READJUSTING part one

Sitting in Lyon Airport at 1745 local time waiting for Martine to arrive from Heathrow, this is a good time to reflect back (Alfred: Tautology! Or maybe you were thinking of reflecting forward the next time, eh?) on the last week or so. At first, I felt there was no real problem settling back in but, as the days went by, things got stranger and stranger. There are loads of good things, loads of things I don’t like and quite a few that are under the general heading of ‘strange’.

But the biggest is that I can’t sleep normally because of the light. In Rwanda, night falls at 18.30, give or take a few minutes and it is reasonably bright around 0600 or so. The day Martine went back to Scotland, I went for a pint in the Porterhouse in Nassau Street (Alfred: or, to be more accurate, went BACK to the Porterhouse, having been there with Martine earlier). Then I noticed it was about 2000 and felt it was time to head home. When I walked out of the pub it was still broad daylight. I checked my watch (which has been giving trouble), then double-checked it against my phone and Palm pilot. Yes, 2000. And then it dawned on me that it was summer! But that doesn’t change the habits of the last two years. I go to bed about three to four hours after sunset and can’t seem to shake this. So several times I have been going to bed at 0300 or even 0400, by which time it is getting bright again. Last night I actually managed to get to bed by midnight given that I had to fly today but the lack of sleep is definitely catching up with me!!

Other than that, here are the pluses, minuses and wierdnesses about being back in Ireland, in no particular order (you can figure out which category each belongs to):

BODY ODOUR: I remember reading a report that, now smoking is banned in Irish pubs (Alfred: Em, he means pubs in Ireland), people were becoming much more conscious of the body odour issue. Well, my friends, that may be the case for your refined nostrils but for me, the freedom to inhale deeply while in crowds is a blessed relief.

BEGGING: No one is continually calling out ‘amafaranga, muzungu’ here – but there are a lot of beggars! OK, they don’t get in your face the way beggars did in Rwanda but I was really surprised how many people I saw begging around the centre of Dublin.

COMPLEXITY: OMG, I had forgotten, and I mean completely forgotten, how much more complicated life is here. Even the process of opening the mail for two years reminded me of so many things that exist here and don’t exist in Rwanda - gas, electricity and phone/broadband, cable TV, refuse collection, house insurance, health insurance, car insurance, salary protection insurance, having a garden, taxes, charity contributions, ... (Alfred: Or, to be more accurate, many things that you have to take care of yourself here are taken care of by VSO in Rwanda). And I have SO MUCH STUFF!!! Where the hell did all these things come from? When I left, all my possessions went into my attic and I have been removing them one bag at a time and discovering what I have. I seem to have a grand total of fifteen cooking utensils – pots, pans, woks, casserole dishes. Two entire sets of cutlery plus endless odds and ends. FIVE sets of table mats, only one set of which I can ever remember having used (and I brought another set back from Rwanda). Three swimming costumes??? (Alfred: the irony of this last one will not be lost on close friends and family). Clothes I don’t even remember owning and that I have never to my knowledge worn. And so on and so on. Not to mention all the things I brought back from Rwanda (Alfred: I am sure faithful readers will be pleased to know that the two DHL parcels arrived safely and pretty much intact – the frame of the framed ‘Thank You’ drum was slightly damaged but this was in the parcel Ruairí packed himself, not the one DHL packed!) What made me think I needed four psychedelically-coloured stuffed elephants? Hollow wooden fish? Not to mention the clothes I got made which looked fine in Rwanda but here...... (Alfred: Ha – YOU may think they looked fine in Rwanda but I don’t remember you venturing outdoors in most of them).

O TEMPORA, O MORES: though it should be whatever the Latin is for ‘place’ rather than ‘time’. My first trip into the city centre was quite a shock to my sensibilities. Were skirts ALWAYS this short? I remember about a month ago seeing a girl in the street Butare wearing a skirt that showed her knees: here – well, I seriously had to keep looking away, I was so embarrassed. And people eating in the streets (and messily at that). I went to a funeral in Cavan where they served chicken and sausages and sandwiches after the service – but no one washed their hands first or used a napkin to pick up the food!

Mind you, so far no one has picked their nose or coughed up half a pint of phlegm from the nether regions of their lungs while chatting to me – like everything else I mentioned, I can get used to that.

ANONYMITY: No one stares at me, no one shouts ‘Muzungu!’, no one comes up to me when I am standing somewhere, parks themselves two feet away and looks at my face with a dropped jaw and a thin line of drool slowly escaping unbeknownst to them from the corner of their mouth.

ANONYMITY: No one pays any attention to me. Instead of being unique, known to everyone in my community, someone complete strangers want to talk to, shake hands with, be seen with, I’m just me in a city of over a million others. And, curiously, this very anonymity makes me much more self-conscious of how I look. In Rwanda I could wear pretty much what I liked, the fact that I was fatter than most others was a positive thing, I could pretty much set my own rules as no-one there really expected me to follow Rwandan rules. But now .... I don’t even wear my favourite Chelsea shirt into town like I always did in Butare, because here football shirts are a sign of tribal allegiance and can spark hostility, rather than attracting friendly comments and chat from fellow football-lovers.

SCHOLARSHIPS, BLOODY SCHOLARSHIPS

I know everyone in Rwanda wants to improve their level of qualifications but the incessant requests for me to find scholarships for people to study abroad has been the single most wearing thing of the last few months. And almost every time, it is the same conversation (and almost always in French):

Random work colleague/bar customer/complete stranger: I need to travel abroad and do an MA and I need you to find me a scholarship.

Me: What do you want to study?

RWC/BC/CS: I don’t care, I just want to have an MA. Anything will do as long as I have a scholarship to do it. But I would prefer Sociology or Psychology.

Me: And where do you want to study? There are scholarships in Belgium and France ....

RWC/BC/CS: No, no, no. Not in French, I need to study in English.

Me: But you don’t speak English.

RWC/BC/CS: I will learn. I am very good at memorising stuff. I will call you tomorrow so you can tell me where I am going because my family want to know.

Me: Your family?

RWC/BC/CS: Yes, I told them yesterday I was meeting you today to arrange a scholarship and they are very excited. My mother said she is going to pray for you every day because of the wonderful thing you have done for me and she gave me this present for you.

Having said that, there is one person on whose behalf I am actively going to look. Paul (nicknamed ‘Jambazi’, which means ‘thief’ in Swahili) is currently doing an MA in Pure Mathematics in the National University of Rwanda (NUR) but really wants to do a PhD. However, there is no-one in the entire country who would be able to supervise him for something like that. It strikes me that helping the first ever Rwandan to do a PhD in Pure Mathematics might actually be something some university department might be interested in supporting. Anyone out there with any ideas, please let me know! (Alfred: As for the nickname, which I notice Ruairí was just going to leave hanging there – Paul currently has three jobs: he teaches Physics in St Philippe Neri secondary school, teaches Mathematics in the Catholic seminary in Butare and also lectures in the Mathematics department of the NUR in Butare. Because he has three jobs, people say he is stealing the jobs of two other people, hence the nickname ‘jambazi’).

TAYTO CRISPS: If you are not Irish, you have no idea what I am talking about. If you are Irish, no explanation is necessary.

AVOCADOS: The first time I visited a supermarket, it was a little bit bewildering but not quite as mind-blowing as others had said. And, after all, Nakumatt in Kigali is a supermarket, albeit a small one by our standards. But it was still interesting gauging my reaction - -part of me found it really difficult to buy anything, a little voice in my ear saying ‘Do you REALLY need that?’. The other part of me wanted to buy everything immediately in case it was all gone the next time I came back. I did succumb and buy a few treats - three ripe pears, pitta bread, a piece of Comté cheese, a nice bottle of red wine – but my first meal in Ireland was Chicken Caesar salad: chicken breasts, romaine lettuce, croutons, good parmesan and a bottle of Caesar salad dressing (the green and red one with the Italian name which I can’t remember now). Washed down with a bottle of Astrolabe Australian chardonnay, one of my favourite white wines.

The downside was when I saw a sign for avocados (possibly my single greatest food experience in Rwanda) in the supermarket: I had been steeling myself for this moment but, even so, what a massive disappointment – tiny, wizened dark green objects as hard as rocks. I couldn’t even touch them! But maybe if I hunt around the specialist greengrocers I can find something faintly resembling what I had in Rwanda.

CAVAN: On Friday last I went to a funeral in Cavan – Jennifer Anderson, who had been head of the boarding house in Rathdown School where I teach since before I started there, died suddenly and a large group of us went up on the school bus. On the journey I got a chance to speak to a lot of the staff and catch up on what was going on. Then I just sat and looked out of the window for a bit.

If you live in Rwanda, sitting on a bus staring out of the window is something you spend a LOT of time doing, so it felt really familiar in one way. And then I noticed what I was looking at and, possibly for the first time, realised that I really was not in Rwanda any more. Large herds of cows, flat landscape, wheat and barley (though there was some maize, which gave me a familiar little thrill). And, most of all, no banana trees. This had been something I had been thinking about because in Rwanda, with the exception of a few areas given totally over to tea plantations, banana trees are ubiquitous. And, sure enough, that was the strangest thing of all – miles and miles of landscape with no banana trees. And so few houses – where were all the people gone??

WEATHER: I had forgotten what real weather is like, as in having many completely different kinds of weather in on day! Hot, cold, wet, windy, calm , dry – it was great! I remember my brother Aindriú telling me about when he worked in Los Angeles and the thing that really drove him crazy was that the weather was utterly predictble. I loved the weather in Rwanda – warm but usually not too hot, predictiable rain (well, for the most part) but it is so nice to have this again!

CHILDREN: a real shock. Sitting in Brussels Airport with my friend Karen. An empty table next to us. A French/Belgian woman with two small girls, aged probably 6 and 3, comes over, plonks them down and then goes up to the counter to order. The older girl immediately starts teasing the younger one, who starts shouting across the room at her mother. The mother shouts at her to behave, whereupon the little girl gets off her chair, picks it up and hurls it at the wall. Then runs over to her mother screaming abuse. NOT what I have been used to from small children for the last two years!