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.