I scrubbed my body with the water from the metal pot at my feet. Technically, I didn’t own the pot, but the owner had entrusted it to me for safe keeping during the night. I usually end each day with a client who’s pot I slowly pound away at, so that I can use it for that night’s cooking and the next morning’s bathing. When I wake up, I get to work on the dirty pot with my usual vigor, and in the morning, the owner doesn’t know any better. All a part of the job.
I’ve been a pot-fixer for close to thirty years now. Most of my work is using rocks and bricks to bang out chinks in the large pots families rely on to cook their charcoal or wood-heated meals. I scrub the bottoms and remove the burnt dirt that collects at the base. I re-bend the lip of the pot so that it can hold a proper lid. A mother might pay me 200 francs for a single pot, so I need to work on at least five pots a day to make enough money to spend the night in whatever village I’m in that day.
Fixing pots is work that could be done by a child, but is reserved for old men like me, who travel from village to village fixing metal pots, farming tools, broken windows or bad locks. In a new village, the first objective is to knock on every door and introduce myself. Today, my name is Valens. Last week, in another village, my name was Gregorie, which was closer to the truth – my son was named Gregorie before he died. I make a point of looking at a family’s pots no matter what and often exaggerate the flaws that I see and the work that I could be paid for. I don’t steal, but it comes close sometimes.
Today I am sitting on a rock near a tall avocado tree under the shade of a hot afternoon. The small canteen across the street is paying me to fix all three of their pots, which is a good haul. A young mother who doesn’t know any better had me clean a stain that hard scrubbing could have taken off. But a man has to eat.
Tomorrow, I think I will leave. My spot near the avocado tree is quiet and hidden – only a small girl has seen me sleep there. Everything I own I can carry on my back. It’s better this way.
—
The class lasted too long. My teacher was also a pastor and on Sundays he rushes to school from his home on a motorcycle and arrives in his Sunday best. Today he was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a yellow tie, and he asked me to go to church. The trivialities of the proceeding hour were not on my mind at the time. I was frustrated that he was half an hour late and spent the entire first hour of our class on the phone, shouting in to the helpless device with the intensity of a technologically handicapped father back in the States. Some things don’t change.
I told him that I was tired and I wanted to go home. “Fine, you are tired, I understand.” Thank you, great teacher, for your bountiful wisdom. Enjoy the ride home. Take my money.
The other teacher in the room just stared at us. As my teacher left, the other teacher rapidly glanced between the two of us. The tension was noticeable.
“Don’t take it personally. He is a busy man. I am sorry that he was rude.”
Deep breaths. Successfully articulating denotation is difficult enough without a language barrier. Articulating connotation, the DNA of language, the stuff that separates “freedom” and “love” from their dictionary entries, is almost impossible. It isn’t worth arguing with someone who cannot understand your denotation, let alone the good stuff. He was right anyways.
The dry season has begun and the sun was brutal. Usually clouds blanket hills and flood valleys with an intense personal quality, like great beasts. Now the only sign of precipitation were the thin waves of upper-atmosphere rifts, like plastic sheeting folded over itself and unsmooth. The feeling of being inside of a greenhouse while everything around us cooked was overwhelming. The night before I made potato stew but it was too oily and the top layer of my concoction reflected a greasy, amber tint on the sludge below. Now, I was looking out, not in.
The road down from the school was without puddles or the constant little streams of water that seemed to spontaneously pour out of any crack in the earth. After a month of this, I imagined the sanguine stupor of activity milling to a halt as people strategically guarded shaded spots during mid-day heat waves. The lack of rain meant that the packed dirt supporting the foundation of the school had ceased to fall away like walls of a sandcastle and the rusty-red color of dirt typifying Rwanda had a wood-like, ancient quality to it.
The heat was getting to me.
On the left Felix was standing straight but his eyes were glazed over. Three mothers, one with a baby at her breast, were sitting on the grass. The assembly was in front of Felix’s guest house near the school and was easily visible from the road. Felix’s Kinyarwanda was fast and heavily inflected but I could hear that he was repeating himself. I asked him how his day was, anxious to continue on the way home, and his response contained so much grief.
How can we describe witnessing a moment of intense emotion? The tell is in the eyes. Very few people I have met in Rwanda have “white” eyes – the clear, almost cartoonish contrast of colorful iris and sclera (the white part – I had to look this up) that comes to mind in America. I’m not sure why, but most of the people I’ve met in Rwanda, Felix included, have a yellowish tint to their sclera and dark irises which have the ability to speak to the subject of a gaze with much more frankness than I can remember seeing back home. When we break down, that iris rapidly expands and kisses the surrounding sclera with an indecent force. I have seen those eyes when I looked in to the faces of past lovers or during arguments with close friends, or in the classroom when a student finally understands a difficult concept. Our eyes have so much power to articulate what we feel and none of the decency to censor that articulation. Today, with Felix standing before me in the hot, public space on the side of the road, I knew we needed to move somewhere else. Quickly.
When we slid down the cement walls of his house, our bodies obscured from the road and away from the mothers whose expressions now struck me as deeply concerned, Felix broke down. The man has shared a wealth of past experiences with me and I can only imagine the strength he possesses to process all of the grief he carries. He channels the basic desire to create beauty in his work as an artist, bringing color to ugliness much like his personality has become a reliable bedrock of creativity and empathy in a chaotic world. He had a daughter, Paloma, with a former partner named Karina and has sense separated from them because of the hostility of her family – he is Burundian, and although he claims no one will say it to his face, the family is Hutu and Felix has a Tutsi background. Since her birth a year and a half ago, Felix has seen his daughter twice, but every week he sends Karina what little money he can set aside to support his daughter.
Now, Paloma is sick, and sick children in Rwanda do not have the same chances as sick children in America. Felix was scared he would not see her again. He needed to go visit her family immediately and hold his daughter. And today, he asked me to go with him.
My earlier frustration with my French teacher dissipated, and I felt my cheeks flush with embarrassment. Minutes ago my world shrunk to a single interaction between my teacher and I, and my emotions from that interaction flooded everything. Now, the world grew to encompass the suffering of a friend and the tragedy of a family, and I felt ashamed that I had ever lost sight of these continental-sized problems. The smoke from our cigarettes flooded my eyes and they started to water, as did Felix’s, and we both took out our bandanas to dab our wet eyes. From the smoke, of course.
We stood up and hugged. I helped him walk back to my house, down and back up the valley, as the sun mercifully began to set and we could look back towards the school to see it awash with colors from Felix’s hard work. My neighbors cheerfully greeted Felix on our way to my house and called after us, saying, “There go the friends!” in Kinyarwanda. When the little kids that freak out around me started toddling over for our customary round of fist-bumping, they patted Felix too. He stood up taller and smiled that massive, disarming smile of his and after a few cups of water and a few more cigarettes we were laughing until it hurt.
It’s strange to write this, to attempt and articulate the beauty that I experience on a daily basis. The amount that I work up the energy to share is a fraction of what I understand, and of everything I experience in my new home, I understand less than a grain of sand on a beach. So many things stand out – the smiles of children that stay with me after my eyes close at night, the warped complexions of the elderly bent over in the street, the melodic hymns of shepherd children as they call out to their friends in the countryside, the mosaic of colored plastic waste collecting behind houses and against riverbanks that prophesizes a future without the room for a place like my community. When someone shares their soul with me, it hits me harder than any of these sensory floods, and I can feel now the ache in my bone marrow that I felt when Felix shared his story.
But I have to share it, because what is this project if not some hubris-driven and Quixotical quest for self-discovery, and what reveals more about one’s self than being in the presence of someone who has hurt so much?
We made plans to visit Paloma and Karina in Kamembe that weekend. The goal was clear: help Felix’s daughter. We departed in the early morning of what would become another hot day.
—
At the end of service in the Peace Corps, volunteers receive a number of benefits that make the altruistic claims of many applicants somewhat embarrassing. We receive non-competitive eligibility for government positions, which many of us will leverage for positions in federal government departments; Aaron, the volunteer at my site before Goose (the volunteer I replaced in December) works for the Fish and Wildlife services in Oregon, for example. We receive access to the Coverdell Fellowship, which is very helpful for funding Masters or Doctorate programs after our service; Chibo, a good friend who will be finishing her service at the beginning of July, will return to a fully paid Master’s program to Brandeis University, an elite private university near Boston. We receive a readjustment allowance proportional to the number of months we have served, and the nearly $8000 sum is used by volunteers to pay for down payments on apartments, new cars, and mounting student loan debt. Education Volunteers (like myself) become TEFL-certified, opening up a lucrative career path abroad. As if all of that wasn’t enough, our healthcare and insurance is paid for by the Peace Corps some months after our COS (Close of Service), and it’s somewhat of a tradition to take advantage of that by travelling around the region where a volunteer has served.
The benefits are impressive and well-earned. And there’s probably going to be a post in the future that details more in depth the problems and benefits of such incentivization for service like this. But right now, I can’t stop thinking about how I’m going to use my haul. Considering the possibilities for a Master’s program in particular makes my mouth water more than thinking about the burgers my brother constantly tortures me with pictures of over WhatsApp about once a week.
There are three routes that I’ve been tossing around for a few weeks now and I think this is the space to tease them out for future reference.
—
We left at sunrise. To get to Kibuye, where Karina and Paloma live, there are two possible routes. The first is to go South to Butare and then West through the Nyongwe National Forrest. This is the route I took back in April, and the serene green of a trip through virgin jungle is somewhat mired by a terrible seven-hour drive on a bad road. The other option is to go north to Muhanga and then south west along the edge of the lake. The road from Kibuye to Muhanga is much, much worse than the road through Nyongwe, but the trip is only three hours long, so we decided to do that. My site is an hour from Nyanza and another two hours from Muhanga, so the entire trip is at least six hours long. Hence, leaving at sunrise.
We met up with Chibo in Muhanga. I haven’t talked a lot about Chibo, but she’s a gem. Chibo leaves for America at the end of the month and we’re spending the next few weekends hanging out. So, on one hand, we’re on a mission to help reunite Felix with his family (if only temporarily), and on the other, we’re trying to enjoy the gorgeous views of Lake Kivu. Chibo had never been to the South West of Rwanda before, and she wanted to make her only trip count.
The bus from Muhanga didn’t leave until close to noon, of course, so Felix and I passed the morning at a flamboyantly red bar (sponsored by Turbo King, the Rwandan equivalent of Bud Light) trying to play pool in a smoky, sticky room full of pool sharks. I like to play, but these men earn their living on the game. The few games we played against other people were brutal and short, like a battlefield amputation. The games against each other were longer and bored the crowd, who were waning in their appreciation of the tattooed mzungu wearing a white tank top. Chibo showed up at the perfect time, and was an excellent distraction for the group. We shared more than a few beers and went on our way when the sun was fully out and our stomachs were haggard from warm booze.
The trip was uneventful, to the extent that trips in Rwanda are uneventful: frequent stops near towns where hopeful passengers excitedly barter with the driver in front of a participatory audience, sick passengers throwing up in the folds of their beautiful igitenge attire, delicious roasted corn and goat brochettes passed between the open windows at rest stops, the strategic positioning of bags and belongings and folded legs to maximize the use of space on the stifling, swerving vehicle.
Like usual, Chibo, Felix and I passed the time trading snacks between our separate rows and listening to podcasts or reading. You kind of just phase out the vomiting after a while. When we reached Kibuye, we basically kissed the ground. We made it to the hotel of Karina’s friend Diana and met up with Karina and Paloma.
It’s difficult to describe what the reunion looked like. I remember a lot of crying – Karina crying when she saw Felix, Felix crying when he held Paloma, Chibo and I crying because of how beautiful their tears were. Felix basically bounded up the steps to embrace them both, and Paloma was laughing with the intensity of their proximity. It was one of those moments which remind us that life is beautiful.
The rest of the weekend was a lazy crawl from one beautiful vista to the next. We stayed at Diana’s hotel for the rest of Friday and ripped through cigarettes as Felix and Karina caught up. It was adorable, to watch them restlessly reposition their frames in the thin plastic lawn chairs we sat at so that his knee could brush her thigh or her hand could just “naturally” fall on his forearm. Paloma made the rounds between the four of us, especially loving Chibo, who handles dozens of babies at her health clinic near Musanze and knows how the game works.
On Saturday, we made the trip out to a bar closer to Rusizi (the border town with the DRC) and learned that it was owned by the Anglican Church, was hosting a wedding that day, did not have a bar at all, and was actually a boarding school with an attached guest house. Go figure. We made the walk down the lake-wrapping highway and found a resort-style hotel, the Emeraude, where another (much ritzier) wedding was taking place. While looking for a table I walked in front of a photographer trying to capture the bride’s beautiful dress as she spun around, and I hope that the picture is something they can laugh at for the rest of their lives.
The five of us relaxed by the lake, across from a bustling lakeside Congolese community. The absurdity of their separation by a border was lost on no one: on two or three islands, bright blue metal bridges connected the “Rwandan” communities with the “Congolese” ones, and people were moving across them all as freely as I walk down to the village market. Why have artificial national lines there at all? Fishermen in thin dugout-style canoes poled across the surface with serenity and slapped the five-meter wooden steering devices against the surface of the water to startle the small fish and attract the big ones. Every now and then, after resting in one spot for twenty minutes, the two fishermen would lift their net out of the water bristling with the flighty silver bullets of amasasha (sardines) and the occasional tilapia. A short way up the lake front was a Navy camp cordoned off from the property of the Emeraude by a rope made of cloth tied together; seven or eight sailors stripped down to their boxers and practiced swimming drills in jungle camouflage life jackets. The temptation was too strong – I asked if I could join them, and we swam laps around each other in the crisp, clear lake water. The sailors and I chatted away from the small dock while I showed them how to tread water without a life jacket. They bought me a beer, which I drank while sun-drying. Paloma played with the wet hair on my chest while Chibo and Karina doted over her.
Noon became afternoon and, as it always does, the afternoon became the sunset. We finally agreed after much deliberation to move to the other side of the small peninsula so that we could see the sunset over the lake. It was a good decision. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) who stayed in Rwanda at the end of her service came over and talked to Chibo about their plans. Groups of fishermen started whisping away from the tiny islands in packs, with two boats connected to a center boat by the long steering poles to make a slapshod catamaran. They sneaked away from the shores, split in to wide circles, and slowly dragged their nets toward the center of the space. Their hauls were enormous. As the sun set from yellow to orange, the bride and groom rode on a small motorboat in donuts near the shore as the assembled, beautifully dressed guests crowded near the shore and whooped their praise. The entire scene was utterly romantic.
We were full on fresh fish and locally-caught jungle chicken (tougher, darker, and juicer than what we have back in the States) and tipsy from hours of sipping surprisingly cold beer. Eventually, we made our way back to the hotel and wished everyone a good night.
In the morning, the kitchen was recovering from a weekend stay by a wedding party (Rwandans are big on weddings) and I offered to buy and clean some tilapia being sold by a walking saleswoman if the chef would cook them for us. It was the right thing to do. Once again full from the surprise breakfast and a warm cup of the ubiquitous corn flour-based igikoma porridge, we gave Karina and Paloma their last hugs and kisses before beginning a journey back to Muhanga that was as winding, hot, and “uneventful” as the trip here. When Felix, Chibo and I finally said goodbye, it was with the exhaustion that can only come after a weekend like ours: complete but lazily unearned.
I don’t know when Felix will see Paloma or Karina again. The tension between her family and Felix is great. We had to meet far away from the family, and I learned afterwards that Karina had told her family she was just visiting Diana for a weekend away from her normal routine. At the time of this writing, Paloma is doing just fine, and her antibiotic regiment has concluded. Felix walks around with a spring in his step, and I don’t think he has stopped smiling since we made it back to the village. Saying goodbye is never easy, but it is more often than not temporary, and we can take solace in that fact when life away from someone we love gets hard.
—
I am in love with the English language, and while she doesn’t love me as much in return, our relationship is strong and getting healthier. I had a particularly abstract affection for her at the University of South Florida, where a passionate but messy affair in high school matured in to a deep desire for intimacy. I learned about her grammar and the somewhat eclectic but essential rules that shape the way we look at the world. I learned about her past lovers, the great authors who abused her and worshiped her and said her sweet nothings to me late at night. I began to visit poetry slams and open mic nights to hear how she sang in front of a crowd, to see how she could be sculpted in to soundwaves that roughed the chords of brave undergrads. And most importantly, we had a serious conversation over her social and political beliefs. I disagreed with her annoying tendency to impose ideas like “class” and “equality” as a given, but when I sat down and had her linguistics explained to me, I began to appreciate an entirely new side of her that I had been ignoring for so long.
And to this day, I read her every day, and I write her on a computer and in cards to friends and families back home, and when I hear her spoken by a young student struggling to understand the concept behind a series of nigh-pandemonious grunts, I see how she can change the world. I am fully and deeply in love.
In the Peace Corps, English has become a partner, and our romance is much more refined. She is my tool of instruction, the condition of my employment, the code of my friends and coworkers, and the sound of modernization and intrusion for my conservative community. She is jealous that I have to share her with a new language and, although her persuasions are dimming, frequently attempts to impose rules upon the sing-song tonal language of Kinyarwanda, confusing the sequence of sounds in my head and forcing me to appreciate a different universe than the one she inhabits. I’m learning how gaining a new language is like going to a paint store and leaving with two colors instead of one, and the sheer breadth of possibilities with both certainly supersedes the dimensions I can express with one.
Teaching English is a joy. In Senior 1, 2 and 3 (the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade equivalents), I’m introducing English to my students for the first time. I threw out the government-mandated Literature curriculum because the concepts of “plot,” “poetry” and “theater” all require a deeper understanding of connotations and idioms inherent in the language than is capable of being understood by rookies to English. Instead, we’ve been working on an intense, remedial curriculum that focuses on the basics of nouns and verbs. It’s been very successful, and some of my tiniest students are able to say full sentences now. My upper level classes have been able to learn about the emotional impact English can have through writing letters to pen pals at my old primary school, Jacksonville Beach Elementary, and coupled with a journal they are required to fill up by the end of the term, are seeing that the vocabulary and colorless concepts they have spent years learning can have the same personal appreciation as their native tongue. The BE and GLOW clubs at our school use English to express values of leadership and responsibility that seem to resonate with the future leaders of the community, and the students practice giving speeches and arguments in English – the gritty but necessary practical practice that is required for language mastery.
I can see myself teaching English for the rest of my life. Teaching English as a Foreign Language is rewarding and romantic, and through TEFL I am able to appreciate my own language as it bumps up against new cultures. The effect of this convergence is somewhat like shopping for hardware at Home Depot, where different screws and nails and washers can have a wide assortment of combinations suitable for specialized tasks. TEFL is fun, impactful, and potentially promises a lifestyle of travel and cultural immersion.
To be truly competitive in the field, teachers should get a Master’s degree in English, potentially even focused on TEFL. A Master’s increases an applicant’s authority on the subject and is a good argument for a better paycheck. But the Peace Corps plays a valuable role in this, because the experience of an Education Volunteer in the Peace Corps is the best item on a resume for a young person hoping to enter the field. Other applicants might have personal experience living abroad and bilingualism is an incredibly valuable asset for TEFL employees, but the standards and rigor of Peace Corps veterans puts them in a special place when applying to become English teachers in programs like the Japanese English Teachers (JET) program – which pays $60,000 a year after benefits, paid housing, free Japanese language lessons, and a monthly living allowance.
But my real passion for English is when a group of fluent English speakers are able to leverage their experience with another linguistic framework to have a driven discussion on the language itself, and it is in those spaces that my vows for the language are reaffirmed. These spaces pop up organically enough here, with people like my Headmaster who are able to sustain a lengthy conversation on the nuances of English, but figure prominently in to collegiate English classes. If I take this route, I can see myself Mastering in English Language when I return to the States, using my qualifications to become a TEFL teachers for several years, and then search for a position teaching English in a university setting. I could write about my experiences teaching abroad, and write novels on the side, and hopefully one day become the kind of great author who lulls young converts over to her embrace.
There are downsides to this course of action. With a Master’s Degree in English, I would be well-positioned to teach in the United States at a secondary level (once passing the tests and what not), but I really don’t want to do that. Becoming a high school English teacher is not one of my dreams. Teaching abroad could be expensive and I wouldn’t be able to see my family as much as if I lived in the United States. Unless I am able to teach with a program like JET, it would be difficult to make enough money in the private sector to pay off student loans easily. On the other hand, the option to re-contract with the Peace Corps is always another option (they like repeat offenders) but without experience outside the education sector I may not be able to serve as a Response Volunteer, who have shorter contracts and work in areas typically recovering from disaster or in a specialized role. Being a PCRV (Peace Corps Response Volunteer) is something I would always like to have the option of doing, but getting a Master’s in English doesn’t guarantee my acceptance in to one of those programs. But then again, what would?
English is sacred. As a lingua franca, it resembles the languages of the former colonial world and while it’s acceptance in Rwanda has been slow at best, the adoption of the English language is a development goal in many of the places that I want to work. It is a language rich with history and complex with possibility, and it is difficult to imagine a future where this richness will not be shared and shaped by an increasingly diverse and aspirant generation of students. Someone has to teach them.
—
I never watched American Idol growing up. I always thought that the bald-faced worship of consumerism – even in my Republican days – was just a little too much to stomach. I don’t know who elected the judges that people tuned in to watch every week, but their decisions seemed to have a lot more headline space than current events that actually mattered. Guiltily I listened to Daughtry for a bit in middle school, who I think was a winner of the competition one year. I can’t remember.
The singing contest took off and was emulated by dozens of countries around the world. In Rwanda, there’s Guma Guma (don’t ask me what that means), and I remember during PST my host mother angrily switching the channel because she said that such displays of exuberance were sinful. So be it. Rwandans love Guma Guma. When it’s on television, the only working TV in my village (at the garish, alien red box known as the Ekocenter) shows it constantly.
Rwanda’s Guma Guma is special because it includes a tour around the country complete with massive outdoor concerts sponsored by Primus, the most popular beer in the country. I personally think that it’s only bearable cold and unspeakably reminiscent of bad memories from college parties served warm. But at Guma Guma, people don’t really care about Primus, or the cultural implications of idolizing a supposed ascension from Sub-Saharan African poverty, or even the musicians themselves. Guma Guma is a massive party, and last weekend, I went to check it out.
Guma Guma is currently touring through major towns in Rwanda and stopped in Butare. Butare was so close, and all of the older volunteers – many of who are leaving for America in the next few weeks – spent days talking about how much fun the party was last year. On top of that, Chibo (who has maybe two weeks left at the time of this writing) had never been to Butare. We figured Guma Guma was a heck of an introduction and committed to a weekend of debauchery.
I love Butare. It’s sulky and dark, nestled in low rolling hills that are more similar to the bleached landscape of the Eastern Province than the verdant energy of the western half of the country. Butare, now technically called Huye, was the first city in Rwanda to have a university and since the 1970s has seen a small explosion of colleges and schools in the area. Unlike the rest of the country, the city has an abundance of college-aged Rwandans who silently protest their conservative culture with drinking in the streets and flashy clothing. Mixing with this young population is a tragic history, as the town experienced severe trauma during the 1994 genocide but also hosted generations of refugees from Burundi, whose border is only an hour away. The worn vibrancy of the clothing and the buildings shows repeated attempts to revitalize the town with the color of Central African exuberance, but decades of fading paint seem to put Butare squarely between a bright past and a bright future. Mix this grime with an intellectual undercurrent and a night life to satisfy a population haggard from crisis-motivated migration and the result is a town with character.
On top of the general charm (or lack thereof), Butare has almost no recreational tourism to speak of, which is refreshing. Like in any town there are a few bars and hotels designed for travelling white people, but there’s not much to see around the district and as a result the occurrence of white-only venues is low. There is a large number of expatriates, however; Red Cross workers use Butare as a base of operations to enter Burundi, Catholic orders run a dozen churches scattered throughout the city and host many foreign priests, a consortium of American protestant missionaries run an evangelical university in the posh, stone-cobbled corner of town, and Chinese construction firms are everywhere, building modern roads connecting Butare to the Burundian capitol of Bujumbura and to Rusizi, through the dense vegetation of Nyongwe forest to the west. There’s even an authentic Chinese restaurant which every Peace Corps Volunteer is essentially required to gorge themselves on whenever they visit town.
On Friday, Chibo and I met up with a few other volunteers and gorged ourselves at the aforementioned Chinese restaurant. I cannot express how delicious lo mein is after weeks of rice, beans and cassava. The next day, we all met up at the same Chinese place (no one ever said that the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer was glamorous) and started the migration towards the heavily-wooded corridor that is home to several of the town’s universities. Hundreds of Rwandans joined us, sporting a predictably wide range of colors and fashions, and everyone was sweating in the afternoon heat. Once we turned on to the avenue leading up to Guma Guma, a column of Rwandan partiers greeted us with energy; almost a thousand people were slowing making their way through security in varying stages of drunkenness and excitement. Promoters of different artists performing that day excitedly danced and shouted for their contestants and chants in Kinyarwanda sang out and over the deafening bustle of anxious fans.
The campus hosting Guma Guma was familiar; multi-storied buildings dedicated to education, clean walkways, trees, and advertisements of school functions reminded me of my time in an American university. On Saturday, however, none of us were thinking about our times in college – a deafening roar from the stadium was overpowering everything, and once we turned on to the field where the celebrations were being held, the scene gave us all pause. Nearly three thousand Rwandans were jumping up and down in unison with the music, creating a two-story tall dust could that caught the light of the blistering afternoon sun. On the western flank was a covered cement sitting section where an older ticket-buying audience was placed, watching the crowd with amusement. The front of the field had a massive stage emblazoned in royal blue Primus advertisements that shone in the sun and an enthusiastic Rwandan artist was bouncing around in front of a full band. The energy was total and invigorating.
We were led down the eastern side, behind the massive crowd, where some black-clad security guards checked the tickets for the exclusive VIP section, walled off at the very front of the audience. Primus-labeled tables and a tented bar section gave the VIP section a lot of space and straddling the VIP section and the enthusiastic, leaping audience was an elevated table where the Guma Guma judges sat. The guards didn’t so much as look at our ticket as we walked up to the VIP section and waved us in before a line of hopeful Rwandans. Once inside, waitresses walking around with trays of cooled beer handed everyone a drink, but the music was so loud they couldn’t even hear our thanks.
The VIP section saved us from being crushed by the energy of the larger crowd, but the situation was awkward at best. All of the white people at Guma Guma – so maybe 40 people out of 3000 – were in the VIP section. A dozen cameras caught us as we entered and hovered around us as we tried to make small talk. Nobody really danced; a few people near the stage had a lot of energy, but it’s not like we were packed in to a mosh pit or in to a club where dancing becomes the only way for anyone to move around. Several singers excitedly motioned to the VIP section to try and elicit some energy, but none of us were feeling it.
For my part, I was on a mission. Several of the women had magically come upon these garish bright blue baseball caps that had the Guma Guma logo, and I wanted my own. Unsurprisingly, none of the men I talked to had any extra hats for me. I set off networking, trying to make as many friends as I could in the concert’s three-hour window. All I wanted was a hat. I made friends with Diesel, one of the blazer-sporting dancers from the first number we had the chance to see, and he whisked me away to the dressing area behind the stage. Everyone was smoking cigarettes and a few people were passed out on the grass, face-down. The music wasn’t quite as deafening though, which helped my bulging headache. Diesel introduced me to Bright, his manager, and we got about to talking about Rwandan politics, as I am likely to do whenever I am holding a beer. Bright was a cool guy.
All of the people I met, however, declined to share one of their hats for me. And yet somehow, all of the women in our thirty-person group had hats on. I suppose this was to be expected. Minutes before the event ended and the few remaining Peace Corps Volunteers started corralling everyone to leave, Chibo walked over to a guard, asked for his hat, and then gave it to me. Go figure.
Of course we all went to Chinese immediately afterwards and only one of the concert attendees planted his face in a plate full of rice, which I would consider a success. Everybody was drained and only a few people went out that night. I personally passed out close to 7:00 pm, which is embarrassing. Butare had outdone me again.
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When I was in high school I was selected for Boys State, a mock-government simulation and extended lesson and civics run by the American Legion, the largest veteran’s organization in the United States and likely familiar because of their protracted and embarrassing mid-90s Supreme Court case, where they wanted to ban the burning of the American flag. In states like Florida and New Jersey, Boys State (and the partner program for women, Girls State) are huge opportunities and “veterans” of the programs often end up working in local or state politics at some level. Every year, two boys and two girls from each state are selected to attend Boys and Girls Nation, a longer program in Washington DC complete with a simulated Senate session and visits to Arlington National Cemetery and even a visit to the White House to meet the President. I really liked hugging President Obama in the Yellow Room. Talk about a formative experience.
It was around this time that I realized I loved politics. I loved staying up reading books on political history and theory, and later, endless series of Wikipedia articles. I loved debating with my father and brother about policies. I loved foreign policy, domestic policy, conservative ideology, liberal ideology, classical and post-modern arguments, and current events. I loved it all.
I started working on campaigns when I was in 10th grade. My first campaign was with a Democrat running for mayor, but afterwards I worked on Republican local and state campaigns exclusively. After experiencing a political re-alignment following my first trip abroad, I started working on Democratic campaigns, eventually working with the Bernie Sanders ticket. As a young lad I knocked on a lot of doors, made a lot of phone calls, planted a lot of signs (and was paid even more to pick up the other side’s), and eventually started telling other people to do those things for me. It was exciting and soul-sucking and, at the time, I considered it a necessary experience if I wanted to leverage my passion and to-be-gained experience to one day run for office myself.
At the same time, I was gaining experience in party and private organizations that gave me an unflattering opinion of the electoral industry. I worked in Student Government at USF for three years and came to despise it and the context of its existence, while working on election campaigns for my friends when they ran for Student Body President each of the four years I was in college. Increasingly, I started working with community organizers, radical student organizations, and “people’s politics”, or movements that were decentralized and issue-oriented. It was a refreshing and inspiring aspect of politics I had not yet experienced but was exhausting, on top of everything else I was doing. When I was accepted in to the Peace Corps I was happy that I was getting from space from American politics and their unhealthy ability to pull me in. Civic engagement is taxing.
Of my experience in the political world, I loved my time with Pi Sigma Alpha (the national Political Science Honors Society) and our frequent trips around the state the most. We were invited to visit Seminole Reservation in the Everglades to learn about the intersection of resource politics and identity politics. We volunteered at several state and national conventions manning tables and eating expensive food, helped out in broadcasting studios during important live interviews, conducted straw polls of the student body on contentious issues and the like. I love me a good protest, especially when the Dakota Access Pipeline was making national headlines and environmental resistance grew in Florida’s normally flaccid political environment over eventually-constructed pipeline, but the effectiveness and impact of Pi Sigma Alpha felt genuine.
My political science courses at USF were uninspiring. I was disappointed at the lack of interest many of my peers had in the subject and I was so put off by the department that I started my second major in English. I ended up writing my thesis on a topic that was a heavy intersection of my political science and English backgrounds, but ultimately I had to ask a professor affiliated with the Honors College to be my thesis director after enough professors in the Political Science department turned me down. I have a feeling that a Master’s Program wouldn’t have the same handicap, but what if it does?
Regardless, politics are something that come naturally to me. If I was sent home early by the PC administration and returned to the States in disgrace, I would probably get involved with politics in some way. I can’t see myself ever divorcing from the field; if English is my passion, politics are my habit. I used to dream about working as a Foreign Service Officer and eventually the State Department, but the ideologically justified mutilation of the State Department by the current administration has proven to be too ugly for most of us serving now and it’s scary to think that I could be an agent for an agenda that is morally reprehensible.
But the political industry, so to speak, is wide and deep. There are elections, of course, and then there are consultancy firms, advocacy groups, and departments that like returned PCVs with a Master’s in something like International Development or Global Conflict. There are aid organizations that could pay people like us to work on and eventually create strategies for improving the conditions of people who suffer the most around the world, and the idea of working for an aid organization other than the Peace Corps in Africa is incredibly attractive. If I ever wanted to work with the United Nations, it would make sense to return to America with a long-term goal of getting that next degree, working with a credible international organization, and then vying for a position with the US government. Who knows?
Ultimately, a Master’s in Political Science, International Development, or Global Conflict Studies would be a wonderful introduction to a focused, service-driven career abroad. I do not want to live in America for long spells of my life – the world is just too big to stay in one place, of that I am convinced.
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When I think of a city, I picture New York, London, or Istanbul: massive, congested hubs of humanity bristling with energy and drawing international attention. The streets are ancient and each has a song or a story to its name. The culture in a city has evolved to reflect both the unique experiences of her inhabitants as well as the individual nature of its existence reflected against the world beyond her walls. There is color, and height, and a common olfactory assault combining the sweat of a few million people with the taint of industry. Cities are primarily visual, however, and as a visitor in one we can see how the dance of development has played out in her buildings and her beggars.
Goma has no height. It has no color. From Gisenyi, a Rwandan town that is essentially the wealthy corner of Goma cut off from the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a heavily armed Rwandan army, Goma is an indiscriminate brush stroke of lush green and the pale, low clouds nourished by Lake Kivu splattered with millions of specks of glimmering silver. Those specks are the roofs of tin houses, which house a population estimated at a million by United Nations observers but which almost certainly holds ten times as many people displaced by savage conflict within the Eastern and North-Eastern swaths of the DRC. From Gisenyi, heavy twin-propeller gray cargo planes emblazoned with a dark “UN” acronym fly between one of a dozen dirt airstrips in Goma and a state-of-the-art airport on the Rwandan side. Goma and Gisenyi have two of the busiest airports in Africa, and their almost exclusive traffic is a fifteen-minute hop across the patrolled border.
Goma needs the traffic. Aside from the usual horrors wrought upon an African urbanality by centuries of injustice at the hands of European colonizers, Goma was leveled and raised countless times by insurrectionist movements during the 20th century. Following the Rwandan Genocide, when almost two million fleeing Tutsi and Hutu fled across the DRC border and settled in Goma, a humanitarian crisis on an order not experienced since the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s ensued. The United Nations came in to establish a semblance of peace and ended up protecting former Interharamwe genocidaires, who used Goma as a staging ground to launch reprisals in to Rwanda before being routed in to the jungle by Kagame’s two invasions of the DRC. Those genocidaires have grown and now stretch across the western shore of Lake Kivu like a scab, harassing some of the poorest people in the world and frequently launching attacks against the city itself. As if all of this was not enough, nature seems to particularly despise Goma: it was subject to destruction from the nearby volcanoes, which in 2002 destroyed almost 40% of the shack megalopolis, residents regularly suffer from mudslides and flooding during the impossibly heavy rainy seasons, and at any moment, Lake Kivu’s record-setting build-up of natural gas can literally cause the life source of this region to explode. Goma is a time bomb that nobody knows how to diffuse.
Within Gisenyi, none of this is readily apparent. Only the constant hum of low-flying cargo planes disrupts the idyllic city of Gisenyi, which has grown exponentially in the twenty-four years since the genocide and is now the destination of choice for successful Rwandans and their foreign business contacts. Perfectly manicured avenues along the lake’s shore host bicycle races and sculpted bushes, constantly attended to by uniformed janitors. Old Belgian colonial homes are now walled-off hostels for adventurous youth who “want to see it” and pricey upscale hotels allow foreign business men to see the contradiction of Goma’s poverty with Gisenyi’s success from the twenty-second floor. On the lake, Russian-financed Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) platforms stick out of the aquamarine, gentle waves like flag posts on the moon and their complicated web of sub-surface piping requires maritime vessels to calculate new obstacles in to the already-complex process of avoiding anything that would upset the highly equipped Rwandan coast guard forces constantly patrolling the Congolese shore for refugees and terrorists attempting to make it over to the other side. But at night, the difference in fates between these two cities is exaggerated to the point of a sick joke: Gisenyi, with a population of less than a million, lights up the evening and hides the stars so poignantly displayed in the Rwandan countryside, while the sprawling Goma only shares the dim, sad lights of wood fires and the occasional Western military convoy. This is what inequality looks like.
Not that Gisenyi doesn’t have its own problems. When I visited for the first time this past weekend, I wasn’t struck by the injustice in outcomes between the two cities, and I wasn’t reflecting how outside influence assisted in creating this disruption. I was only thinking about my legs: my poor legs, which were never very flexible to begin with but which folded with a surprising degree of endurance on a six-hour twege ride from Muhanga over some of the worst-paved roads you can imagine. A twege is about the size of an American mini-van (albeit slightly shorter in height) and is designed to hold twenty-four people and all of their belongings, which on a six-hour ride are numerous. Knees are strategically squeezed in the smalls of backs and arms rest in adjacent laps. People sleep on each other, or if they’re sick, they throw up on each other. Thankfully we can open windows mid-transit and get some air in, but if a mother brings her child along for the ride it’s a guarantee that the twege will be a sensory invasion, weaving a powerfully human smell with decibel-maxing screams and a jerking driving style that is sure to displace even the strongest stomachs.
I arrived at the bus station after this twege ride and stepped out in to a street whose tropical, warm rain created the familiar mud-slicked surfaces of the rural poor. And I stretched my legs, hoping to take it all in. Most of the Rwandans living in Gisenyi don’t live in the part of the town that colonizers grew, gardened and guarded with their lives; they live in slums, just like in every other city in Rwanda. There is no sewage system so the bulk of human waste is dumped in the lake or on the road. The shops and houses alongside the main roads have plastic, electric signs and colorful lights that almost obscure the dozen streets behind them where people rise and fall in the dark. At night, outside the clubs, young women get out of cars and wait by street posts, shivering silhouettes in the shadows of red light from multi-story clubs. Night and day, people are moving around, looking for work, balancing the usual baskets or branches on their heads, skipping over puddles and avoiding flying mud, all in an intricate symbiotic relationship between need and desire. Because unlike the rest of Rwanda (with the exception of maybe Kigali), Gisenyi is a place to go, and if you can make it to Gisenyi, it’s a sign that you have what it takes to be successful.
I picked up on a lot of this during a weekend in Gisenyi. I stayed at one of those walled-off hostels that borders the lake. An American family, all wearing matching t-shirts, stayed at the same hostel and complained about the music I played on my speaker. The next day, it was much louder. A long public beach stretched out between the Serena, an upscale hotel, and Calafia, a café founded by Californian expats but now owned by Rwandans. On the beach people lounged and played football and enjoyed life, but no one swam; leaving belongings on the beach is asking to have something stolen. At the private Tam Tam Beach, the situation is much different. My friend and I were encouraged to skip a long line of Rwandans, each one inspected by the owner and the bouncer before paying an entrance fee we didn’t have to pay. On the beach, dozens of Rwandans swam and drank and ate perfectly grilled fish, while camera-toting entrepreneurs offered to take shots of fashionable women and their chiseled boyfriends. We sat in the far corner away from most of the bustle, but several photographers and their clients wandered over and very bluntly tried to take pictures with the two of us in the background, wanting to show their friends how many mzungu they knew. Near us, an older gentleman wearing a bright red track suit sat by the water while two large men sat rapt with attention and stared down people visiting their boss. Young men visited the track suit-clad boss throughout the afternoon and the entire scene had somewhat of a Godfather vibe to it.
Later in the evening, we visited the Cotton Club, a bar that divides the Rwandan and mzungu part of Gisenyi. The regular DJ was throwing himself a birthday party and the club owner insisted that the four of us who visited sit on leather couches and drink from expensive liquor bottles. It was all kind of surreal. Dozens of people tried to come in and were turned away by the bouncer with impunity, and drunk expats from Sri Lanka called their prostitutes “nigress” and got in a fight with another club attendee. Only in Rwanda have I been to a club where anyone can dance by themselves, and the music was a strange mix of edgy modern dance hall songs and old hits from the 60s and 70s re-mixed for the packed room. As the night wore on, we spent more and more time outside, where the street full of hopeful attendees looked up at us. In the night, we could only see their eyes.
None of this was exceptionally unique to Gisenyi. But the combination of the energy of the town, the vibrant night life, the strikingly beautiful lake and the presence of a middle class made Gisenyi feel like a diamond in the rough. We spent an evening at a bar run by two Lebanese businessmen; two dozen different flags lined the walls and American music sung on the radio. A German executive of an aid organization based in Goma overheard a conversation we were having about the constant sound of planes flying overhead and joined us at our table. He shared with us a lifetime of exciting adventures, from being captured by the Masaai in Tanzania to smuggling children out of a starving refugee camp. He loved his job and, once our typically American habit of debasing Donald Trump kicked in (drinks will do that), he spent a good thirty minutes making a case about why he loved the generosity and grace of the American South more than his home in Frankfurt. I was tickled by that.
Arriving in Gisenyi via twege, slopping wet and only able to limp, I felt a little bit of the relief that all Rwandans must feel when they arrive here. It’s in a different orbit than the rest of Rwanda; not quite sharing the humility and patience of the rest of the country, instead absorbed by the vibrancy of a truly Central African culture; Rwandan only by force of law, bordered by the largest open-air refugee camp in the DRC, where the force of law is nigh-nonexistent. Visiting Gisenyi felt like visiting a different country, one where the threat of an explosion of militia violence is more terrifying than the ominous glow from the active volcanoes just under the beyond the tin-roofed sprawl. When I returned to my humble little village in the country side, I was relieved to continue living with the familiar contradictions of my home and put some distance between myself and the contradictions of another time and place.
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There’s more to write about but I’m late getting this out so I’m just going to post it as is. Till next time!
certification 
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