevant to my life. It was absolutely not relevant to my life, which is why it was so exciting to read. Even when I graduated to Sweet Valley University, it still was not relevant for my life, and I probably would not read the books if someone made me use “reflective thinking” about Sweet Valley University.

For the required reading books in school, absolutely encourage kids to think about the relevancy to their own lives. Encourage them to use critical thinking, the works. But I think you need that niche of useless reading to gain the reading skills to read the “reflective thinking and critical thinking” types of books, and maybe to even think critically about Batman comic books and Nancy Drew.

Stories

I had the honor reading some excellent stories from the kids at the school. It is not only an honor because some of them have very sophisticated writing, but because I feel like I am getting to know kids in a way that would not be possible with verbal conversation, due to my lack of skills in Kinyarwanda and their lack of confidence in spoken English.

The kids were given the assignment of writing about “new beginnings” and “fresh starts. I have read a number of stories that were very disturbing, with women being raped and the rapists being forgiven, without any obvious punishments. I would not mention this if it was one or two specific students, but I have seen this a number of times, and mention it as a pattern. This was how they defined “new beginnings” and starting a new life. I am going to meet with all the students whose papers I corrected and will need to ask the teachers and social workers how to address this – if I am meant to give advice on how to improve writing, beyond just pure grammar and spelling, I don’t think I can quite ignore this. I don’t have a smidgen of psychological training to talk about or ask the obvious question at hand – why are the rapists forgiven? I do not know if the students will have the answer.

The stories were all typed up on the computer, not hand-written, which is great. Most of the stories have really large, thick, colorful gaudy borders – think clip-art style 1980s Macintosh but in color – and lots and lots of images pasted in throughout the story, usually blocking some text because it was placed in the center of the page. Most of the stories are romances and, as I was reading about romances in small Rwandan villages, I needed to move the photographs of the skinny white blond with her buff white boyfriend, who were meant to represent the Rwandan girl and boy who fall in love.

What is interesting in the stories, from a grammatical point of view, is the total almost lack of sentences. They can write six-page short stories, that are relatively coherent and even powerful – and major challenge in a language that one has only been learning for two or three years – yet most, if not all, do not quite what a sentence is. At all. I’m not talking about the poetic-license type of mistakes. Some of the stories do not have a single period. Which is a bit of a relief, because I feel like punctuation rules are more technical, but then again, it really is quite intuitive – at least the basics without too many mistakes. I thought one good suggestion for learning punctuation was having the kids read plays out-loud, so they get a feel for when periods and commas feel right. They are reading Romeo and Juliet soon. Maybe something easier first to learn punctuation.

There was one girl that wrote an absolutely beautiful story with very creative style. When I met with her, she barely opened her mouth the entire time we met, and I have no idea if she will improve her story – I do not quite know how to talk about their stories in a way that encourages them to continue writing. I hope to find some publication that could publish the stories, to give them that extra push. It is interesting – even with less-than-perfect English, and even with a very, very large number of spelling and grammar mistakes and a fair share of incomprehensible sentences – you can still see that some have a knack for writing. Thank goodness that there is a way for these kids to express themselves other than speaking out-loud, because many do not want to speak in English, at least to a newbie like myself.

But some of the kids surprise me. After walking back from the first English debate meeting that the head English teacher organized, a girl was walking along the same path. I said hello to her, and she very quietly said “hello” back. She stared ahead and did not make eye-contact and very quietly, in perfect English, with a very blank expressionless stare ahead, asked, “You taught a debate meeting today with the English teachers, right?” I told her that I did and asked – in a shamefully hesitant manner, because she was very quiet and expressionless – “Do you want to join?” She answered without a beat, “Yes, I really want to do debate.” We continued speaking, and talked about where my house in the village was, which I always get slightly lost while walking to if I take a slightly different rout. Her English was very good and I did not hear a single mistake. She did not look at me or smile or alter her expression the entire time we were walking until, at the end, when I finally realized where my house was, she looked at me and laughed, said she was happy I found my house, and ran off. I am happy my total lack of navigation skills (it is literally a seven minute walk from the school to the house) could make someone laugh. I wonder how many other quiet girls want to do English debating but have not run into me while I get lost on the way back to my house.

On to other news: The mix of public breast-feeding and sitting like sardines on the bus made for an interesting bus ride. I had the odd experience of having a baby rest his head on my arm as he breastfed from his mother who was sitting next to me. I suppose this was much safer for the baby.

Occasionally, I walk outside ASYV at the same time that school is out in Rubona or another surrounding village. At these regrettable moments, I am followed by over a hundred kids in their little blue dress (the girls) and beige uniforms (boys) that look like miniature UPS uniforms, all competing to get my attention. I use these moment to try to more efficiently spread the meme that “good mourning” is only said in the morning and “good afternoon” is said in the afternoon. This is especially important for the kids getting out at around 13:00, who inevitably have had a morning English class.

"...Children from a Deprived Environment"

Yesterday, my grandma Joan, (Joan Gerver), passed away after a life of brilliant artwork, fashion, dance, stories, research, wisdom and love.

I looked up articles written and published by my grandmother, who was a child psychologist. I searched her name in google scholar, and found two articles available, though other non-published and unavailable papers had also been cited. The main one was entitled, “Attitudes of Children from a Deprived Environment toward Achievement-Related Concepts” published with Judith W. Greenberg in The Journal of Education Research in 1965. The article is available on jstor at: http://www.jstor.org/pss/27531652

In the study, surveys were handed to fourth grade African-American children living in low-income urban areas. These surveys asked them to evaluate different influences in their lives in terms of how good these influences were, and also how potent they were – how much these good or bad things were strong influencers in their lives. If I am getting this wrong, friends and family and others who are reading this, let me know. My favorite conclusion was:

“In general, it appears that the poor-achievers tended to assign the most favorable ratings, particularly to concepts which have high social value. It may be that they were less able than the better achievers to express critical attitudes.”

Similarly, for TV - which has, in many ways, a low social value – the lowest-achievers put the lowest value on TV, either as a defensive mechanism, to show that they knew what was right and wrong despite the poor grades, or perhaps, as written above, because they did not have the critical thinking skills to question the lectures about the evils of television.

To an extent, I think the kids in the village should be encouraged to question and critique even the values of the village and some of the rules, as long as they know they need to follow the rules – sort of like critiquing laws that you still should follow. They do this, to an extent, in family discussions and the “debate” club, which is more like a chance to discuss, from different perspectives, the rules of the village.

I was in Agahozo-Shalom when I heard the news about my grandmother passing away, and desperately wanted to take a walk by myself outside the village. As I stepped outside, a handful of children started to follow me, as I knew would inevitably happen. More followed, until around ten to fifteen children were following me, eager to engage in a conversation with me, as I was eager to avoid talking to them. I felt half guilty as I picked up my pace, watching them struggle to keep up which, for the smaller toddlers, necessitated running. But they kept up with me, despite the cultural norm of walking very slowly, something routed in the very long walks taken to fetch water and balance it on one’s head.

As I came closer to a small rocky path that turned off into a small cluster of homes and cows, a man came with his own six massively meaty cows and bulls to also take the same small, narrow path. One of the children asked for money in Kinyarwanda, which they often do in giggling, dare-devil voices, as the other children burst into laughter. I said, “no,” perhaps a bit to tensely, and the man walking his cows raised the stick he used to heard the cows above the little children’s heads, threateningly, and yelled at them, most likely telling them to stop following me. Some looked frightened, especially the small ones, and I felt very bad, so I yelled to them and the herder, “no, it’s ok! It’s ok!” which was also a sign for them to continue following me. So off we went – me, followed by six cows, followed by a herder, followed by fifteen children, up a the narrow rocky pathway. At one point the cows started to gallop – the cows and bulls in Rwanda are very in shape, it’s quite impressive, I saw one jump its hind legs in the air when I first got here. The herder hit the running cow – or was it a bull? - and I was saved.

I really did not want to walk with children, but they are a wonderful distraction, and more clueless than adults at facial expressions which say, “I really don’t want you to follow me.” They are also exuberantly happy to see me, and this cheerfulness rubs off on me, sometimes, at least for a moment. And, eventually, they did get tired and walk/toddle home.

Ode to Birds, Sort Of.

The birds all look like they could be in Disney’s Snow White – and no, I do not know their names. There is one bright yellow bird, with puffy cheeks and a funny bird call. It’s everywhere, and yesterday I walked by its village. A tree on the corner between two roads was filled with almost perfectly circular balls of twigs hanging down from singular tiny twigs that connected them to the branches of the tree. There were about fifty such cylinders. The yellow birds where coming in and out of their little tree commune. It seemed very organized.

There is one bird, I am not sure which, that sounds like the sound you hear from Skype when you get a message, or like some cell-phone text message sing-songy beeps – or, someone pointed out, cell phones and Skype sound like the birds. They sound very artificial, and I am slowly learning that, in fact, those sounds are not artificial, but found in nature, designed into technology in areas where nature’s sort of thinning out. There is a sound that also sounds like a motor – I am not sure if it is from a frog or a bird. The motor combined with the birds that have shorter beeps sounds exactly like a pickup truck backing out. Some have this fantastic talent of throwing their musical bird beeps so that they echo. I would say it was beautiful, but it really does sound a little like techno computer-generated synthetic sounds. Which I was never a big fan of. But it definitely is cool. And maybe there is an evolutionary adaptation to liking these sorts of funny techno-sounding bird sounds which can explain why techno and trans music are so popular among humanity and really seedy clubs. Maybe these sounds are an indication that there is plentiful food and water, and so now’s a good time to procreate? Or something.

There is one black-and-white bird with a ridiculously long tail – really, it’s absurd – and it flies around really awkwardly, bouncing as it flies because its tail keeps on taking it down a notch, and you really see it struggling to keep himself up. I was told by another volunteer that this tail’s sole purpose is mate selection for the females. The tail may also be a sign for the other females that it has other hidden useful traits, because you fly like that, you’ve got to have some other hidden talent to stay alive.

Speaking of little creatures - a little girl, maybe three or four, was holding her baby sibling, maybe one or two. In the moment of excitement that a white person was walking by, excitement perhaps multiplied by the other children and adults who saw me, she waved to me with the hand holding the baby bi-accident, and down went the baby, which cried a lot but seemed ok. The baby didn’t have a long way down to go, being almost the same size as its holder. I have always read that, in traditional societies on an almost universal level, mothers do not directly take care of children much after two or three, but give them to older children to take care of. This has always made me very happy, because it breaks the stereotype as women caring for their children until adulthood of even teenagehood which seems to be a more modern phenomenon. It is interesting seeing the whole give-the-toddler-over-to-older-children phenomenon in practice, though in Jerusalem, with very large Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jewish families and religious Muslim families, you see this quite a lot as well.

Baby Sophia the Singer

Everyone seems to have fantastic voices, and now I know why. A woman was carrying her baby, a two year old girl with very impressive cornrows in her hair who was showing off her pipes with some high-pitched happy improvised squeals. Her mother then said, “Na na” and the baby responded “na na.” Then the mother said “na na” at a different a pitch (or note? I don’t tell the difference), and the baby responded pretty accurately. The mother continued with her “na na’s” at different notes, with the baby responding and changing her little “na na’s” in response to her mother. At one point the baby got kind of spacey and wasn’t responding so the mother persistently continued, “Sophia, na na, na na!” and Sophia responded diligently with her “na na’s.”

Sophia was wrapped up in a little womb of colorful cloth on the mother’s back, as all babies are carried. Very young children carry their siblings like this, and I saw one girl who was so young that her head was smaller than the baby she was carrying. Everyone carries yellow jugs of water home – they look a bit like the ones you carry oil or gasoline in for your car, if I remember correctly. The little kids have a smaller version of the jug, and the very small kids have these teensy little mini yellow jugs that look the same, only much smaller. It’s almost cute.

Occasionally, I see modern-dressed women in Rubona, wearing tank-tops and jeans, perhaps visiting their family. This is relatively rare, but interesting when I see it – I feel like they probably live very different lives from the other women they are visiting, who wear long pieces of colorful cloth draped in a more traditional style, or at least a longer skirt and t-shirt with sleeves, often carrying babies. I passed one modern women and she said hello and pointed to another woman, dressed traditionally – the woman holding Sophia the Singer – and said, “That woman speaks English!” and the woman responded something back in Kinyarwanda, something along the lines of “no, I really don’t” and they had a small conversation using the words “Mazungu” [loosely translated as “white person” or “foreigner”], “Englisha” and “Kinyarwanda.” It seemed like a real, earnest, thoughtful conversation based on their tones, and not the usual laughing at my ignorant Mazungu ways that I normally get.

Babies are great ways to break the ice – mothers like when you say hello to their babies and often love showing off their babies, which maybe explains Sophia’s impromptu singing lesson. And cuteness is conveniently universal and often more interesting for passerbyers than a white person, so it takes the pressure off.

When I got to my usual buttermilk hotspot, it was closed. A nicely dressed tall old man with glasses (I rarely see glasses, so they stood out) was outside the spot, sort of just hanging out, and I pointed to the door to ask if it was opened, and he shook his head. I went to the other store to get some tomatoes, and asked, as an afterthought, where I could get milk (“Amata”, for milk, seems to always refer to the butter milk). Everyone in the shop indicated, with their fingers, the place I had just come from. I shook my head, indicating that it was closed, and mentioned so in English because, well, why not. An old lady, who understood my “closed,” took my arm and persistently dragged me back to the butter milk shop, also saw the door was locked, and went out to the back of the shop, where I imagine the young lady that runs the shop lives, to call to her. The very heavy, newly filled massive jug of milk was taken out, and the lady kept laughing apologetically, pointing out the bits of thick milk/butter in the milk, which I actually like. As I sat to drink, two boys, seeing it was now opened, used the opportunity to try to fix the television in the corner, which would not be fixed despite efforts fiddling with the cable, antenna, knobs, etc. Little kids peeked in, as they always do, to wave.

Enjoy

A kind message to the generous Israeli who donated the particular T-shirt I saw in Rubona: Your old T-shirt that says “Enjoy קוקיין[Cocaine]” with cocaine italicized to look like the Coca Cola logo is hilarious, really clever, but if you donate it to Good Will while cleaning your house in Israel then a modestly-dressed Rwandese woman may end up wearing it, with her baby waddling behind her as she carefully balances a jug of water on her head, walking down a dirt path, perhaps on her way home or to church. How it got to tiny Rabona is beyond me. I suppose no one else understands it.

After spotting this particular woman, I struck up a conversation with another woman, and had a conversation in Kinyarwanda using the precisely ten phrases I know. And then she asked me for my number. My number! This is fantastically exciting because until now only men have asked for my number . With a woman I know it's for platonic reasons, at least in village with a 100% church/mosque attendance rate. It must have been my awesome personality deduced from the ten phrases I stated, or at least the three that she probably understood….Anyway, she was a very cheery, smiley woman and lived right outside of Agahozo-Shalom.

When going to the market in Rubona, it is easy to forget that the rare good imported from a country farther than Uganda is significantly more expensive than any local goods. I spent 250 Frances on a garlic clove, about the price of half a kilo of tomatoes. The garlic was in a package with Chinese letters on it, and even if only the packaging was from china, that could still explain the price difference. I do not think I was getting ripped off – there was only one lady in the market with garlic, which seems to be a bit of a luxury item.

Speaking of purchasing luxury items, I got a bottle of the Pineapple and Passion fruit whine. It satisfyingly tastes like Kiddish/Communion/cheap-yet-delicious-dessert wine but better because it is sold in cute little bottles by cute little nuns. They sit in front of their church in a little whole-in-the-wall with a microscopic piece of paper with writing on it indicating that something is sold there, and you point to the little bottle of sugary pineapple goodness.They wrote a price in their calculator, I did not have exact change, but a little boy eventually came to buy candles so I only waited five to ten minutes for change. I took the wine and went back the Agahozo-Shalom, past the woman with the Enjoy קוקיין T-shirt.

Back from Botswana

I returned to Rwanda to find my computer fried. I had left it plugged into the wall for two weeks without one of those magical boxes between the plug and wall that protects your computer when something bad happens with electricity, which seems to happen very, very often in Rwanda. So leaving it that way for two weeks was the equivalent of raising my computer far above my head and throwing it down on a concrete sidewalk.

As my computer was being fried (the metal from the charger was literally welded into the cable), I was in Botswana for the World University Debating Championships. I got off the plane in Johannesburg two weeks ago to the soft familiar whispers of Israeli debaters discussing Israel Debate League politics, fantastically mundane enough to feel like I was right at home. The shuttle which was meant to take us from Johannesburg to Gaborone, was five hours late. Literally. Five hours. But it was of course more than worth it - not only did I get to meet the Rwandan team, I got to see and talk with friends, make new friends, debate, and have debate-like conversations for a whole nine days, something socially unacceptable in the vast-majority of humanity.

But let's fast-track two weeks ago.

A few days before I left for Botswana, in a bar, while sitting with other volunteers, we heard a child screaming. At first, I thought it was a goat, because there are lots of them in back of the bar, and they often sound like, well, kids. One of us went out back, and found that a child had been beaten by drunken men. I don't know how often this happens. Around a half hour to an hour later, a policeman came. The policemen hit the door very loudly with his rifle in a request that the noise in the bar be kept at a minimum while he was asking questions. It was the same bar where the son of the owner, a small boy, perhaps ten or twelve, would serve us drinks and practice his English. Women do not seem to drink to much here. Most of the drinking is done my men. I wrote notes about what I would write about after returning to Rwanda, notes which died with my computer, but that incident seems to be the one that stayed in my mind. '

On a much, much lighter note, and without any nice rhetorical bridge from such a serious note, yet still related because it's about bars: used beer glasses seem to be cleaned in bars with other beer. Which at first is gross, but actually makes sense, because you can drink beer but you cannot drink the water.

At the local bar I met a man from the local school in Rubona who is hoping the school will get laptops through the aid program "One Laptop Per Child" My first reaction to myself was, "Isn't a laptop a bit extreme?" until I remembered the complete absence of books, and the major shipping and transport costs that bringing books would entail compared to just giving affordable laptops.

Today I returned to Agahozo-Shalom with actual children, who are slowly arriving for the new school year. Hopefully I will have a new computer in the coming days, or a magically fixed computer, to tell you all about life at Agahozo-Shalom, and not only about the surrounding village and Kigali.