–
Last night, a flood descended upon my village. We’ve had sporadic rain for the past few weeks, but in the middle of the night I was woken up to the sound of what I first thought was hail. The rain was heavy and constant; from the blackness of my bedroom I could make out near-horizontal sheets pelting my living room floor, covering the polished cement with dark water. I then realized that the intensity of the rain was exaggerated because my bedroom window, left open for my cat to easily access the safety of my warm bed, was also letting the rain in. My bedroom floor was connected to the rest of the house in one giant, continuous lake, soaking the rice mat I use as a makeshift rug and connecting to my closet-sized kitchen via a small waterfall cresting over the two-inch lip to the room. I hurried from my wool-blanket covered nest and shut as many windows as I could, replacing the sound of rain-on-cement with rain-on-wood, and then ditched the thick socks I’ve taken to wearing every night to supplement my elongated frame against the painfully cold evenings because, of course, they too were soaked through.
This was not a typical evening in my village, one whose name the Peace Corps does not allow me to share on published material like this but which is too small to be found on any map I’ve come across. And this morning, when I woke up to see the full effects of the downpour – flooded streets, flattened dark mud on every surface, a hazy fog covering the valley and everything in sight – I almost forgot the unpleasant shock of the rain from the night before. My village (“site” in Peace Corps jargon) has no cement roads, and the dirt roads are a mix of deep mud and steep rocky declines which always seem to trip me up when at least ten Rwandans are watching me. We have no power, so with the exception of the few wealthier homes that can afford to buy solar panels and the Coca-Cola sponsored “Ekocenter”, a brandless red box in the middle of the village square boasting both halogen lights and a television, there are no lights to illuminate the village once the sun sets around 6 pm. There are no sewers or drainage ditches, so the rain cleaned whatever rubbish was left on the village’s single dirt road, giving the place a clean, earthy smell. And there is no plumbing, meaning that families must pay to use the single pump in village to fill jerry cans full of water and then carry them, often on their heads, back to their homes. The rainfall meant that families wouldn’t have to pay for water today and maybe for the rest of the week – every home I’ve visited has some sort of rain collection system – and it means that the crops that the village economy depends upon will grow healthy and strong. Watching villagers return to their homes after tending their crops, hoe on shoulder, boots covered in mud, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these people looked undeniably, irrevocably happy.
And despite the still-drying inland ocean inside my house, I’m pretty happy too. For the past month, I’ve been living at site and getting used to the myriad new details that surprise me on a daily basis. But from September to December, my cohort and I experienced Pre-Service Training (PST), the “boot camp” of Peace Corps. I opted to avoid writing about my experiences during PST because everyone said it was a completely different part of Peace Corps and it was difficult to stay positive for three solid months. Don’t get me wrong – on a daily basis I was awestruck by the beauty of Eastern Rwanda (PST was held in Rwamagana, a small city that is about as different meteorologically and culturally from my site as possible) and the integrity of the culture that I was slowly falling in love with. But PST is not supposed to be fun. It is a three-month program that is designed to teach volunteers how to speak a language completely alien from their native tongue, how to avoid the endless list of health afflictions that plagued every one of us at some point in our training, and how to appreciate a history and set of customs that flies in the face of everything we’ve grown up with in the States. I know that I don’t speak for myself when I say that PST will be the worst part of my service; every serving volunteer I’ve met has echoed the sentiment, and from my month at site so far, I can already confirm the difference.
Not every part of PST was bad. I miss my cohort. Over the twelve weeks, we became an extended family, with the inside jokes and familial bonds to match. Our disagreements were petty and our time spent at the bars after a long day were fantastic. We learned to cook on charcoal together, we spent afternoons under avocado trees practicing Kinyarwanda and discussing literature, and we shared moments of silence when bad news reached us from the States or when one of our cohort left to return home. Our language teachers, persistent and patient, were kind and great to hang out with off-the-clock. The currently serving volunteers who visited us at various weeks during PST were sympathetic to our complaints and shared with us some hard truths about Rwanda and the Peace Corps. And the sambusas – if you’ve never had a sambusa, the deep-fried cassava pastries stuffed with meat or potatoes were killer, and my village simply does not compare.
During one of the later weeks of PST us trainees had our “site visits.” We loaded on to busses headed towards Kigali and then parted ways at the massive, chaotic bus station, cast off to the four corners of this tiny country. The excitement was palpable – we had yet to leave Rwamagana and our hopes were high. At site, I met Goos, the Ed-7 volunteer I would replace. His house was everything I could dream of: an hour motorcycle ride away from the closest paved road, no light or power, and more stars than I’ve seen in my lifetime. We had an incredible week. During PST, I took to writing “impressions” of various moments throughout the experience because simply not writing was inexcusable. Below is an impression I wrote up after a memorable meal in village:
We stepped down from the single dirt lot encompassing the square of [my site] and in to the room. There was no light. The sunset had dependably fallen swiftly and the lights of the village grossly underrepresented the chatter of market talk in the square or revelry in the akabare.
The room – shack? house? – was black. The walls, caked with noire smoke from burnt charcoal, showed age like the sediment of canyon walls. As men, more than as Caucasians, our presence was noted – the hush of recently spoken gossip was familiar. The space was simple: four walls, lined with squat wood benches. A great wok in the center was radiating a hellishly charming red glow, which reflected little on the matte perimeter.
Goos leaned over. “Do you notice anything?”
What did he want me to say? The sight of a fully robed woman using a meter-length stick to stir what looked like a hundred dancing crab shells? The smell… that smell, of hot oil and spice, filling every square inch of the room?
“Only women. Ibibenes are for women. I’ve been coming here for two years now, so they kind of let it slide. Can you believe that?”
The maestra slides five of the crab shells on a plate, expertly, which is received by another woman. The plate makes its way to Goos. The smell is erotic. The plate is plastic and barely transfers heat.
The first bite: crispy half shells of date oil-fried cassava dough collapse by force, flaming savory potion pours out. It’s better than cheese, an accolade reserved for very few culinary experiences in my life time; the cassava paste, mixed with molten tomato and onion, is packed in to fist-sized pastry like a tremor waiting to shift. Two bites later, the piece is gone. The plate empties in the minute.
Another plate is ordered, and then another, and another. The soft chatter behind three dozen bright eyes resumes at a low volume. The rhythm behind the wok owner’s motions is hypnotizing: the batch shifts constantly, her eyes never losing track of the order, her tool flipping the grilled mana over to create what I can only assume to be a perfect golden tan, the next empty plate never far from being filled. A hundred sizzling pastries transform from blonde flat shapes, puff with heat and oil and expansion and develop a crisp shell, the chef managing this procedure by affectionately prodding each piece like a tickle and keeping the input to output ratio at a perfect balance. The work is mathematical, precise, and yet human. Paradox.
“These are Ibibenes. They’re only made here, near Nyanza, which used to be the seat of the Rwandan royal government. People have been making these since the Iron Age.”
It was a meal fit for queens. As we left, a collective giggle floated out of the room, carried out of the enclosure with the crackling smoke. We couldn’t see it in the night.
Ibibene – the culinary climax of Rwanda, made first in my new home. I could tell I was going to like this place. I met up with Eric, the Health-9 volunteer who is serving in Rwanda after a period of service in Kyrgyzstan several years before, and the three of us laughed away in the unlit akabare (bars) that occupy most of the small structures in the village. When I had to return to Rwamagana, I was sad to leave.
This is the last thing that I’ll say about PST: after site visit, the mood shifted dramatically. All of us had tasted our future homes, making our imminent service much more concrete and dulling our ability to deal with the tribulations of PST. Every trainee in my cohort seemed to be dour in the week after Site Visit. People started succumbing to illnesses more often and missing home more intimately. Some of us were very disappointed with our future sites and took great strides to change their site placement before Swear In, which added additional stress to the increasingly-packed daily schedule. But over the remaining weeks, we made peace with what was to happen and where we were to be living, and by the time the cohort was packing their belongings in to cramped jeeps to move away and begin their service, everyone was crying. PST was an incredible experience precisely because the intimacy of the group wears down at one’s ability to maintain a polite, cheery face day in and day out. We were forced to share our most difficult moments with complete strangers. I can honestly say that I have never been more proud to belong to a group of people, and that I am still continually humbled by the achievements, motivation, and sheer perseverance of my new friends.
We were installed close to Christmas, which meant that my first Christmas in the Peace Corps would be spent in a village where I could barely speak the language, without any of the friends I’d made over the past three months, and without any ability to communicate with people back home – the village offers some cell reception, but with little sunlight and no external batteries, my phone struggled to keep a charge and constantly would break up during calls. These issues are what volunteers call “growing pains.” Additionally, the Peace Corps has strict restrictions on travelling outside of our sites during the first three months of service, leaving many to wonder how the holiday would be spent. That being said, eleven of us met at Tom and Christina’s home several hours from my site and had an incredible Christmas meal, complete with a white elephant gift exchange and some spiced sangria. Our Christmas travelling was the first time we ventured out of site and despite only being separated for a week, we spent the entire evening laughing about what the next two years would hold. The difference in attitude and outlook was immediately noticeable, and all of us were inspired by the examples of Tom and Kristina, a volunteer couple who have both served previously and are a constant source of positivity. I managed to use their home’s decent reception and reliable power to call family and friends back in the States, which was probably the best present I could have asked for.
—
I am from Jacksonville, Florida, a city in the northeast of the state. When I tell Rwandans about my home, they are inevitably confused. Is Jacksonville close to New York? I tell them it is in the South. Do you have slaves? I tell them that many people died to end slavery a long time ago. I toss out “Miami” as a city close by, which it is not, and to no avail – Rwandans have not heard of Miami, and if I have a map, they cannot find my state. I explain to them that my home is a large city near the ocean – a word rarely used in land-locked Rwanda – and that it is very hot and rains every day. When I tell them about the raining, they are happy, because Rwanda also has rain. They say that my old home and my new home are alike.
The two meteorological events could not be more distinct. One of my last memories of Florida was during Hurricane Irma, the storm which is more infamously known for contributing to Puerto Rico’s ongoing power and utility crisis. Irma rocked Jacksonville unlike any storm I have ever seen. In Florida, rain is a constant presence. It generally rains every month of the year, most often in the afternoon for a few hours during the summer or sometimes for several days at a time. The rain is heavy and constant, as if spigots in the sky poured water heater-processed streams on everything in sight. Florida’s uncontrollable vegetation comes alive during the rain. Everything with chloroform bounces under the drumbeat, as if laughing at our state’s feeble attempt to curb growth into our sprawling suburbs and water-sucking golf courses. Rain can flood streets, especially in the more fiscally conservative, public utility-stunted parts of the state like Jacksonville, but aside from a few smirks at the warnings about downed power lines on television life continues as normal. Falling asleep listening to rain is romanticized in many novels that I have read to the point of cliché, and it was not until living in arid East Rwanda that I realized how I had taken that soothing sound for granted all my life.
When Hurricane Irma was approaching Jacksonville, our city’s colors shone. The general reaction was unanimous: nobody cares. Beach-dwellers like myself have skirted rough storms like Matthew the previous year and the presence of a hurricane is really a coded message for good waves in our thriving surfer culture. Wealthier suburban dwellers loved the news; it was the time of year again for soccer moms to bump in to friends while stripping grocery stores of emergency supplies in bulk, and for football-coaching dads to compare notes on “home fortification” like feudal kinds discussing defensive strategies in wartime. For the majority of Jacksonville’s population – lower-income, urban, and living in property that wears age and a lack of refurbishment with un-self-conscious pride, a hurricane is a test. Who will leave all of their belongings in a house that could be flooded by one of the St. John’s River’s many estuaries? Who will miss a day of work in an economy that runs on self-employment, or take their kids out of school when education is often the only ticket away from northeast Florida? And most importantly, who actually believes that this is the one, that this is the storm to be afraid of, a Katrina 2.0? It’s a long-running joke that for Floridians, that anything below a Category 4 hurricane is just an excuse to have a party with the friends brave enough to weather it out.
Matthew’s scarring effect on the First Coast (as we proudly call ourselves – this is where the first North American colonists landed and lived, after all) had dulled the pride of many of the more affluent home owners and a week before Irma made landfall store shelves were empty. A mandatory evacuation order was put in place when the storm showed no signs of a last-minute weakening. By the time the order went in to effect, Red Cross stations were set up and people were making last-minute efforts to fill sandbags from communal dirt mounds under our many bridges to stop as much of the expected flooding as they could. The community, normally sleepy and content to spend their days alternating between favorite beach bars in late August, jolted awake that week, scrambling to board windows and urging friends to leave the city.
My mother and I stayed to volunteer at a Red Cross shelter, partly as a gesture of respect to my city before I moved away for 27 months and partially out of an inflated sense of importance afforded to me after my acceptance in to the Peace Corps. The rain, when it came, was devastating. Downtown Jacksonville was hit the hardest, being home to the oldest impoverished areas in the sprawling city, creating boatable rivers down potholed avenues near our imperially sized courthouse. The many suburbs between the urban center and the Intracoastal Waterway, which separates the beaches from the city proper, experienced flooding as well as the leveling of forests in to our many low-income communities and across wide roads bridging the metropolitan area. Thankfully, close to home, the damage was not so bad; the storm surge accompanying Irma was meek compared to Matthew, damaging only a few blocks closest to the ocean, and the majority of the flooding was caused by rainfall, not the surge. But I will never forget the rain, so warm and familiar throughout my life, become unhinged, disobedient; the wind pulled the water sideways and upward, dancing as if possessed in the flickering lights of sparking electrical wires, themselves veins of a climate experiencing seizure in the horribly strong winds. I remember the sight of water droplets moving upward in our parked car as my mother and I shared a cigarette away from the middle school we were staying at, and that simple observation etched the power that nature can have in my brain like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
Rain is different in Rwanda. It, too, has moods, ranging from annoying to furious to almost romantic. But the rain here is cold, spit from the cloud formations unwarmed by a steamy ocean current, and it is light, the droplets never quite causing me to flinch like they did back home and scarcely gaining the mass to drip from my unkempt beard. When it rains hard, as it did this past week, it is not so much a deluge of pelted pails of water as it is an evacuation of tiny flecks of condensation, unimpressive alone but a horde moving at once. Indoors the rain sounds hellish, but that is because the vast majority of buildings I have entered in site have thin and metal-reinforced rooves, so rain makes a sound not unlike the sharp clash of a hose on a tarp but amplified by the invariably small confines of a home.
When I resigned myself to walk home after a day of watching Breaking Bad and leaching off the health clinic’s power to do so, I knew that I would get wet. I did not own an umbrella and my rain poncho, blessedly sent by my mother at Christmas, was uselessly at my home an hour walk away. But the rain was difficult to explain at the time, and still escapes familiarity even as it falls while I write. In Florida, the rain invariable feels like tears, hot and heavy, not always cried in sadness but always from a place of memory. And here, the rain feels the warm and oozing trickle of blood, and I could not shake the feeling that I was walking through the capillary system of a living giant, and that the blood was racing because the giant was laughing. The dirt roads upon which I tread carefully, slowly so as not to slip and prolong my already-lengthy journey, are gouged along their sides so that rainwater will slide down their slopes; mixing with the reddish clay-heavy soil of Rwanda, the resulting mud moved swiftly with gravity and gained a peach tint, like an experimental ingredient out of Willy Wonka fantasy. Trees did not bend because the wind was slight, not unlike on a clear day; they vibrated, almost giggling, and as I walked along the faint but unmistakable sound of rain patter on rooftop mixed with the much closer sound of millions of banana tree leaves all lapping up the water in to their erect spines, the leaves fanning with the force like fins. To reach my home from the health clinic or the school, I must walk down a steep slope towards a three-trunk bridge that covers a normally pathetic trickle of brown water before making a slow ascent up the sides of a large hill towards the village square. As I approached the creek, the distinct sound of water lapping over water with intensity reached my ears, and as I stood looking at the now-full bed of rushing mud smashing branches my size against long-overgrown boulders, the three-trunk bridge suddenly looked woefully inadequate to support my weight.
But of course I crossed it – I’m writing this, aren’t I? – and I laughed at my own feebleness moments ago, and I was joined by the laughter of three small children nearby, who were watching my hesitation with glee. Nothing quite eases me like the laughter of children. And when I looked around at the bottom of this gulch, I was awestruck by how durable and comfortable and undeniably old my new home was. The rain columns came over the nearby mountain with the severity of a cavalry charge and lowered their massive, space-reaching selves in to the valley so that I was quite literally walking on clouds. The enlarged stream I had just crossed was one of hundreds from my field of vision, which was limited by the thick condensation of the storm; distinct veins of peachy, rosy, and ogre water weaved through the sloped corn fields and bronze-colored brick houses (they would be derogatorily be called “shacks” in the States by the same kind of person who refers to countries they have never visited as “shitholes”) and converged in the bottom of the valley some distance away. The crops, so crucial for the sustenance and livelihoods of my new community yet seemingly so haphazardly planted throughout the gulch, grew tallest alongside these free-flowing passages, and it dawned on me that the villagers here designed their fields to accommodate this kind of rainfall. I laughed with this revelation, and my spectating new friends laughed with greater intensity as a result, and overall the entire experience could only be described as alive.
—
Tomorrow will be Thursday, and Thursday is Market Day. Sharing this distinction with only Monday, and being misnamed due to its existence only between the hours of 4 and 7 pm, Market Day is nonetheless the defining event of my village. If Market Day tomorrow is anything like the previous 10 market days I have witnessed and the uncountable thousands that I have not, I can relate with confidence the feel of the occasion.
The Setting: My village is centered around a small dirt lot, bulging almost enough at its center to be described as a “hill” in the comically flat Florida of my memory, that sits due west of a cascading series of smaller hills, each holding their own smaller but equally vital dirt lots, connected by a gradually thinning series of dirt roads towards the crest of Rubona, a gorgeous mountain that bends around and hugs the lives of my community and many others. My village and Rubona are not unlike a heart and a breastbone; whereas many smaller hills have their own beautifully complex patterns and stories to tell, my village, and the otherwise unceremonious dirt lot at its center, are the site of a very large Market Day.
Bordering this hill are roughly two dozen structures, each resting at least a dozen feet below the trampled cap of this mound. Some are boutiques, cramped to the brim with the exact same combination of snacks, cooking supplies, cheap alcohol, and essentially any item one would ever need to live in a place like here. Some are “dens”, not quite bars; mostly empty for five of the seven days of the week, and closed on Saturdays – this is an Adventist community, after all, and a degree of decorum is expected. These dens house only benches and a backroom or two from which small jerry cans full of grain liquor are delivered to patient and invariably already-drunk patrons. More on that later. A few of the structures are milk bars, perhaps known as tea shops elsewhere, but as my village literally translates to “Where They Milk Cows,” hot, thick, delicious and intestinal-friendly milk is served hourly to the unlimited number of patrons who request it. Marked by beautifully flowing white sheets in their open doors, milk shops also house the ubiquitous amandazi, a thick ball of fried dough (not unlike a doughnut) and the always-warm chapati, a Swahili culinary creation popular throughout East Africa that mixes the crunchy utilitarianism of an Indian naan with the thick, semi-sweet heaviness of a good ole’ fashioned American pancake. I like the milk bars. In one corner is Mama Dalmour’s, the only definable restaurant in the village, owned by Mama Dalmour, the only definable power broker regularly seen by the villagers. Mama Dalmour’s makes excellent rice, beans, potatoes, and the occasional goat brochette (meaning pretty much every dish traditionally eaten in my neck of the woods), serves beer, and specializes in serving alcohol without allowing the all-male patrons to ever get out of line, which is likely the source of her mysterious yet undeniable power. At the crest of the hill is the aforementioned “Ekocenter,” raised by Coca-Cola like a flag for all to see, any time of day, and while this bulging, bright eyesore is frequently flocked to for its repeated playing of Miley Cyrus’ newest song and the attention of the two young female workers, it does not seem to detract from the regular going-ons of village life. And certainly not on Market Day.
The Cast: Roughly 300 people on a wet evening and 400 on a dry one, all on top of a dirt lot smaller than a regulation sized NFL end zone. A fifth of those in attendance will be sitting on the ground, maybe on a tarp portraying their wares, but it is perfectly acceptable to sit on Market Day, because the sellers have walked between 30 minutes to 3 hours to be here, with everything they hope to sell, twice a week. As the remaining four-fifths of those in attendance are buying something, the first sellers to arrive establish a rough order, with dry grains such as potatoes, corn and sorghum creating an aisle and vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, onions and eggplant (I strongly discourage the eggplant) facing the former about ten feet away. This order is strictly abided by, Market Day after Market Day, because it has always been this way, and it is constructed without the need to push or shout the hundreds of people milling about; when a new seller arrives, the crowd simply parts where the seller is walking – as much out of respect for the woman (invariably) carrying her load upon her head, hands-free (again, invariably) – and the aisle elongates. The crowd may briefly condense around the new seller to stare in curiosity at the goods she brings, deftly evaluate their color, quality and age, and if suitable, purchase a collection of her belongings before she places them in piles, each one typically costing an ijana (one hundred francs, or roughly 15 US cents). The seller has an incentive to sell her items quickly, because this will reduce the amount of leftover goods she must carry back, but she must also carefully parse her belongings and make the most of her wares, because there are at least five other sellers with the exact same product, and she may have been sent alone to collect income for her entire family. The stakes are high.
Behind the two main rows, a less defined ecosystem exists. Along one side may be a series of tarps covered in old shirts, shoes, or underwear. This will become the “strong side.” Soap tarps, fat and oil tarps, cooking supplies tarps will appear next to these, and near them will be “service providers” who will offer to fix a shoe, replace the head of an old farming tool, or, surprisingly, program a cell phone. The opposite side will typically become fleshed out by the very old or the crippled, who settle down on their tarps of produce away from the lights of the Ekocenter. The “weak side” will be less traversed, and while not always so Darwinian in its organization, the fastest and healthiest sellers are also the strongest farmers and often have the best crops. Once they run out of produce to sell, they will give up their spot for the next person behind them. The last person to set up their product tarp at market day will be the farthest away from the light, the movement, and the money.
And lastly, at the base of the hill, are the dens. On Wednesday and Sunday nights – Catholics seem to be less scrupulous about alcohol production on their Holy Day than the Adventists – large fires boil massive iron pots of banana “wine”, as it is called. This wine is taken to the back room of empty dens and mixed in a trough with boiling water and sorghum, for an extra kick. The wine is filtered and then cooled in time for the following evening. And on Market Days, the product is the most popular of the bunch. Trickles of the mob-like crowd buying and selling their wares make their way down to the dens, now packed to the brim with the husbands (notice a pattern?) of attendees. The establishment’s availability of liquor is marked by a jerry can with a ten-foot branch in its mouth in front of the den on top of the hill; in the sunsets of Market Days, these jerry-can-poles point towards the sky like spears of a resting army. Nestled between the dens are two black-charred rooms in which the women who have exhausted their agricultural commerce for the evening sit in the dark and gossip with old friends while their daughters run in and out to complete the shopping list for the family. The smell seeping out of these structures is intoxicating to the alcohol-infused crowd ambling about in the dark with varying degrees of success, and if he can stand it, a hungry Rwandan father will sneak in to one of these female-dominated ventures to munch on the succulent pastries and avocados offered inside at the cost of loud laughter from his equally drunk onlooking friends, but often will be accompanied by a lone young white man too oblivious and too hungry to care about such stigmas.
What I Expect Tomorrow Evening: Market Day in my village is unlike any cultural event I have ever witnessed. It is a break from back-breaking work in a field and the sweaty labor of the home in an invariably cool evening. It is an open air party, whereby the men get to be away from the women, the women get to be away from the men, and the children get to see their friends away from the suspicious eyes of a switch-wielding Dean of Students. It is couched in desperate terms – the competition is fierce, the prices are never final, and for the majority of those present, it is the difference between one meal a day or two for the next week. And more than anything, it has the air of hope: hope that a friend is still doing well, that her newborn is still healthy, that her son has not hurt himself too badly playing outside, that his best friend’s wife is pregnant with a boy this time, that his family will make enough to eat so he will not feel guilty spending their money on this momentary break from the confines of rural life. Market Days are a display of the soul of my new home, and it is a proud one, unambiguously determined to walk up the winding hills of our region towards an unassuming dirt lot twice a week, rain or shine. It is a home that I am proud to be a part of.
—-
January is now halfway complete and I am anxious about the coming weeks. On Monday, the Rwandan school system begins again. I will start teaching English to Rwandan children. It feels strange to write that sentence, partially because in it I can relate to the anxiety felt at the dawn of many new jobs and adventures that I have begun over my short lifespan, and partially because I have never truly taught before, nor have I ever taught in Africa, nor have I ever begun a job after graduating from the University of South Florida only seven months prior. The following week will be the Superbowl, which may feature my home team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, for the first time ever. That the historical laughing stock of the NFL – and a disdainful source of attention throughout my early years playing and watching the game – could play in and possibly win the most televised sporting event of the biggest television-watching nation on the planet, and that I will not be present for this eventuality, is frustrating. I normally could care less about football, but I have always told the curious friend that the Jaguars are my favorite team, and I have always compared that team to the drunken relative you just can’t quite stop loving, and now that relative is emerging victorious from a long-suffered rehab and I am not there to share in his victory. And of course, my birthday is at the start of February, and I will be celebrating 23 complete cycles around the sun, as a favorite teacher of mine likes to say.
So a lot is on the docket. I also have a list of goals that I set for myself in 2018, things to occupy my time in the power-starved confines of my home. I’m wagering that if I publish these goals online, I will feel more pressure to abide by them, so here goes.
- Stop smoking. I’ve been smoking on and off since I was 16 years old and the habit needs to die. Smoking in Rwanda is incredibly disrespectful. Men are viewed with distaste if they are seen smoking, and women who smoke are quite literally viewed as prostitutes. Despite their cheapness, my living allowance will disappear if I smoke at the rate I did during PST or before my departure for Rwanda. And crucially, my lungs need all the help they can; I live almost 5000 feet above sea level and I must walk everywhere I go, including to the crest of Rubona, my favorite vantage point. Smoking is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle, and the image of a child sneaking a peak at me smoking during PST was enough to dissuade me from my romanticized image of the habit.
So far, I’ve managed pretty well. I threw out the pack I had on January 1st and started whittling my way down from there. By January 5th, I had dropped to two cigarettes a day. By January 8th, I was down to one. I have not bought a pack as of this writing, but I have also not yet been tested; when I consume alcohol my desire to smoke spikes. I’ve cut back on drinking (I’ve had 3 beers since January 1st, a high-water mark for a former bartender) to compensate. We’ll see how my birthday works out.
- Exercise daily. My site mate, Eric, is fantastically in shape and has developed a very healthy exercise regimen that combines jogging with using our massive water-filled jerry cans for basic weight lifting. My hope is to give myself a month off smoking before I begin exercising in earnest – one massive habit change at a time – and regularly hike up and down Rubona in the meantime. Unfortunately, I recently took a nasty fall and banged up both of my knees pretty badly; I have not been to Rubona this week. February is a good month to start exercising, right?
- Write regularly. I love to write and if I plan on attending a graduate program following the completion of my service then I need to stay sharp. This blog is a first pass at this goal; we’ll see how consistently I can comply. I’ve also taken to composing lengthy emails with several good friends back in the States, and our correspondence is more or less daily. Finally, I have a lofty but intimate idea for a novel; during PST I won the “Most likely to write a book during service” superlative at our talent show and I’m intent on getting on that. But this can and will wait.
- Reading regularly. This one is self-explanatory. And of all my goals, this has been handled the easiest. Since my installation in mid-December, I’ve finished 14 novels. The best have been Shantaram, by David Gregory Roberts; The Bang-Bang Club, by Greg Marinovich and Jaoa Silva; and The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushie. I’m currently reading The Swan Thieves, by Elizabeth Kostova, but that should be finished by tonight. The best book I’ve read since coming to Rwanda, however, has been The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and I’m excited to repair my Kindle in a catch-all tech shop in Kigali so that I can get access to the massive library of Kindle books at the volunteer’s disposal.
- Practice photography. Before I left, a very dear family friend gifted me a camera to use during my service. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the lens. I am hoping to have the lens replaced at the same shop mentioned above. This goal can wait, as the rainy season is starting soon and I have no reason to subject the gift to any more abuse.
The remaining goals are more personal but not less important. I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions but I need to have something to take up my time, don’t I?
—–
When I woke up this morning, there was not an inland ocean collecting on the floor of my home. Unlike the wet night we recently had, the stars were out last night, and from my bed I can see them through my open window. The air was cool but comfortable, comfortable enough for me to forget to put on socks and not mind. I slept deeply; since moving to my site, I have slept more than I ever have in my life, and I feel as if I am making up for a masochistic schedule throughout college. I would typically smirk with some air of self-righteousness when I told my friends, bragging, that I could engage in so many activities on half the sleep. I forget why I used to do that now.
The cat is cradled in the crook of my left arm, his tail completing a full circle with his tawny ears. He vibrates softly as I stir. Most mornings, he is nestled somewhat uncomfortably between my upper thighs, forcing me to form a wishbone pattern in my bed that is all too familiar after living with a long frame and a short mattress for so many years. Today, however, I quietly move my arm to let him keep sleeping and climb in to the clear morning.
My first activity is invariably boiling water for tea. My kitchen is still dirty from the night before, but not as filthy as I imagined in the dark; two tables form an L in one corner, one for a collection of spices and silverwares boxed away (the “work” table) and one under my window that balances the two-burner gas stove and my large, stainless steel water filter and several containers of fresh, over-bleached water. The wall directly in front of the door – the window is open to the right, so that a geometric isosceles triangle of light cuts groundward – holds a collection of pots and pans, hanging on nails so that pests cannot occupy my cooking tools. The wall to my left has a few hanging utensils and a “knife bag,” this canvas tote left by a former volunteer that constantly instills the value of patience if I return a knife too quickly and it slices through the bottom of the bag, clanging to the floor. On the ground, a large metal trunk rests, in which my food is stored in plastic Ziploc bags sent from home and a shoebox that used to include a collection of sweets given as a Christmas gift. I switch the lever on the kerosene tank and spark the fizzling escaping gas, beginning to boil water left over from the night before.
When the tea is ready, I throw on a shirt (a tank top – the tattoo on my right shoulder is taboo in my new home but is already a source of interest for village children as they run to brush the spine of the jumping bull) and check to make sure that nobody broke in the night before. My bedroom and kitchen are separated by an “atrium”, I suppose it would be called, in which I have nailed a dozen gorgeous landscape photographs of American national parks above the crossbeams of the four doorways, each stolen from an old calendar also left behind by a former volunteer. The den is simple enough; a bookshelf crammed with child’s games, memorabilia from home, the almost-full medical kits of the past volunteers and close to two dozen books (nearly all read – I need to fix my Kindle pronto) adorns one wall, which is lit by a curtained window overlooking a low table atop a burnt orange and cyan rice mat rug, bordered by a couch and two wooden chairs. The long wall of the den is taken up by a massive red, black, yellow and white rice mat purchased in Rwamagana before site installation: instead of littering the wall of my landlord’s house with nail holes, I’ve paperclipped dozens of pictures from home, letters from friends, the odd Turkey feather from our Thanksgiving in the cohort, and an agenda from my church back in Jacksonville mailed by my mother on Christmas day. To the right of the door is an emergency medical kit and a “catch-all” kit given to me by my cousin Will in Asheville, in case I need to leave in a hurry. No one has broken in to my home, and although it is possible, I have a suspicion that no one will.
I round the corner to the left of my house and walk behind it, slightly down hill. Behind my house are several empty brick shells, homes under construction. This area is a favorite stop for the goats that are herded down the street day in and day out and is carelessly a small garbage pile for local children. But behind these ghostly, empty structures is an endless sky, filled with slowly wafting fog uncovering a limitless number of hills. The morning is stunning; I can see dozens of small valleys and homes, all slowly gaining form as the heat causes the fog to dissipate. It is as if the universe deleted this field of view every night, and yet every morning decided to reassemble the world, anxious to place the same amount of detail and care in to what was taken away. The steam from the tea rises with the fog.
Breakfast today will be egg based. Breakfast every day is egg based. But today, I will do something special: slice the petite potatoes in to thin slivers and quick fry them, sautéing them with southern barbecue rub (again, gifted by my darling Mother) and then cooking them in to an omelet in an American twist on the “special omelet” of Rwamagana fame. The attempt is successful; I eat with vigor, drinking from the whey protein powder-infused “milk” I use to supplement a relative lack of protein in my diet and warning my cat with my eyes that any attempt to snatch from my new creation will be met with righteous anger.
Behind my primary structure is a courtyard of sorts, no larger than a single-car garage; there is a small path made of cracked clay pots that connects the back door to the concrete rim of the rear three rooms, the path being flanked by a fledgling but optimistically growing corn patch over which two lines for drying laundry hang to the left, and a little grass plot with a firepit and a hammock against the far wall. The first room, on the far left, is a latrine. Those familiar with a third-world plumbing situation need no further description, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise of those who are not. The third room, on the far right, is my “shed”, in which I store a 60-kilo erect bag of charcoal, a bundle of wood, and a motley assortment of tools both brought from the States and purchased before installation. I love this room.
The inevitable follow-up to cooking is cleaning dishes, unpleasant with a machine and more so without one. This is what the center room is for. In it is the embarrassingly growing pile of cooking implements soaking in water to make their associated scrubbing that much easier, three large tubs and a stack of soap. Each of these rooms have a simple dirt floor, clay-heavy mud brick walls, and terra cotta shingles, all in varying shades of beige. The overall look somewhat reminds me of a ranch I worked on in Colombia, and as I am digging in to the slightly burnt egg, rice remnants, coffee grounds, and rotting vegetable carcasses of past meals, I try to think of that ranch. The water is poured from one of three large jerry cans, and after usage will be dumped in to the patch of corn, unevenly growing due to the angle of the sun. As the labor drags on – all done squatting, or slightly falling on my ass while trying to squat, still groggy from sleep – the sun starts to peak over the roof of the main building, giving a golden tinge to the chore. As I finish and dry up, my watch reads 7:00 am.
The day will be centered around meeting with my boss, Epimaque, at the school I will soon start working at. Earlier in the week he said that he wants me to meet him at 10. I’ve taken to getting up early to prepare for the start of school – classes begin at 7, and since I need to leave home no later than 6:15, I’ve taken to waking up every day at 4. I settle on to the hammock and lazily bat away flies, content to read in the sun as the dishes dry. The cat leaps on to my abdomen, examines a black-and-white magpie three times his size above the shed, and proceeds to leap on to the roof of the wall adjacent, hunter in action. I’ve never owned a cat before and I’ve fallen in love with his graceful, if often fruitless pursuits.
I make the walk to the school – I arrive half an hour early, sitting on a still-shaded stoop. I resume my reading, inching closer to the part where the protagonist puts all of the clues together and essentially says “Gosh, darngit! How did I not see this before!” around the 500th page. My aggression comes out when I realize that a book I’m reading is wasting my time and I’m committed to finishing this one as soon as possible, but when I victoriously shut it at 10:45, my boss is not there. One feature of Rwanda is Rwandan time, and I would not be saying this if our Rwandan counterparts in PST did not joke about it so heavily. As Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in Shadows of the Sun (one of the best books of my time in the Peace Corps so far, following the multi-decade coverage of Poland’s first Sub-Saharan reporter), time has a different significance here; things happen when they are supposed to happen, and I repeated this to myself until I had dulled my brain in to calm as I marched downhill towards the health clinic.
Le Sante, as the health clinic is known, is the only medical facility within an hour drive of my house. It is Rwandan-run and funded, serving the 500 official residents of the village community and the residents of anyone else nearby, free of charge. Eric, my site mate, spends his weekdays here, assisting in passing out baby formula, conducting vaccinations, and measuring limb width for signs of malnutrition, which he optimistically says is on the decline. The health clinic is also the most reliable source of power (and even internet!) that doesn’t require an hour-long motorcycle drive. After a recent renovation, the clinic’s solar powered system has become even more reliable, meaning that I could spend all day sitting on a bench watching Breaking Bad if I wanted to. And I have wanted to, many times. But for now, I find a free bench and lie down, waiting until noon or so to return to the school and hunt down my boss.
The sound of straining wood awakens me, and I realize that the lurking clouds I didn’t register earlier had begun to pour violently around me, hiding anything past 20 meters. The straining wood really sounds like wood splitting under a great weight, and I begin to flinch, but I realize that I had ignored the hail bouncing off the glittering grass outside. It was denting the sheet metal roofs of the health center complex, and reliably, a window broke at the corner of the room I was napping in, dramatic for an instant and then a cool source of sideways rain in the stifling heat of the room. I put on an episode of Breaking Bad, the one about the fly, and slipped back to sleep.
I awoke sometime after 3:00. Epimaque had to be at the school by now. I pack my belongings, an embarrassing little act given the stark empty hands and sullen cheeks of the mothers now sitting in the room with me. One child was sleeping, tied on the back of a mother with a bolt of cloth, and the other was at his mother’s breast, a practice so common and so practical that I cannot remember why there was such a debate about the 2-minute feeding session in the States. I hurried out of the room, accepted the mud that would swamp my shoe as I made my way up the hill towards the school, and enjoyed the smell of fresh rain on wet ground.
——
The journey back to my site was arduous. Two friends offered to meet me in Huye (formerly Butare), a bustling city in the south of Rwanda known for its high volume of young people attending university and the accompanying night life that has grown with the student population. Huye is a popular destination for Peace Corps Volunteers looking to get out of their sites for a night and experience akabenzi, a Southern dish of fried pork sautéed in spices and served with chips. I was excited to see my friends and take a breath of fresh air before school began on Monday.
It was a glorious outing. We grumbled awake the following morning and attempted to figure out how to return to our sites. The weekend was promised to be a travelling nightmare due to the massive influx of students using the limited bus options to travel to their homes for the term. I’m still not sure how that relocation works: are students leaving home to live with relatives or family friends for the school term? Are they leaving relatives in more affluent cities to return to their families before their education resumes? Are thousands of children also in cities like Butare to relax one last time before the onset of a tedious school semester? I hope to learn of such Rwandan secrets within the next two years.
Travelling home would involve fighting for a spot on one of the busses from Butare to Nyanza. This is easier said than done; the busses are loaded to the brim, four people to a thin row, on a normal day, and on travel-heavy days the spare room on the bus – as in, the space we would normally consider to be for our heads – is squeezed with everything from hundred-pound suitcases to mattresses, rolled up and tied together. Sacks of rice spill their contents on every one of the billion potholes of the road and for a tall person like myself, the inescapable claustrophobia of many people in a small space is guaranteed, alleviated only by the presence of an immersive fiction (Travels with Charlie, by John Steinbeck, was the hero of the day). Upon arriving in Nyanza, I would then need to wade through dozens of motorcycle taxis (the most ubiquitous form of transport in Rwanda) and find my man from the village, who would not charge me an excess price because our destinations were the same. Competing umumotari will block my crossing of a road, swerving in front of traffic, for the opportunity to drive a white man and charge him the “usual rate.” When I am carrying my Peace Corps-issued motorcycle helmet, all white and of moderate quality in the States but leagues more safe than the makeshift helmets resembling welder’s gear in Rwanda, the lust for my patronage is loud and constant, and I can’t shake the feeling that a motorcycle gang is following me around the town.
Travelling is a headache, but becomes as normal as seasonal pollen allergies after the third or fourth trip. I don’t even think about the discomfort anymore, which is surprising, because I had become so acclimated to the luxury of American commutes during the past few years. The discomfort becomes tertiary to the striking beauty of endless terraced hills and a hundred shades of green, and to the infinite humorous interactions experienced in a normal drive. Bus passengers are accosted by sambusa salesman, farmers peddling fresh maize, and children asking for money at every conceivable stop, and the spectacle of a middle-isle mother negotiating with a window-seated passenger, who is in turn negotiating with the entrepreneurs outside, is lively and organic. Invariably a tapping noise will stall our transit – the signal from a passenger to the driver that her stop is imminent – and a collective groan will rise from the bus’s inhabitants, a dishonest sound nominally signifying a reluctance to move people and cargo out of the way for the needing back-seat passenger but in reality a call to arms to exercise the Rwandan grace (and it is a grace) of efficient organization, as 20 people in the way of the departing traveler compete to contort themselves in more novel ways for the inconvenient exit. Luggage is passed overhead, bumping in to cranium and small child alike, who are so used to the dutiful obligation of making way for a complete stranger that they elicit no cry. At a rate of one stop every five minutes, transit in Rwanda is rarely a sober affair, and with excitement in my heart for my meeting with Felix, I was laughing all the from Butare to Nyanza.
Felix is a Burundian artist who I met over several games of pool on the way out of Nyanza the day prior. His demeanor struck me at once; he sported a ragged beard, unusual for adult Rwandan males, as well as a well-loved beanie obviously concealing a tangle of dreads, a custom apparently common outside of Rwanda but rarely seen here. Most crucially, his hands were caked with dried paint, and his English was impeccable. When I say “we met over pool,” I mean Felix kicked my ass with the geometric precision of a player used to playing around the world against a variety of opponents and styles, the kind of skill I’d seen in many hostels throughout Europe and South America on my previous travels. I could tell that this man was someone that I wanted to talk to. We shared a beer and promised to meet up in Nyanza after my night out in Butare, and on the bus towards home and I couldn’t shake his hearty laugh and bloodshot eyes out of my mind.
He was at the bar 10 minutes before our stated appointment – another trait uncharacteristic of Rwandans – and we spent the better part of two hours talking about our journeys to this moment. I related a brief overview of my time in college, my trips abroad, the luster of loves lost and my ambitions for the future. Felix had a similar story: born in Burundi in the late 80s, he left for Bolivia to escape political conflict and become a painter. He lived in Bolivia for several years, travelling around the region (we had similar disgruntlements of Southern Peru with the reservation that the sky above Lake Titicaca was sublime) and meeting other expats. He followed a woman to Switzerland, where he lived for 6 years supporting his income as an artist by working in an apple orchard, and fell out of love with her and European decadence around the same time. He caught a boat back to Africa (flowing in the opposite direction from the human flood of migrants escaping in to Europe) and travelled by land down to Burundi, where his family was scattered or dead and his home was unrecognizable. He ended up in Rwanda, travelling from city to city, taking commissions for mural projects like the one he was finishing up when I met him and painting portraits and landscapes in his spare time.
His story was interspersed with reflections about his four years in Rwanda, reflections that articulated many questions I have been quietly deliberating in my mind. He compared the government’s insistence on “cleanliness” in appearance – cutting off dreadlocks, daily shaving – to the jingoism of North Korea, saying that the amount of compliance to State orders was disconcerting. He believes that Rwanda is a perfect laboratory for authoritarianism; compared to Burundi, the cultural and social makeup of the two neighboring states are identical, but the confounding variable in economic and political differences has been the heavy hand of the State since the 1994 genocide. The edicts of government councils explains both the resounding success of Rwanda’s military (domestically but also within Africa, leading the 56 countries in support for UN-sponsored peacekeeping missions on the continent) and economy, which is heavily manipulated by often arbitrary declarations, such as the overnight banning of hookah this past December or the more impactful ban on secondhand clothing imported from abroad, requiring the Rwandan textile industry to make up for lost imports. Compared to Burundi – mired in constant political strife, on the verge of ethnic conflict, stratified along the same lines as pre-genocide Rwanda and negligible economically and militarily – the Rwandan experiment has proven to be wildly successful.
In Felix’s mind, Rwandans have chosen the security of an authoritarian state over the freedom of a liberal one, and the choice was well-made. It is not kosher to say it in the countries of the “Occident”, where the specter of authoritarian states seems to become more concrete every day, but there is something to be said in choosing safety over freedom, if the dichotomy can be simplified so easily. “Freedom” is not an agreed-upon idea in even the slimmest sense of the word, to start; what we Americans may call a free political process is definitively not free because of the abundance of private wealth in the electoral system, embodied by a President who boasts about his massive private wealth and a string of gubernatorial elections in which the wealthiest Americans of their respective states are vying for power. How can a system be “free” if wealth is unjustly passed from generation to generation with no dividend for the workers and public who provided for that wealth, and then imposes no limit on the imposition of that wealth in a political process? Many Rwandans would claim that the arrogance and stupidity of pampered Americans is on display when diplomats criticize Rwanda for a supposedly less-free political system. Similarly, boasting of a “free press”, one of the Occident’s proudest attributes and most frequent lamentations of Rwandan politics, is a haughty claim at best. One of the benefits of a free press, according to the common sense of our capitalist system, is a degree of veracity not matched in the propaganda machines of non-Western authoritarian powers. But this argument is fraught on both ends; on one hand, our expectation of freedom in publication allows for corporate-sponsored propaganda to dominate traditional and social media with no requirement for fact-based reporting, and on the other hand, our “more accurate” free press failed to predict the election of President Trump, instead spending months lambasting the possibility and up until election night spreading the belief that there was no statistically possible way for Trump to win. If our system of press is free, why do corporate interests control it? And if our system of press is true, why was it so horribly wrong? The Rwandan approach to censorship abhors neoliberals in the Occident, primarily for their reluctance to allow information critical of the government to be published. Of course, international reporting covers the statistical problems and intellectual criticisms of Rwanda as much as they would any African state (read: with a bias towards Western reader’s assumption of widespread poverty and “tribally”-charged motivation for every action), and a simple argument for the Rwandan approach is that very few Western readers know of the amazing vitality of Rwanda’s growing economy, insistence on women’s equality, and reliant stability in a region fraught with electoral and economic discord. But more darkly, the government has made the wager that reporting against the government should be censored because any popular opposition reporting could become polarized on repressed ethnic lines, repeating the press-fueled ethnic stratification proceeding the 1994 genocide and mirrored today in the “free press” of Burundi, which if more internally organized may well repeat ethnic conflicts of their own nightmares from the past decade.
I have hesitated to discuss the genocide in Rwanda and I will continue to do so. I am a foreigner, an umuzungu, and my opinion does not matter. I will be struggling with an understanding of the events of 1994 until I leave Rwanda and probably for long afterwards. And crucially, I do not want to contribute to the hysterical ignorance of many Americans, some of whom feel intellectually comfortable with their understanding of my new home based on a movie starring Don Cheadle, if they understand Africa to be a continent (as opposed to a country) in the first place. This country is so much more than a genocide story, and my experience here has and will be so much more than a journal about living in a country torn by genocide. But my conversation with Felix struck a much deeper cord, one that I could relate to: what does authoritarianism look like, how similar is it to the changes happening in my own country, and how much denial factors in to the social psychology of the citizenry of an authoritarian state? Is the kind of entrapment that predicated conflict in the 90’s similar to what is happening in America today? And as conflict among different races, both inside my home country and as deliberate foreign policy, becomes more normalized, how will the American People’s response mirror the response to increasing government-by-edict in Rwanda?
Felix’s story was harsh but he punctuated his adventures with the kind of deep, holy laughter that a travelling monk might have. We laughed over musings about Rwandan women and the strange union of love and property ownership in the “Occident”, as he calls the West. He was hoping to leave Nyanza for Kigali in the coming month but did not have a place to stay; I passed along the information of an artist collective that helped aspiring painters and musicians catch a break in Rwanda’s capital, and we laughed again at the fickle wanderlust of artists in general. We traded phone numbers and sipped on our last beer in silence, the kind of silence that is both embarrassed by personal revelation to a stranger and hesitantly optimistic about the beginning of a friendship. We plan on meeting again, and before I leave Rwanda, I would not be surprised if I take with me a beautiful portrait of the countryside’s endless terraced hills.
——-
I would be remiss if I did not relate the story of my first day at school. I was nervous beyond belief, at least as nervous as I was on my first day in college, except there would be no party to dissipate my anxiety on the first night and no acceptance by my headmaster of a hangover the following day. I decided to wear khaki slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt under a blue blazer, which I wore to conceal the large tattoo on the inside of my left forearm, and when my long-loved leather shoes refused to stay together the morning of, I opted to wear my tried-and-true combat boots, my companions for the past 7 months and easily the most comfortable articles of clothing I have ever owned. I checked myself in the reflection of my backdoor, with just enough light out at 6 am despite the heavier-than-normal fog obstructing everything beyond a ten-foot radius, and saw that my shaved head had grown back in to a comfortable buzz and my beard was maybe even a little more civilized than it had been in my mind’s eye. My backpack was packed with computer and cable to charge at school, as the previous volunteer recommended, and I filled up a thermos of coffee. School starts at 7 in the morning and ends at 4 in the afternoon, and I had the feeling it was going to be a long day.
I had been told “horror stories” of first day chaos by other volunteers, but I suppose that my romanticism had gotten the best of me, and despite my headmaster’s tardiness the week before and my lack of a schedule, I assumed that this picturesque school-on-a-hill, overlooking a valley of color and fog, would become orderly at the presence of a foreign teacher. I was wrong, of course. At 7, I was the only person at the school; the umukozi sweeping and mopping the grounds arrived at 7:15, a few teachers wandered in around 7:30, the headmaster arrived at 8, and not a student was to be seen until 10:00. Not that we spent the interceding hours discussing teaching strategies or lesson planning; instead, I received my schedule (fewer classes than I wanted, but no teaching on Fridays, meaning perpetual three-day weekends and time for after-school clubs and Kinyarwanda classes) and set to work finishing the Steinbeck novel I had on hand. I’ve never been good at waiting, despite an abundant amount of practice, and at every paragraph break I nervously looked up from my book to see what everyone else was doing, how they were doing it, where they were going, and assessing if I needed to go with them. The coffee was warm, but I didn’t know if it’s presence was a sign of flaunted, grotesque wealth or of my weakness as a teacher, unable to make it in on the first day without the added effect of a drug? Only one other teacher wore a blazer (I saw several at a teacher’s meeting the day before) and many threw on long white coats, traditional teacher’s attire resembling that of a lab technician. Was I overdressed? Did my boots, now much dirtier than they looked in the morning light, break the strict Rwandan dress code?
I got to sit on these anxieties until noon, when my first class began, and I admit before God and Man that I snuck in to a local shop and purchased two chalky cigarettes to ease my anxiety. They did not work, and now I’m starting my month over. What if the students could smell that nasty, post-drag smell and laugh me off as an rude foreigner? I checked my pants for stains, and saw a small drip of coffee on my right knee – or was that blood from a bad fall still healing – and wondered if my students would think that I play in the mud. I have already resolved to tell them that I am 23, for the first time in my life lying about my age (in truth, I turn 23 on 7 February, but the distinction is one we rarely make in advance of our birthdays in the States) and hoping that the extra year will grant me some additional modicum of respect, given that many of my students will be older than 18 and some may be older than I. I’ve finished Travels with Charlie recently and began The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a dense academic text by Julian Jaynes that revolves around dissecting our definition of consciousness and tracking its origin throughout human history. Jaynes makes many excellent points about how our best learning and acting – when we are in our “flow” – is done without conscious attention to our actions. I wish that I had read that chapter before my first lesson, instead of the forlorn end of a Steinbeck novel.
My anxiety was premature. My first class, an English lesson to S5 students (equivalent to 11th grade in the States), had 4 students. They were very quiet. I was told that the class should have 16 students, but these 4 would have to suffice. I wrote my name on the board and told them a little about myself, that I had graduated from university after studying English and Political Science, that I loved to travel, that my brother was a student in an American university but wanted to be a soldier after graduating. I opened up the remainder of the short period for questions. They asked me if I was single, to which I said yes. They asked me why – “Kuko mfite akazi” (Because I have a job) had all of them giggling. I asked what they wanted to learn, and two of the students hoped to be geography teachers, so I promised them that I would use geography terms in class this term. And the feared question: Why does Donald Trump hate Africans? I told them that Trump does not represent Americans, and that most Americans love Africans, that many Americans descended from Africa and are friends with non-African-Americans. We spent a few awkward seconds in silence as I erased the blackboard of my scrambled writing and then the period was over.
That was it. My first class as a Peace Corps volunteer. They learned nothing, and seemed as scared as I was. In my next class, I had three of my promised 21 students, and I repeated the same thing. This time, they asked me if I also hated Africans, like my President. I told them no, and tried to stifle my anger at the Kafkaesque situation us Peace Corps volunteers in Africa have found ourselves in, the context of our service changed from one under a President who seemed intent on rebuilding America’s relationship with the continent to one under a President who seems intent on reversing that progress, casting us as patronizing and imperial to our students. These students (all girls) were excited to have me as a teacher and to continue the progress they began under the previous volunteer. They asked me about applications to GLOW Camp (Girls Leading Our World) on the first day in impeccable English. I knew that this would be a good class.
My last class of the day was with S1 students, or the equivalent of 6th graders. They knew very, very little English. They did not understand me when I asked them if they had any questions about me, or America, or the Peace Corps. We broke in to pairs and practiced basic introductions, starting with responses to “How are you?” other than the wrote-memorized “I am fine.” I could feel their interest waning, so we played a “game.” This class was large, and I took a gamble that the noise would not upset the other teachers; we sang “Making Melodies” as the other volunteers and I did in Model School during PST, and with 80 students, the sound was deafening. The kids loved seeing this tall white man awkwardly tiptoeing around the room with his thumbs out, and they mimicked me to much applause. I could not help smiling when I arrived at school the next day and heard muffled “Making melodies, in my heart…” as I walked past.
The day was complete. Somehow, I had drank the entire thermos of pitch black coffee and could feel the oncoming crash that comes with caffeine saturation. When I made it home, though, I remembered that I needed to go shopping for a week’s worth of food, and I set off towards the market with a spring in my step. My students saw me out of the blazer, wearing an olive-green jacket over my undershirt, and smiled and waved as I walked by. There were so many! In the sleepy twilight of the evening the beige and blue uniforms of the students stuck out in the assembled crowd on my village’s little dirt lot, now heavily populated by buyers and sellers and the loud, laughing drunks stumbling out of dens, the entire scene a chronological mosaic containing my apprehension of move-in and a new-found sense of purpose mingled amongst the raw humanity. I stopped and talked to friends and co-teachers and students and their mothers, and by the time my bag was full the soupy night had permeated every corner of the village. The day was over, and the next two years had truly begun, and nothing has ever felt so right.
——–
A final impression, written during PST but appropriate nonetheless:
The hills offer two, maybe three bright lights at night. I can see the LED sunray of a flashlight spark in and out of existence. Maybe that’s a car? The orange must be a fire. There are no light poles. No living room windows, amber. No planes.
The belt of indigo-black parses a rocky night horizon from a cloudless Sky. The stars are pinholes, punctured through a dark curtain. Where does all their light come from? I imagine white lamps positioned strategically, hung by rope from a ceiling I will never see.
Powdered between stars are arms of nebulae some rose pink, others watered milk. Partial brushstrokes of distant matter, contorted over the Sky like after-thoughts or first drafts. They are larger than I can measure but they fit between the tips of my fingers, and the depthless silhouette of my arm cancels their soft span.
I can hear it, wind, liquid motion between crests of the Land of a Thousand Hills. It rushes over me with character and races up the nearest mountain, billowing that dark curtain, reminding the Sky that it used to be a sail and if it weren’t for the stars to let our breath escape one giant gasp would bring it all down on top of us.
certification 
Leave a comment