certification

 

–

It felt like a dream.

The rain is cold and steady.  Standing against the rough cement wall of a school building, the narrow outcropping of the roof shields my body from the near horizontal rain, which is not falling from above as much as it is materializing from the storm cloud I am standing in.  Standing in a storm cloud is tense: the static of possible lightning makes the hair on my forearm stand on end, and when I straighten out my elbow to notice this phenomenon, for the briefest of seconds a forest of tiny blonde hairs stand end over end until the rain shifts directions and sprays my torso like a firing squad.  I rush to relocate, repeating this same process several times until it becomes apparent that the stiff hairs on my arm are a reaction to the soaking, artery-deep chill of wet jeans and soggy socks, not the attention of a weather system.

Slowly by slowly people start to appear out of the storm.  This is strange, because in Rwanda, rain means exposure to illnesses and without an efficient heating source rain will keep children out of the school houses everyone is huddling against.  When I walk in the rain on a normal day, neighbors wave me over to offer shelter, and look at me with a mix of curiosity and humor when I smile and keep walking.  The rain is not particularly abnormal – this is Central Africa – but nothing else about today is regular.  Like skeletons my neighbors apparate from the thick cloud around me and stoically accept their fate in the cold downpour.  No one is talking.  No one is smiling.  In the distance, a sliver of blue sky creeps over a hill.  Moments later I can see nothing farther than the mud field bouncing rust-colored filth in to the air.

Shivering and silent I continue to stand under the overhead, migrating with the crowd as the rain stabs in a new direction.  I do this for hours, until one by one, an assembly of five hundred somber villagers have occupied every inch of semi-dry territory.  Children know their place: tiny bare feet splash in the mud, making a dance of the rain, their parents looking on with that practiced resignation we learn to resent in adolescence.  I realize that my face is resting in the same way as theirs.

A large man, the sector executive, arrives in a rain-licked SUV.  His attendant hurries from the driver’s seat to the back-left door, spreading an umbrella that looks almost military-grade next to the home-renovated contraptions of the unlucky numbers who arrived too late to secure a dry square to stand in.  The attendant holds the umbrella over the head of the large man while his own legs become the rusty color of the dancing mud field.  Several other men pull desks out of the open classrooms and create a staging area, on to which the now-unaccompanied attendant places several large speakers and a radio set with two shiny new antennae.  I’m watching the crowd as they turn their heads towards the only dry man in sight, in perfect, practiced unison, and only the youngest handful of the hundred children present are looking around, waiting for a cue that their parents have already felt.  The large man looks directly at me over the crowd and with a smile that flashes brighter than an unsheathed sword beckons me over towards the staging area.

Rows of chairs appear under the awning, and the people with the nicest outfits all sit down, a veritable congregation forming in twenty rows of four chairs each, split in the middle by the radio table and a nervously fidgeting attendant.  More people could fit under the awning but the chairs take up too much space and as I carefully step over the murky streams flowing from a thousand marching feet I remember again that those hairs on my arm are standing up perfectly straight.  The large man pulls my right arm towards a chair facing the now-drenched crowd (one of only four chairs in non-compliance with the awning-protected arrangement, adjacent to the radio table), and as I sit down in my designated spot, the eyes of everyone I’ve spent the past three months trying to equate myself too, the eyes of these people that I so desperately want to consider my equals, turn and gently but perceptively narrow.

They are looking at me.  The water on their brows and in their eyeballs creates rapidity of flinching the likes of which I never thought that I would see in a crowd of human beings.  The rain falls heavily off the sheet metal awning, as if a literal wall of water separated me and them.

The hairs on my arm are stiff.  Is it the cold of my sleeves?  The static of this surreal, thunder-wrenched pandemonium?  Or is it something else, something deeper, an animal response familiar to the ancient hunter-gatherer regions of our brains? Is this what it feels like to be cornered?

The radio flickers on.  Someone starts to speak, here and at every radio in the country.  Every ear in Rwanda hears his words.

This was the first day of Kwibuka¸ or “to remember,” the period beginning the annual national commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda.  The genocide lasted 100 days, from the 7 April assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents on their return flight from a peace conference to 4 July, when Paul Kagame and the Tutsi-dominated, Ugandan-trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ended the violence that killed almost one million Tutsi and Hutu-moderates (Hutu who refused or resisted the orders of the Hutu-led Interharamwe death squads) and displaced close to three million people.  The genocide was notable for several reasons: the sheer brutality of the street-based, neighborhood-organized killings, the reluctant French forces deployed to the southwest of the country that legitimized the Interharamwe’s orders, the complete apathy of international forces engaged in an equally horrifying but much smaller campaign of genocide prevention in Southeastern Europe, and the decisiveness of Kagame’s rise to power and the ensuing destabilization of the neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), to name a few.

Since the 1994 genocide, the RPF has made Rwanda a poster child of developmental success.  Rwanda established community courts to expedite the massive genocide-related caseload, took a tolerant approach to many genocidaires in the interest of national harmony, and quickly became the fastest growing economy in Africa, the fastest growing region in the world.  To say that Rwanda’s recovery since 1994 has been anything less than a miracle would be foolish.  With the anniversary of the genocide, the practice of Kwibuka has become normalized in the annual calendar of festive holidays and religious observations, marking a decidedly unique social event.  Few countries can claim to have experienced contemporary genocide and none of them remember their tragedies in the way that Rwandans do.

Before continuing, I would like to give the caveat that I have lived in Rwanda for a little over six months, and my ability to understand the complexities of Rwandan culture, let alone the defining sociopolitical event of the region in the past quarter century, is negligible.  I did not want to write extensively about Kwibuka because I cannot and will not be able “to remember” the horror of 1994 with my neighbors; despite my earnest efforts to integrate with my host community, I am a marked outsider this week, and I can feel it everywhere I go.  That being said, I am finding it impossible to not reflect on this moment and this cultural occurrence.  Rwanda is, after all, my home for two years.

Almost three weeks after standing at my school, witnessing the onset of Rwanda’s one-hundred-day period of remembrance for the 1994 genocide, I am still struggling with how to articulate my thoughts on the event.  There are so many factors to take in to account: the need for cultural sensitivity to respect this horrible time, the desire to air my unfiltered thoughts on the ramifications of this form of sanctification, my fear and inability to transcribe accurately the feelings I have, and the impact of a foreigner’s novice understanding but wider access to an audience on this subject than the people who bear the memory of the event every day.  I do not think that I am capable of writing what I want to say the way it needs to be said; as such, I want to instead reflect on what the rest of that first week felt like.

The weather didn’t change much at all.  Rwanda’s rainy season continued on, and with it, public activity became negligent.  The village market that continues to dazzle my eyes with color was vacant on Monday and Thursday, making my walks around the community noticeably more sober.  None of the shops were open; this is before pay day, and unlike my neighbors, I did not have the foresight to stock up on food before Kwibuka began.  I finished off my stockpile of rice by Tuesday and for the rest of the week rationed my tiny potatoes which, without oil to fry them in, I boiled and ate with salt.  Romantically I could say that this was a respectful form of fasting, however I was honestly miserable every time I saw village children munching away on corn or the high-fat biscuits made to supplement a weak rural diet.  None of the shops were open and my remaining money had to be saved for a “vacation” I had planned the following week, so I spent a lot of time reading and planning out my lessons for the next term so that I wouldn’t be caught off guard, scrambling to piece together a worthwhile lesson like I ended up doing the first term.  I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts and classical music and the radio, holed up in my house.

When I did go outside it was for the one or two cigarettes a day that I could scrounge up with my remaining spending money and for a glimpse of other human life.  Once the cigarette fund dried up, I became restless and anxious.  I tried to attend more events during the week, but the rain made the trips to communal burial grounds uncomfortable and my anxiety after the first event was peaking.  In all honesty, I felt trapped.  I haven’t felt like this since coming to country and at the time of this writing I can say that life has resumed is normally colorful and beautiful hue, but with the backdrop of the gray, nasty weather and the week’s memorials at hand, I was bleak.  I try to go outside every day to say hello to someone, anyone, and this week, no one wanted to hear any of it.

Many of the people in my cohort seemed to feel the same way.  Every village commemorates the memory of the genocide differently, and most of us were unsure of how to interact with our neighbors during this week of mourning.  Half of my cohort travelled to Uganda to enjoy a vacation of white water rafting, horseback riding and gentle cruises on the Nile, and I would imagine that the other half of us were all pretty envious of their escape.

But despite the unambiguous misery of the week, I am glad that I stayed.  Leo Tolstoy once said that all happiness is relatable, but each form of pain takes on its unique form.  The pain that my community feels over the events of 1994 was genuine and severe and wide, like a gash that refuses to heal, and while I could not feel it with them, I am humbled to have been in their presence during their time of mourning.  I am a foreigner, an umuzungu, and while I will never be able to bridge the gap that divides us, I was able to stand by their side and witness their respect for what has happened.  With all that I experienced that week, I can say that I now feel as though I am living in Rwanda, that I am no longer a temporary addition to this beautiful and complex nation, and that I have begun a journey towards one day feeling for the suffering of my fellow man with an intimacy I could never have imagined in my previous life.

—

Despite my greatest attempts I have yet to get learn how to properly manage my finances.  So instead of spending the week before my classes resumed vacationing out of the country, I decided instead to go on a “budget” vacation: a hiking trip from Rusizi, in the far south west of the country, to Karengera, a site near Lake Kivu.  I would be staying at the houses of three volunteers along the way to cut back on rent, share some recipes to save on food expenses, and maybe even camp outside a night to just experience nature the way it was meant to be.  I spoke to all three of the volunteers I was visiting during IST to clear the plan and dates well ahead of my trip.  And despite my financial illiteracy, I set aside enough money to get through the trip.  Or so I thought.

The trip began in Butare, the southernmost major city in the country.  My friend Cay, an expat pastor with years of experience in Africa, is teaching at a university in the city and has opened her door to Peace Corps volunteers who need a warm bed and a hot shower (and incredible conversation, in actual, fluent English!).  I stayed in her home the first night and we spent the majority of the evening talking about the role of the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda and the structural difficulties inherent in the church’s approach to development.

When I was in my adolescence I grew familiar with that formless hatred of the church that comes naturally to many of my generation.  I’m sure that a Hegelian would have a field day analyzing the thesis of the previous generation’s relationship to society when compared to my own, and the synthesis (read: grudging acceptance and slowly developing respect) of my generation’s general appreciation of organized religion as it stands.  Church in one’s home country is not inherently relatable to church operations in other countries, where the words being shared with a congregation can be distorted with little appreciation for the historical contexts of the language and culture where the Word is being preached.  For example, in the States, mainstream Christianity has become much more accepting of homosexual relationships, with some denominations allowing openly gay church officials and many more officiating homosexual weddings.  Many fringe church organizations have not taken these humane and pluralistic steps, however, and a very vocal minority of churches in the US point to certain Bible verses to justify their positions.  So even in the US, the “most Christian” country on the planet, there is a healthy debate on the language of the Bible that makes a very real impact on the lives of our congregations, a debate that is driven at from hundreds of perspectives and arguments despite everyone sharing the same language and cultural heritage.

This debate is relatively minor in the United States, where there is a separation of church and state and a rapidly growing portion of the population that considers themselves non-religious, and in places like Rwanda, where almost 95% of the population belongs to either the Catholic or newer charismatic church movements.  In Rwanda, churches are the primary social organ other than the family and church attendance, membership, and doctrine have a heavy influence in the activities of everyday Rwandans (As an example, during an information session on malaria prevention, one student said to me, “We cannot cure malaria because God made malaria and the church says that anything God makes cannot be destroyed”).  The debate on doctrine is thus much more significant in material terms.  Adding to this severity, foreign churches – churches primarily financed by non-Rwandan members – knowingly wade in to this snakes’ nest of conflicting factors and cause harm, often intentionally.  In 1994, several Catholic priests openly encouraged their congregation to commit genocide and in some cases even committed heinous acts themselves or directed mass murders, a series of events that Pope Francis officially recognized and apologized for in 2017.  Given the problematic nature of foreign religion in Africa and a long history of abuse by white colonizers in the name of God many in the Peace Corps are understandably skeptical about the role of churches in development.

So with all of this in mind, I had an incredible conversation with Cay about the role of the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda.  It’s been around since the early 1900s and has always had a relatively small number of Rwandan adherents.  The Presbyterian Church primarily sponsors several regionally-recognized universities and offers degrees on humanitarian aid and development while also teaching basic English and entrepreneurial skills.  I was humbled to hear Cay’s patient and eager responses to my questions about what exactly the Church does in country and was pleased to hear that the missionary efforts that have become caricatures of many denominations in America are negligible in Rwanda.  We stayed up all night, her drinking tea, me eating coffee, eating properly salted popcorn for the first time in seven months, and we eventually made it around to the topics of our individual “faith journeys” and the chance occurrences in life that led us to this moment.

My job requires me to interact with Catholic Church officials on a daily basis, and every one of my students is able to understand references to the Bible.  Congregations organize funerals and weddings and collect money for members who experience financial hardships.  Teachers are leaders in their church communities

After our conversation Cay went to bed and I made another pot of coffee.  Not my wisest decision.  Cay had an incredible Wi-Fi connection and I decided to stay up and talk to my mother and brother on the phone.  My brother and I spent an hour talking about our future plans for global domination and my mother and I laughed on the phone for hours.  The moon was perfect and round and radiated a warm, blanketing light.

I ended up not sleeping that night with the idea that I would get to the bus station early and catch the first bus to the Southwest, where I was planning to meet up with another volunteer from my cohort, Taylor Schmidt.  I got a lot of work done, and watched a lot of YouTube videos, but despite the royal auburn sunrise blessing the morning fog on my walk to the bus station, the first bus didn’t leave until almost noon.  I was laced with caffeine and nicotine and felt an uncontrollable twitch coming on.  I had packed too much and my camera was incredibly exposed and I felt vulnerable.  It’s not the best feeling in the world and not one that I have learned how to healthily deal with.  But there it was, haunting the back of my head as I sat and waited for a bus to finally fill up and leave.  My plan was to go on a long hike from Taylor’s site to the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that afternoon, but the bus trip was at least five hours long and my plans for the week were slowly slipping away.

The next thing I knew I felt my head slowly rolling along the headrest of a massive bus.  The isle was packed to my chin with the luggage of long-distance travelers, the majority of whom had travelled from Uganda and were headed to the DRC.  Nobody spoke Kinyarwanda and few people spoke English so I was confused by the new sounds I was hearing, as if someone were whispering an ancient language from somewhere close behind me.  As my head sluggishly rolled towards the window, I was caught by the sight of a thick canopy jungle – an actual, honest to God jungle – of thick broccoli-stem gnarled trunks, visible layers of ecosystemic differences visible from my vantage point on the bus.  A few blonde monkeys scurried out of the winding road as the tall bus lurched from bend to bend with a remarkable disdain for the separating line of the road, an effect which was not lost on several passengers as they vomited out of the tinted windows of our transportation method.  I had awoken in Nyongwe, the third largest national reserve of Rwanda and a tropical jungle out of a Disney movie.  And as soon as I registered the awesome complexity and verdancy of the world around me, I drifted back to sleep.

I awoke in Rusizi, a border town on the Rwandan side and a hive of energy.  Hundreds of people were on either side of the checkpoint waiting to be processed or to have their complaints answered.  Small twege busses, bolting out of the nearby market streets like a bat out of hell, swerved through impossibly thick foot traffic and taxis hungrily searching for the next customer.  All of this was against the backdrop of a lake, imposing in its blue stillness and quietly flaking surf off its surface as the nearby mountain breeze cooled the valley full of humans.  I found a quiet place to sit and appreciate this first contact with an actual body of water since coming to my new home.

Eventually I had to find Taylor’s site, and I obeyed the rules of the Peace Corps (including not using a much cheaper moto on a cement road, despite the lack of road traffic moments out of Rusizi and ridiculously hiked taxi fares) and enjoyed a winding hilltop ride towards a friend’s home.  I paid what felt like a bribe to the taxi driver and relaxed in the shade of a school until Taylor found me and we found a bar.

I’ve written about Taylor in a previous post, but she’s a gem.  We spent the evening eating akabenzi, which is a regional specialty of slowly grilled pork seasoned with fruits and a spicy sauce, talking about the absurdity of life back in America and the improbability of our current stations in life.  I learned that Taylor played the cello and that she didn’t like wearing her glasses back in the States and that akabenzi, despite the hype and almost cultish comparisons among regions, is rarely worth the high price of meat.  I also learned that Taylor shared many of my sentiments about the human relations of the Peace Corps and it felt really good to spend a night venting over warm beer and well-cooked pork.

We resolved to do the hike to the border the following morning.  We crossed a gargantuan, rain soaked field on a sort of muddy highway, with hundreds of people heading to her closest town for the market day.  Cows, goats and chickens joined the human traffic in sliding and falling in the impossibly slick mud, with Taylor and I trying to avoid humiliation by slowly traversing along the mile-long stretch only touching the driest, narrowest strip of well-trod mud, and we still managed to fall a number of times.  After the “highway” we sleepily crept through village after village, each slightly more “developed” than my own site but still having that charming openness and assemblage of gawking children that characterizes rural life anywhere I’ve ever been.  We walked through fields of tea, coffee, beans, sorghum and potatoes, the vegetation around us slowly becoming more and more dense and the houses become more sporadically immersed in their environment and submitting less to the haughty organization of human civilization.

When we reached the Rift Valley two and a half hours later, we were sunburnt and sticky from sweat.  A chorus of children had followed us the last half hour and we periodically surprised them by turning around and making a monster noise, leading to a harmonic giggle-scream and ensuing trampling that can only be characterized as the sound and spectacle of angels.  Once the Rift Valley, a thin, snaking gorge spanning from South Sudan and Ethiopia to Malawi and covering most of the eastern border of the DRC (read: at least as long as the Appalachians and potentially as long as the Rockies), came in to view, even the children stopped their laughter and appreciated the scene.  From our vantage point we could look down in to the valley and watch as a river too distant to hear exploded across the convex of the geography with a force that I reckon ripped the stone from the hills in the past week, not slowly and methodically over hundreds of thousands of years, and because the walls of the valley were so vast and tall, a chromatic scale of lighter lime green to nearly black tree shade spread before us to the infinite.  It was breathtaking.

At the bottom of the valley was a checkpoint and between us and the checkpoint is some of the worst trail I have ever had the misfortune to fall down and scramble up.  There was nothing resembling a road; instead, the narrow, rocky and steep path sliced every direction between homes and micro-waterfalls that laughed at us as they sped to the river below.  As we made it to the bottom, the trail lost any resemblance to a well-travelled path and instead became a vegetation-littered mud field.  I fell so many times.  Several sleepy, hushed men near the border sat in wooden stools smoking out of hand carved pipes and eyed the two foreigners as we cautiously made our way to the river-spanning concrete bridge/dam that connected the two forlorn borders.

Below the bridge, which controlled the outflow of water from the slower, higher part of the river, a slew of small stones were scattered in the nearly still headwaters from the man-made impediment and on those rocks stood three young boys, each fishing for dinner that had swam too close to the cement structure and were projected over the crest of the flowing water to land in the silty stone creek, most likely to their incredible surprise.  The boys used cane poles with precision and would talk to each other with plastic bags slung over their shoulders as their thin wrists flicked the cane violently in to the air and landed tiny fish in their shoulder bags, all in one motion, all without breaking conversation.  Taylor and I sat on the banks of this river on shaded, mossy boulders and appreciated the scene before us.  It was strange – in our minds, the tranquility of the scene seemed to betray our preconceptions of the violence and chaos that characterizes the American imagination of Rwanda and the DRC, and as we looked more intently, we realized that our imaginations had committed the betrayal.

Eventually we left our serenity and, through a combination of belly-crawling and heavy heaving, made it to the top of the ridge.  Another two hours of walking lay ahead of us, and we took our time taking pictures and playing with the spectating children.  At the last village before the flat muddy highway we stopped in to a small cantina and shared urgwagwa with a room of excited Rwandans, all enthusiastically greeting us and praising us for coming “all the way out here” to visit them.  It was Taylor’s first time enjoying the stuff, and at less than 10 cents a bottle, we enjoyed ourselves for a minute.  Despite their protests we left the fine establishment as the rain clouds started materializing and made it back to Taylor’s site just as the heavy rainfall began to cover the earth and create the perfect sound for a deep, long sleep.

Sleep which was definitely necessary after my ill-planned all-nighter and a five-hour hike within 24 hours.  But, because I had also failed to budget for the trip properly, I decided that I was going to walk to Tristan’s site (the next stop on the trip) and save money.  Unfortunately the walk was almost 12 hours, up and down mountainous roads with no cover from the shade.  I woke up at 3:00 AM and started my death march in the dark, listening to podcasts and staving off a knowing hunger for more coffee and another cigarette.  In my haze I was able to appreciate the morning as it erupted through the world around me, but I had somehow managed to crack the bottom of my boots and mud had slipped in and hardened on the hike from the prior day, making my feet feel as if they were compressed in a bear trap.  But hey, the pain kept me awake.

I made it halfway before getting on the cheapest bus I could find, falling asleep on the bus, missing the stop for Tristan’s site, and paying as much for my mistake as I would have if I had taken a bus directly between the two sites.  Go figure.

Tristan and I pounded out corn tortillas and ate homemade tacos while talking about life.  Tristan is a singular human being; I’ve never met someone with his self-control or sense of calm, let alone someone my age.  Tristan has a fiancée who lives in America and visited him recently, and I could tell that a lot of his pent-up stress had evaporated.  Which is good, because he has big shoes to fill: the volunteer he replaced stayed at the site for an extra year and was loved by his community.  We spent time talking about the interlacing power dynamics of the community and the challenges that integration had held for us.  It was refreshing, because Tristan and I are probably the most like-minded volunteers in the cohort (I don’t know if you’d agree with this Tristan but you’re not writing it) and I think we both are annoyed or frustrated by similar problems.  At least, while we were discussing our frustrations over urgwagwa (it was also his first time!), we felt like we had a lot in common, but black-market sorghum-liquor-laced banana wine can probably have that effect.

I only spent two nights with Tristan.  I had hoped to spend more, but everything was thrown out of whack when I learned that a third volunteer I had hoped to stay with between Taylor and Tristan was still in Uganda with several other members of the cohort.  A lot of volunteers decided to leave the country during Kwibuka and a lot of other volunteers had some thoughts on that decision that I personally feel are valid, but which I cannot wisely relate without spending more time in country first.  Regardless, my flailing fail of a vacation ended on a sweet note, over sweet coffee and a delicious breakfast of eggs and potatoes and fruit, and when I waved Tristan off, I felt as though I had only just scratched the surface of this crazy and eclectic man.  Till next time, sir.

The last leg of my trip was simply getting home, which should have been easy, but because of the way these roads work I had to go north before I could go south east.  I ended up falling asleep on another bus and woke up to feel us hydroplaning across a mountainous, potholed highway past where I needed to get off.  I ditched the bus in the middle of the road and waited for the next one to pass the opposite direction.  Standing in the rain, feeling the marrow of my bones becoming diluted with the rain water, I realized how much better the past week would have been if I had spent it appreciating the world around me instead of dwelling on my mishaps.  My time in the South West was awash with the beauty of humans and nature alike, from the savory akabenzi to the laughter over rebottled alcohol to the late-night conversations with kindred spirits.  It just wasn’t much of a vacation.

—

The following is a reflection of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, a dystopian novel set in 1980’s Japan.

On the bus ride from my site to Kigali, I finished one of the most delicious, intoxicating and surreal novels I have ever had the pleasure to open.  I was working at a bookstore in Jacksonville, Florida when 1Q84 was published in the United States.  I love Orwell and the title grabbed me immediately, but the length of the book seemed too intimidating given how complex my life of applying to colleges and balancing several part-time jobs felt at the time.  I’m incredibly happy that I had the chance to pick up the book a few weeks ago.

1Q84 is the story of two lovers whose lives mysteriously cross in to an alternate reality, and whose forlorn love for one another is the only force giving direction in their events.  Aoname is a physical therapist and assassin who discreetly murders domestic abusers in the middle of her therapy sessions, but who at the start of the novel realizes that reality has definitely but almost imperceptibly switched in to something strange and unfamiliar.  Tengo is an unpublished novelist who is given the opportunity to rewrite a captivating but adolescent fantasy novel in order to win a new author’s prize for Fuka-Eri, a young woman who recently escaped from a radical religious commune in the Japanese country side.

The novel is written in the perspective of both characters as each becomes increasingly intertwined in a conspiracy meant to suppress the tidbits of truth hidden in Fuka-Eri’s novel, Air Chrysalis.  Both characters eventually end up hiding from a private investigator hired by the commune to track down their movements and through a series of improbable events realize that they are closer together now than they ever have been before.  By the end of the novel I was confused beyond belief at the plot and the questions that it raised, and I was frustrated that I didn’t get to know if the two lovers had escaped the warped world they were living in or if they had simply stepped in to something new and darker.

But the point of 1Q84 was not to be a self-contained work of fiction that leaves a reader satisfied at its conclusion.  Rather, 1Q84 is a meta-novel: a story about the engrossing aspect of fiction itself, and the way in which we suspend our own reality for the duration of a work of fiction.  When Aoname and Tengo step in to the world they believe to be the real one, they are concluding a fantastical tale not unlike the one that a reader concludes when he puts down an exhaustingly captivating story.  Maybe I’ve just had too much cheap wine before writing this, but the profound “moral” of the story is that we all release our grip on reality when we choose to open up a thick book and plunge in to a hammock for the afternoon.  The details of 1Q84 are less important than the fact that we all choose to immerse ourselves in the minute details of a new story.

When I finished the novel, I looked up at the moon.  The defining evidence that Aoname, Tengo, and several other characters point to as evidence of an altered reality in 1Q84 is a second moon.  How crazy would that be – to see two moons in the night sky, and to be completely unable to share this observation with anyone else?  I’d slowly lose my mind, much like the characters in the story.  In some ways I can intimately relate to the paranoia of the protagonists; when my bus was pulling in to the main station this afternoon, a young boy balancing the rim of a bike tire, holding a large clock in his hand, was frozen in the middle of the street, mid step, waiting for traffic to subside before continuing across the chaotic, muddy intersection.  I couldn’t stop looking at him; the clock in his right hand was frozen still, and when I blinked, I swear that the hands had moved backwards.  The frenetic, organic action of the intersection outside of the bus station was nothing less than a swarm of life, and in the middle of it all stood this pensive teenager, seemingly unaffected by the world around him, holding something that seemed to defy everything I knew to be true.  There’s a hundred perfectly rational explanations for what I saw, and yet none of them came to me while I was folded up in the hot bus waiting to finally get off this five-hour bus ride.

Our lives are like the lives of the protagonists of 1Q84: we’re caught in the middle of stories with no clear beginning or ends, fumbling through the cornucopia of information set before us, trying to do the best we can with what we have before us.  We only (and then, only momentarily) step out of the flow of reality when we witness the unexplainable and thus shatter the illusion of continuity we rely on to function normally.  If we take the time to observe enough of these unexplainables – and there are so, so many, just waiting to be paid attention to – our own lives become the plots of an impossible story, full of impossible facts that if taken as a whole can destabilize our grips on reality.  1Q84 excels as a novel not because it offers some new approach to plot development or is filled with stylistic originality, both of which are true, but because it functions as a mirror on the mode of experiencing reality that all of us operate according to, and whose plot arch is structured around two protagonists realizing the flow that they are conditioned to accept as a given is in fact as constructed as any other abstract idea that we can fancy.  This point is not immediate, and until the last few pages of this 1100-page goliath, I was waiting for the kind of tidy conclusion that most novels so kindly provide.

But both life and 1Q84 fail to provide us with that conclusion which our rational function craves like nourishment to the starved.  Instead, it demands that we regularly pause in the course of our day, examine the unexplainables that surround us, and appreciate the beauty of the fiction that we willingly believe to cope with the world around us.

I couldn’t ask for a better story to read in the Peace Corps.

—-

I intend to use this space as a brain vomit of thoughts about “development” and how the abstract ideas we use to define and evaluate development completely break down in the flow of human activity.  If the pseudo-academic musings of young man isolated in a rural village isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to skip over this part.

I think that there is a general idea of development that is popular in American universities, one that can trace its roots to the core doctrine of neoliberalism: development is the gradual but sustained improvement in the quality of life of a population.  Quality of life depends on the economic system in place that governs the interactions of a population, and this economic system in turn improves the quality of cultural necessities like education, religion and the family, while also promising a cessation of disease and a remedy to the daily struggles of un-developed populations.  Central to this notion is the idea of the “un-developed,” or of populations that do not subscribe to liberalizing economic conditions and thus choose to abstain from the wonders of progress, and equally central is the idea of the “developing,” or of populations who are in the throughs of development but for one reason or another are falling short of the goals that neoliberal development brings with it.

In this context, development can be measured by the economic activity of a state, it can be seen in the social norms of everyday human interaction, it can be tasted in the quality and cleanliness of food and in the flavor of air pollution, and it can be felt in the flow and chaos of life.  Development is something that either is or isn’t.  Some countries have that special stuff needed for development – entrepreneurial genius? A divine mandate? The right friends? – and other countries lack the prerequisite stuff needed for progress.

Development agencies like the Peace Corps play a crucial role in this framework of development.  Development agencies target opportunities for development, like a lagging education system in my case, and spend exorbitant resources on correcting this problem.  In Rwanda, there are development agencies that focus on education, child and maternal health, the prevention of diseases, food security, infrastructure development, minority and LGBTQ+ representation, freedom of the press, and commercial enterprises, to name a few.  All of these development agencies rely on Rwandans (in varying degrees) to execute their programs, and all of these agencies are predominately financed by international donors, administered by foreign nationals, and set their agendas based on the wishes of people living somewhere else.  That’s not to say that development agencies don’t do an incredible amount of work – they do, and I’m glad that they do, because the amount of assistance they provide is far from negligible.

Despite those accommodations, development agencies in particular and the neoliberal paradigm of development in general deserve to be criticized.  The role of development agencies can be likened to a general practitioner in the medical field, who devotes her time to treating an abundance of symptoms without looking at the underlying causes for suffering.  If we take the mentality that Western development promotes as a given, the work of development agencies consistently fails to address a crucial question: when is our work ever done?  There is no example of an “underdeveloped” state rising to the status of “developed” through the concerted efforts of foreign development agencies.  The Peace Corps does a lot of good, but ultimately, they have been serving in countries like Ghana and Mongolia for more than 50 years and the change in living conditions could hardly be attributed to the hard work of energetic volunteers like myself.

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Thinking more about this after some time away:

The first English that many children will say upon seeing a muzungu is “Give me money.”  At school, I hear the sentence about once a day, and now that the students recognize me, most of them say “Good morning teacher!”, even if it’s past 4 in the afternoon.  But in cities like Musanze or Butare, or in my regional town Nyanza, its very common to hear “give me money” about once every ten minutes in a crowded area.  Many of were struck by this, especially because the implication is that their parents or their friends taught them to say these three words to any foreigner that they come across.  It’s embarrassing and humiliating and until close to the end of PST I didn’t really have an idea about how to respond.

Now that I’ve been here for almost 8 months, I feel much more equipped to understand why these words are so important.  It’s a cliché at this point, but a lot of people who travel to places like Africa can and probably should feel guilt for the historical circumstances that led to kind of poverty we see every day.  Aid agencies are big on building things that people in the west assume people in Rwanda want, and those projects look pretty and make an amazing bulletin for promoting the goals of the agency back home, but the poorest in society do not have the access to many of these projects or maybe were simply given a “gift” without any training about how to use it, both situations rendering the gift useless.

My friend Felix shared a story about his childhood in Burundi.  A western aid agency (he doesn’t remember which one) “gifted” his village a truckload of donkeys to help the villagers with agricultural work.  Donkeys are used in many parts of the world to assist in agriculture, and are incredibly reliable animals for the kind of work that suits them.  The agency dropped off the donkeys, started passing them around to the villagers, and took some pictures.  They left that same day.  That night, the villagers killed most of the donkeys and had a giant feast.  It was more meat than many of them had seen in their lifetime.  The remaining donkeys ran off in to the countryside and to this day a few European-bred donkeys are rummaging around the hills of a Burundian village, absorbed in to the magical landscape like so many other oddities.

A lot of aid is like the “gift” that Felix’s village received.  Despite being well intentioned, gifts are not asked for, and unlike the gifts we give to our friends and family, the recipient does not know the giver.  This creates a strange dynamic: if you received a large, cumbersome gift from a stranger one day, who then ran up and took a picture with you before leaving you alone for the rest of your life, how would you feel?  I would be frustrated that my neediness was used to make the stranger feel validated or moral in some way.  I would feel incredibly untrustworthy of the gift I was given, and if he gave me instructions on how to use the gift, I’d probably tear them up and do whatever I wanted to do with it.  Why go through all of the trouble of buying donkeys, shipping them across the world, driving to the middle of nowhere and dropping them off when they could have just mailed a check and split it in to the community, to use as people saw fit?

A lot of aid seems to be pretty similar to these Burundian donkeys.  Western organizations spend billions on organizing aid campaigns to eliminate the perceived barriers to development with little consideration for how these barriers got there in the first place and even less for how their role in “alleviating suffering” contributes to the problems they want to alleviate.  The Peace Corps is an incredible example of this.  We’re put in to schools and health clinics and essentially take a job away from a Rwandan, which them deprives a community member of being able to use these learned skills to benefit people after we leave, learned skills and all.  The amount of resources that go in to making the Peace Corps possible is enormous.  We pay American human resource officers to screen tens of thousands of applicants, American doctors to treat us if we get sick in country, American-certified safety and security officials to comb through potential sites and evaluate the feasibility of a naïve foreigner living there for two years, and we do this all in almost a hundred countries every year, and none of this includes the costs of the bureaucracy in Peace Corps Washington.  Last year, the Peace Corps budget was $410 million, which is nothing compared to the developmental aid industry in the United States.  If we split $410 million among each of the members of our rural communities in the countries we serve, the influx of cash could be used to create savings that would help end the cycle of poverty we see everywhere we go in rural Rwanda.

Of course, the Peace Corps exists for more than just to improve the lives of the communities we serve in.  We also share our culture with our neighbors, and when we return to the States, we share the culture of our recent homes with our countrymen.  These are noble and worth seeing through in their own rights.  But in light of the first part of this section, I think it is worth re-examining the concept of development and the role that aid organizations play.

Dr. Walter Rodney, an influential social activist and political theorist from Guyana, wrote a book titled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) that was an incredibly impactful perspective for several volunteers during PST.  One of his central theses is that the European concept of development uses racial prejudice to blame a lack of development on artificial “roadblocks”, such as a lack of education or a lack of democratic representation.  If Africans were taught how to manage a complex financial sector, utilize sustainable forms of agriculture, or appreciate political diversity, then the “rising tide” of liberal markets would improve the quality of life for everyone on the continent.  From this assumption, Western aid agencies can characterize states like Rwanda as “rapidly developing” (towards an economic and social system that mirrors the superstructures of European states), and conversely can point to countries like Somalia or South Sudan as “failed states,” whose internal barriers are too great to resemble a European state in the near future.

Rodney’s counter to this idea was “underdevelopment,” or that the structural barriers to “development” in place today were intentionally designed by colonizers who set their colonies on paths of regressive development.  Rodney points to a variety of sources to validate his position, such as the widespread and accepted practice of homosexuality in pre-British Uganda, the widespread agricultural reappropriation evident in pre-Belgian Congo, the complex system of internal trade networks along the West African coast prior to the fracturing of British and French colonizers, and the historical trends of a number of African states, all of which had economies and societies at least as complex as most European states prior to their expansion in to other continents.  The result was that while African colonies “developed” under colonial rule (in the form of technological advancements), the systems that had held traditional societies in place for thousands of years were wrenched apart by the dual afflictions of the slave trade and later the imposition of governments and economies directed by foreign leaders.  The Belgian Congo is a perfect example of this transition: once a kingdom the size of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States with trade relations stretching across the continent and a developed religion that created a meritocratic civil service exam, the Belgian colonizers committed genocide against the people of the Congo and famously forbade anyone from the Congo from attending higher education, which was required to participate in the Belgian governmental apparatus.

The result was that Congo was designed to “underdevelop” – to suppress the solidarity of Congolese society and thus prevent rebellion, to restructure village life around the brutal extraction of raw materials for Belgian trade, to remove the tradition of ancestor worship and thus the fabric of social life with the forced conversion to Christianity, and to privilege Congolese leaders who used a hard hand to suppress dissent, all traditions that carry over to this day.  The development of the Congo was not “frozen” by European colonialism, but instead continued, with the aim of making it in to one giant outdoor factory for foreign exploitation.  Under this definition, states like the DRC are not simply lacking the resources or knowledge to “progress”, but the conditions that led to European development were deliberately denied to African societies, and in order to alleviate widespread poverty, there must first be a removal of the calcified layovers from colonialism before Africans are able to chart their own course for their own countries.

Rodney was an incredibly consequential and divisive figure in African theory and we have had the benefit of looking at how African states have attempted to remove the vestiges of colonialism and “chart their own course” since he published his work in 1972.  The fifty years between when he wrote his last work and our present day have worked to support his theory, I think; the continent is independent, organized, and generally seems to be supportive of supra-national cooperation within organizations like the African Union and the East African Community.  More African leaders are staying in office for shorter periods of time, there is a greater acceptance of debate and dissent among national governments, and crucially, economic development is occurring at a breakneck speed.  The standard of living for many Africans improves every day.

In the context of my Peace Corps service, I cannot help but think that despite our good intentions, the Peace Corps is very much like that truckload of donkeys in Burundi.  The challenge is to recognize how our organization contributes to historical “underdevelopment”, how we can use the mission of the Peace Corps to instead reverse the trend of historical domination, and how our roles at our sites should mold to reflect the reality of continued overbearing Western influence.

All of this was in my head when our school began a committee to organize and fund projects to benefit the school.  There’s a lot going on in this department at the moment and I hope that I can share more in the next two months as things get off the ground.  Until then, I hope that these few brief, unorganized thoughts can help contextualize the work that us volunteers are trying to do over here.

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At the end of April I had the pleasure of sticking my arms in to a rice sack full of cow manure.  It was a humbling and, dare I say, enlightening experience.  The smell was royal: earthy, musky, somehow sweet perhaps.  Cow manure is not a homogenous substance by any stretch of the imagination, containing a variety of grasses and sticks in various stages of digestion and with different degrees of solidity.  When my fingers wormed in to a particularly dense clump at the back of the bag, I could make out at least a dozen different textures on my fingertips, each competing for my disgust and amusement.  A “clump” (the industry term for a collected mass of the stuff) of cow manure weighs about the same as a softball but is less dense, perhaps the size of one of those inflatable globe balls I used to toss around in elementary school.  With the emergence of my colored arm from the rice sack, the small number of people paying attention to me and not the digging taking place in our garden patch nodded with an approval.  They, too, had the stuff in the wrinkles of their straightened elbows, and in the rain-kissed field of our current demonstration, the smell added to a natural perfume that would have made anyone familiar with the back country of American farm life tear up with nostalgia.

This was a moment from the Southern Region’s Permagardening Training, held a few weekends back.  It was the best Peace Corps-organized event I have yet to attend and, if we use what we learned to its full extent, could make the most impact out of any singular skill we have developed thus far.  Permagardening – permanent gardening – is a farming technique that emphasizes water conversation, community engagement, and long-term sustainability to supplement nutritional deficits.  Permagardens require very little space to work properly, rely on locally sourced materials for composting and improving the soil, and uses berms – walls of dirt planted with perennials – and deep holes to control the flow of water and sink it deep in to the ground.  Crops are rotated every season between the beds in the center of the garden, which replenish the nutrients in the soil.  The entire concept combines the sustainability of scientific agriculture with the responsibility of a decentralized, community-based approach.

The group was commendable in its own right.  This was the first time I had attended a training that was mostly made up of volunteers from other cohorts and the professionalism and resiliency of the volunteers present gave me some hope for what the next few years have in store.  Alex Wang, a volunteer from Health 9 (the same as my site mate), led the training and shared his experiences trying and failing and trying again to make permagardening a staple of his community.  For the first time Rwandan counterparts were invited to attend as well, so we brought along teachers and clinic workers who were all enthusiastic about the information we were receiving.  We made a compost pile and everyone contributed to helping it grow, and when Modeste (the Rwandan PC staffer helping Alex run the training) pulled a stick out of a tarp-covered pile of dried leaves and more manure to show us how the warmth of the compost meant that decomposition was taking effect, the crowd gathered around started clapping.  We left the training with bags full of seeds to start planting permagardens at our sites.

I don’t have too much left to say about the gardens, other than that my school is going to organize a demonstration garden and eventually each of the grades will be responsible for their own gardens.  Concurrently, I’m hoping to recruit a few students to make a team of planters for the village that I live in, with the goal of planting a garden a week over the next few months.  We’ll see if the plan comes to fruition but I’m stoked to see what can happen.

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This month took a lot longer to write than I expected it to, and I think that’s a good thing.  My work schedule has recently been ramped up because a few other English teachers left and I’m balancing another ten or so projects at the same time.  I don’t have the time to sit down and write at school anymore, and when I leave my writing to the end of the month I feel rushed to get it all done in time, which is not the best feeling in the world.  This is supposed to be a therapeutic exercise, but the stress is getting to me at the moment.  I’ll feel better when I send this off finally.

A cripple slides on his well-worn, tattered shorts across the cement.  His hands extend behind his back, wearing sandals.  His feet hang limply at the sides of his hips, bent backwards and unmoving.

The next bus pulls a sharp turn in to the station, traction stretching because of the rain.  The driver is looking at the hundreds of visual cues around him – bus boys, eager customers, other busses.  His eyes are not on the road.

The cripple stops his sliding, his right foot bent so far that only paralysis could explain his pain tolerance.  He raises his shoe-wrapped foot above his head.  For a moment, the rain stops.

The driver sees him and slams the breaks.  He sticks his torso out of the window and excitedly talks to the cripple, who slowly slides next to the driver’s window.  They are talking about life in the city, family. 

The painful crippling of body, the shoes on the hands, the almost fatal accident, the backdrop of bustling color and human activity, all of it is so much.  My mouth is hanging open.

The friends say goodbye.  The bus backs up and bulls in to his assigned space.  The other man moves away, methodically.