certification

–

I set out at 4:00 in the morning, convinced that the journey from my site to Nyanza would take a little under four hours.  The trip is an hour on the back of a speeding moto and I roughly estimated that a 15-minute stretch with the driver would take me an hour to cover.  If I wanted to reach Nyanza by 9:00 to meet with Felix and talk about the art project brewing in my mind, leaving at 4:00 would guarantee a cushion.  And leaving so early wouldn’t be that difficult, since it had become habit during the first two weeks of school, and I could leave my site in the dark of morning without a bulging backpack drawing attention in the morning rush of an awakening village.

All of this calculation took place over drinks the night before with a friend in my village, who was embarrassed that our meet up had been commandeered by a call from his lover, the object of his obsession.  I sat in a dark room, sipping warm beer the color of refuse, slowly peeling away the aluminum label of my bottle to maximize my pleasure from the dull interaction.  My friend anxiously looked over at me for the first ten minutes of his lengthy call, but once he started laughing with that vigor us young men get when we need to express that everything our beau says is comedic gold, my mind turned to the following morning.  I had hiked to another volunteer’s site the previous weekend on a whim, bored and stuck in my own head and desperate for fresh air, and the experience was wonderful.  Each village’s legion of children swarmed the wooden beam-and-post “gate” of their settlement anticipating my arrival.  The stretches between villages were filled with toothy-grinned kids too anxious to talk but laughing at my every facial expression, and when I started singing (a habit on long walks) the children multiplied.  My walk to Nyanza, figured in my slightly intoxicated mind, would be no different.

So I packed for the trip, knowing that I would take a bus to Kigali after arriving in Nyanza and wanting to use the opportunity to repair several damaged electronics as a treat for my upcoming birthday.  In the dark, my personal physics challenged by my broody consumption, I rationalized that a bag weighing as much as a grown man was not too much of an inconvenience on a four-hour hike.  I laid out my boots and rolled up a pair of slacks to the knee that would allow me to cover my legs in the cool dark morning, picked out a shirt borrowed from my brother (whose peak physical condition is a source of inspiration), and struggled to fall asleep giddy with anticipation.  My alarms read, in order, “It’s coming…”, “Start showing signs of life,” and “YOU’RE HIKING TODAY!”

The moon – being one of the lunar events that blew up my Facebook feed in the past few weeks – was large and blue.  The red-earth roads in my village were a dark, rosy color, infused with the lunar light, and the still towers of banana trees and shop faces were discernable in the glow yet too dark to cast shadows; the rush out of the house, designed to prevent any hesitation of my departure, made the personless morning’s lines blurred and shaded, giving a dream-like quality to my steps.

The first hour was an exercise in solitude.  My village sits at the crest of a hill, perched like a nest above a spiraling series of dirt roads scarred by chasms and lopsided wooden bridges.  At the bottom of the hill is the “big bridge”, six thick logs spanning a twenty-foot gulf, below which water rushes over a dozen flat, polished boulders.  In the day time, I have seen mothers and daughters stamping out their clothing on the backs of the largest boulders, sitting like islands upon which the strong silhouettes of the laborers bend and rise with mathematical repetition.  In the pre-dawn morning the water’s most important quality was the roar of the flow as it crashed in to the steep banks of the river, illuminated specks of silver from the moon glittering in an otherwise black landscape.  Past the bridge, the road winds up another hill, seemingly placed on the incline like paint is strung on a Roscoe painting, without form, only function.  The moon sunk lower in to the sky and the trees blurred even more in that eerie space between the light of a clear night and the rush of color from dawn.  At the end of the first hour, I could turn around and see my village starting to teem, the distinct craning of backs and slicing of earth by farmers on the slopes of this hill-top nest becoming obtuse and acute angles even in this light.

As I passed in to the following hour, I could see the winding of the road to come.  When I hiked to my friend’s site, the children led me between the hills, along the thin slivers of footpath which connect the corners of Rwanda like the synapses in a verdant brain, and we avoided the difficulty of steep ascent and hasty descent until we could see her house.  Today I was walking along the path the moto drivers use – wider, steeper, lined with homes and offering the vantage points that postcard photographers murder for.  When I left the first valley, a lavender band of color was running along the spines of a hundred hills, and with this hint of vibrancy the sheer mass of fog became apparent.  I could hear the first birds crying out and pop in to existence for the briefest of moments before diving in to the sea of fog like gulls off Atlantic Beach back home, their reappearance some kilometers away discernable only by the slightest tufts of collected condensation solidifying and then evaporating along their flight path.  Along the road I met my first people, their eyes averting mine as they do in the dead of night, although I could not tell if their reluctance to greet me was due to the oddity of seeing a white man walking on a road at 5:00 in the morning or if they too were entranced by the dreamy, ethereal awakening of the world around them.

The second valley lurched below the road with intensity, its basin invisible beneath the fog.  In my sleep-choked perception the world was upside-down, with the clouds hovering below my feet.  A fall would be lethal, the tumble stopped harshly by a mud brick home constructed at an improbable angle or by a tree whose roots lay somewhere below the morning haze.  I walked in the middle of the road, the most worn by travel, spotted with the bald heads of stones whose dirt blanket was no longer intact after years of use.  The inclines were difficult; I swayed my hips with each step, like my marching-trained brother had taught me, the straps of the backpack already cutting in to my shoulders.  My lungs were weaker than I imagined.  My goal of quitting smoking was hampered by a lack of self control exacerbated by the decision-making process in place under the influence of alcohol the night before, and the heat of the smoke had freshly scarred my throat.  At one point I stopped at the rounded bottom of the road before I made yet another ascent, and paused to smoke.  I was enraptured by the image of a young man standing in his doorway, watching the lavender slowly give birth to hues of purple and rose before the explosion of bright orange colored the top of the sea of fog and began the slow parting of the sea before us.  His posture was so relaxed, so engrossed in the beauty before him.  I envied the ease with which he began to descend in to the valley to an unseen plot of farmland.  I put out my cigarette and continued.

Two valleys turned in to four, four in to eight.  Landmarks familiar on the moto ride in to my village became familiar.  Here was the village that densely packed around a tight bend in the road, where an adolescent girl with a severe mental disability would rush my driver and I, waving her arms to slow our approach before demanding money.  The first time this happened, I was mortified – what do I do, a white man in a foreign land?  The connotations of her proposition and my presence were immense.  But this morning, her family tended to her, lovingly washing her face and cleaning her shoes with the kindness of Rwandan culture that borders on embarrassing.  They smiled and waved, saying Mwaramutze at a volume so soft that I thought they were not trying to disturb the growing red light that was such a feast to our eyes.  The girl waved too, as if oblivious to our previous encounters.

And here was the “snake village,” a boulevard of houses built along a winding descent towards the main road leading in to Nyanza, each more structurally sound than the last.  At this time of morning, the sun was above the hills and the fog was dying in a rapid compression that caked the impossible variety of vegetation below it with glistening diamonds.  Children were walking sleepily to school and waved with delight, calling out “Good morning!” and “What is your name?” with practiced articulation.  I waved in return and shared a rehearsed version of my story.  If their promises have weight, I expect close to a hundred children to visit my village in the coming years.

The prison was now by my side.  Earlier, a column of cheery orange-clad men had walked about, aggressively shouting bonjour at my presence.  Most were smiling, carrying heavy wooden tools over their shoulders with ease, laughing with their block mates about the day of work to come.  Several men walked by wearing pastel pink hats or pants; convicted genocidaires are required to wear pink during their service and if a complete uniform is unavailable, a single parcel of clothing must be pink at all times.  These men were quiet and steely, not joining in the conversations of their peers.  Behind the column walked two tan-clad prison guards with AK-47s held out front, their fingers gripped around the trigger of the ubiquitous weapon.  They glanced at my direction but did not smile.  In front of the prison, six of these guards stood in front of a gate that may have belonged in front of an aspiring suburban development in Florida, so simple and rudimentary as it was, and they watched over the orange bodies sweeping the dirt road leading to the prison with apathy.  Smoke billowed out of a chimney in the walled-off complex and a pang of disgust swept through me at the sight of pink uniforms, which tapered as the convicts approached a small crowd of people gathered outside the prison gates that held food and books for their fathers and brothers inside.  It is difficult and unnecessary to feel disgust for the damned.

A young boy was walking to school, munching on the coconut-tasting biscuits so prevalent in boutiques around the countryside, and sneakily glanced over at me from the other side of the road.  We were going in the same direction.  His uniform was tan and ratty, an inflexible short-sleeved collared shirt and shorts with a frayed rear – he was in Primary school, and had been subjected to the switch more than once.  Despite my long strides he kept pace for thirty minutes.  I took a large water bottle out of a side pocket and drank some before passing it to him.  While he was drinking, we asked each other simple questions in Ikinyarwanda and appreciated the quietness of the stretch.  It was nice, just walking, not being pointed at or laughed at or tugged at.  We finished the water.  At one point, I stepped on a wrapper too worn out to identify and stuffed it in my back pocket.  Immediately the boy sprinted in the opposite direction and picked up the bright red wrapper from his biscuits.  He ran back to me before putting the wrapper in his own pocket.  I couldn’t help but smile.  That stretch of the hike was more bearable than most.

In one of the final valleys before reaching my destination, a young man was pushing a rusty bicycle loaded up with three sacks of cement.  The bicycle is the vehicle of preference in the countryside: easy to repair if damaged, small enough to lock inside of a home, sturdy enough to balance loads too heavy for a head.  As we ascended the incline I passed him and asked if he wanted help.  He just gazed ahead.  As we reached the bend, he hopped on his bike and carefully rode downhill, out of my sight.  Twenty minutes later, I had caught up to him again.  I again asked him if I could help.  Same response.  And like this we went for almost an hour, passing each other, defying each other’s presence.  At the bottom of the final incline he stopped and heaved, exhausted.  I slowly walked past him and looked in to his eyes.  He simply nodded.  We pushed the bike up the hill together.  How he managed to push the thing up a single hill, in thin flip flops, on a rusty bike, defied logic.  He jumped on the bike at the crest and left me behind.

My journey to Nyanza was taking longer than I expected.  As I crossed the 29^th small wooden bridge (they cover difficult depressions in the roads that motos use) and Nyanza’s relatively massive expanse of development came in to sight, I was behind schedule.  For the first time in my five-hour walk, my foot stepped on to a cement road.  My rolled-up pants were form fitted to my thighs from the sweat and my black shirt quietly steamed, as if I carried some of the fog from the morning with me.  My meeting with Felix would be in less than ten minutes and I still needed to march up the final incline in to the city towards the hotel pavilion we had agreed on.  I paused to watch a procession of ten hulking cows along the banks of an artificial pond steered by a boy who couldn’t be older than ten.  I caught my breath and continued on – after all, the day was just beginning.

—

If you ever want to feel like an ungrateful stain on the human race, become a teacher, for only then will you truly come to appreciate the hard work that these people put in for so little gratitude.  How many teachers do I even remember from my fifteen years of education?  Maybe a dozen, out of a hundred?  How many of them changed my life, steering my development in the right direction like a ship’s captain kissing the wheel to align the perfect angle in to a dock?  It’s only been a month, and if I had known the difficulty of this profession during my own education, I would have written and dedicated a book to each and every teacher who has ever graced my life.

The difficulty is not in the technical aspects of the profession, for these are different in different environments and vary with a local administration.  Every teacher lesson plans, writes exams, grades homework, scrounges up limited materials, and deals with some form of inflexible and seemingly arbitrary curricular criteria.  And while stressful, the time between classes is unrecognizable from the time inside of a classroom.

Inside of a classroom, a thousand anxieties storm out of the gates of my subconscious into the forefront of my attention, each demanding a moment of authority at the helm of my decision making process, all corralled and subdued by a cocktail of desperate self-discipline like a drunken legion of riot police.  I could write a separate entry for these anxieties and still not exhaust them.  The question of appropriateness in the classroom is constant: if I am too formal with these students, their boredom and resentment could abort anything they need to learn, but if I am too familiar, they will relax and fail to retain an important lesson.  Lesson planning is playing chess against the universe, such that one poorly planned lesson may doom me to a semester of stumbling around from week to week, trying to teach concepts in a hurry to make up for lost time and sentencing these students to the hell of learned mistakes.  What is the right name of this or that grammatical tense, and if I tell them, is it unnecessarily complex knowledge that would only serve to hinder their grasping of a different concept?  When a student speaks in class, how do you correct an obviously wrong answer to an incredibly easy question?

The language barrier between myself and my students complicates these insecurities further.  Peace Corps Volunteers speak in “Special English,” a horribly named creole of English that is slower, simpler, and more awkwardly pronounced than what we speak amongst ourselves.  In the classroom, a sentence takes twice as long to say and every word is a calculated, tactical decision.  In one of my Literature classes, I’m teaching plot and context.  Of the fifty students, maybe two have the English to comfortably respond to every question.  Another ten speak maybe once every class.  But none of the students knew the word “plot,” so I had to get creative; I numbered the simple sentences of my story and with each sentence, took a giant, comical step.  I would ask my students if Sentence 1 could come after Sentence 3 and trip and stumble if they said it could.  Eventually, I wrote “Plot is the sequence of events in a story” on the blackboard.  And then, when my students’ eyes glazed over in confusion, I attempted to explain “sequence,” “events,” and “story.”

Keep in mind, these are students at the level of seventh graders in the United States.  They’ve had some level of English teaching for six years, and in their Kinyarwanda classes, they read stories and discussed ideas like theme, context, and characters in Kinyarwanda.  So by the time they get to my class, they’ve been exposed to the ideas I want to teach them.  But looking at the state-provided textbooks and teaching guides, the expectation is far, far higher.  I struggle to get my students through a four-sentence “short story” and answer questions about plot.  The textbooks we’re given have five-page excerpts from novellas, with questions about socio-economic parity and writing prompts asking students to use inference.

This past week I’ve given my first quizzes to a few of my classes.  The week prior, I wrote out a mirror copy of the contents on the quiz for a review and we struggled through the questions we had spent a month answering in class.  The experience of watching my students taking their first quiz encapsulated my time teaching so far.  The first ten minutes of our forty-minute class are spent using one pen to act as a straightedge and the second pen to slowly, painfully draw a series of straight lines.  Stillborn papers are crumbled and thrown on the floor of the classroom like insects gassed by a bug bomb.  As the students get comfortable with their templates, they stare in bewilderment at the paragraphs on the board and the questions they have to answer, my presence for once not the focus of their attention.  Despite my stern warnings not to talk, students are asking each other what a word means, guiltily looking at my staring gaze or weaving their heads between the sea of uniformed bodies thinking that I can’t see them.  As I walked around the classroom, students would shove their notebooks in to their desks and pretend that their answers weren’t just copies of our review notes from the week before, complete with last week’s short story characters and events.

And as our class time comes to an end, the Headmaster informs me that two speakers from the local health clinic have come to speak to the student body and he needs my class to join the assembly.  I grimace without helping it and collect my student’s papers mid-quizzes; they proudly clutch their papers, refusing to let me see their incomplete answers, defiantly using every second to scribble something in the blanks.  A few of the whispering head-weavers smirk at this curve ball pitched by the universe, and I can’t help but admit to the humor.  My brightest students look both devastated at a missed opportunity to prove their brilliance and confident when they pass their papers in, surgically removed from the flimsy notebooks adorned with pictures of animals and practiced signatures.

Despite assurances to the contrary, I’m still waiting to “change lives,” as the Facebook-delivered promises and hushed praises shared by my friends in the States have guaranteed.  Like the blank faces of my Literature students, teaching has been characterized more by the impossibility of my presence than by the wonder of my shared wisdom.  But thankfully, it’s only the first month.  I have so much to learn.

—

On the morning of my 23^rd birthday, I sliced potatoes in the darkness of pre-dawn and drank steaming coffee.  The valley was probably as foggy and translucently glorious as any other morning, but like a new face I was struck once again by the complexity of the normalness.  The coffee was black and slightly soupy, the taste accented by the smell of soggy grounds in the pot near my knife blade.  The potatoes sizzled in one of my last pans – the others are victims of thick burn marks – and with garlic and onion and tomato, the pan began to radiate that steamy, delicious smell that tells the stomach everything is going to be alright.

My omelet was near-perfect (I even managed to flip it in one piece today, a first for me in Rwanda) and my cat managed to spend the entire morning without once biting at my toes or clawing at my shivering leg.  I grabbed my mentor’s birthday card from a paperclip on the rice mat hanging on my wall, proud of myself for not opening it when it arrived with her package at Christmas.  It was kind, and I cried, as I usually do when I read the things she sends me.  I cleaned up my dishes and rinsed myself in my bucket and grabbed the case of Fanta sitting at my doorstep.

Fanta is both the name of a drink and a cultural phenomenon.  In a country with limited drinking options, Fanta has cornered the market on non-alcoholic beverages in Rwanda.  Coke is a “flavor” of Fanta, as are tonic, grenadine, and soda water.  Fanta has become as ubiquitous as Band-Aids or Kleenex.  In Rwanda, people celebrate important events by buying things for other people, which makes perfect sense in an economy dominated by people who struggle to afford their week’s expenses.  Fanta is the go-to special event purchase, especially in a community as heavily Christian as mine.  So for my birthday, I had purchased a case of 25 glass-bottle Fantas the night before and decided to take them on the hike to school with me that morning.

A crate of full glass bottles is exceptionally heavy.  Carrying said crate down in to and then out of a steep valley, slick with mud from a previous night’s rain, while wearing clothing that respects the Rwandan insistence upon cleanliness, is a difficult feat.  During the descent I constantly switched the crate between my shoulders and passed several women balancing 60-pound sacks of flour or beans on their heads, gracefully gliding over the uneven, wet path without so much as a glance.  I tried to balance the crate on my head too.  It didn’t work.  A small child caught up to me and offered to carry the crate up the last, steepest incline to the school.  I protested between heaves and he laughed before gently relieving me of the package.  And of course, he balanced it on his head, and climbed the last stretch to the school without difficulty.

Classes were easy enough.  I had lesson planned the week out the prior weekend and my day’s load was easy enough.  Somehow, all of my students knew that it was my birthday and proceeded to sing for me in class, the decibel level almost unbearable.  The gesture was warmly received, and I almost skipped between classes, singing Bob Marley or Mumford and Sons to much applause.  My fellow teachers were kind and went out of their way to wish me a happy birthday, despite being disgruntled that our typical lunch of rice and beans was being delayed for a special “birthday surprise.”

That afternoon, we drank the Fanta in the library of the school, munching on bowls of beans and seasoned bananas with peanut sauce.  Two children, no older than 7, entered the library with crates of beer balanced on their heads and the teachers were very happy after that.  We were laughing about my first month and the struggle of integration when my headmaster cleared his throat and told us that he had an announcement.  “Christopher has a wonderful idea about beauty for the school.  Please listen.”

The Headmaster and I had talked about a project framework for the past week and he decided that this meeting would be the moment to announce it.  I just wish that he had decided this before I had finished my second beer.  I stood up in the center of the library, for the first time seeing all of my fellow teachers in one room, and made the pitch: a series of improvements for the school, starting small with signs demarcating the classrooms and some of the massive, gorgeous murals that are painted on the walls of schools around Rwanda.  Once we began building up momentum with these basic improvements, we would turn our attention towards pouring cement for a basketball court (a long sought after addition) and the funding of annual field trips to incentivize students to stay in school past the deadly Senior 3 dropout point.  If we were successful, we could use the attention to pay for infrastructure improvements such as lighting, a rain-catching tank, and eventually a fence.

So I’m saying all of this in English and my coworker’s faces are slowly starting to droop.  I start to pause every few moments so that my Headmaster can catch up the staff and type out our meeting minutes on a Word document projected on to a sheet.  Slowly, the other teachers started drifting off and talking amongst themselves.  And suddenly, just as I thought the meeting was going to die down, the Headmaster announced that I would be chairing a committee responsible for these suggested changes, and he appointed the most vocal teachers to the committee to work as my assistants.

This all made me anxious.  The school teachers were all at least ten years older than me and had a much greater stake in what the school was experiencing than I did.  The Peace Corps warns about imposing our ideas on to a community without talking to the community first; while the Headmaster and I had spoken several times about these ideas, I had not planned to play this role this soon in to my time at the school.  I could feel the justifiable resentment of my coworkers bubbling, or at least I certainly imagined that they were harboring such feelings just out of sight.

But we continued to drink and talk, and by the time I left school, I was feeling much calmer about the whole thing.  Some children carried the crates of empty glasses back to the village and allowed me to trip over the still-wet path in peace.  My site mate Eric met up with me for dinner at Mama Dalmour’s and we had our first “Peace Corps Conversation” about how writing grants and funding projects is supposed to work.  And just as I was ready to turn in for the night and enjoy my sleep, my friend Albert blocked off my access to my house with his moto and demanded that he buy me a few beers.

When I look back to my birthdays in the States, I can’t say that I remember them too well.  I remember moments, like when my girlfriend at the time and my good friend spent my 21^st birthday playing pool at a dive bar, or when a good friend working for the Democrat Party gave me a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump as a hilarious gag gift.  I remember parties and kind wishes and good gifts, but I remember the memories of these days even more, the expectations and resolutions made and reinforced every year.  “This year will be different.”  And yet for my 23^rd birthday, it was difficult to remember why I was so comfortable repeating the party-rinse-repeat cycle of these past years with such loyalty.  Why did I celebrate my birthdays by partying to the point of forgetting the beautiful details of my life?

Or maybe this discomfort that I felt, lying under a mosquito net, looking at the thousand stars visible through my iron-barred bedroom window alone, was the realization that I had spent four years promising to make changes in my behavior or my circumstances without following through.  My presence in Rwanda is an indictment on years of aborted commitments to improve myself, because for the first time in my life, I took charge of my future and demanded to improve my lot in life.

I have a feeling that I won’t be forgetting this birthday for a long time.  I spent my 23^rd birthday abroad for the first time, in a home by myself for the first time, with a job and a future that I can comfortably say is putting me on the right track.  It was a good day.

—-

And of course, I found myself on a bus to Muhanga to celebrate my birthday and the birthday of Michael, another volunteer in my cohort, the weekend after this “revelation.”  Our only goal was throwing a party that would challenge our bodily constitutions after two days of reconvening with volunteers we hadn’t seen since swear-in.  I can confidently say that we accomplished our objective.

I realized that I haven’t taken the opportunity to write about the other volunteers in my cohort.  I think that this is a pretty good time to do so.  If it wasn’t for these people, America and other Americans would be a distant shore by now.  They’re literally holding me together.  They deserve a few kind words.

Leah’s home was the setting of our debauchery.  She and Michael go way back – he was a graduate student at Purdue when she was a student, and they have the kind of bond that siblings strive for.  She’s a natural born leader, as comfortable commanding a frenzy of hungover volunteers cleaning up after a late night as she is in leading the destruction the night before.  When more than four or five people are present, Leah’s soft voice and resolute actions create a natural hierarchy of order, where she is able to suggest the obvious in the midst of panic or fall back and enjoy the journey once everything is set in motion.  Her home is a relative resort compared to my site: three large buildings and a large, stone courtyard with two steel gates and a private water tap, a dining room, guest rooms, and an unbeatable view of the stars.

At the start of the party, we realized that we needed cake, and the best way to bake cake in the Peace Corps is with a Peace Corps Oven (copyright pending): a large metal pot balancing the batter-containing pan, topped by another large pot and crowned with heavy rocks, all over a small clay charcoal stove called an Imbabura.  Leah did not have an Imbabura but in one of the two unused buildings of her complex sat a perfectly fine stove, perfectly visible behind a locked metal door.  Unfortunately, the key went missing with the previous volunteer.  But we needed a cake, and for that we needed the stove.  I was tasked with breaking in to the room – “picking the lock,” originally, but resorting to force and cunning when a more graceful approach proved unfruitful.

At my side was Taylor, a petite Volunteer cast to the far Southwestern corner of Rwanda.  She was originally assigned to be a Health Volunteer in Western Africa, but as the program was cut back she was reassigned to Rwanda and told to teach.  Taylor is quite possibly the funniest human being I have ever met.  As my attempts to use a hammer and bash in the steel door handle failed, her quips kept me crying with laughter.  She would randomly kick the door and give it a mean look, just to assert her dominance on the thing.  She also happens to be one of the most level-headed volunteers I have met, calmly suggesting more feasible solutions (such as buying a new stove for less than $2 at a store down the street) rather than resorting to repeated hammer banging, which at this point was destroying the metal lining of the door frame and raining glass in to the empty room.

But bang away I did.  Trent took a few turns too.  Trent hails from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and reeks of a Midwestern sense of humor.  He’s always standing or moving around, and when it hits the fan, Trent is more than willing to walk with me to get cigarettes after 2:00 in the morning.  He’s a great guy, and a brother, and never fails to express his lightning-fast sense of humor.  He treats baseball like the religion it should be and was a constant source of perspective during PST.  At this stage of the night, he perceived that the sheet metal roof over the room was probably super thin and easy to remove.  I value his suggestions.

So now I’m using a chair to hoist myself on to the 6-inch thick cement wall on the other side of the complex and part-walk, part-crawl above the 12-foot drop over to the building in question.  Michael was below, observing the scene and offering measured rationality between thunderclaps of hammer on metal door.  Michael is one of the volunteers coming out of a graduate program in the cohort and is also the owner of the worst joke ever told in my entire life, about a little green ball shared on another night of revelry during a PST Talent Show.  Michael is the kind of person that just about everyone feels comfortable confiding in, because Michael is the epitome of integrity.  Some times his maturity cracks, like tonight, when he gently pushed a dangling piece of glass in the warped metal door and giggled with the joy of a kid drawing on a wall.  But when he was watching me pull the rusted nails out of the roof of Leah’s house and begin to peel back the sheet metal roofing, he advised me to cease and desist before any more damaged was caused, and I carefully cleaned up my mess.

We reached a standstill in our poorly planned attempted larceny.  The door opens to the outside, but because of the abuse, the door was unable to swing outward.  Glass glittered on the floor of the room, and while the other fifteen or so attendees glanced at the chaos like spectators at a fight in a Walmart, our select team was stumped on how to proceed.  The goal was to wedge the door open just enough so that Sydney, a Cornell-alum pint-sized human of unbridled optimism and logical thinking, could squeeze through and recover the stove.  Spilling our recently poured drinks, Michael, Trent and I took turns kicking the door like Leonidas in 300 and hoping that the laws of physics would change through passion alone.

And Taylor came along, and kicked the door without spilling the drink in her hand, and then Sydney was able to squeeze through.  Just like that.

The cake – chocolate cake, sweet chocolate cake – was cooking and our dinner of sautéed beef tacos served with grilled vegetables over toasted chapati was underway.  The table was set outside and party guests rotated through the motions, gobbling up the deliciously prepared dinner while Yasmine watched with approval.  Yasmine was the chef of the weekend, assembling her team of food-preppers to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner two days in a row.  Everyone chipped in, and she would never be too proud to say it, but Yasmine exerts a magnetic force on the cohort through a mix of dry humor and teen spirit that makes people want to be around her.  She’s the perennial “cool girl” at the party.  At this party, she was also determined to keep the centrifugal force of revelry from getting out of hand, and if a crisis arises, one look at Yasmine’s collected demeanor is enough to set a group at ease.

The night proceeded smoothly enough.  Music blasted throughout the evening and after the food came out we started draping ourselves over anything that could hold a human: couch cushions, laid out mattresses in the living room, rice mats on the floor, chairs outside.  The energy slipped away from all of us.  A party with Peace Corps Volunteers is a joyous event, but half the fun comes from the excitement of seeing friends after being cast off to the far corners of the country, and the other half comes from the ability to sleep, unhindered, with the heavy breathing of friends who understand the exhaustion we all feel.  That first day at Leah’s will be a moment in my service that I will never forget.

—–

The morning after was like all mornings after; the prime directive was to eat away our overindulgences of the night before, silence the symphonies in our skulls, and consume any Advil and water within arm’s reach.  Food was cooked and bucket showers were taken, even the most hesitant of us not waiting for the water to boil before cleaning off the stench from the night before.  And as the last of us shook awake, we were faced with a full, unplanned day.

The original plan for the weekend was to have a 48-hour bender for the history books.  Nobody seemed up to the challenge now.  We cleaned up Leah’s house, forming teams for dishwashing duties and mopping rooms, and eventually just sat around and listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles while exchanging files on our hard drives.

Michael mentioned that there was a beautiful hike we could take, no more than 20 minutes of a walk.  The plan was to meet up with two other volunteers, Tom and Kristina, in the local town for a nice sit-down restaurant sometime in the evening.  The hike would give us an excuse to walk off the grime and not feel like we just marinated for a full day, something every volunteer dreams of doing but no one really wants to be guilty of.  With a few sleepy nods and a rush to refill water bottles, we set off.

The hike was really only 20 minutes away.  I like to hike (it’s my favorite past time at site) and I admit to being slightly disappointed at the ease with which we reached the destination, which in itself was pretty enough.  The small stream we had been following grew in to a larger brook, with bold rocky descents leading down towards the banks and allowing us to set our feet in the cool water.  Trent mentioned that there was a perfectly climbable sheer rock wall around the corner, and he and I took turns free climbing, the kind of activity that young men only have the gall to do if encouraged by other irresponsible young men.  We had a blast.  At one point, I could sit in a slight carved out dirt section of the wall and look out at the small brook and thorny vegetation surrounding it.  I was disappointed.

Leah was resting at her home, but before we left, she mentioned that there was a cave near by the destination that people hiked to for prayers.  The group stumbled around the right vocabulary to ask a nearby group of onlooking young boys, eventually settling for “hole” and “mountain,” and we skipped over the rocks offering passage across the cool stream with a new objective in mind.

Trent and I led the pack, and slowly our numbers started dwindling.  All twenty of the young boys were excited to show the abazungu where the sacred cave was, and in moments like these I remembered just how placid American life makes us: the young men hiked up the steep hill adjacent to us without breaking a sweat, as the Volunteers heaved, complained, and dripped sweat on the way up.  The hike was not easy.  Soon enough, one or two Volunteers decided to turn around, and the boys showed no signs of slowing down, so Trent and I pressed on, making our way down the mountain towards the sound of a very large river.

The descent was where we lost everyone else.  Hills in Rwanda have small foot trails that are as organically part of the geography as the vegetation.  This slope did not.  Instead, an uncountable sea of pine needles covered the soil with at least five inches of thickness.  The small children made their trek through a combination of jumping between the vertical supports of pine trees with the grace of a mountain goat and by sliding over the needles like they were snow.  Trent and I (mostly myself) struggled greatly.  For every solid step, I slid another foot or five and eventually resigned myself to half-fall, half-glide down the pine needles like I was sledding.  The boys laughed at us both, and we covered a lot of ground very quickly, gaining velocity as the valley in front of us bloomed in to existence.

We had moved maybe a hundred yards laterally, but after climbing almost a hundred yards to follow the boys, descended close to three times that length.  The river had singed itself over a collection of boulders, gaining intensity, and then exploded down a steep crevice into a roaring waterfall; the waterfall itself was unseeable from our starting point, and was walled in by the thick mountains around it so as to only be truly visible from its foot, but the aftermath of its existence was plainly visible.

My first reaction was wonder.  An impression from that moment of ecstasy:

Hallelujah!

Her arms were outstretched, the tendons in her shoulders flexed and cut from the straightedge formed by her frame.  The afternoon sun shone down on her cloth wrap and colored her body with an autumn gold.  Her fingers stretched outwards, palms facing the wind, willed in to wings to catch the torrent of air and water and energy rushing around her.

The tablet of stone stabbed in to the sky, another corner in the rapid beige river.  At heaven’s gate, this is a river of gold, flowing towards the walls of Jerusalem, sustaining the faithful.  The stone cliff was itself the heart of the valley, steep on all sides; to her right, a bank of brown pine needles was solid, the shed skin of trees older than my home country, to her left, the pummiced scalp of a bald mountain, trails trod by pilgrims against its sun-soaked face like raised veins.

Hallelujah!

Upon this rock she made her stand, her back to the endless gorge, her bare breasts pulsing with each cry towards the source of her revelation.  The water fall was Mighty, tall, the analogy of grace and power made physical.  From the cascade a roar unrelatable to human sound flew out and humbled the assembled pilgrims.  Her skin seemed to reflect light like silver ore, the mist from the falls and the tears from her smiling face covering her skin with light.

We had to stop climbing.  It was all so much.  Breathing deeply, we felt the hair on our necks raise and the uncontrollable shiver run down our spine.  How beautiful, how blessed, to stand in the presence of your God, to feel the truth of his existence in every detail of your universe, to shed yourself and become as integral a part of his universe as the Earth around you, all bending and roaring and burning in praise.  What can two heathens do but stop, and listen, and in our silence remember that there may just be a purpose for the lungs in our chests after all?

Three times she cried out, each time more real than the last.  Truth to power.

Hallelujah!

From our vantage point, we could see the guts of the valley opening up before us.  The river weaved between rocks bridged by thin, loose branches that people used as bridges to cross the water.  To our left, a large free-standing cliff stood like a tower.  A woman stood on top of the cliff and belted praise.  The river’s banks were dotted by pilgrims, some sitting in the sun reading from their Bibles, others washing their clothes in the raging water.  Trent and I were speechless as we carefully crossed the river and climbed up the next incline towards the cave, following our children, who were now practically skipping with excitement.

The cave was small.  At the entrance, Trent and I were able to stand, but a few meters in we had to duck and eventually crawl towards the rear.  We took turns going farther in to the cave, covering ourselves with soft silt.  At the rear of the cave, an opening big enough for a small child prevented us from going further.  Dozens of small paper slips in various stages of decay littered the floor of this large room beyond our reach.  Trent picked one of them up: they were prayers, written in nearly illegible handwriting and left for antiquity.

We stopped to catch our breath.  We could not see the other volunteers from the cave.  If we were them, we would have already started walking back to the first destination and probably back to Leah’s house.  We would need to catch up, but since we were so close to the waterfall, we decided to take a look.  Florida is a flat state, and we have some incredible rivers, but they move slowly across the irrigated land and rarely break in to a waterfall.  Trent’s home of Oklahoma is the same, only with more corn.  This was an opportunity we could not miss.

Tossing my camera across wide chasms, we jumped from slippery boulder to slippery boulder, careful not to fall in and prematurely end our Peace Corps service with a medical evacuation.  From any other vantage point near the waterfall, all we could hear was violent crashing, and all we could see was the steady flow of golden-brown water.  But approached from the front, the water slowed in to a massive pool too deep and opaque to wade in, and from this pool we could see the full stretch of the waterfall: at least five stories tall, walled in on both sides by thick glistening mountain walls, invisible from the sides because of the lush jungle vegetation.  The shadows that danced along the surface of the torrent created illusions of shifting volume such that the force of the natural phenomenon was exaggerated, more impressive than these words can relate.

And just then, I sat down on the rock I stood upon and started bawling.  I was beyond struck by the sight of this event, by one of Nature’s neural pathways, articulating ambiguous sanctity in to very real, loud, pungently powerful existence.  I turned around to Trent and he could see the tears.  He had encouraged me at each step and he came up behind me and put his arms around me.  “This is the point.  This is what we are supposed to worship.”  I was overwhelmed.  We all joined the Peace Corps to run away from something as much as to run towards something better, and few moments remind us of this truth in the daily pattern of work and survival.  This was one of those moments.

We sat in silence for several minutes, our feet in the water.  Years before I would have wanted to leave, we decided we needed to find our friends.  We took a short cut up the nearest slope, thick with briar patches and vines, cutting our bodies as a sort of tax for the beauty we had just seen.  We eventually found a few volunteers and just sat on the edge of yet another heroic cliff, looking out at the valley and the afternoon sun-lit landscape with the awe of children.  Over the rush of the deluge, we could hear a woman singing praise.

——

These last two sections will be written to a younger version of myself, anxious about applying for the Peace Corps and unable to find the perfect answers to my most difficult questions.  In the infinite array of alternate universes, I hope that these sections will one day reach a version of me whose admission to Peace Corps Rwanda was not finalized until the end of 2019.

If there is a fundamental contradiction of the Peace Corps volunteer, it is this: how do I balance my obligation and passion to my community with my wanderlust and hunger to see my magical new home in its entirety?  We are given an incredible responsibility with our positions, and entrusted not only to do a good job but to also not be distracted by the biggest prize you can put in front of a travel-starving young person: a new country, with an infinite number of secrets and stories just waiting to be told.

Only a few of us settle this contradiction by remaining at site for a lengthy duration; these volunteers are very serious about their responsibilities to their community, or have anxiety about travelling too far away from site, or are so remote that travel is a costly and time-consuming affair.  I wish these PCV’s the best.  Similarly, several of us leave our site almost every weekend, travelling to see friends or stay in hotels (drawing upon reserve funds from family back home).  These are the volunteers with the killer Instagram accounts.  And while I envy the freedom that comes with this approach, I feel as though it is important to strike a balance between the two philosophies.  We integrate more successfully if we spend more time at site, but we handle the anxiety of integration more healthily if we spend more time exploring the country.  I would imagine that this is a dichotomy that any Peace Corps Volunteer can relate to.

In January, I spent most of my weekends at site.  Travelling away from my village is expensive and time consuming.  In February, I’ve spent every weekend exploring.  This past weekend I was around Musanze, and before that, I was in Muhanga for the birthday party.  On the 3^rd I was in Musanze again and the weekend before that I had travelled somewhere else.  If I can find the financial freedom, I could head to Kigali to celebrate Eric’s birthday this weekend, and again to Kigali the following weekend for a meeting with Safe Space, the LGBT advocacy volunteer group.  Suffice to say, I have yet found that balance.

And it was starting to feel like I didn’t need to.  Travelling is fun.  One of the benefits of getting out is the sheer excitement of a new mission in a new space; hanging on for dear life on a moto has the stimulating effect equivalent to a pot of black coffee delivered via injection, buses are a mobile pod of undiluted humanity, and the bus stations we stop in and leave from are swirling masses of energy and activity unlike anything I’ve encountered.  You get to see new markets and smell the local specialties from unmarked shop windows, and you get to hit it up at new bars in new towns, stumbling upon a live show with a gorgeous dancer seductively gyrating on stage while singing a slower rendition of Bob Marley fit for a jazz club.

Travelling is also expensive.  The moto ride from my site to Nyanza is more than any other ride I’ve been on in country, buses included.  If you travel alone without a place to stay, that means spending money on food you don’t cook and a bed you don’t own.  Getting around in a city is expensive if you aren’t with someone who knows the local transit prices enough to bargain down the ridiculous demands of a moto driver aware of your naivete.  And invariably, there’s unplanned costs.  This last weekend, my low-grade phone purchased during PST finally bit the dust.  I had to spend a third of my paycheck on a new one.  When I was travelling back to my site, the recent rain and the darkness made the moto ride the most dangerous one I had ever been on, with the low-fueled moto driver sliding down slopes and my legs being the only thing stopping us from hitting the mud face-first more than a few times.  I tipped him extra for the excellent skill he displayed on the journey, and then when I walked in to my house, I realized that I had managed to spend half of my month’s income on a single weekend.

I’ve been out of the country three times before moving to Rwanda.  The first was to Europe.  I backpacked from Istanbul to Amsterdam and then studied abroad in London for a month.  It was a life changing experience for any number of the reasons people who have undergone such a trip can attest to, and part of the change was a realization that a failure to be financially sound could endanger me.  Several times in that first trip I found myself in some very, very unsafe situations because I hadn’t adequately planned for what things would cost.

The second time out of the country, a former partner and I traveled through Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.  I went with the financial blessing of my University, whose Honors College had granted me a stipend for the trip so that I could conduct research for my thesis.  My partner was being paid by her employer to conduct research as well, so we thought we were safe in the financial arena.  But we didn’t plan for the unexpected; her camera and computer broke and needed to be repaired for our work, my phone and small tablet broke (I’m really bad with phones) were both stolen, and by the time we made it back to the States, we were mentally exhausted just thinking about the credit card debt we would be paying back to make up for our carelessness with our belongings.

This past summer, I tried something different: I was travelling to France, partly to experience the culture dominantly responsible for Rwanda’s current economic oppression, and partly to relax after a hellish Senior year of college.  Instead of staying in hostels, I set up Couch Surfing arrangements.  Instead of eating out for most meals, I cooked all but one meal a week.  I brought more money than I thought I would need.  I felt prepared.  And by the end of the summer, I had to walk from the Notre Dame to Orly International Airport, a six hour walk through industrial parks and across highways, because I could not afford the ten-euro metro ticket that would have brought me to Orly in thirty minutes.

The Peace Corps is unlike any of these experiences. To be abundantly clear, I would not trade a single second from any of those three summers for anything in the world.  I enjoyed every aspect, from the first taste of Turkish air stepping off the plane at Ataturk Airport in 2015 to the stale smoking cage in Orly this past summer, swapping stories with a former health worker in Burundi and taking advice on living in central Africa.  But if I’ve learned anything about money these past three summers, it’s that how I manage my finances impacts much more than just myself.

In the Peace Corps, our “primary mission” is to fulfill the role we are assigned when we apply for a position.  Education volunteers teach English, Health volunteers work at a health clinic, Agriculture volunteers support local farming practices, and so on.  Our secondary mission, if you will, is to support the community any way that we can.  This is done passively, by injecting cash in the local economy and helping resolve disputes or give advice as the opportunity arises, and this is also done actively, by planning and executing projects.  Failing to plan your finances accordingly impacts much more than an inability to buy a few more tomatoes during Market Day; many smaller projects are financed by volunteers and their families back home, so if you want to be able to pay for these grant-less projects, you need to learn how to budget.

I’m a little embarrassed to relate this story, but from what I’ve gathered among other volunteers, it is by no means unique to my situation.  Epimaque, my school’s headmaster, recently appointed me to lead a committee that plans and executes improvements for the school I work at, as I mentioned earlier in this post.  We have several projects planned out, with the goal of completing them all by the end of 2018.  Some of these projects require months of planning, researching and execution, and will hopefully receive financial support from the Peace Corps as well as from third-party donors.  But the first projects we want to complete are much smaller, and are designed to build momentum among the staff and students for larger projects down the road.

One of our first projects is having Felix, the Burundian painter I met in January, complete nine murals around the school in March.  We paid for him to visit the school, and after several conversations, we are ready for his visit and the two weeks he will be lodging at the teacher’s dormitory near the school.  The electricity is contagious – the other teachers have started coming to me with their own ideas for projects to complete around the school, and when we start cleaning and re-cementing the walls in preparation for his arrival, everyone will be pitching in to help out.

The proverbial rub is that I was careless and broke my phone this past weekend and had to replace it, which meant eating in to the money I had budgeted to pay our visiting artist.  Now, I am anxious, because if it was my house getting a few murals done, I would feel angry at myself, but my community, my coworkers, and my kids are all depending on me to get this done.  This project is my first real test in the Peace Corps, and while I was smart enough to plan a contingency for this exact situation (really – I asked myself how I would afford to pay Felix if my phone broke before he arrived in March), the pressure is on.

Finances are an ugly aspect of life, one that I did not learn about growing up.  My family was not the most gifted when it came to finances and I resented many of my peers for what I viewed was their relative privilege when it came to money.  But out here, the only person I can blame is myself.  There is more at stake in this project than I could have predicted.  I can only hope that I will rise to the challenge.

So, past self, take note.  Financial decisions are like any other decision in that they impact others more than we may think, but unlike other decisions, financial decisions can hurt these other people in very material ways, and the suffering and embarrassment you inflict on others as a result is much more painful than the difficulty in “tightening the bootstraps” after your own poor planning.

Go have fun.  Do not ever say no to the next adventure, whether on a motorcycle or a plane, alone or with a loved one.  But before you jump, know where you’re going to land, and know who is going to have to catch you if you trip on the way down.

——-

When I received my acceptance to the Peace Corps in January of 2017, two thoughts went through my mind: I finally had a plan for when I graduate college, and I was going to need to say goodbye to my friends and family.  In the months following the acceptance I came to realize that saying goodbye to my friends would be necessary to move on with my life, and in the dozens of goodbyes over coffee and late-night parties leading up to graduation, it never really hit me how impactful these goodbyes would one day feel.

Our friends and the situations in which we find them are who we essentially are.  Our friends represent repeated value statements, articulated in to flesh: if your friends do a lot of drugs, go to church every Sunday, have bailed you out of a major problem or can finish your sentences, we can safely summarize the values in our life that we have invested in.  Your mentors and role models describe who you want to be one day.  Your old friends or old lovers show you who you used to be.  More so than any other facet of life, our relationships neatly summarize our identity.

Saying goodbye to these relationships is akin to saying goodbye to your identity.  Before you fly off on that plane ride you’ve been waiting eight months for, these goodbyes might be enthusiastically embraced.  But once you get to country and you’re faced with the very real challenges of loneliness and isolation that are as integral to the Peace Corps experience as dysentery and dehydration, these friendships become so much more important.

Because the truth of the matter is that you’re leaving these people behind, and it takes a lot of motivation to preserve a relationship across an ocean, seven or eight time zones ahead.  If your best friends were leaving you for 27 months, how much energy would you give to keep your relationship going?  What about the friend that you always went to parties with but never shared a meal with?  What about a college roommate or a close coworker?  How much would you expend?

A month in to my experience, I noticed the bulk of my communication with people back home dropping off dramatically.  I realized that aside from the occasional message on Facebook or a letter every six months, getting accepted in to the Peace Corps means hoping that your relationships will be frozen in time and will comfortably thaw upon returning to your home, when both you and your friend are two years past wherever you left off.  This hope is unrealistic.  And when you realize this, life changes.

You can’t turn to your friends for advice.  You can’t turn to your parents for comfort.  You can’t turn to your lover for support – half of the volunteers in my cohort were in a relationship when they started their service, and all but six have moved on.  When you’re doing your interview with the guy on the phone and he asks if you’ve ever spent a considerable time away from your friends and family, he’s really asking how you deal with the crippling inability to recognize any traditional form of support in the world around you.

I had a rough night last week.  I realized that an old friend and I had grown very far apart and I could not rely on them for the support that I used to be able to.  It was as much my fault as their’s, but the realization was harsh, because I had already mentally signed off most of my connections from back home.  I sat on the couch in my living room and stared at my open journal, unable to regurgitate the hollowness in my chest.  I was numb.

The children of my landlord knocked on my door.  It shook me awake; they reminded me that I had promised them a meal last week, a meal of ibibenets none the less, and they grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me to the market.  We had a fun time buying the cassava flour and amamesa, an undistilled palm oil required for the production.  The greasy orange goo covered the inside of the bag I was using to carry the groceries and the smallest kid in the family started greedily licking the inside of the gray llama-hair bag I had kept from a trip to Peru.

When we showed up to their family’s house, the mother – quite possibly the kindest human being I have ever met – asked if we could cook the meal at my house, to take advantage of my gas stove.  Of course I said yes.  The next thing I knew, all five children were washing all of my accumulated dishes, chopping up onions and tomatoes, mixing cassava flour with boiling water in a large palm basket, and slowly covering every square inch of my living room and kitchen with oil-soaked sticky flour.

The mother spoke rapid Kinyarwanda the entire time, marshalling her children like shock troops in the midst of battle, and her husband showed up with a case of beer, unprompted.  Three other men from the village stumbled in and we were eventually joined by my sitemate, who started playing a high-energy setlist on a speaker.  I took notes of the recipe the entire time to impress my friends at a later date.  I quizzed the students on their assignments in English class and found myself entering the stream of activity in my house with a release of endorphins and acceptance, propelled on through a disgust of my self-absorption hours before and pure bliss from the love around me.

By the time everyone left, it was well past my bedtime.  My hands were orange from the amamesa used to smash the cassava dough into half-shells.  Avocado shells and pits littered the floor and the smell of heaven itself permeated throughout my home.  I fell asleep warm, despite the cold rain outside.

Saying goodbye to friends is lonely.  But saying goodbye pushes us towards a truer sense of ourselves, that “sense of self-discovery” that every volunteer hopes to find during his or her service but is often too bashful to state so openly.  Saying goodbye forces us to find these moments of bliss to elevate us out of our self-absorption and despair.  And when these currents of happiness catch us in the chest and propel us in to something new, the effect is life changing.  I felt happy that my friends had blessed me with their kindness and countless nights, and I was able to see my love for them with the nostalgic golden hue it deserved.  Moving on is sad, but it’s a good sadness.  And it’s a sadness we all become intimate with in our new homes, in our new lives, welcomed or not.

——–

A final impression of this past month, from the night in Musanze at the bar watching the live band preform:

Only in Africa do you not need a partner to dance.

Only in this place can unlit incandescent bulbs look like fireflies in front of neon strings.

Only here do hips move like they should; do bodies strain and creak with the vocal cords inside, do limbs forget joints and flow with soundwaves, do eyes flutter and tear up without the invocation of a savior, beyond the savior we can all hear of course.

We’re all standing, moving in synchronized sway, no one is facing a partner but everyone is mirroring Her steps on stage, the idol of the evening.  Her voice is a color similar to the insides of our glasses, amber and sultry.  Our congregation follows Her steps with the uniformity of a confirmation class, unembarrassed in our mistakes and beaming with our devotion.

Would you be loved?

Only in this moment can Bob Marley’s hymnal be a call to our response.  Only in this moment are eight muzungus standing up and joining the crowd, indistinct in this sea of rhythm, for once not the glaring banners of Other.  We’ve all gathered in this holy place.

She is still dancing and we are still moving and the spine shivers with the vibrations of the bassist and his product.  She opens her eyes and glances over, her thick lips curling in to a smile unlike anything we’ve ever seen.  I’ve never been at the receiving end of a gift like this.

The song ends and the light illuminates our sweat-matted clean shirts and we are heaving with the pace of our praise.  I remember hearing another woman in another place praise another god, and I remember the wetness of my eyes streaking down my face in the awe of another religion.

It all feels so familiar now, doesn’t it?