Sunday, April 18, 2010
In the meanwhile ....
Alfred: Well, after his last entry, Ruairí seems to be finding it difficult to restart his more usual, light-hearted and what he considers to be humourous entries (isn’t there a proper English equivalent for ‘quotidienne’?). So I guess it’s up to me to get the ball rolling again with a more general update. Since Genocide Memorial Day he has been at work, then down to Bujumbura for the weekend (that definitely needs an entry all to itself, if only to describe the night-club and the astonishing, unbelievable fact that Ruairí actually wore togs and got into a swimming pool – amazing what can happen when two stunningly beautiful girls in bikinis are in there calling you, eh?), then up to Kigali to do In-Country Training for the new volunteers. Meanwhile we have volunteers stuck abroad waiting to return and family visiting here who can’t get home because some Icelandic volcano farted and apparently planes have a very sensitive sense of smell. Makes you wonder what the Icelanders will do next to mess us around!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Genocide Memorial Day
This is a long one, but do read it through!
The usual confusion attended the preparations for today – yesterday at work I was asking where was everyone going or which ceremony would they be attending and no-one seemed sure. So I figured I would either be told where to go or I would go to the local one in my sector. One of my good friends at work, Sylver Chris, was going to the ceremony at Kabuye where I had been last year and there was one outside my local church where 2,500 people were massacred and are buried in a mass grave opposite the church’s main door. This last would have been the most local and where the people I live amidst would mostly be going but I have to admit I was a bit nervous of being there with no-one I knew well (all the friends I have made are work colleagues and they virtually all live in Butare, not the village).
Anyway, I heard that the official District ceremony was being held in Save sector beside a lake. The government had announced that all official District ceremonies were to commemorate those killed and dumped into lakes and rivers, many of whose bodies were never found. I rang my faithful moto driver Alexis – he hadn’t been going to work that day but agreed to take me in to Butare to meet my colleagues if we could go really early in the morning: he said he’d pick me up at 0640. I felt a bit bad as he obviously wasn’t comfortable about working on that day but …
Today morning I woke up even before my 0520 alarm went off – NOT a day to be late! I boiled TWO kettles to have a thorough hot shower and had a big breakfast – you never know at the best of times when you will get a chance to eat again and today promised to be even more unpredictable than usual. It was an absolutely stunningly beautiful morning, clear already at 0600, all the peaks visible as far away to the north as Nyanza but all the valleys in between them still swimming in mist. At 0615 Alexis rang to see if I was ready. Panic – I had one sock on and my dressing gown! Luckily, he was just leaving his house and wanted to be sure I was going to be ready for him!
Threw on my suit (dry-cleaned the previous weekend in Kigali, then stuffed into my rucksack and then hung up here hoping the creases would fall out) and put my tie in my pocket – Rwandans really dress up for these occasions and you do not want to be seen to be showing disrespect. Threw an umbrella, poncho, Palm Pilot (reading material) and notebook into my small backpack and wandered outside to wait for Alexis.
It was still only 0630 and everything was really quiet – which is not usual, things kick off here around 0530 and by 0630 the street would be quite busy. I stood among the coffee bushes beside our house looking again at that beautiful view, the mist now burning away and the mountain peaks becoming clearer. The only people about were an elderly man who came wandering up through the coffee bushes from the valley below and greeted me with the usual ‘Amahoro’ that older people use in preference to ‘Muraho’ or ‘Mwaramutse’ (‘Amahoro’ means ‘peace’). Up the road one of my elderly neighbours was sweeping the area in front of the house and waved to me. I wondered what they were thinking – the older people here in this area were almost all living here during the genocide and some of them came here as refugees from Burundi in 1972 when 200,000 – 300,000 Hutus were killed following an attempted coup against the Tutsi government there.
A little further up the road, a dog was playing with her puppy in the middle of the road. Dogs are common in my village and I rarely notice them anymore, though my visitors always remark on them – elsewhere in Rwanda, dogs are scarce and distrusted. Virtually every dog in the country was killed after the Genocide as they were feeding on the dead bodies and people feared they had developed a taste for human flesh. But this morning, with memories of all I had read and seen running through my head (and, to be frank, feeling more than a little nervous about what lay ahead), they didn’t seem as playful and innocent as usual.
Alexis turned up at 0640 on the dot and, apart from one or two pleasantries at the beginning, was silent throughout the trip. However, as I paid him, he told me to be sure to ring him if I found myself stranded in Butare after the ceremony, there being no public transport today and few or no moto drivers working.
So, here I was in Butare at 0700. I wandered up the town and ran into my chargé, Alexis, and two other co-workers. A few places were still open and buses running but everything was due to shut down completely at 0800, which it did. And so we stood around, silently, no-one knowing exactly how we were supposed to get to the site. I glanced through a copy of the Guardian Weekly and wandered up and down the pavement, too wound up to sit down in the bus office like the rest. Then I heard shouting in the distance. Further up the road, near the Matar Supermarket, a thin middle-aged man, barefoot and in ragged, filthy clothes, was shouting incoherently at no-one, stopping after every three or four minutes to catch his breath before launching into another passionate diatribe against whatever. I wasn’t the only one feeling nervous about him, as I could see from the faces and demeanour of other passers-by but he stayed up the far end of the street.
Around 0830 a bus appeared and we got on. And sat there. As we sat, I noticed over the roof of the Hotel Faucon, where I had been standing, a massive black cloud had appeared and was bearing down on us quite quickly. Within two minutes, we were in the middle of a torrential downpour, it was dark and a river was pouring down the main street, while the few people caught in the open scattered under awnings and doorways. One bicycle shot down the main street, a man pedalling frantically and swerving madly, his little son hanging onto the back for dear life and laughing hysterically! Away to the north, where we were headed, the clouds were wispier but I could see their beefier, angry cousins muscling up behind them. Not a good omen.
And so we sit there, the rain hammering on the roof like a machine-gun, most of us wearing our purple scarves (symbol of commemorating the genocide) and arguing as to whether we should head off or wait longer. I’ve now been in Butare two hours and have succeeded in boarding a stationary bus. It is a measure, it occurs to me, of how well I have acclimatized to Rwanda that this doesn’t really bother me at all, even knowing it may be another two hours before we actually ever get anywhere.
Half an hour later we are parked in a different part of town where some other district workers may be coming to join us. And eventually they do and we actually set off for the site at 0950! It is very near Butare but accessible by a small muddy track on which a bus has got stuck while trying to come up. Our driver gets out with a real no-nonsense expression on his face and, within two minutes, the unfortunate driver of the other vehicle is reversing all the way back down while our guy drives down within about three feet of the other car’s front bumper! Eventually we pass him and drive/slide the rest of the way down with a sheer drop on our right hand side. Certainly took my mind off the other things that were worrying me!
So, here we are. Now what? Well, apparently the large tent that had been set up that morning was in the wrong place, too far from the room that would be used for those who needed medical attention during the day. So about thirty men picked the whole thing up bodily and intact and marched it about 100 metres and re-erected it. Quite impressive actually. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how to put my triangle of purple material around my neck – it seemed a lot smaller than everyone else’s and I have a large neck! Managed it eventually but was convinced I looked stupid (I did try to take some pics of myself with my phone and then prayed that I didn’t actually look like that). There were still surprisingly few people around, a fact that worried the colleagues with me, but there were three other abazungu that I had never seen before (turned out later that two of them were trauma counsellors, never found out who the third one was).
By about 1100 people began to stream in. The town of Save is over the hill from the lake and a procession of people ran along each of them, many of them carrying brightly coloured umbrellas against the blazing sun (yes, blazing sun – that’s Rwanda for you; by now it was stiflingly hot), four multicoloured snakes slowly winding their way towards us. Police took up positions beside the lake to intercept anyone who might try and throw themselves in, including one tiny little policewoman carrying an enormous automatic rifle, the only armed police officer I could see.
As we waited, Alexis told me more about what had happened here. The lake (‘reservoir’ would be a better word) had been created years before the genocide by a missionary (called ‘Disha’ I think) to irrigate the nearby rice fields. In 1994, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women and children were herded here and killed. Most of them were tied up or tied to each other and then thrown into the water. Others were held while their children were tied together and thrown in and then allowed to jump in after them and try to save them. The few who crawled out were butchered and their bodies thrown back in. Unlike other massacres, such as at Kabuye, there were no known survivors others than those that had managed to escape on the way: in other cases, where people were hacked or bludgeoned to death, some survived because they were not actually dead or were simply buried so far under the bodies they were missed. But it’s quite a big lake, there was plenty of space for everyone to drown.
Later, some bodies were recovered but, given the nature of the chaos and the length of time it took for recovery efforts to start, many of the bodies had sunk to the bottom of the lake and were never recovered. There is always talk of draining the entire lake and recovering the remains but it would be a mammoth task and no-one seems to believe it will ever happen. I spoke to one woman who was introduced to me as the head of an organisation called (I think) ‘Les Escapes’, representing those who had lost their families or their parents in this massacre – her husband and all her children are somewhere at the bottom of this lake.
When the procession arrived (all four snakes having amalgamated into one giant snake) singing a hymn, we all stood and then the actual ceremony began. First there was a throwing of bunches of flowers and flower petals into the lake which, I was slowly beginning to realise, was one huge tomb. The Executive Secretary, Eugène, beckoned me over and told me I was to take part in this too. As I went over to the lakeside, a small, pretty but blank-faced girl in a traditional Rwandan outfit held out a peace-basket full of wonderfully-scented flower petals. It smelled just like a woman’s perfume and, after I had sprinkled them over the lake and was walking back to my seat, I could still smell the perfume on my hand as if I had just caressed someone’s cheek.
Last year I attended the ceremony at Kabuye where 40,000 perished in appalling circumstances but, for some reason the underground mass tomb on the hillside didn’t have a huge effect on me. Looking at the beautiful lake, lying between the sweeping hills on a beautiful sunny day, sitting with my friends and colleagues, smelling the faint traces of perfume on my hand, looking at the crowd of men, women and children gathered round me and realising just what lay below the surface of the calm, green waters – it was the first time I really felt the full horror of it all. For a while, every woman or child I looked at I could see tied up, ready to be tossed or rolled into the lake’s waters until the entire surface became covered in struggling or still bodies.
And then the screaming started. The first speaker was a young man, the only survivor of his family. He told (I think as it wasn’t the kind of account that Alexis could translate literally) of how he watched from a hiding place as the rest of his family were tied up and thrown in, and he named those who he saw doing it. As he was halfway through, a woman on my right started screaming and threw herself on the ground – this is a common occurrence at these ceremonies – and was carried by four people over to the nearby tin hut that had been set up especially for people needing attention. As I looked around, I realised that it wasn’t just me that was feeling jittery: so were a large proportion of the people around me. I figured they would be used to this kind of thing by now, but I realised that inside everyone around me the same feelings of loss, hurt, anger and grief were struggling to get out and were barely being kept under control. And, of course, for years upon years, this ceremony had been held at Kabuye, in a relatively familiar setting with a proper grave and with a strong religious component. Here, there was no escaping the raw immediacy of what lay in front of you and, for the first time, I noticed how many people in the crowd had contrived to sit so that they weren’t looking directly at the lake.
Over on my left, one of my colleagues from work (one of only three survivors of his family) was wiping tears from his eyes with his purple neck-scarf. In front of me a nun was sitting, plump, aged about thirty-five, blue habit and white head-dress. Her fists were clenched hard, the nails biting so hard into her palms I expected to see blood running down. Every few minutes she would jerk her head up as if she were going to scream and then, with an effort of will so strong you could actually feel it, she would force her feelings, and her head, back down. On each side of her, her sisters kept an eye as unobtrusively as possible, ready to jump in and help, or else try and stop her in case she bring embarrassment on the order by a public show of grief.
All through the ceremony, a steady stream of people are carried to the hut, some sobbing quietly, some screaming, some stupefied or unconscious. Being a tin hut, the screams of those who continue after they have been brought in reverberate, sometimes almost drowning out the voices of those speaking outside. Strangely, when we stand for a minute’s silence at midday, they fall quiet, only some quiet sobbing and one woman talking to herself breaking the silence.
Then we switch over to a radio broadcast – it is supposed to be the president but the radio, or whatever, like everything else in Rwanda, is running late. We are treated to a choir, a folk group and various other strange musical offerings, none of which sound particularly Rwandan and all of them delivered through a poorly-tuned radio placed next to a defective microphone hooked up to an antiquated speaker system set at ultra-loud. People were getting bored now, checking on their mobile phones, trying to fight off sleep (as I was myself, it was incredibly hot). And then I heard the most appalling noise, far different from the screams earlier – like someone’s throat being ripped out, a howl of sheer and utter desperation that didn’t sound even remotely human. Everyone froze and, as I looked around, I could see a wave of that same unspeakable sorrow wash over everyone around me, a mini-tsunami of anguish and pain. Some people winced, some wept, some jumped to their feet, some buried their faces in their hands, others just looked grim and sat there impassively. The inhuman screams continue, without a break, fading gradually as the woman is carried away, not to the recovery hut but towards the main road as someone has already called an ambulance.
The master of ceremonies had had the presence of mind to switch off the radio when this happened; now he switched it back on but realised we were still quite a way off the president’s speech, so decided it was time for the ‘religious bit’. This turned out to be two quite brief prayers (well, brief by Rwandan standards) – one by an elderly pastor, delivered with verve and gusto and much waving of a battered black bible, the other by a Catholic priest which was a succession of prayers with a sung response which was rather nice and helped to calm down the atmosphere.
The it was back to the radio – apparently the President’s speech was near but we had some more music, ballads about the genocide which I can only describe as a Rwandan version of a cross between Clannad and Enya. Through this all, more women being carried through, wailing and screaming, a few emerging later, drained, subdued, often embarrassed. A woman in the front of the crowd directly opposite me suddenly collapsed, moaning and thrashing her arms about. I noticed how efficiently the people around her dealt with her – one woman wrapped a loose piece of material around the lower parts of her legs so she would not be exposed while being carried while two men gripped her arms, pinned them to her body and lifted her off the ground. As they did so a fourth woman quickly removed her shoes so they wouldn’t fall off and be lost, then turned around to pick up the woman’s other possessions and followed her into the hut.
And then it was time for the President’s speech, a large part of which was in English, to my surprise. It was a good speech – Alexis translated the Kinyarwanda parts virtually verbatim (and I have to stop here and say how impressed I am by Alexis’ English, which was virtually non-existent when I came and now he is doing simultaneous translation from Kinyarwandan into comprehensible English - outstanding!) and it was good stuff, typical Kagame. He spoke of remembrance and of forgiveness…. For those that wanted to be forgiven. He spoke of being ready to co-operate and work with those who wanted to help, but if anyone wanted a fight, the Rwandans would give them a fight they would never forget. “We use our anger to give us the strength to build our future, to build the Rwanda our people deserve.” Some fairly blunt comments about criticisms of freedom of speech and a few shots at the putative opposition presidential candidate, Victoire Ingabire. Finished with a phrase that had me thinking – ‘my commitment to Rwanda is a life-long one’.
And that was it. I went down to the edge of the lake for a last look, standing among the eight girls in the traditional costumes, each of them (I now knew) a survivor of a family most of whom had died here. There is something deeply upsetting about a beautiful setting where something terrible has happened – you look at the calm water, with ripples where fish are moving about, the wooded shores, the steep terraced hillsides covered in yellow flowers, sorghum, avocado trees and winding red paths and to your right the long valley of rice fields stretching into the distance until the valley curves to the right and vanishes. And you try and imagine what it was like on that evening in April sixteen years ago, and equally hard try not to imagine it.
And now it is 2236 and I am sitting at my laptop trying to put this into words and I am crying, crying for the first time that I can remember in I don’t know how long. And I am crying because for the first time I could feel, feel within me the hurt and loss and pain and anguish of my friends, the people I have come to know and love since I came here.
And I am crying because I still don’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand what happened here, no more than the Rwandans themselves understand.
And I am crying because I can still see the blank expression in that girl’s eyes when she handed me the flowers to throw on her family’s grave.
And most of all I am crying because I can still smell the perfume on my hand. And I don’t know why that makes me cry, but it does.
The usual confusion attended the preparations for today – yesterday at work I was asking where was everyone going or which ceremony would they be attending and no-one seemed sure. So I figured I would either be told where to go or I would go to the local one in my sector. One of my good friends at work, Sylver Chris, was going to the ceremony at Kabuye where I had been last year and there was one outside my local church where 2,500 people were massacred and are buried in a mass grave opposite the church’s main door. This last would have been the most local and where the people I live amidst would mostly be going but I have to admit I was a bit nervous of being there with no-one I knew well (all the friends I have made are work colleagues and they virtually all live in Butare, not the village).
Anyway, I heard that the official District ceremony was being held in Save sector beside a lake. The government had announced that all official District ceremonies were to commemorate those killed and dumped into lakes and rivers, many of whose bodies were never found. I rang my faithful moto driver Alexis – he hadn’t been going to work that day but agreed to take me in to Butare to meet my colleagues if we could go really early in the morning: he said he’d pick me up at 0640. I felt a bit bad as he obviously wasn’t comfortable about working on that day but …
Today morning I woke up even before my 0520 alarm went off – NOT a day to be late! I boiled TWO kettles to have a thorough hot shower and had a big breakfast – you never know at the best of times when you will get a chance to eat again and today promised to be even more unpredictable than usual. It was an absolutely stunningly beautiful morning, clear already at 0600, all the peaks visible as far away to the north as Nyanza but all the valleys in between them still swimming in mist. At 0615 Alexis rang to see if I was ready. Panic – I had one sock on and my dressing gown! Luckily, he was just leaving his house and wanted to be sure I was going to be ready for him!
Threw on my suit (dry-cleaned the previous weekend in Kigali, then stuffed into my rucksack and then hung up here hoping the creases would fall out) and put my tie in my pocket – Rwandans really dress up for these occasions and you do not want to be seen to be showing disrespect. Threw an umbrella, poncho, Palm Pilot (reading material) and notebook into my small backpack and wandered outside to wait for Alexis.
It was still only 0630 and everything was really quiet – which is not usual, things kick off here around 0530 and by 0630 the street would be quite busy. I stood among the coffee bushes beside our house looking again at that beautiful view, the mist now burning away and the mountain peaks becoming clearer. The only people about were an elderly man who came wandering up through the coffee bushes from the valley below and greeted me with the usual ‘Amahoro’ that older people use in preference to ‘Muraho’ or ‘Mwaramutse’ (‘Amahoro’ means ‘peace’). Up the road one of my elderly neighbours was sweeping the area in front of the house and waved to me. I wondered what they were thinking – the older people here in this area were almost all living here during the genocide and some of them came here as refugees from Burundi in 1972 when 200,000 – 300,000 Hutus were killed following an attempted coup against the Tutsi government there.
A little further up the road, a dog was playing with her puppy in the middle of the road. Dogs are common in my village and I rarely notice them anymore, though my visitors always remark on them – elsewhere in Rwanda, dogs are scarce and distrusted. Virtually every dog in the country was killed after the Genocide as they were feeding on the dead bodies and people feared they had developed a taste for human flesh. But this morning, with memories of all I had read and seen running through my head (and, to be frank, feeling more than a little nervous about what lay ahead), they didn’t seem as playful and innocent as usual.
Alexis turned up at 0640 on the dot and, apart from one or two pleasantries at the beginning, was silent throughout the trip. However, as I paid him, he told me to be sure to ring him if I found myself stranded in Butare after the ceremony, there being no public transport today and few or no moto drivers working.
So, here I was in Butare at 0700. I wandered up the town and ran into my chargé, Alexis, and two other co-workers. A few places were still open and buses running but everything was due to shut down completely at 0800, which it did. And so we stood around, silently, no-one knowing exactly how we were supposed to get to the site. I glanced through a copy of the Guardian Weekly and wandered up and down the pavement, too wound up to sit down in the bus office like the rest. Then I heard shouting in the distance. Further up the road, near the Matar Supermarket, a thin middle-aged man, barefoot and in ragged, filthy clothes, was shouting incoherently at no-one, stopping after every three or four minutes to catch his breath before launching into another passionate diatribe against whatever. I wasn’t the only one feeling nervous about him, as I could see from the faces and demeanour of other passers-by but he stayed up the far end of the street.
Around 0830 a bus appeared and we got on. And sat there. As we sat, I noticed over the roof of the Hotel Faucon, where I had been standing, a massive black cloud had appeared and was bearing down on us quite quickly. Within two minutes, we were in the middle of a torrential downpour, it was dark and a river was pouring down the main street, while the few people caught in the open scattered under awnings and doorways. One bicycle shot down the main street, a man pedalling frantically and swerving madly, his little son hanging onto the back for dear life and laughing hysterically! Away to the north, where we were headed, the clouds were wispier but I could see their beefier, angry cousins muscling up behind them. Not a good omen.
And so we sit there, the rain hammering on the roof like a machine-gun, most of us wearing our purple scarves (symbol of commemorating the genocide) and arguing as to whether we should head off or wait longer. I’ve now been in Butare two hours and have succeeded in boarding a stationary bus. It is a measure, it occurs to me, of how well I have acclimatized to Rwanda that this doesn’t really bother me at all, even knowing it may be another two hours before we actually ever get anywhere.
Half an hour later we are parked in a different part of town where some other district workers may be coming to join us. And eventually they do and we actually set off for the site at 0950! It is very near Butare but accessible by a small muddy track on which a bus has got stuck while trying to come up. Our driver gets out with a real no-nonsense expression on his face and, within two minutes, the unfortunate driver of the other vehicle is reversing all the way back down while our guy drives down within about three feet of the other car’s front bumper! Eventually we pass him and drive/slide the rest of the way down with a sheer drop on our right hand side. Certainly took my mind off the other things that were worrying me!
So, here we are. Now what? Well, apparently the large tent that had been set up that morning was in the wrong place, too far from the room that would be used for those who needed medical attention during the day. So about thirty men picked the whole thing up bodily and intact and marched it about 100 metres and re-erected it. Quite impressive actually. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how to put my triangle of purple material around my neck – it seemed a lot smaller than everyone else’s and I have a large neck! Managed it eventually but was convinced I looked stupid (I did try to take some pics of myself with my phone and then prayed that I didn’t actually look like that). There were still surprisingly few people around, a fact that worried the colleagues with me, but there were three other abazungu that I had never seen before (turned out later that two of them were trauma counsellors, never found out who the third one was).
By about 1100 people began to stream in. The town of Save is over the hill from the lake and a procession of people ran along each of them, many of them carrying brightly coloured umbrellas against the blazing sun (yes, blazing sun – that’s Rwanda for you; by now it was stiflingly hot), four multicoloured snakes slowly winding their way towards us. Police took up positions beside the lake to intercept anyone who might try and throw themselves in, including one tiny little policewoman carrying an enormous automatic rifle, the only armed police officer I could see.
As we waited, Alexis told me more about what had happened here. The lake (‘reservoir’ would be a better word) had been created years before the genocide by a missionary (called ‘Disha’ I think) to irrigate the nearby rice fields. In 1994, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women and children were herded here and killed. Most of them were tied up or tied to each other and then thrown into the water. Others were held while their children were tied together and thrown in and then allowed to jump in after them and try to save them. The few who crawled out were butchered and their bodies thrown back in. Unlike other massacres, such as at Kabuye, there were no known survivors others than those that had managed to escape on the way: in other cases, where people were hacked or bludgeoned to death, some survived because they were not actually dead or were simply buried so far under the bodies they were missed. But it’s quite a big lake, there was plenty of space for everyone to drown.
Later, some bodies were recovered but, given the nature of the chaos and the length of time it took for recovery efforts to start, many of the bodies had sunk to the bottom of the lake and were never recovered. There is always talk of draining the entire lake and recovering the remains but it would be a mammoth task and no-one seems to believe it will ever happen. I spoke to one woman who was introduced to me as the head of an organisation called (I think) ‘Les Escapes’, representing those who had lost their families or their parents in this massacre – her husband and all her children are somewhere at the bottom of this lake.
When the procession arrived (all four snakes having amalgamated into one giant snake) singing a hymn, we all stood and then the actual ceremony began. First there was a throwing of bunches of flowers and flower petals into the lake which, I was slowly beginning to realise, was one huge tomb. The Executive Secretary, Eugène, beckoned me over and told me I was to take part in this too. As I went over to the lakeside, a small, pretty but blank-faced girl in a traditional Rwandan outfit held out a peace-basket full of wonderfully-scented flower petals. It smelled just like a woman’s perfume and, after I had sprinkled them over the lake and was walking back to my seat, I could still smell the perfume on my hand as if I had just caressed someone’s cheek.
Last year I attended the ceremony at Kabuye where 40,000 perished in appalling circumstances but, for some reason the underground mass tomb on the hillside didn’t have a huge effect on me. Looking at the beautiful lake, lying between the sweeping hills on a beautiful sunny day, sitting with my friends and colleagues, smelling the faint traces of perfume on my hand, looking at the crowd of men, women and children gathered round me and realising just what lay below the surface of the calm, green waters – it was the first time I really felt the full horror of it all. For a while, every woman or child I looked at I could see tied up, ready to be tossed or rolled into the lake’s waters until the entire surface became covered in struggling or still bodies.
And then the screaming started. The first speaker was a young man, the only survivor of his family. He told (I think as it wasn’t the kind of account that Alexis could translate literally) of how he watched from a hiding place as the rest of his family were tied up and thrown in, and he named those who he saw doing it. As he was halfway through, a woman on my right started screaming and threw herself on the ground – this is a common occurrence at these ceremonies – and was carried by four people over to the nearby tin hut that had been set up especially for people needing attention. As I looked around, I realised that it wasn’t just me that was feeling jittery: so were a large proportion of the people around me. I figured they would be used to this kind of thing by now, but I realised that inside everyone around me the same feelings of loss, hurt, anger and grief were struggling to get out and were barely being kept under control. And, of course, for years upon years, this ceremony had been held at Kabuye, in a relatively familiar setting with a proper grave and with a strong religious component. Here, there was no escaping the raw immediacy of what lay in front of you and, for the first time, I noticed how many people in the crowd had contrived to sit so that they weren’t looking directly at the lake.
Over on my left, one of my colleagues from work (one of only three survivors of his family) was wiping tears from his eyes with his purple neck-scarf. In front of me a nun was sitting, plump, aged about thirty-five, blue habit and white head-dress. Her fists were clenched hard, the nails biting so hard into her palms I expected to see blood running down. Every few minutes she would jerk her head up as if she were going to scream and then, with an effort of will so strong you could actually feel it, she would force her feelings, and her head, back down. On each side of her, her sisters kept an eye as unobtrusively as possible, ready to jump in and help, or else try and stop her in case she bring embarrassment on the order by a public show of grief.
All through the ceremony, a steady stream of people are carried to the hut, some sobbing quietly, some screaming, some stupefied or unconscious. Being a tin hut, the screams of those who continue after they have been brought in reverberate, sometimes almost drowning out the voices of those speaking outside. Strangely, when we stand for a minute’s silence at midday, they fall quiet, only some quiet sobbing and one woman talking to herself breaking the silence.
Then we switch over to a radio broadcast – it is supposed to be the president but the radio, or whatever, like everything else in Rwanda, is running late. We are treated to a choir, a folk group and various other strange musical offerings, none of which sound particularly Rwandan and all of them delivered through a poorly-tuned radio placed next to a defective microphone hooked up to an antiquated speaker system set at ultra-loud. People were getting bored now, checking on their mobile phones, trying to fight off sleep (as I was myself, it was incredibly hot). And then I heard the most appalling noise, far different from the screams earlier – like someone’s throat being ripped out, a howl of sheer and utter desperation that didn’t sound even remotely human. Everyone froze and, as I looked around, I could see a wave of that same unspeakable sorrow wash over everyone around me, a mini-tsunami of anguish and pain. Some people winced, some wept, some jumped to their feet, some buried their faces in their hands, others just looked grim and sat there impassively. The inhuman screams continue, without a break, fading gradually as the woman is carried away, not to the recovery hut but towards the main road as someone has already called an ambulance.
The master of ceremonies had had the presence of mind to switch off the radio when this happened; now he switched it back on but realised we were still quite a way off the president’s speech, so decided it was time for the ‘religious bit’. This turned out to be two quite brief prayers (well, brief by Rwandan standards) – one by an elderly pastor, delivered with verve and gusto and much waving of a battered black bible, the other by a Catholic priest which was a succession of prayers with a sung response which was rather nice and helped to calm down the atmosphere.
The it was back to the radio – apparently the President’s speech was near but we had some more music, ballads about the genocide which I can only describe as a Rwandan version of a cross between Clannad and Enya. Through this all, more women being carried through, wailing and screaming, a few emerging later, drained, subdued, often embarrassed. A woman in the front of the crowd directly opposite me suddenly collapsed, moaning and thrashing her arms about. I noticed how efficiently the people around her dealt with her – one woman wrapped a loose piece of material around the lower parts of her legs so she would not be exposed while being carried while two men gripped her arms, pinned them to her body and lifted her off the ground. As they did so a fourth woman quickly removed her shoes so they wouldn’t fall off and be lost, then turned around to pick up the woman’s other possessions and followed her into the hut.
And then it was time for the President’s speech, a large part of which was in English, to my surprise. It was a good speech – Alexis translated the Kinyarwanda parts virtually verbatim (and I have to stop here and say how impressed I am by Alexis’ English, which was virtually non-existent when I came and now he is doing simultaneous translation from Kinyarwandan into comprehensible English - outstanding!) and it was good stuff, typical Kagame. He spoke of remembrance and of forgiveness…. For those that wanted to be forgiven. He spoke of being ready to co-operate and work with those who wanted to help, but if anyone wanted a fight, the Rwandans would give them a fight they would never forget. “We use our anger to give us the strength to build our future, to build the Rwanda our people deserve.” Some fairly blunt comments about criticisms of freedom of speech and a few shots at the putative opposition presidential candidate, Victoire Ingabire. Finished with a phrase that had me thinking – ‘my commitment to Rwanda is a life-long one’.
And that was it. I went down to the edge of the lake for a last look, standing among the eight girls in the traditional costumes, each of them (I now knew) a survivor of a family most of whom had died here. There is something deeply upsetting about a beautiful setting where something terrible has happened – you look at the calm water, with ripples where fish are moving about, the wooded shores, the steep terraced hillsides covered in yellow flowers, sorghum, avocado trees and winding red paths and to your right the long valley of rice fields stretching into the distance until the valley curves to the right and vanishes. And you try and imagine what it was like on that evening in April sixteen years ago, and equally hard try not to imagine it.
And now it is 2236 and I am sitting at my laptop trying to put this into words and I am crying, crying for the first time that I can remember in I don’t know how long. And I am crying because for the first time I could feel, feel within me the hurt and loss and pain and anguish of my friends, the people I have come to know and love since I came here.
And I am crying because I still don’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand what happened here, no more than the Rwandans themselves understand.
And I am crying because I can still see the blank expression in that girl’s eyes when she handed me the flowers to throw on her family’s grave.
And most of all I am crying because I can still smell the perfume on my hand. And I don’t know why that makes me cry, but it does.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Massive March/April blog update Part One
It is now April 6th and I haven’t written a blog of any serious sort since March 16th!! Sorry all round but it does mean you are in for a bit of a marathon this time round! Feel free to skim (Alfred: Emm, I don’t think they need, or have ever needed your permission for that). Oh, and I can’t absolutely vouch for the chronological order of events at this stage – I know various things happened at weekends, but not exactly which weekends they were!
‘L’ and ‘R’
I wrote on Facebook recently about this. I visited a Science class a few weeks ago and written on the board was the following that the class were busily (Alfred: ‘busily’ is a bit of an exaggeration) writing down as part of their module on human reproduction: ‘Every man has two testicules shaped like uggs ….. The penis must be elected before intercourse can take place.’ My cousin in the USA said this latter must be a Bill Clinton reference. It reminded me of another incident involving the same confusion of ‘R’ and ‘L’ when a VSO staff member was informed by the students that they couldn’t come to school the next day because they all had erections.
St Patrick's Day in Gisagara
No St Patrick’s Day is complete without a drink so I met up with Enock and Claude in Vestine’s bar (which now has a fridge! Cold beer!). Poor Enock was wrecked so we only had the one drink. I did manage to ring most of my family to wish them a happy Paddy’s Day which was great! I also tried to explain to my friend and other customers the significance of St Patrick’s Day. I tried to explain about the snakes but that caused enormous confusion (Alfred: Might have helped if you told them Ireland was an island). However, I was wearing my Shamrock Rovers shirt so I told them about how he used the shamrock to explain the Trinity – that they got immediately and liked the idea very much!! (Alfred: sad to relate, Vestine’s has now disconnected the fridge – it was using too much electricity for the amount of cold beer they were selling)
St Patrick’s Day in Kigali
I headed up to Kigali on Thursday afternoon – was going to go after work but we had another of these power cuts and there was nothing to do so I bailed out early. Stayed with Sonya and Paula in their lovely (but probably temporary) new residence – their employer hasn’t got around to finding them a house yet so he has put them in one of the two he owns himself. Friday we headed in to the Serena Hotel to start setting up for the party. We had been a bit worried about ticket sales but sold 390 of the 400 in the end and raised all the money we had hoped for and more for the Kibagabaga Hospital Nutrition Education Project which gives advice to the mothers of HIV/AIDs-positive children on the best diet within their limited resources (Alfred: and a huge 'Thank You' again to the four friends who sponsored tickets for the Ball!!)
It was a great night, though not IMHO up to last year’s. But the Serena certainly had their act together better than last year, though their decision to move some of the seats around and set up an extra table came as a bit of a shock when Pamela had completed the extremely elaborate seating plan! There was also some weird business with the wine which poor Paul Stewart got to sort out with the management!! But it was a great night. My main contribution was to dress up in a leprechaun outfit and behave like a lunatic on the dance floor. Nic had also put on a red beard and giant green hat so it was like twins being reunited!
However, just like last year, as soon as the Irish music started the Rwandans pretty much all left. Another slight problem was that, unlike last year, the band didn’t adapt their set to where they were, so there were a lot of ballads when people actually wanted to dance which led to rather amusing sequences of people swaying like kelp in a current to ‘The Fields of Athenry’ or whatever.
So we actually wrapped up earlier than expected and a bunch of us headed to KBC night club. Various people begged me to go in my leprechaun outfit but I politely declined (Alfred: just to explain – there are photos out there somewhere of Ruairí in this outfit and he assures me he has been doing his best to track them down and destroy, sorry ... get copies of them to post here. There is even a video clip that Steve Vaid has on his phone – now THAT is really worth seeing!). But it wasn’t very interesting to be honest and we headed off pretty soon. John Harris did stay behind however – I think he eventually got to bed at seven! I also managed to lose my wallet at KBC but luckily and for no reason I can think of, when I was leaving Paula & Sonya’s house I decided to take absolutely everything out of it – credit card, business cards, ID and so on – only leaving a relatively small amount of money in it, so no real loss there.
So, home to bed … well, not exactly. We got to the house and remembered that someone had to ring Amy at 0500 – she had been at the Ball and had gone home earlier because she had to be up by 0500 to catch a bus to Kampala or Nairobi or somewhere, so someone had to remain awake until then to ring her, and I was volunteered. So bed at last at 0502.
Saturday Morning, Afternoon and Evening
At 0900 my phone rings – it’s Jörg from the Dutch NGO, SNV, asking if I was still OK for breakfast at 1100! I had forgotten about this. I drag myself out of bed, shower, breakfast and then wander off down the road to meet him as he comes to fetch me. He has the most amazing house, next door to Jane Baxter, the Deputy British Ambassador (Alfred: No, no, no – Deputy High Commissioner. Rwanda is in the Commonwealth now! Wonder how much it cost to change all the headed notepaper …..), really beautifully designed and with fabulous furniture. Another VSO volunteer, Dorothy, had met Jörg in Kibungo in the south-east and he had mentioned he was going to be working in my district next so she said we should meet. He had visited my district and met with my chargé, Alexis, the previous week (Alexis had told me someone from MINEDUC had been to see him so I thought nothing of it). While there he had seen my statistical analysis of the examination results and, this being one of his areas, was intrigued.
Anyway, we had an amazing breakfast, almost Central European style, cold meats, cheese and so on – his Rwandan wife, Gaudence, cures her own pork! – and chatted away. Then Dorothy said she needed to head for the bus soon. So Jörg goes into the house (this is around 1230) and comes back with …. a bottle of Chivas Regal and three glasses so we can toast our new friendship. Sweet Lord. Anyway, I figured a) I had never tasted Chivas Regal and b) it was a good opportunity to put the ‘hair of the dog’ theory to the test. And I don’t know whether it is the excellence of the Chivas Regal or the validity of the theory but two glasses of that had me feeling pretty chipper all over again!!
I agreed to come over Sunday with all my data so we could have a proper business meeting and then headed for Nyarutarama – my friends Graham and Sarah McFadden, the two British Council representatives in Rwanda, were leaving the following week and had basically invited anyone who wanted to to come to their house and take stuff. So I did – a coffee machine for Paula & Sonya’s house (Alfred: yeah – those of you who know Ruairí and coffee will appreciate that when he first stayed with P&S, they only have one tiny little percolator – a really beautiful metal one but it makes one small cup and then, being metal, is boiling hot, making cleaning and refilling it a bit tricky!), some thrillers … and a printer! They had a really old Canon printer but they said it was really good but you need a cable to convert the parallel port connection to USB. Hope I can find one!!
And then, having delivered the stuff back to Sonya and Paula’s I …. Em, what did I do? Saturday 20th March – football? Dinner? I actually have no idea (Alfred: Who cares?? It obviously wasn’t interesting, or else the alcoholic overload finally caught up with you. Didn’t you meet John in the MTN Centre in Nyarutarama, and met the guy from Manchester who is opening Rwanda’s first Irish pub? And then you and John got something to eat …… exciting stuff!!!! Actually, the Irish pub bit actually IS exciting).
Ok – Alfred as raison as the French say. Met Jörg Sunday for about four hours and then headed back to Butare. A really good meeting (Alfred: I love the moment where, Ruairí having transferred all his statistics onto Jörg’s computer, he opens the files and says, after a few minutes, in that wonderfully laconic way the Germans have: ‘Ah! I can see you have never had any training whatsoever in statistics!’) It was funny but, interestingly, he pointed out that had he been doing it, as a trained statistician he would have done it very differently but the chances are the Rwandan directors and district officials would have been completely unable to understand it!
The length of the meeting meant I didn’t get to Butare until 1900 which meant a moto-ride in the pitch dark back to Gisagara with an enormous rucksack (including Canon printer) on my back. Luckily I had rung the faithful Alexis and he had waited for me.
Yvonne – stalker extraordinaire
A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. Now, in Rwanda, this often happens and usually I don’t answer. But recently a lot of people I know have changed their SIM cards and I have missed a few important calls, so I decided to answer this time. The conversation went like this:
Me: Hello?
Voice: Hi there – how are you? Long time!!
Me: Emm, who is this?
Voice: It’s Yvonne!!
Me: Oh. Hi! Em, when exactly did we meet?
Yvonne: Don’t you remember?? (Instant pangs of guilt) We had coffee together in the UTC Centre. (Guilt dissapates - I have almost never had coffee in the UTC Centre and certainly never with an Yvonne. And I am pretty sure I have NEVER met a Rwandan called Yvonne, or any Rwandan woman with English as good as this) (Alfred: Hey, what’s with the italics? Those are MINE!!)
Me: I think you are wrong – I don’t remember ever having coffee in the UTC Centre.
Yvonne: No, no – it was in Butare!! (Out of the question – other than Matar, it is impossible to get decent coffee in Butare)
Me: Hmmm … I don’t think so.
Yvonne: Anyway, I just wanted to ring and say ‘Hi’ and ask how you were doing.
Me: Oh. I’m doing fine but …
Yvonne: I am sending you my Facebook address – have a look and see if you remember me. Maybe we can meet sometime if you are up in Kigali.
Me: Emm, can I just ask where did you get my num….
Yvonne: (hangs up)
OK – I definitely never met any Yvonne anywhere, never had coffee with anyone other than VSOs in UTC and don’t drink coffee in Butare except in Matar. But she had my number, knew that Butare was the obvious alternative to Kigali and, most interestingly, wanted me to check her out on Facebook. So I did. Lovely looking girl (Yvonne Mutesi if you want to look for yourself) but definitely not anyone I had ever met.
Over the next few weeks I get the occasional message or call – always brief, never pushy, not asking to meet but saying ‘Hi’ and generally inquiring after my well-being and amazingly adept – I mean amazingly – at side-stepping the issue of where she got my number. ‘Subtle’ I thought to myself – the usual Rwandan ploy is to rub their rear end against your crotch, say after five minutes ‘I love you’ and ask to get married immediately (Alfred: That is a tad harsh. But only a tad ...)
Eventually, when I was coming up to Kigali one weekend, I decided I really wanted to know where had she got my number and rang her and offered to meet up. She said rather than coming into town I could drive out to her place in my car. ‘I don’t have a car’ I said, wondering if this was suddenly going to end the whole thing. ‘No problem’ she said, ‘just get on a moto and if you ring me I will give him directions.’
‘But Yvonne’, I said, ‘we’ve never even met (an assertion I noted she didn’t dispute) and I don’t think it is appropriate to meet you for the first time in your house.’ ‘Oh there’s no problem’ she said, ‘my parents and all my brothers and sisters and cousins and everyone else are here to see you’.
So what could I do? I hung up is what I did. And she rang and rang and rang and eventually I turned my phone off. Passing an Internet café, I hopped online and checked my Facebook status. She had answered my Friend request seven minutes ago! Click of a button, friend deleted, end of story.
And this is the problem. I would love to make/to have made more Rwandan friends but the guys eventually (with a few exceptions) start looking for money, sponsorship, scholarships etc, the women pretty much the same though the mechanics of getting you to agree to it are a little different. Ah well!
Nicknames
Two interesting nicknames I came across recently. One is a friend of Enock’s called ‘Jambazi’ which means ‘thief’ in Swahili. Interesting name to have and one he seemed to take great pleasure in. Eventually, Enock and Jambazi together explained it to me. Jambazi (I have no idea what his real name is) is a Mathematics teacher in the local secondary school, but also teaches in a seminary school in Butare and also in the university, where he is finishing his Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics (he will have to go abroad to do a doctorate as there is no one to supervise him here; he was the only person to graduate in Pure Mathematics the year he did his BA). Anyway, that means he had the equivalent of three jobs, so that is why he is called ‘Jambazi’, as he is stealing the jobs of two other people.
The other one was a bit weirder. I was driving in Butare with Joseph, the guy organising the catering for our training (that will be in the next entry) and he waved at another driver. ‘Who is that?’ I said (in French). ‘C’est l’animal’ he replied. OK, one could think of various reasons for a nickname like that but I decided to ask why. Apparently, after the genocide he was accused of having decapitated a lot of people with a sword. He was put on trial and found not guilty, but the name stuck. Apparently everyone calls him that (I can’t be sure if they do it to his face or not). Weird!
‘L’ and ‘R’
I wrote on Facebook recently about this. I visited a Science class a few weeks ago and written on the board was the following that the class were busily (Alfred: ‘busily’ is a bit of an exaggeration) writing down as part of their module on human reproduction: ‘Every man has two testicules shaped like uggs ….. The penis must be elected before intercourse can take place.’ My cousin in the USA said this latter must be a Bill Clinton reference. It reminded me of another incident involving the same confusion of ‘R’ and ‘L’ when a VSO staff member was informed by the students that they couldn’t come to school the next day because they all had erections.
St Patrick's Day in Gisagara
No St Patrick’s Day is complete without a drink so I met up with Enock and Claude in Vestine’s bar (which now has a fridge! Cold beer!). Poor Enock was wrecked so we only had the one drink. I did manage to ring most of my family to wish them a happy Paddy’s Day which was great! I also tried to explain to my friend and other customers the significance of St Patrick’s Day. I tried to explain about the snakes but that caused enormous confusion (Alfred: Might have helped if you told them Ireland was an island). However, I was wearing my Shamrock Rovers shirt so I told them about how he used the shamrock to explain the Trinity – that they got immediately and liked the idea very much!! (Alfred: sad to relate, Vestine’s has now disconnected the fridge – it was using too much electricity for the amount of cold beer they were selling)
St Patrick’s Day in Kigali
I headed up to Kigali on Thursday afternoon – was going to go after work but we had another of these power cuts and there was nothing to do so I bailed out early. Stayed with Sonya and Paula in their lovely (but probably temporary) new residence – their employer hasn’t got around to finding them a house yet so he has put them in one of the two he owns himself. Friday we headed in to the Serena Hotel to start setting up for the party. We had been a bit worried about ticket sales but sold 390 of the 400 in the end and raised all the money we had hoped for and more for the Kibagabaga Hospital Nutrition Education Project which gives advice to the mothers of HIV/AIDs-positive children on the best diet within their limited resources (Alfred: and a huge 'Thank You' again to the four friends who sponsored tickets for the Ball!!)
It was a great night, though not IMHO up to last year’s. But the Serena certainly had their act together better than last year, though their decision to move some of the seats around and set up an extra table came as a bit of a shock when Pamela had completed the extremely elaborate seating plan! There was also some weird business with the wine which poor Paul Stewart got to sort out with the management!! But it was a great night. My main contribution was to dress up in a leprechaun outfit and behave like a lunatic on the dance floor. Nic had also put on a red beard and giant green hat so it was like twins being reunited!
However, just like last year, as soon as the Irish music started the Rwandans pretty much all left. Another slight problem was that, unlike last year, the band didn’t adapt their set to where they were, so there were a lot of ballads when people actually wanted to dance which led to rather amusing sequences of people swaying like kelp in a current to ‘The Fields of Athenry’ or whatever.
So we actually wrapped up earlier than expected and a bunch of us headed to KBC night club. Various people begged me to go in my leprechaun outfit but I politely declined (Alfred: just to explain – there are photos out there somewhere of Ruairí in this outfit and he assures me he has been doing his best to track them down and destroy, sorry ... get copies of them to post here. There is even a video clip that Steve Vaid has on his phone – now THAT is really worth seeing!). But it wasn’t very interesting to be honest and we headed off pretty soon. John Harris did stay behind however – I think he eventually got to bed at seven! I also managed to lose my wallet at KBC but luckily and for no reason I can think of, when I was leaving Paula & Sonya’s house I decided to take absolutely everything out of it – credit card, business cards, ID and so on – only leaving a relatively small amount of money in it, so no real loss there.
So, home to bed … well, not exactly. We got to the house and remembered that someone had to ring Amy at 0500 – she had been at the Ball and had gone home earlier because she had to be up by 0500 to catch a bus to Kampala or Nairobi or somewhere, so someone had to remain awake until then to ring her, and I was volunteered. So bed at last at 0502.
Saturday Morning, Afternoon and Evening
At 0900 my phone rings – it’s Jörg from the Dutch NGO, SNV, asking if I was still OK for breakfast at 1100! I had forgotten about this. I drag myself out of bed, shower, breakfast and then wander off down the road to meet him as he comes to fetch me. He has the most amazing house, next door to Jane Baxter, the Deputy British Ambassador (Alfred: No, no, no – Deputy High Commissioner. Rwanda is in the Commonwealth now! Wonder how much it cost to change all the headed notepaper …..), really beautifully designed and with fabulous furniture. Another VSO volunteer, Dorothy, had met Jörg in Kibungo in the south-east and he had mentioned he was going to be working in my district next so she said we should meet. He had visited my district and met with my chargé, Alexis, the previous week (Alexis had told me someone from MINEDUC had been to see him so I thought nothing of it). While there he had seen my statistical analysis of the examination results and, this being one of his areas, was intrigued.
Anyway, we had an amazing breakfast, almost Central European style, cold meats, cheese and so on – his Rwandan wife, Gaudence, cures her own pork! – and chatted away. Then Dorothy said she needed to head for the bus soon. So Jörg goes into the house (this is around 1230) and comes back with …. a bottle of Chivas Regal and three glasses so we can toast our new friendship. Sweet Lord. Anyway, I figured a) I had never tasted Chivas Regal and b) it was a good opportunity to put the ‘hair of the dog’ theory to the test. And I don’t know whether it is the excellence of the Chivas Regal or the validity of the theory but two glasses of that had me feeling pretty chipper all over again!!
I agreed to come over Sunday with all my data so we could have a proper business meeting and then headed for Nyarutarama – my friends Graham and Sarah McFadden, the two British Council representatives in Rwanda, were leaving the following week and had basically invited anyone who wanted to to come to their house and take stuff. So I did – a coffee machine for Paula & Sonya’s house (Alfred: yeah – those of you who know Ruairí and coffee will appreciate that when he first stayed with P&S, they only have one tiny little percolator – a really beautiful metal one but it makes one small cup and then, being metal, is boiling hot, making cleaning and refilling it a bit tricky!), some thrillers … and a printer! They had a really old Canon printer but they said it was really good but you need a cable to convert the parallel port connection to USB. Hope I can find one!!
And then, having delivered the stuff back to Sonya and Paula’s I …. Em, what did I do? Saturday 20th March – football? Dinner? I actually have no idea (Alfred: Who cares?? It obviously wasn’t interesting, or else the alcoholic overload finally caught up with you. Didn’t you meet John in the MTN Centre in Nyarutarama, and met the guy from Manchester who is opening Rwanda’s first Irish pub? And then you and John got something to eat …… exciting stuff!!!! Actually, the Irish pub bit actually IS exciting).
Ok – Alfred as raison as the French say. Met Jörg Sunday for about four hours and then headed back to Butare. A really good meeting (Alfred: I love the moment where, Ruairí having transferred all his statistics onto Jörg’s computer, he opens the files and says, after a few minutes, in that wonderfully laconic way the Germans have: ‘Ah! I can see you have never had any training whatsoever in statistics!’) It was funny but, interestingly, he pointed out that had he been doing it, as a trained statistician he would have done it very differently but the chances are the Rwandan directors and district officials would have been completely unable to understand it!
The length of the meeting meant I didn’t get to Butare until 1900 which meant a moto-ride in the pitch dark back to Gisagara with an enormous rucksack (including Canon printer) on my back. Luckily I had rung the faithful Alexis and he had waited for me.
Yvonne – stalker extraordinaire
A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. Now, in Rwanda, this often happens and usually I don’t answer. But recently a lot of people I know have changed their SIM cards and I have missed a few important calls, so I decided to answer this time. The conversation went like this:
Me: Hello?
Voice: Hi there – how are you? Long time!!
Me: Emm, who is this?
Voice: It’s Yvonne!!
Me: Oh. Hi! Em, when exactly did we meet?
Yvonne: Don’t you remember?? (Instant pangs of guilt) We had coffee together in the UTC Centre. (Guilt dissapates - I have almost never had coffee in the UTC Centre and certainly never with an Yvonne. And I am pretty sure I have NEVER met a Rwandan called Yvonne, or any Rwandan woman with English as good as this) (Alfred: Hey, what’s with the italics? Those are MINE!!)
Me: I think you are wrong – I don’t remember ever having coffee in the UTC Centre.
Yvonne: No, no – it was in Butare!! (Out of the question – other than Matar, it is impossible to get decent coffee in Butare)
Me: Hmmm … I don’t think so.
Yvonne: Anyway, I just wanted to ring and say ‘Hi’ and ask how you were doing.
Me: Oh. I’m doing fine but …
Yvonne: I am sending you my Facebook address – have a look and see if you remember me. Maybe we can meet sometime if you are up in Kigali.
Me: Emm, can I just ask where did you get my num….
Yvonne: (hangs up)
OK – I definitely never met any Yvonne anywhere, never had coffee with anyone other than VSOs in UTC and don’t drink coffee in Butare except in Matar. But she had my number, knew that Butare was the obvious alternative to Kigali and, most interestingly, wanted me to check her out on Facebook. So I did. Lovely looking girl (Yvonne Mutesi if you want to look for yourself) but definitely not anyone I had ever met.
Over the next few weeks I get the occasional message or call – always brief, never pushy, not asking to meet but saying ‘Hi’ and generally inquiring after my well-being and amazingly adept – I mean amazingly – at side-stepping the issue of where she got my number. ‘Subtle’ I thought to myself – the usual Rwandan ploy is to rub their rear end against your crotch, say after five minutes ‘I love you’ and ask to get married immediately (Alfred: That is a tad harsh. But only a tad ...)
Eventually, when I was coming up to Kigali one weekend, I decided I really wanted to know where had she got my number and rang her and offered to meet up. She said rather than coming into town I could drive out to her place in my car. ‘I don’t have a car’ I said, wondering if this was suddenly going to end the whole thing. ‘No problem’ she said, ‘just get on a moto and if you ring me I will give him directions.’
‘But Yvonne’, I said, ‘we’ve never even met (an assertion I noted she didn’t dispute) and I don’t think it is appropriate to meet you for the first time in your house.’ ‘Oh there’s no problem’ she said, ‘my parents and all my brothers and sisters and cousins and everyone else are here to see you’.
So what could I do? I hung up is what I did. And she rang and rang and rang and eventually I turned my phone off. Passing an Internet café, I hopped online and checked my Facebook status. She had answered my Friend request seven minutes ago! Click of a button, friend deleted, end of story.
And this is the problem. I would love to make/to have made more Rwandan friends but the guys eventually (with a few exceptions) start looking for money, sponsorship, scholarships etc, the women pretty much the same though the mechanics of getting you to agree to it are a little different. Ah well!
Nicknames
Two interesting nicknames I came across recently. One is a friend of Enock’s called ‘Jambazi’ which means ‘thief’ in Swahili. Interesting name to have and one he seemed to take great pleasure in. Eventually, Enock and Jambazi together explained it to me. Jambazi (I have no idea what his real name is) is a Mathematics teacher in the local secondary school, but also teaches in a seminary school in Butare and also in the university, where he is finishing his Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics (he will have to go abroad to do a doctorate as there is no one to supervise him here; he was the only person to graduate in Pure Mathematics the year he did his BA). Anyway, that means he had the equivalent of three jobs, so that is why he is called ‘Jambazi’, as he is stealing the jobs of two other people.
The other one was a bit weirder. I was driving in Butare with Joseph, the guy organising the catering for our training (that will be in the next entry) and he waved at another driver. ‘Who is that?’ I said (in French). ‘C’est l’animal’ he replied. OK, one could think of various reasons for a nickname like that but I decided to ask why. Apparently, after the genocide he was accused of having decapitated a lot of people with a sword. He was put on trial and found not guilty, but the name stuck. Apparently everyone calls him that (I can’t be sure if they do it to his face or not). Weird!
Friday, April 2, 2010
RWANDAN HAIKUS
RWANDAN HAIKUS
(Alfred eat your heart out!)
Ripe avocado
Melts in your mouth like ice cream
One thing I will miss.
Amafaranga!
Cent francs à manger monsieur,
Amafaranga!
Mwaramutseho!
Warashatse muzungu?
Kubera iki?
Before intelcourse
Please elect the penis first
And use a lubber.
Où est le cachet?
Sans cachet vous ne pouvez
Rien faire ici.
Leaving Rwanda -
Never thought this day would come,
It’s time to go home.
I'm opening this up (here and on Facebook) for any present or past volunteers in Rwanda to contribute their haikus. Or, indeed, anyone else who wants to! If you post them here as a comment, please tell me if you don't want them copied to my Facebook page!
(Alfred eat your heart out!)
Ripe avocado
Melts in your mouth like ice cream
One thing I will miss.
Amafaranga!
Cent francs à manger monsieur,
Amafaranga!
Mwaramutseho!
Warashatse muzungu?
Kubera iki?
Before intelcourse
Please elect the penis first
And use a lubber.
Où est le cachet?
Sans cachet vous ne pouvez
Rien faire ici.
Leaving Rwanda -
Never thought this day would come,
It’s time to go home.
I'm opening this up (here and on Facebook) for any present or past volunteers in Rwanda to contribute their haikus. Or, indeed, anyone else who wants to! If you post them here as a comment, please tell me if you don't want them copied to my Facebook page!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Interlude with Alfred
It’s Alfred – I apologise,
The poor guy’s right up to his eyes.
Two weeks since he last updated
By all his fans he’ll be berated.
Translating handouts into French
While thinking of his absent wench…
Hmm … there might be trouble about that (sorry M. – don’t tell Alphonsine!). Let’s start again.
Ruairí’s blog’s still unupdated,
By his fan(s) he’ll be berated,
Funny stories long-awaited,
Rwandan poems he’s translated.
Reading entries annotated
(By myself, it should be stated)
And read by fans with breath most bated.
When the blog was first created
Ruairí would be quite elated;
Oft his office he vacated
While his entries he dictated.
How the taxi-bus he hated,
Rwandan verbs he conjugated,
How the rain was unabated,
And other matters unrelated.
But then his loyal fans, they waited
A little fragment, oft undated,
And usually quite belated
Left their appetites unsated
And expectations most deflated.
Maybe his skill was overrated?
But soon it will be reinstated;
So, if your interest’s unabated
Your pupils soon will be dilated
As the flow is recreated;
Current news will be debated,
The laws of poetry desecrated,
The wonders of the country fêted,
And Portsmouth will be relegated.
And if by then you feel sedated
Thinking blogs are overrated,
All these anecdotes collated
And none of them interrelated,
If Alfred on your nerves has grated
As Ruairí’s taste he once more slated,
Well, here’s my answer – silver-plated:
TOUGH! NOBODY ASKED YOU TO READ THIS ANYWAY!!!
The poor guy’s right up to his eyes.
Two weeks since he last updated
By all his fans he’ll be berated.
Translating handouts into French
While thinking of his absent wench…
Hmm … there might be trouble about that (sorry M. – don’t tell Alphonsine!). Let’s start again.
Ruairí’s blog’s still unupdated,
By his fan(s) he’ll be berated,
Funny stories long-awaited,
Rwandan poems he’s translated.
Reading entries annotated
(By myself, it should be stated)
And read by fans with breath most bated.
When the blog was first created
Ruairí would be quite elated;
Oft his office he vacated
While his entries he dictated.
How the taxi-bus he hated,
Rwandan verbs he conjugated,
How the rain was unabated,
And other matters unrelated.
But then his loyal fans, they waited
A little fragment, oft undated,
And usually quite belated
Left their appetites unsated
And expectations most deflated.
Maybe his skill was overrated?
But soon it will be reinstated;
So, if your interest’s unabated
Your pupils soon will be dilated
As the flow is recreated;
Current news will be debated,
The laws of poetry desecrated,
The wonders of the country fêted,
And Portsmouth will be relegated.
And if by then you feel sedated
Thinking blogs are overrated,
All these anecdotes collated
And none of them interrelated,
If Alfred on your nerves has grated
As Ruairí’s taste he once more slated,
Well, here’s my answer – silver-plated:
TOUGH! NOBODY ASKED YOU TO READ THIS ANYWAY!!!
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