a non-Africa topic (partially)

Breaking away from my usual range of snippets of life in Rwanda for a minute, because today is a momentous occasion...

My baby big girl turned 5 today. I cannot believe I am the mother of a five year old child... Not a baby, not a toddler, not a preschooler... A real, honest-to-goodness kid. How on earth did this happen? (Yes, of course, we all understand the scientific reasons behind an infant turning into a real person... but allow me the moment of amazement). I hate that I'm not with her, and I miss her immensely... but I am so proud of my little person. Happy birthday, Leah!

Back to Africa... I am off to Tanzania tomorrow morning (Rwandair, I do not need to be at the airport at 5am... really!). While I'm sure I'll find my way to a net cafe or two along the way, I'm not sure I'll get a chance to blog. Expect updates and pictures of my well-deserved, disgustingly touristy time in Tanzania when I get back.

oh, rwanda

Earlier this morning (after the internet returned from its day and a half hiatus here at the office...), I received an email from my boss asking me to translate a letter for our Francophone directors of advocacy and programming from our regional office. It began with the line "Over the time remaining to travel to Kirimanjaro..."

Point of Interest #1: Amusing misspelling of 'Kilimanjaro.'
Point of Interest #2: He thought it would take me THREE DAYS to translate this one page letter? Yikes.

Point of Interest #1 has some blogging potential that I haven't previously covered, though. So, because the one page letter translation did not take the expected three days (but instead a typical 2ish hours), the r's and the l's. Rwandans amuse me beyond all reason with their ability to use 'r' and 'l' interchangeably. Imagine your confusion when you're speaking to someone, or reading an email or text and the words are just... all wrong. (Well here, for example, the previous sentence in typical Rwandan speak: "Rwandans amuse me beyond arr leason with theil abirity to use 'l' and 'r' intelchangeabry. Imagine youl confusion when you'le speaking to someone, ol leading an emair or text and the wolds ale just... arr wlong." It's not quite that bad... but the confusion!)

My favourite r/l mix up is probably the 'rice/lice.' When the waiter asks you if you'd like some "lice" with your meal, it's extremely difficult not to crack up. People here pronounce my daughter's name as "Reah" rather than "Leah." A Canadian friend of mine is a maid of honour in a Rwandan/Canadian wedding this weekend; the wedding invitations came back reading "We play you will attend" rather than "we pray." When Rwanda held its parliamentary elections back in September, more than one individual told me that we would have the day off work because there were "erections." The hilarity.

these are my confessions

Admissions of guilt are the order of the day. Before moving to Rwanda, there was frantic information-gathering: what’s the highest SPF sunscreen I can find to bring along? Which bugspray has the highest concentration of DEET? Which anti-malarial will make me less crazy? Where can I find a treated bednet for less than $70? What kind of bugs and snakes are in Rwanda, and which can kill me? Will bottled water be easily accessible so I can brush my teeth and wash fruit and veggies?

Well. I’ve lived in Rwanda for nearly five months. I’ve never used bug spray. I bought a bednet my second week here… and it’s still in its package. Sometimes I forget my Malarone (and it does make you crazy, no matter what they say). I’ve used less than a quarter of one of my three bottles of sunscreen. I stopped buying bottled water a long time ago; I brush my teeth with water from the tap, single-boil water in a kettle to drink, and more often than not, I forget to wash produce. Guess what? I’m still alive. No malaria, no sun-burn, no amoebas.

I’m admittedly much more cavalier about things than I should be with my health and safety, much less cautious than the guidebooks (and CIDA…) suggest. Life is a routine here, and while I know the risks, so far so good. Well, except for the time I did think I had malaria…

Just watch though - the day after I get back in Canada, I'll come down with pneumonia again. Winters in Canada are more likely to kill me than Africa is.

bless the rains down in africa

The rainy season is starting to let up, I think. The haze covering the tops of the mountains has returned from its hiatus. A day or two can pass without a torrential downpour pelting the city, drowning the fields and coating every road (and every shoe) with thick mud. People have started forgetting their umbrellas at home (except me, because I’ve never once actually remembered my umbrella!). Most of us are starting to develop what’s called the “Kigali cough,” brought on by the rising red dust in the streets that clogs your throat and makes your lungs feel like they’re burning. Signs of dry weather returning.

As happy as I am about the prospect of no longer getting caught in the rain (and believe me, if it’s raining, I’m bound to get caught in it, usually in a tank top or a white shirt, and never with an umbrella), the rainy season brings a lot of beautiful scenery. The hills that were dry and brittle, faded gold and brown patchwork quilts of fields when I first arrived in Rwanda turned lusciously green almost overnight when the rain started. Shades of green echo across the horizon; the only brown you see is the mud these days. Trees are sprouting more fruit, and there’s a veritable rainbow at every stall in the market as the rainy season brought more interesting things in season. And better still are the people-watching opportunities brought on by the rain. Huge crowds gather under every awning; sometimes people look so morose and confused, like they’ve never encountered a rainstorm before in their lives. The streets become a sea of umbrellas of every colour and design – Premiere League football teams, Primus beer logos, ads for Tuzanet (the free mosquito nets the government provides to mothers) all mixed in with plaids, stripes and floral patterns. Little girls walk down the streets barefoot, shoes in hand, to avoid getting them muddy. And my favourite sight of all – masses of moto drivers hovering under whatever empty space they can find, with or without their bikes.

in which i make a list of the reasons i can't stay

Despite having spent one fifth of my waking hours on Monday (15 hours total, meaning 3 hours) waiting for buses... Despite being broker than I've ever been in my entire life... Despite missing my parents and my friends and my Leah more than I thought I would... Despite having strong cravings for real food (that I can afford; see Point #2)... Despite the miserable state of telecommunications (please, MTN, stop charging me for text messages you aren't even sending. Oh, and make your internet work more than one day a week, yeah?) and the difficulties in talking with anyone at home... Despite forgetting what a real shower feels like, and what it's like to have power most of the day... Despite all this... I have this nearly irrepressible urge to just stay.

52 days left? That's it? Are you kidding me?

A(nother) numbers game

2 … is the number of Thanksgivings I’ve celebrated in Kigali.
3 … is the number of cups of coffee I’ve consumed this morning (and the headache remains).
5 … is the number of years my baby is turning in 15 days!
6 … is the number of people who have called me fat in the past month.
17 … is the number of discrepancies in Rwandan statistics I’ve noticed today.
24 … is the number of different restaurants (with names) that I’ve eaten at in Kigali.
24 … is the number of books I’ve read since being in Rwanda.
59 … is the number of days I have left in Africa.
90 … is approximately the number of dollars I received for stipends in the past week (don’t even get me started).
96 … is the number of phone numbers saved to my phone… 12 is the number of those numbers that I would use in a given month… 71 is the number of those numbers that I have never called/do not remember the person who’s number it is.
114 … is the number of times I’ve tried repairing the office internet connection today.
138 … is the number of days since I left Canada.
1,633 … is the number of pictures I’ve taken since arriving here.
135,000 … is the number of Rwandan Francs it will take to replace my stolen phone.

there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime

It’s already December; it’s unreal how fast time has passed here. Getting off the plane in July, six months stretched out forever ahead of me – six months of being away from my family and my friends, six months of trying to work in a language I barely comprehend, six months of none of the comforts of home (oh, how I miss showers…). It seemed like forever. And now it’s December, and I’m in the homestretch… and I’m not altogether sure that I’m ready to leave. Today included, I have exactly sixty days left in Africa. Sixty days! That’s nothing. A few weeks of work and a handful of weekends left to explore and enjoy this beautiful place. Some of you probably remember me joking that I thought I would fall in love the second I got off the plane and you’d have to drag me back to Canada… It was never a joke. Africa is home now, and I know I’ll be coming back.

My sixty days are divided up between three (potentially four) countries, so I need to use my time wisely. Friday morning, Katie, Claire, Logan and I are setting off to Burundi for the weekend. This is half necessity, half insanity, I think. Katie and I need to renew our visas sometime before Christmas, and Burundi is the cheapest way for us to do that. And we all want to see more of this beautiful continent, so Burundi it is. Luckily, Burundi isn’t in the news as much anymore as our neighbour to the west – a peace deal was signed in May and the country is slowly becoming more secure. We’re overlanding, taking the long and winding road from Kigali down through Butare, crossing the border and going south to Bujumbura on the banks of Lake Tanganyika. I’m expecting a pretty laidback weekend; there’s not a lot to do or see in Bujumbura but it’ll be a nice break from the routine of Kigali.

Post-Burundi, I ‘work’ for two weeks, and then Katie and I are off to Tanzania for Christmas. We fly from Kigali to Kilimanjaro, where we’ll spend a day bumming around admiring the view before heading over to Arusha, where we’ll stay the night. Bright and early the next morning, we set off on our safari adventure – five days of driving through the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Lake Manyara – before getting back to Arusha on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day will be a bit of a weird one for us… We’re spending it on the 8 or 9 hour bus ride from Arusha to Dar es Salaam! We have loaded Christmas movies onto Katie’s IPod though, so it’ll be a tolerable trip despite my carsickness, I hope. We’re hoping to get into Dar just before the last ferry leaves for Zanzibar, where we’re spending December 26^th- January 4^th. We’re spending the first few days exploring Stone Town, followed by a few days in the northern coast towns of Nungwe and Kendwa. I’m so excited for the beach! I’m a Maritime girl; take me away from the ocean for too long and I feel homesick for the waves and the salty air. Zanzibar is an African paradise – beaches to lounge on, forests to hike in, city streets to discover.

I’m hoping our amazing Christmas plans will make up for the feelings that have started springing up over the past few days. I haven’t been homesick yet; lonely, sure, and I miss my family, but so far I hadn’t experienced any particular intense “I need to be at home” feelings (minus the unpleasant phone situation, of course). Now, though… I miss home. Or more specifically, I miss Christmas at home. It’s December 3^rd… And it feels like the middle of August. I’m sitting in my office listening to Christmas carols, staring out my door at a sea of green hills and red dust. The sun is blinding, but not because it’s reflecting off inches of pristine snow. Rwandans tell me it’s cold outside at night now, but it’s certainly not the kind of chill you keep off with mittens and a scarf. I’ve always argued I could live anywhere at Christmas time because I hate (hate hate hate) the snow and cold, and I never thought that was a part of my Christmas experience. Nothing like moving to Africa to let you know you’re wrong!

I am a Christmas preparer extraordinaire. Despite five years of working retail during the Christmas season (which is enough to drive anyone to drink), I love this season. I love the buildup – the Christmas carols in the mall starting November 1^st; peppermint mochas at Starbucks; lights going up on houses and nurseries hawking their trees by the side of the road; baking and decorating cookies; shopping for presents and wrapping them. It’s funny though, because as much as I am sad to be missing Christmas with Leah and all the preparations that go into Christmas with a young child in the house… what I find I’m missing most is Christmas with my mother. The smell of cookies baking in my mum’s kitchen. Endless lists of ingredients and snacks, choosing hors d’oeuvres and cheeses and wine together. Her panicky shopping starting the first week of December (I’m smugly always finished in October or November), where we wander the mall in search of something for my dad (the hardest person to buy for, ever) and stop to have coffee and chat. I think it’s not so much that I miss my family, or that I miss Christmas, but that I’m mourning a huge interruption in tradition – an interruption that is likely to become the new norm. It sort of hadn’t occurred to me that being an adult would mean the loss of something I didn’t realize meant so much to me.

Oh, and four countries (because if you did the math, you would see that Rwanda + Burundi + Tanzania = 3) is because we might take a couple of days prior to our flight into Heathrow to play around in Kenya. I say might, because I am already broke. And surprisingly to some people, traveling in Africa costs money. Real money, which I don't have. Depressing!

women keep the skies from falling

One thing I have discovered is that nothing could more encourage my feminism and my outrage at the dire state of women’s reproductive health than living in Rwanda (I am tempted to say “living in Africa” because I suspect my indignation would be similar across the continent, but as my experience is here, we’ll stick with that). I work with the only provider of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in all of Rwanda (according to UNFPA) and I have been a witness, directly in my activities and indirectly through reviews of programming, of the absolute lack of quality services, of information, of anything.

I spent last night at the home of my best friend, Nadine’s, cousin. His wife, pregnant with their fourth child, died over the weekend, while her husband was stationed in Darfur. Yesterday marked the final day of mourning, during which the extended family and friends congregate at the deceased’s house to support the family members before the burial. She was in her early thirties, already a mother to three girls aged 12, 8 and 5. This fourth baby was their first boy. She had had a difficult pregnancy, primarily due to extremely elevated blood pressure. Her primary care clinic determined it was necessary to have a c-section, despite the complications that would arise for the premature infant. They sent her off to the best hospital in the city, where she was told she needed transfer papers in order for them to proceed with the procedure. She took the two mini-buses back to her clinic all the way across the city. They were so concerned about her condition that they considered doing the c-section at the clinic, but decided against it due to the lack of incubators. Back she went again, alone, to the hospital, papers in hand. On her way up to the ward to be admitted, she collapsed and fell into a coma. This young woman and her son died because of a couple of papers. The bureaucracy involved in obtaining health services here is mind-boggling. The paper trail exists at home, too, but the consequences are so vastly different here.

I’m alternately depressed and energized by the state of reproductive health here. Depressed because there is so little I can do, because it’s engrained – no matter what leaps and bounds have been made in progress for women’s rights and equality, women’s health issues, here as everywhere, are not a central concern. Maternal mortality is still high at 750 women per 100,000 live births. The HIV prevalence for women is estimated at 3.6% versus 2.3% for men (regardless of whether I think the statistics on prevalence are correct, there is a clear feminization of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda as in the rest of Africa). The last DHS found that 80% of married women reported recent spousal abuse. 70% of births occur at home, and 61% of births occur without the assistance of trained health personnel. The total fertility rate remains above 6 children per women per lifetime. 29% of women are illiterate, and few women have received above a Primary education. These are determinants for poor reproductive health – anyone in the field is well aware of the connections between wealth, education, fertility and overall reproductive health status. Poorer and less educated women bear more children in shorter time frames, are more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication, and are less likely to receive ante- or post-natal care. Their children, especially their girls, are more likely to suffer malnutrition and less likely to receive an education; they are statistically more likely to die before they reach their fifth birthdays. It’s a nasty and preventable cycle, and seeing it in action in Rwanda is heartbreaking. It’s for this reason that I’m energized at the same time as being outraged – there is so much potential for improvement. Many women here want change. They’re becoming more aware of their rights, particularly to education and to reproductive health, and women are beginning to demand change. It’s heartening to see more and more young women speaking out against the conditions that have oppressed their mothers and grandmothers. More and more young women are finishing secondary school and going on to university. More and more young women are seeking access to contraceptives and family planning information, and are actively involved in protecting themselves against unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and HIV. Women are becoming actors and participants in their own reproductive lives, rather than remaining passive spectators as their lives unfold around them.

I spent two days last week in a training organized by my organization and funded through UNFPA (the UN Population Fund, the only UN body to focus specifically on population activities and the importance of reproductive health). The first day’s training was on the minimum initial service package (MISP) for reproductive health interventions in emergency situations (refugee camps, conflict zones, etc), and the second day focused on sexual and gender-based violence, specifically in emergency situations. Old information to me as the MISP was something I’d researched quite a bit while writing my honours paper and prior to arriving here, but interesting to see in a new light, especially as for the majority of attendees, this was a whole new aspect of disaster management and response. A few staff from ARBEF was there, as well as several representatives from different NGOs in Kigali, but the vast majority were Disaster Response representatives from districts around the country, people who had little to no training on reproductive health issues. I was sitting in a room full of well-educated and well-spoken Rwandans, roughly evenly divided by sex. And yet, it was still primarily the men who were speaking. And the comments being made demonstrated exactly why training on GBV is so necessary in Rwanda. Comments about what leads to a woman being sexually assaulted, what kind of acts constitute ‘violence,’ and when and whether women have a right to refuse sex. People say the same things in Canada, too. But women here have so little protection, legally or socially, and it’s largely because of a culture that treats women as less. This isn’t to say that women aren’t respected, or that all men treat all women with contempt, because I have seen a lot that suggests the very great respect that many men have for their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. But there is a culture that emphasizes the role of men as being dominant over women; the patriarchy is alive and well in Rwanda. I’m not criticizing Rwandan culture, because I think there is a lot to be celebrated about it. At the same time, change needs to happen at all levels, and needs to come from men as well as from women. It’s interesting to see the winds of change for women’s reproductive rights starting to blow here, beginning with a whisper of a breeze. Hopefully it will build up to a windstorm.

get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

Today is World AIDS Day – the twentieth anniversary of the first one, in fact. This year's slogan is 'Lead, Empower, Deliver.' Many milestones, some progress, much sorrow. We’re seeing changes, small ones, but there is still no end in sight. The number of new HIV infections has declined, certainly: 3 million in 2001, 2.7 million in 2007. But that’s still 2.7 million people. Fewer people are dying: 2.2 million in 2005, 2 million in 2007. But that’s still 2 million people. Nearly 8 million people are still waiting for treatment. Over 7,400 individuals were infected each day in 2007 – 7,400! That’s more people being infected every day than the entire population of my university town.

But this is the problem with HIV/AIDS. It’s a numbers game to most people. You see the figures written down, and you struggle to imagine. You gasp in surprise when you hear how many children are HIV positive (about 1,000 of those 7,400 daily infections are children under 15) and you puzzle over prevalence rates – can it really be 12%, 15%, over 25%?

In Rwanda, it’s a bit about the numbers. The official prevalence rate is quoted at 3% (3.5% is the highest published estimate I’ve ever seen). There is statistically no way that this is even close to accurate. Not even a little bit. For the sake of my safety sanity at the moment, however, I’m going to leave that analysis for another day. I will, however, throw out a few numbers for the statistics-lovers among you: Of more then 154,000 Rwandans requiring ARVs, 68,034 receive treatment. 75.8% of women and 78.1% of men here have never been tested for HIV. Only 19.7% of women and 40.9% of men use condoms consistently. 19,000 Rwandan children are HIV positive. 220,000 are AIDS orphans.

For me, though, it’s about the faces behind the numbers. The woman on the street the other day who begged me for money for ARVs (the official line is that ARV treatment in Rwanda is free – it is, for pregnant women and those deemed ‘low income;’ for everyone else, it’s approximately $20USD a month… The average Rwandan earns about 1,000RWF a week, around $2USD). My 21 year old friend who has endured and survived more than his fair share of tragedy and still just never stops going on. The tell-tale signs of ARV side effects on the men who call out the names of buses. All my friends here who refuse to get tested, because they just don’t want to know. The women at one of the camps I work with who recently underwent VCT and came back with a positive result. Sitting in a room surrounded by these women, all returned refugees living in camps because they have nowhere else to go, all young, all married, almost all mothers. There is nothing more heartbreaking than looking into the eyes of a woman bouncing a new baby on her lap when you both know she has no chance of seeing that child grow up.

For me, right now, the statistics on AIDS in Africa are all around me, every minute. But it’s important to remember that AIDS in not an ‘African’ disease, or an ‘African’ problem. It happens at home, too – we have just been lucky. Prevention and education are everyone’s business. HIV affects us all. Take a few minutes today to find out your HIV status.

Thanksgiving, Take Two

Today's best part of being an expat: we got to celebrate American Thanksgiving, because one of Logan's new roommates is from the States and was missing home. Delicious, delicious, delicious.

that while we breathe, we hope

I spent most of the night of November 4^th and the early morning of November 5^th snuggled in a deck chair wearing a party dress, eyes glued to CNN. Aside from it being the first time I’d really watched TV since I’d arrived in Africa, this was something big. We had started the “Yes We Can” celebration early, meeting at an American-run restaurant in Kigali for an all-night election party. Everyone there – Americans, Canadians, Europeans, expat Africans and Rwandans alike – were on edge; hopeful and hoping but not quite sure what the results would be. 8pm our time was a good 5 hours ahead of when the first polls were going to close, but we sat and we waited; we ate and we drank and we laughed and we endlessly discussed the issues – how much would his race matter? Would his inexperience count against him? Could the world tolerate Sarah Palin for the next four years? It was the race issue that had me concerned, to be honest. Every African I’d met was in awe that ‘one of their own’ had even made it this far… Could we even begin to hope he’d really make it?

Katie and I headed home around 1:30 in the morning, before any polls closed, due to extreme exhaustion (and a couple of beers…). A text message just after 6am woke me up; a friend from home saying “Wake up. He did it!” I have never welcomed an early morning wake-up call so happily. On about three and a half hours of sleep, I climbed out bed, got ready and headed for the bus park. Sitting on the bus bound for mu mujyi, everyone was quiet but there was a buzz in the air. Everyone knew, and everyone had hopes for what was to come. The driver flipped the radio on in time for the news. The words “Barack Obama” crackled out over the speaker amidst a stream of Kinyarwanda… and the entire bus erupted in cheers.

I’m so glad I was in Africa for this.

Katie (right), Laura (our American Lawyers Without Borders friend) and me at Heaven for the all-nighter.

Say what you need to say

Expect a stream of new blog entries; I know I'm behind. I've been writing here and there but never manage to post anything - massive internet troubles; a visit from Coady's volunteer coordinator, Natalie; the phone issue, of course, and grad school applications. I've been burying myself in plans for next year: funding applications, statements of purpose, CV revisions, and job searches. My heart is still so firmly in Africa but my head is starting to wander back home, just a little bit.

I take back my last entry - I'm still incredibly frustrated and upset about the phone situation (I spent the morning at the police station filling out paperwork while they refused to find an officer who spoke French or English... now I need to go all the way across town to drop the paperwork off with MTN in the hopes that they'll trace it) but I am not ready to come home. At all. Because Kigali is home. It's home without the people I love, which I never imagined; I always thought I associated thoughts of 'home' with people more than any place, but I'm out here on my own (well, aside from my lovely Coady interns + Logan) and I feel as much at home here as I did in Sackville or in my parents' home. Thinking of leaving this place, leaving these people... As much as I'm ready to get on with the rest of my life, I can't imagine the rest of my life not including Africa.

Ready to come home

This is a whiny blog rather than an interesting or informative one. I am officially (today, anyway) ready to come home.

Yesterday, our cleaning lady let someone else into my apartment to clean. Apparently someone else came alone, was left alone in my house, and stole my Canadian cell phone. My $300, year old but in perfect shape Canadian cell phone. The one that people from home were using to text me, because for some reason Rwandan phones cannot receive Canadian text messages. So now, an important way for me to communicate with friends at home has been completely shut off. Not to mention all the pictures and videos I had of Leah on it, and the fact that I'm dead broke and can't afford to get another, either here or in Canada. Luckily I still have my Rwandan phone, although it's getting to the end of its life, I think. But at least this way people from home can still call me.

I am depressed and upset and just feel really violated. And there's no way it was a coincidence, which makes it worse. I've said nothing the other times things have gone missing from my house, including 50$US, because I figured it really didn't matter - they were just things, it was just money, and if it was making someone else's life better, then I'd just deal. But this is much worse, because it's cut me off from people I love. The worst part is that even if I can get the actual phone back (apparently the network here is able to trace phones through serial numbers? I don't get it, and doubt it will work since my phone was still locked to a Canadian network), my SIM card has probably been tossed out by now, which leaves me with more than two months left with a lot less communication with home.

I know these things happen everywhere, and it's life - but it's really broken my trust in people I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to get to know. It goes to show what I've been thinking a lot about lately - no matter what I do here, I'm always going to be the muzungu outsider and there's always someone who's waiting to get something off me. It's depressing to realise I'm living here another two months when I feel so distrustful and upset.

Makin' the News

Until I have time to write my version of last Sunday's tree-planting extravaganza, here's what Kigali's New Times has to say:

Five University graduates from Canada currently interning with several organisations in Kigali on Sunday fulfilled their pledge of planting 500 cypress trees.

Assisted by10 members of Youth Association for Human Rights Promotion and Development (AJPRODHO-JIJUKIRWA), 40 residents and leaders of Amahoro village, the interns planted the trees along the newly constructed stone-paved road connecting Kacyiru-Kimicanga Road with Kinamba.

Before leaving their homeland in July, the Canadian group made a pact to directly offset the carbon emissions from their air travel by planting trees in their respective host countries.

According to Emmanuel Nzeyimana, President of AJPRODHO, the initiative is in line with environmental protection. He emphasised that planting trees is not merely a way to beautify one’s surroundings, but also good for health.

“We have to understand that there is a positive relationship between environmental protection and health for sustainable development,” Nzeyimana underscored.

He asserted that tree planting combats both soil erosion and air pollution, adding said that air travel is not the only contributor to air pollution but that any road vehicle is a major burden on the environment.

“In fact, a running engine releases two times more pollution when the vehicle is not in motion. Letting the engine run for more than ten seconds produces more carbon dioxide and uses more fuel than stopping and restarting the vehicle,” Nzeyimana noted.

Crystal Milligan, one of the interns working with AJPRODHO said that 97 trees needed to be planted to compensate for the carbon released into the atmosphere by her flight between Canada and Kigali.

Kacyiru Sector youth coordinator, Christian Munyeshuri, responded that the flights of each of the Canadians had been fully compensated for with 500 trees, meaning that the interns were free to return to Rwanda again in the future.

“But I will not call you ‘the Canadians’,” Munyeshuri stated, “After today, you are our own people in Canada.”

The interns initiated the tree planting idea and given the fact that environmental protection is one of AJPRODHO’s crosscutting themes of focus, it enthusiastically offered to support the Canadians in the initiative.

When contacted, the village leaders welcomed the idea and joined the rest for they also had a plan of planting trees to combat soil erosion in the area.

All parties involved in the tree planting exercise expressed keen interest in maintaining and developing this collaboration in the years to come.

The interns were sent by the Coady International Institute in Nova Scotia, Canada, as part of a larger contingent of 16 interns currently working elsewhere in Africa and Latin America.

If you visit the link, there's a small picture of our tree-planting team. As is the norm for the New Times, some of the facts are slightly less than accurate, but regardless it's good to see the story made it to the local media (even if we had to pay them to cover it, but that's another story for another day...)

Across the border...

Taken from the BBC, October 30th, 2008

Interesting coincidence that my last post was about our escape to Gisenyi... Just across the border, hundreds of thousands of Congolese civilians are on the move to stay ahead of clashes between Laurent Nkunda's rebels and Kabila's government forces. Nkunda has been taking the province of North Kivu by storm over the past two months and is currently less than 20 kilometres outside of Goma, the provincial capital. Rwanda has been accused both of bombing government forces and of cross-border attacks. Here in Kigali, it's hard to say what's true and what isn't; we're relying heavily on outside media for some idea about what's going on. I know there's more than a few of you who follow international news and may have put the DRC-Rwanda puzzle pieces together, so I wanted to assure everyone that I'm fine and in no danger. Rwanda is still perfectly safe and I don't expect any trouble on our end, although I'll be keeping a close eye on news reports in the next while. Nkunda declared a ceasefire yesterday evening but I think it's only a matter of time until he takes Goma as well, and it's difficult to say what the results of that might be.

Postcards from Gisenyi

Last Saturday, Katie and I took off for a day trip up to Gisenyi, a lakeside town in the northwestern part of Rwanda by the DRC border. Three and a half hours by bus there and three and a half hours back, but worth it - the drive took us right up into the rolling hills of northern Rwanda. It was mostly a lazy, relaxing day, so I'll let some pictures do the talking.

A Rwandan Thanksgiving

What do you get when you throw five CIDA interns into the best kitchen they’ve seen in months? A Thanksgiving feast!

Rwanda is a bit… tricky, shall we say, when it comes to eating. You can eat as many kinds of starch as possible in one sitting, but getting a more well-rounded nutritional experience does not come easy. Keeping that in mind, the thought of the upcoming Canadian Thanksgiving and all the deliciousness that means for most of us was getting to be a bit too much to bear for the five of us living in Kigali for these six months. A little creativity goes a long way in Rwanda, however; Logan tracked down a turkey (free-range, even, if you call wandering around someone’s yard in Nyamirambo ‘free-range’), Claire was gifted a 1.5L bottle of Chilean wine, and the rest of us supplied vegetables and pie recipes to put together a slightly haphazard but delicious Thanksgiving meal.

Bright and early Sunday morning, we all got together at Logan’s house, which has a kitchen complete with an OVEN (you have no idea how exciting an oven is in Rwanda). The turkey, who had met its demise the day before in Logan and Crystal’s presence, was in various pieces in a bag, ready for Claire to do her best with. Crystal and Katie set to work making squash pie (pumpkins are scarce around here) and Claire assembled a delightful apple crumble. Logan and I wandered helpfully. Various vegetable dishes were prepared while Claire’s turkey did its thing – sweet potatoes (no marshmallows here though, Mum!), mashed potatoes, broccoli, and peas and carrots. Tofu was marinated for the vegetarians in the house, and crispy baguettes were sliced up. Claire did a beautiful job setting the table, complete with a Canadian flag to remind us of home. Logan’s housemates (a Brit/American and an Australian, newly arrived the night before) joined us and were bemused by our cooking frenzy.

It was a Thanksgiving celebration not quite like any in Canada – a few little quirks and a lot of improvisation went into making the meal. Regardless, it was a wonderful day with great company… we’re considering a repeat for American Thanksgiving, just for good measure!

The Day I Met the Elephant

Last week, I happened to be on a field visit to one of the camps we work with that’s just within the borders of Akagera Park, one of Rwanda’s three national parks. The visit started out like they often do – people chattering to me in Kinyarwanda hoping I might catch something (and sometimes I do!), lots of excited preparation for whatever performance they’re about to put on. I found myself standing by myself in a crowd of women, one of whom kept telling me something over and over about a “mutware.” I knew I knew the word but couldn’t place it, so I turned to Alexi, ARBEF’s fantastic driver and said “Mutware iki?” (roughly meaning “What’s ‘mutware’?”). Now, Alexi and I have a lovely relationship. We make each other laugh, he keeps me amused during long (and frankly boring) Kinyarwanda speeches, and he looks out for me around the office and on trips. It’s an interesting relationship though, because Alexi is unilingual (unless you count his sole French phrase, “Tu es fatiguer?”) and my Kinyarwanda is, well, interesting. Our friendship is based on limited Kinyarwanda, absurdly exaggerated gestures and a lot of observation. It was immediately apparent that Alexi knew what “mutware” was, and boy was he excited. He wandered off to speak to the woman who’d said it to me, and eventually got the message across to me that “mutware” meant… ELEPHANT! There was apparently an elephant near the village that often wandered over to raid food stores (including home-brewing banana beer!). Alexi was determined to find me the elephant.

After our sensitization session was finished, we piled into the car and set off for the next village. It was explained by my supervisor, Enock, in French that Alexi planned on finding someone who’d seen the elephant recently and was going to buy something to feed the elephant. Let me be clear that at this point, I really thought they were kidding. See an elephant? Sure, we might be so lucky, despite the numerous complaints I’ve heard from tourists that there are no elephants in Akagera. Alexi stops and asks villager after villager if they’ve seen the elephant. Someone says that they’ve seen it just that morning, so Alexi tells him to hop in. We buy some bananas (I still fully believed this was a joke) and off we go. We drove for quite awhile and all we’re seeing is cows and goats… Not exactly the wildlife we hoped for. The villager we collected along the way jumped out, called out to someone nearby and the two of them took off hand-in-hand over a hill, signaling Alexi to follow. I’m painfully aware of the branches scraping the sides and bottom of the Land Rover and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this is not a good idea. Until we get over the hill and there is the elephant.

I can’t even explain how shockingly amazing this was. Just a pure “Oh my god, I really am in AFRICA” moment. Enock, Alexi, and I hop out of the car and make our way over toward the elephant, where the two villagers are already close enough to touch it. I should say at this point that I was indeed pondering my sanity of getting out of the car near an elephant – it was absolutely breaking the number one rule of safaris, not to mention the likelihood that the Coady probably wouldn’t recommend it and my mother would surely kill me if the elephant didn’t. But, hell, if this wasn’t the chance of a lifetime, I don’t know what is. Enock fed a banana to the elephant and kept calling me over, but I refused – I was happy being photographer. The villagers were not satisfied and wanted the silly muzungu to get closer, and pulled me over. I tried to get Alexi to come with me but funny enough, the man who was determined to find the elephant was more scared of it than I was! So… I fed the elephant. A wild African elephant ate bananas out of my hand. I have never been more delighted in my life. Sadly, he decided immediately post-feeding that he wanted to have a bit of a wander, so we backed off and watched from a distance, but for five minutes, I was a foot away from an ELEPHANT.

So, for all the tourists who complain that there are absolutely no elephants in Akagera, there are – you just have to know the villagers ;)

Tabara

The morning after we went to Heaven, Katie and I were up bright and early on a trek across town for a 9am meeting… on a Saturday. Those familiar with me might well be wondering what on earth might have dragged me out of the house on a Saturday morning before I’d even had a cup of coffee… The answer is Tabara.

Tabara is an NGO just getting started here in Kigali, which is aiming to provide support and assistance to single parents in the city, and Saturday morning was their first public meeting. I’d come across Tabara while reading the blog of a VSO volunteer, Marion, based here in Kigali; the organization is an initiative started up by a Ugandan friend of hers, Jasmine. I’d been looking for something to get involved with since I arrived here, and decided to get in touch with them to see what I might be able to contribute. Luckily a meeting with Marion, Jasmine, Florence (another Tabara member), Katie and I proved successful and two weeks later, Katie and I were knocking on Jasmine’s door so we could head over to the preschool Tabara had borrowed for the morning. It was a tiny room with about 18 tiny wooden benches; Jasmine was telling me that up to five little children fill each bench every day!

To be honest, none of us expected very many people to show up. Jasmine had said she’d told a few parents about the meeting but didn’t expect more than about ten people… By 9:30, the tiny schoolroom was packed with over fifty parents (and some of their children). It was unreal. Jasmine and the Pastor who serves as Tabara’s president (because Rwandan NGOs must be officially run by a Rwandan) introduced the organization and what support it hoped to provide to Kigali’s single parents, and we began taking down people’s names and information about their children. Jasmine organized the parents (which, while mostly women did include two men) into small groups to discuss what the parents wanted Tabara to do for them, primarily concerning income-generating activities. There was so much discussion (of course, almost none I could understand, although Jasmine is a lifesaver about translations) about what each of these parents wanted to be able to do to improve their lives and the lives of their children, and it was so exciting to see so many who had come out for no incentive other than trying to start making a difference for their kids. I was so excited for Jasmine that there was such a turn out. Someone from the district council stopped by, and sent a photographer over to take pictures, which will really help to demonstrate that there is a real need for supporting such an organization.

This is something I am so excited to be a part of. It’s personal for me – it’s only circumstance that separates myself and my child from these men and women I met. I’m so pleased to try and share some of what I’ve learned from being involved in parenting groups in Canada and seeing what might apply here, particularly in terms of setting up support networks and working to improve health and education opportunities for these children. There is so much to be done for single parents and their kids here in Kigali, but Tabara is a big step forward.

Friday Night in Heaven

Last Friday, the girls and I met in Heaven. Luckily, the trip there was relatively painless and didn’t involve anyone dying (although there was the usual confusion over exactly why Katie paid one fare for the bus and I paid nothing at all). Heaven, touted as Rwanda’s first international quality venue produced by Rwandans (but owned by Americans), is an absolutely gorgeous restaurant in Kigali, overlooking the valley between Kiyovu and Kacyiru… Great wine, great food, and a great view. This was mine and Katie’s first trip to Heaven, and we were there for a silent art auction organized by Ivuka Arts Studios, a Rwandan-owned arts cooperative of young Rwandese artists producing contemporary Rwandese art. The whole night was spectacular.

We started the evening off with a great glass of wine (at the happy hour price of 1500 RWF, making it a not totally unreasonably treat), which we enjoyed while watching Intore dancers! These ones were more special than others I’ve seen – because they were mostly children! The man who started Ivuka Arts also organized a dance troupe, RwaMakondera, made up of former street and other disadvantaged children. The troupe is hired out for events, and the money earned goes to the children in order to pay their school fees and other expenses as a means of keeping them off the streets. The kids were fantastic – and I was delighted to see that dance recitals are the same the world over, with kids eagerly grinning at the crowd, a beat or two off from each other, looking at the child to their left or right to see if they’re doing the right move at the right time. It was wonderful. There were beautiful little girls, including one tiny child that couldn’t be more than three years old; the boys were dressed in traditional Intore costumes with bells and shields and headdresses. Adults also danced, and played and sang the music the children danced along to.

And then there was the art… Traditional Rwandan art (such as imigongo, which are geometrical designs made of cow dung… seriously) doesn’t really appeal to me, so I wasn’t sure what to expect of ‘contemporary’ Rwandan art. I was more than pleasantly surprised by what was on display at Heaven that night, and had to really hold myself back from making a purchase. There were two artists doing live painting at the restaurant as well, which was lovely to watch. I was particularly drawn to one artist’s work in particular – a lot of themes of women and motherhood and women’s bodies. None of the paintings I loved were auctioned off that night, and I’m hoping a trip to the studio in Kacyiru might result in me coming home with one of the ones I loved the most. The talent of these young artists was overwhelming and I can’t wait to see more.
Much to my and Katie’s delight, we stayed at Heaven for supper – great service and wonderful food… minus the fact that Katie got food poisoning! Regardless, it was a great night out in Kigali and a repeat trip to Heaven is in the works to celebrate Logan’s birthday in October.

New House!

As the title suggests... I moved! About 50 feet from where I lived before but it's amazing the difference both Katie and I are feeling now. We spent two months in an apartment with no running water, no real kitchen (a hot plate that shocked us every chance it got...), bedrooms furnished only with beds (so we were living out of suitcases... as were cockroaches!)... just a really awful situation. We'd tried finding a new place with no luck at all, and had fully resigned ourselves to four more months of no water, no cooking and not feeling settled in. Luckily, our landlady is actually pretty awesome (just a bit flighty...) and offered us her newly-vacant one-bedroom apartments attached to her house, for the same rent we pay now. Hello running water (showers? washing dishes? COOKING?!), clean floors, a workable kitchen and a place to hang my clothes. I'm pretty much in heaven.

Nothing more than tourists?

My dad was kind enough to scan an article out of a recent Maclean's for me. Here is the online version... Not quite ready to comment with my own thoughts, but let's just say the article hits quite close to home. A lot like reading about myself and my own experiences, as disappointing as that is. By the end of my six months, I might have more to say but for now I just wanted to share what I think is a fairly accurate insight into my current experience.

Kampala Adventures

This past weekend was a long one in Rwanda – parliamentary elections on Monday meant that our offices were closed – so Katie and I decided to take the opportunity to do a little travelling. Destination, Kampala… a 10 hour bus ride away. We set off at 5am by taxi to Nyabugogo bus park, which managed to be busy even at 530 in the morning. The bus set off promptly at 6am (I’ll admit some surprise that something ran on time here…) and off we went. I napped most of the way up to the Ugandan border, which is okay as I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of Rwanda looks the same. So it’s 730 and border-crossing time. To get into Uganda, you must queue up (in the longest, slowest lines of life, really) to have your departure card looked at and your passport stamped with an exit stamp to sign you out of the country. You then have to walk a short distance through ‘no-man’s land’ until you reach a post where a fairly unofficial-looking guy will have a brief look at your passport and send you on your way to the Uganda Immigration office, where you fill out a form, pay your $50 US for a single entry visa (if you’re not from the Great Lakes region, anyway) and get a Ugandan visa. The guy who stamped mine gave me a visa for up to seven days, because as he said “Kampala is great fun and you just never know what might happen.”

Cue getting back on the bus (more passport checking) and off you go through the Ugandan countryside… Which at first seemed just like Rwanda, only less people and a lot of pigs. We also saw a goat being gutted at the roadside, lovely. The scenery changed quickly though- Ugandan hills are beautiful, green, rolling things topped with such beautiful trees. I wished we’d had the chance to stop once in awhile to take pictures; it was beautiful. But really, so many less people- Uganda has a much bigger population than Rwanda, but it’s also about 4 times the size. You haven’t seen population density until you’ve driven through rural Rwanda, let me tell you, and Uganda was quite different- definitely people around but not as much overall movement, fewer people working the fields and not nearly as many walking along the road. Lots of neat things to see out the windows though, like the roadside market stands where Ugandan women pile their fruit and vegetables up in the exact same formations, all over the south-western part of the country…. It was neat to see little red tomato pyramids in each town we passed through all the way up to Kampala. The bus ride was full of entertaining Swahili-dubbed action movies and the Boney M Christmas album (which happens to be a favourite of both Katie and I, so we enjoyed it regardless of the odd season). We arrived in Kampala around 430pm, a long nine and a half hours after we set out (Uganda is an hour ahead of Rwanda), with no Ugandan shillings, a very small map of Kampala printed from Lonely Planet’s chapter on Uganda, and only the vaguest ideas of where we ought to go. Such is travelling in Africa when you really only decided to go somewhere a day or two before.

So we set off on a walk and wound up nearly where we wanted to be- at a branch of Barclay’s bank which, charmingly, gave me shillings without charging me any service fees (thanks to a partnership with Scotiabank… nice change from the bank fees from hell that I’m charged in Kigali). From there, we wandered through a mall (supposedly Kampala’s first and still best, ha) and up to Kampala Rd, where we had supper (vegetarian pizza), investigated our surroundings a bit and wound up catching a bus toward our hostel (the Red Chilli Hideaway, recommended by the way) with the help of a nice boda-boda driver (a moto driver). So we’re on the bus and we see what we think is the right place for us to get off; this notion is supported by others on the bus when we tell them where the directions to the hostel say to go. So off we get… and wander around the area for half an hour to no avail. We call the hostel- turns out we’re not even close to being in the right place and it’s another 30 minute walk away. So we get brave and hop onto a boda-boda, without helmets (!!!) as they just hardly use them here. A big deal, even for me, the self-professed moto lover here in Kigali. Luckily it was a short ride and he drove pretty carefully; we arrived in one piece (well, two pieces, because Katie and I were on the same one… which is so illegal in Rwanda).

The guard at the hostel gate opened it, greeted us and asked us (and I quote) “Are you here to see some whites?” Took all the self-restraint we possessed to stop from cracking up on the spot. We checked in, had a berry Fanta (doesn’t exist in Rwanda and turns out that’s okay, as it wasn’t the best I’ve ever had) and dropped our things off. It was by now after 9pm, so we got ourselves looking clean and pretty and stopped in the hostel bar for a beer. When it closed, the bartender recommended we check out a club he knew called Rouge (just like one at home) so off we went. The bouncer at the club was telling us the differences between his club and the one right next door- he said the cover was cheaper there, so we thought we’d check it out. Turned out is the same price, but the bouncer there let us in for free. Thank goodness, because it wasn’t worth paying; we watched a few minutes of Big Brother Africa, checked to make sure the unconscious guy sitting across from us was still breathing, and headed over to the other club. Definitely more upscale, busy but not packed and filled with well-dressed Ugandans… and a whole lot of young white men on the prowl. I’ll save my thoughts on that for another occasion. We spent the night avoiding being chatted up by creeps (one who just wouldn’t let up for the life of him… awful) and dancing a bit. Headed home around 2am, which is, of course, closing time for clubs at home… but African clubs go strong until dawn.

Sunday morning saw us getting up and heading downtown on a few shopping missions… This shopping trip increased in necessity when Katie’s sandal broke just as we left the hostel – the only shoes she had with her. We caught a bus downtown, walked to this crazy shopping mall (just like at home, really) and took a look around. Being Sunday, a lot of places were closed… Still interesting to see I guess! More walking around in search for a used bookshop someone at the hostel told us about (closed, naturally) and a long, long walk downtown to find the bus office to buy tickets home… Of course, the office was not at all where the map thought it should be, so we ended up wandering through some… interesting… parts of Kampala.

Good to have a look around, though, and no harm done as we soon figured out where we were and where we needed to be. Tickets bought, we headed back downtown, still on foot despite Katie’s sandal, because the traffic was moving so slowly we figured we’d get there before a bus would. Had some tasty veggie burgers at a fast food restaurant on Kampala Rd and had a bit more of a wander before heading back to the hostel. Our plans to sit around the bar with a drink and a book were foiled as we met an Australian woman who we ended up hanging out with through the night; she’s applying to all sorts of primatologist/conservationist jobs in the region using Kampala as a base for now. Quite a neat woman; it never ceases to amaze me the things people do for a living! Later on, I headed out to an area called Kabalagala with some friends I’d made; this was clearly the place to be on a Sunday night. Jam-packed with people, loud music all over, tons of bars. Had a great time and good conversation, and fell into bed around 2am despite needing to be up around 6 to get ready for the bus. Monday morning was about as eventful as Sunday, as we caught a bus going generally in the direction we needed but not quite there… We ended up walking through yet another odd part of the city until we recognized the street we needed to be on and soon enough we were boarding the bus to make it back to Kigali. The ride was much more comfortable this time – we paid 5000 Ugandan shillings more but that couple of dollars was worth the extra space and comfort. Much easier getting back across the border and we now have a new 90 day visa for Rwanda… but of course our Christmas plans start on the 95th day, so we’ll need to take another trip somewhere to renew our visas again.

So Kampala was great fun, although I wish I’d had more time there to really enjoy. It was so lovely to get a break from Kigali, as I’d really been having a bit of a bad time of it lately and wasn’t feeling so great about being here. Funny though… I realized while in Kampala that I absolutely think of Kigali as ‘home’ now. I’d catch myself talking to someone or thinking to myself “Oh, at home it’s like this…” and was thinking completely of Kigali and not at all of Canada. Odd how a place becomes so much a part of you without you even realizing it.

A Numbers Game

10,548… is the number of kilometers between home and Kigali.
7,000… is the number of Francs I spent on a bus ticket to Kampala today.
5,000… is the number of Francs Katie and I are paying a taxi driver to take us to Nyabugogo bus station at 5am tomorrow.
300… is the number of Canadian dollars I have to live off of until my next stipend comes sometime in October…
142… is the number of days I have left in Rwanda.
46… is the number of schoolchildren I watched running after an FPR propaganda truck today.
19… is the number of times my internet has stopped working today.
10… is the number of hours I’ll be spending on a bus to Kampala tomorrow.
4… is the number of buses I missed this morning on my way to work.
3… is the number of cups of poorly-made coffee I’ve drank today.
3… is also the number of men I’ve seen beaten up by the police this week.
2… is the number of field visits I’ve been on since arriving here (but 0 is the number I suspect I’ll be going on in the near future).
2... is also the number of people who've called me fat since I got here.
0… is the number of new emails I had this morning (now that’s depressing).

As you may have noticed, I am off to Kampala tomorrow morning. Katie and I are braving the 10 hour bus ride at 6am tomorrow, coming back sometime on Monday, which is election day here for members of parliament and thus a holiday. We have no real plans, other than shopping a bit and seeing what kind of characters we meet at the hostel we're staying at. Adventures will be revealed when we get back!

FESPAD 2008 (from August...)

So back at the beginning of August (yes, it's taken this long to upload the videos!), the girls and I - along with Franco, the anesthesiologist from Montreal who was staying with Claire at the KHI guesthouse, and Hilaire, a Rwandan friend Claire met on her last trip to Rwanda – went to the closing ceremonies of the Festival of Pan-African Dance (FESPAD). We hadn’t managed to get to any of the other events but the closing ceremony was simply amazing.

We got there around 5pm, after a ridiculously complicated taxi ride. The performances started soon after, in a replica of the King’s Palace, complete with risers carved into the ground. The first few acts were Rwandan artists- almost all in Kinyarwanda, so it made it a little difficult to understand! The music was all very good though. It was too hard to catch the names of the artists, which was too bad as I really liked some of it… I’ll admit, mostly I liked the dancing, which was occasionally pretty ridiculous. After the modern Rwandan musicians came traditional music and dance from different African countries- all the region’s countries were represented (Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo) as well as Congo-Brazzaville, Namibia and Guinea. The group from Burundi was my absolute favourite – a group of men carrying huge drums on their heads… and actually drumming on them like that! It was amazing. Last came an hour-long performance by traditional Rwandan musicians and dancers… It was INCREDIBLE! Lots of drumming and singing, women dancing with pots and baskets, and finally the Intore dancers… It was just fantastic.

I don’t think I can describe it well enough in words, so I’ll let the videos I took do the talking. In some of them, you can’t see a whole lot- the lighting and distance made it a little bit difficult to get great shots, but at the least, the music is great.

A good old-fashioned rant.

Things I need to get used to in Rwanda…

• Spitting everywhere, by everyone. Kids, grandmothers, men in business suits – doesn’t matter who or where (although people are generally kind enough to direct it away from you). Interestingly enough, there’s a letter at least once a week in The New Times, Kigali’s primary English-language newspaper, from someone asking everyone to please stop spitting in public. I’ve unfortunately not yet met an anti-spitter…
• Somewhat related to the first point… Everyone picking their nose. It’s absolutely acceptable to pick one’s nose in the middle of a face-to-face conversation with someone else, and acceptable still to flick whatever you’ve pulled out of your nose toward the shoes of your companion… I’m still finding it shockingly hard to keep a straight face when whomever I’m speaking to starts digging around…
• Also about snot: people blowing their noses everywhere… onto the ground. The funniest I’ve seen was a man using his handkerchief to hold one nostril closed while he launched snot out the other onto the sidewalk. Katie wins, however, because she saw people blowing their noses off the side of a pool one day. Classic.
• Still related to bodily functions and fluids… The sheer number of men I’ve seen peeing all over the place. On the sides of buildings, next to the street (more often than not facing traffic), in the middle of the sidewalk. I’ve watched men of all ages zipping back up along the roadside. This is definitely a gendered activity, as I’ve not seen any women squatting wherever they please. Needless to say, I’ve seen an awful lot of penises here...
• Everyone’s desire to touch me all the time. It’s never a harassment thing (and in fact, it’s split 50-50 between men and women doing it) so it technically isn’t a problem… but it is interesting. I’ve had women slipping their arms around my waist casually while we’re waiting to get on the bus, men rubbing my arm (one was kind enough to explain it was because as a child, he thought that when you rubbed at white skin, it came off), and children running their hands through my hair. They don’t need to know me (and often don’t); it’s just considered acceptable to touch the muzungu.

I decided over lunch a few days ago that I needed to write a bit of a rant. A lot of the time, my blog entries and my emails home are about all these amazing things about Rwanda – and there are so many amazing things, really. I’m lucky to be here, and I love living here, for all the quirks and things I’ve had to adapt to (like showering out of a bucket, whacking cockroaches with shoes, and having to wash my feet about 60 million times a day so I don’t look as dirty as I am). Most of the time, I wake up happy that I’m here, even if I’m not terribly happy about heading to work unshowered in wrinkled clothes on a 25 minute bus ride. The problem is that through the course of the day, some things just start to wear at me. Another volunteer in Rwanda described living here on her blog as being in a permanent state of PMS, and I’d have to say that’s fairly apt most of the time, as I can swing from loving Rwanda and everyone I meet to feeling like I’m going to turn around and smack the next person who lets muzungu slip out of their mouth.

The worst of my frustrations can be put into two categories, as follows:

• Men. I almost feel like not bothering to explain as any woman who’s travelled through Africa will likely understand, and everyone else can probably make the leap to understanding quite easily. I meet a lot of men here – for a population where women outnumber the men (one of the many consequences of the genocide and subsequent imprisonment of a large number of men, there are roughly 88 men for every 100 women), I meet perhaps 10 men to every 1 woman. Perhaps “encounter” is a better word than “meet,” because so often these meetings take the following form:
  o Man (or group of men) on sidewalk/sitting outside a building/guarding a parking lot/guiding people onto the buses/you name it: “Muzungu! Hey, sister! Hey, hey! Bonjour! Good morning! How are you? Sister, sister, come here. Where are you coming from? Your name? Muzungu! Tst tst tst [this ridiculous hissing noise Rwandese use to get someone’s attention, be it a waitress, moto driver, or white girl] Muzungu! Where are you going? Sister, how are you?” and on and on and on.
  o Me: Usually an awkward, tight smile, a nod or if they’ve not hissed or used muzungu to get my attention, I’ll generally politely answer their questions or say “hi.”
  I’m always torn. I don’t want to be rude, but I also don’t want to encourage the unwanted attention, so I generally resort to the least contact as possible without actually being rude or ignoring them. I just get so tired of the constant stream of attention and would give anything to blend into the background most of the time; it just gets old hearing the same thing day in, day out, over and over and over. Part of me keeps trying to remind myself that while I’ve heard it a million times already today, it’s rarely the same guy trying to talk to me over and over, so I shouldn’t get so annoyed with it… But at the same time, they’re all aware of how many times I and every other expat woman hears it. Also tiresome, the constant demand for my phone number. Originally I was giving out my Rwandese friend, David’s, phone number as a ploy to avoid unwanted calls… The problem is that Rwandese often have a habit of ‘beeping’ your number when you give it to them, to check if it’s the right number or not. Having been a bit embarrassed by this before, I’ve given in and give my number, usually taking care to save theirs into my contact list with something that tells me if it’s someone I’d ever want to speak to again. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve met a lot of great people (men included) and have begun to make some friends and contacts that are really nice and sincere people. But I’m also getting chatted up regularly by men of all ages (coming back from lunch when I wrote this the other day, a man in his 40s started talking to me from the balcony of the building next door… Could barely understand him and yet he still asked for my number. Worse still, he works right next door, so avoiding him may become a daily activity). I just would like some peace once in awhile.
• Children. I wrote before about how difficult it is to see mothers with young infants and toddlers begging on the streets, especially when the children are the ones with their hands out. It’s still hard to see, and it still occasionally makes me struggle inside a bit with my no-money policy. Luckily, the sheer numbers of painfully obnoxious children who beg from me regularly just for sport snap me back out of that struggle. There are the kids who beg because they have to, and you can tell those ones from a mile away – the kids wearing discarded winter jackets for clothes, barefoot and still out on the street at midnight. Interestingly enough, they’ve been some of the most polite kids I’ve met here. Then there are the kids who are just plain awful, really. The kids who will see me coming up the street and yell “Muzungu! Give me money! Donnez-moi l’argent!” It’s so frustrating! This happens multiple times a day and it never gets any less tiresome. The worst was Saturday when Katie and I were in the new grocery store that opened up downtown. A little girl, maybe about ten and very well-dressed with packets of cookies in her hand, stopped to talk to me. It started out pretty innocently- a “bonjour, comment ca va? Comment t’appelle tu?” etc. And then “Donnez-moi l’argent!” It just blew my mind. I hate that I’m seen as this infinite source of money – when in fact I’m here volunteering and my monthly stipend is less than what my coworkers earn. I get that a lot of the time, whites who are working here do have quite a bit of money, and I get that other people have set a bad precedent in giving kids money/candy/pens/you name it… but I do have such a firm stance against it as a whole and I really dislike the kids who expect you to hand over whatever you have happily because they demanded it. I think it’s the expectation that really does me in, as the children who ask politely rarely grate on my nerves like this. From the street kids downtown, it’s a pretty regular chorus of “Cent francs a manger” (100 Francs to eat) but more often than not, they’re the ones who back down quickly when you say no and more often than not will tell you to have a good day as you walk on.

I’ve had a difficult few days lately – feeling a little overwhelmed by the constant attention, struggling with language barriers and just generally feeling a bit cranky (let’s blame the heat, shall we?) and writing it all out makes it seem so much less of a big deal… And really, it isn’t. It’s good to know though that even when I forget why I’m here and start to wish I was back home, the people who know me best think I’m exactly where I should be and are there to remind me (thanks, Chris!).