Relax Africa-Style

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Originally uploaded by miss.sutton

Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of new news. I have been stuck at home sick for the past couple of days, which of course makes the whole world feel extremely small.

My roommate is doing pre-research for her dissertation on the reconciliation process in Rwanda. So, on Thursday, I went with her to get her permits from various ministries all around the city. The first one that we visited was at the big soccer stadium where the Rwandan Army is camped out and training for the upcoming Liberation Day Parade. Although that celebration is on July 4th, I don't expect it will be anything like our Independence Day. No fireworks, but there will be military parades. Liberation Day here is a marker for when the RPF reached Kigali and stopped the Genocide, and now the RPF is in power, so I expect that it will mostly be a show of their military prowess. All I know for sure, is that I have never seen as many huge guns in my life as I did at the stadium on Thursday.

Of course, I couldn't take pictures then, so instead the attached photo is of the porch at my house. My Mom has been begging me to send her pictures of where I live, so I posted a lot of my pictures to my flickr account. Here is the address: flickr.com/photos/josssutton/

Hopefully things will get more noteworthy soon - hopefully I will be able to leave the house today . . .

Murambi Technical School

The past few days have been fairly packed. On Saturday, I took a trip to Gikongoro with the other interns. We visited Murambi Technical School, which is now a genocide memorial. During the genocide, people fleeing the Interahamwe were told that schools and churches would be safe and that the clergy and others would protect them. Instead, they were used as mass gathering spots so that the Interhamwe could kill them more efficiently. About 45,000 Tutsis were murdered at this school in April of ’94.
Honestly, I hadn’t planned to go and see many of the memorials. I felt – I am here in 2007 and I should focus on the problems that are killing people and disenfranchising people now. I also felt (and partially still feel) that there is no benefit to anyone for me to see things like that. But, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to get out of the city for a day, I went with the 4 other girls to see the memorial – and I don’t think I prepared myself adequately. The memorials that I am used to seeing have pamphlets and gift-shops and guides. This one was left almost without explanation. There were rooms filled with skeletons. At first I thought they were models because there was a strong scent of plaster in the air and everything was covered in white. Then I thought to myself, this is Rwanda – no one has the time or the money to make thousands of model skeletons. And then I saw the tufts of hair on a few of the skulls – the positions of the children, a few infants. I stopped looking then – and the tour went on and all of the rooms were the same. After the first two I stopped going in. We didn’t even open all of the doors or go to all of the buildings. A few of the bodies had flowers laid by them. There was a separate hall where all of the clothes were hung and folded in stacks.

Then, as we walked back around to the front of the school, there was a huge pit in the ground – it had been a mass grave. During the later months of the genocide, the French soldiers occupied these school grounds. Apparently they built a volleyball court over the grave, and also were complicit in notifying the Interahamwe and gathering the Tutsis. As a result of these types of actions, there is no longer a French Embassy in Rwanda, and I don’t believe that relations between the two nations are very friendly.

Summer Nights in Kigali

So just when I was beginning to think that all of my blog entries were going to sound the same, talking about the maladies of poverty and trauma of the genocide, something changed. Last night I went for an evening walk with my friend Nina. We left our house at about 7pm and decided to go in a new direction. Down the hill, we passed Republika, the local bar and lounge and continued on a windy road of half dirt, half asphalt. It was past sunset and there was just the leftover light, like the warmth still emanating from the ground after a day under the bright sun. We heard some children laughing and as we rounded a corner, there were 5 or 6 little boys scooting down their driveway on a cardboard box. My friends and I used to do that down the long concrete slides at Golden Gate Park. They hardly payed attention to us (usually everyone pays attention to muzungus), but when I asked “amakooroo yanyu?” (how are you), they all answered “ni meza” in sing-songy unison. The crickets chirped and the scent in the air reminded me of alfalfa, a scent that my Mother loves and always pointed out to me when we drove through the valley or woke up on a weekend morning in the delta. Just as I was reflecting on how peaceful and lovely a summer night it was, and how refreshing it is to hear familiar sounds and smell familiar things, I looked up and the moon was lit from beneath, creating a slim, horizontal crescent and Mars was lit up just to the left of it. It was so slender and still so bright that I couldn’t stop staring the rest of the way home. And then I taught Nina the Good Night Moon song that my Mom always sang to me before she left on a trip.

I see the moon and the moon sees me. The moon sees the one I want to see. So God bless the moon, and God bless me. And God bless the one I want to see.

Rwandan Women's Support Group

First of all, my apologies for not having kept this more updated. I have been having some trouble with the internet being slow, and blogger taking a ridiculously long time to load. Last night, during a skype date with my Mom, she said – well, Joss, why don’t you write in Word and then copy and paste? -. Because I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I go to Berkeley . . .

So now that I have been here for more than 2 weeks (although it feels much longer), I have started to get to know my way around Kigali and have learned a few useful phrases in Kinyarwanda.

Good morning: Mware Mutse
Thank you: Murakoze
No, thank you: Hoya, murakoze.
Nice to meet you: Kuhula nawe nibyiza. (Although people always laugh when I say that, so I think that it’s incorrect. Mostly people say “enchantée”).

Another reason that I haven’t been updating as often is that every day there is so much to tell, that I can’t decide what to sort through. I sort of feel like being here is like experiencing my textbooks in 3D and everything seems bigger. The issues that I have heard about for years and years are now surrounding me – namely, poverty and AIDS. You can say, “AIDs is an epidemic and it is killing people” until you are blue in the face, but seeing it is an entirely different experience. Whereas I have grown up in a society where it can generally be assumed that a child’s parents are both living. Here, it seems that that is the exception and not the rule. If a kid tells me that their mother or father or both are dead, it is either because of HIV or because of the genocide. I have yet to find an exception.

Before coming to Rwanda, I wrote a paper on poverty and AIDS, with specific regard to Rwanda and WE-ACTx. Rwanda is an extremely impoverished nation with something like 84% of the population living under US$2 per day. It is based on subsistence agriculture – so each family traditionally has a small plot of land and they farm on that enough food to support themselves. Since the war (genocide), there was a massive influx of refugees, overwhelming the already dense nation. If you have too many people, not enough land, and absolutely no economy, the results are poverty and malnutrition. The one positive thing that I found in writing that paper was that the women benefiting from WE-ACTx were receiving food each month through the World Food Program (compliments of the World Bank). However, over the course of the year after my sources were published and my arrival here, the World Food Program has been cancelled here in Rwanda. According to my bosses here, this has to do with the Rwandan government’s need to “look capable”. Essentially, the program ended “because there is no poverty or hunger in Rwanda”. In the past two weeks, I have seen exactly the opposite.

Why Food is More Important Than You Know

On Monday morning, I was asked to translate for Mary, the head of the Trauma Counseling department (visiting from Chicago) at a support group. Speaking French is great here – I get to go more places just to do translation, which, by the way, is exhausting. So we took a taxi along with the head trauma councilor here, named Henriette. We arrived in a neighborhood in Kigali that roughly resembles the slums of Buenos Aires (of which I’ve only seen pictures in books). The buildings are surrounded by sheet metal leaned against posts. The women inside were crammed onto chairs and on the dirt-covered floor. It is such an odd sensation to see how these people are living – and to feel so humbled by it, and at the same time they want to treat you like a queen. They clap at your arrival, give you the nicest chairs – always offering something that they have made or offering to buy you a Fanta (everyone here drinks those like water). After introductions, Mary asked them why they would stop taking their ARVs (AIDS medications).
One after the other, women raised their hands and expressed that taking the ARVs makes them too hungry, thirsty and weak. The medications do nothing to speed up the metabolism or create a false sense of hunger. As the women become healthier, their appetites return and they are suddenly aware of how hungry they already were. Many of them chose not to take the meds (I don’t know if this was for lack of understanding or if hunger was just too much to take). Then one woman raised her arm and said something so painful that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it – she said that she can suck it up and take the ARVs and push past her hunger, but her children, also taking ARVs, they just cry. Almost all (if not all) of these women’s children were born HIV+ because they lack the funds and access to medications that prevent transmission through the birth canal, or money to buy milk, since it can also be spread through breast-feeding.

I am sure that this was intense to read, but as I discover more, I will find ways that we all can do something, and let all of you know. Also, if you have any questions – about politics, the genocide, the weather, my favorite color – don’t hesitate to e-mail me at miss.sutton@gmail.com.

And just so you don’t leave my blog feeling downtrodden, we spent the rest of the morning brainstorming about possible income generation projects and dancing. Despite everything, these women are so strong and positive. They also didn’t laugh at me when I danced. Attached is a photo of some of the women holding baskets that they had woven, as well as one of some little boys peaking through the window.

Now that I have been in Rwanda for almost a week (it feels like so much more for all that i have learned . . .), I am starting to figure out exactly what I am going to be doing here. I have been spending some time with the Trauma Councilors in the family program. I am going to try and put together a serious of audio interviews and video interviews of the kids here - because so far, things have mostly been written. It will be a lot easier (especially for kids) to express their feelings about HIV and AIDS - family members they may have lost, futures they may or may not be looking forward to - verbally. Then I will work to translate the interviews for the co-executives to have the information. I will also try to put together some video clips for the website. Hopefully, this will spur more people to donate, since they will be able to match a face and a story to the organization. Today I spent hanging out with a ton of kids who speak kinyarwanda. It's amazing how much easier it is to communicate with kids across a language barrier than it is adults. A few of us sat in a circle and I drew a picture of something, for example a heart, and then asked them "iki ni iki" - "what is it" and then we would list the words in kinyarwanda, english and french - mutima, heart, coeur. Those kind of small successes help to make all of the huge differences between their childhood and mine fall away.

Being white in africa is a really odd situation. In some ways, it's sort of like being a celebrity, except it doesn't matter who you are or what your favorite color is. All that matters is that you are a muzungo (white person). This connotes money, privilege, and beauty. It's like you are the most desired person and an alien at the same time. This past weekend, a few of my friends and I took a bus up to a gorgeous lake called Lake Kivu in the countryside. When we got off the bus in this rural town, probably 20 to 30 school children started following us and all over the town we could here children calling out "muzungo" and rallying more and more to follow us. All I know how to say really is hello, how are you, fine, and what is your name. So clearly the conversations were short.

People followed us throughout the town - some unaware that we could hear them whispering "muzungo" and "money". It really sucks to know that you are worth one thing only to an entire community. And I imagined what it would be like to be a celebrity - to be swarmed with people, but to be completely alone.

In Kigali, the city where I live, white people aren't as rare. But even so, every man that you talk to wants your phone number, and they don't take no easily, even with a wedding ring. Those annoyances aside, I am constantly amazed by people's kindness here. Honestly, the atrocities are visible still 14 years after the genocide (often referred to as the war here, I think because it's less painful). You occasionally see people without legs, which isn't that uncommon across the world - but here it is because many had their limbs cut off so that they could not escape. At first, I noticed people with scars and just thought that they were normal - that skin care wasn't as good here, that scars are more visible on dark skin, but they are just too numerous to ignore.

That said, these people bear their pain more gracefully than I thought possible. Their past has become a fact of life and they continue each day with a genuine interest in other people and are continually welcoming.

That was much more long-winded than I had anticipated . . . But just to show you a little bit of the sentiment that I have developed for this place, here is a picture of the countryside that I saw on my way to the lake. My camera couldn't do it justice - the colors are more vivid with more depth and everything is bigger and surrounds you . . .