certification

Before anything, I need to thank my mother, Mae Johnson, my father, Christopher Ray Johnson, my aunt and uncle, Carl and Judy Johnson, and my dear friend and mentor, Cayla Lanier. You’ve all sent me care packages in the past two months and each one has brightened up my week. A lot of volunteers aren’t fortunate enough to receive a single package their entire service, and to be honest, I’ve stopped counting. I could never have expected this kind of support before leaving at the onset of my service and I can’t thank each of you enough for your generosity and love. You are the reason being away from home is both incredibly difficult and not nearly as severe as it could be.
I stayed at site for the entirety of the month, deciding to remain at home and save up some money before my mother visits in early August. Instead of detailing a few long stories about the stay I wanted to share some impressions that I wrote down. Here goes…

—

As France was beating Belgium, a thousand students and teachers converged on a grassy almost-flat field separated from our homes by a mountain. The mountain in question takes about an hour to climb and another hour to descend, a trip elongated by the afternoon sun. Upon descending with the troop of dust-kicking students towards the field, a perimeter of humans stood shoulder-to-shoulder, watching young boys kicking a bundle to plastic tied together by string a hundred meters. They sprint back and forth without shoes, their toes numb to the pressure of stones and tough from use. In earnest attempts at flight the boys propel themselves off the ground and buck their tiny heads with the force of a sledgehammer, barely missing the bundle of trash as their spines twist and then snap straight again like broken springs.

Today, the teachers are playing. Everyone is between the age of twenty-five and thirty, all lean and worn. Players from one school don comically green matching jerseys and sprint in formation around the borders of the field, more strut than warm-up. The goalies stood under post-and-beam wooden constructions out of a Wild West theme park, makeshift goals nailed in to place and leaning angrily with each child’s small push against a side. A third party, with no attachments to either school, stands in the middle of the field, whistle ready – this is a legitimate sport, not a game.

And they play. Their entire lives, the young men have kicked balls of trash on dirt roads, over erected dirt hills, in to gullies, down steep slopes, chasing their mistakes with the velocity of a bird of prey and eagerly returning to the challengers at hand. Every young boy in Rwanda does the same; everyone kicks, passes, shoots, jukes, tricks, and scores, every day. It is beyond a national past time. It is a way of life.

—

After the first goal a woman begins to lead a crowd of students in a rhythmic chant behind the losing team’s goal post. The girls, dancing, bring their feet down hard, kicking up dust and filling the air with a haze. The shrillness of the players spikes as the ball nears the goal; this is a tactic out of Sun-Tzu. The players shoots and the goalie lamely falls towards the general direction of the strike, but misses. A team scores.

Suddenly the artificial boundaries of the game break down as the field implodes; hundreds of children rush the players and, through the force of their numbers, lock them in place. Everyone is jumping and their tiny feet can tolerate the crushing force of two dozen pounding bodies weighing down on them because their team has scored and a momentary bedlam of bliss and wonder has erupted.

Like a dam breaking, I would imagine, or a levee spilling over. The effect is dramatic and instant.

Players are likewise jumping in to outspread arms, sliding on their knees, back flipping, jumping in the air and pounding their fists, just like their heroes do on the television.

(In America, the NFL is somewhat of a climax; all players everywhere want to be in the NFL, but they have little hope of getting past the Pop Warner leagues, let alone high school ball, let alone college, and with one bad hit a neck can snap and a lifetime of sacrifice is made worthless. Real football isn’t the same; the World Cup is a watered-down version of the real game, this game, where anyone and everyone can play. All that is required is endurance and a good spirit. Far cry from the gladiator’s arena of the United States.)

At any moment a thousand fields implode all over the world, tens of thousands of children scream with delight, and an infinite number of woes disappear for the duration of that moment in the ecstasy of the game.

—

At the bar after the game the director buys everyone a round. The weight of the day is heavy. There are no straight backs.

Two teachers kiss and everyone stands up to take pictures. The room is small and the forty inhabitants are all sitting close. Everyone is happy. Everyone is drunk.

The haze of exhaustion becomes amplified after the second beer and slowly the energy of the crowd slips away with the coming moonlight. One by one we creep out, bidding farewell and walking out of the dim single lightbulb of our bar in to the cracked and canyoned road we all must use to go home. Somewhere, the goat sacrificed for our brochettes has stopped dripping blood on to the dirt floor beneath it, and the sanguine river from its slit neck dries in to the dirt.

All is quiet.

—

No sleep. Shouldn’t have had a cup of coffee before going to the bar with the teachers. Cigarettes are making me sneeze, that’s a new one.

The wind at night is mighty. From the vantage of my mosquito net bed, the outside world is grainy, as if I am looking out from a womb. The moon is gone so the only light is the distant diffusion from stars, the only shape is a rectangle of said diffusion crisscrossed by four wrought iron bars, no longer blue at this colorless hour. Wind pours in to the open window like I would imagine the ocean pours in to the split hull of a sinking ship, and the usual comfort from this invasive, liquid presence is absent.

Bihangane – patience, for it will come.

—

Slow start, but I’m awake, count my blessings, all that crap.

Coffee is meant to be drank after being boiled in a pot. As water reaches a boil, the grains float to the surface and form a thick, fragrant mask on the surface of the water.

Blemishes of energy puncture the taught film and slowly brown nectar like struck oil jets above this landscape, eventually turning the entire pot in to a furnace; the smell floats on the cold morning air through the house and in to every web-colonized corner of the small house, and as I huddle around the boiling pot for warmth, the smell is overpowering.

—

As I leave the flatness of the village mound and make my way to the first of many descending slopes on the way to school, two girls, four and five, run up and grab my hands.

This is how a good day starts.

We job down the first slope together.

It’s tricky, somehow like skiing, because the two little humans in either fist refuse to let go but also can’t handle the large gaps and berms the litter any given dirt road as well as a two-meter giant can, so I squat next to them as we make our way in to the gorge.

Along the way, they ask me to sing, so we sing a few songs together.

At one rocky juncture, where the stones jut and stab out of the earth like stairsteps to Hell, I lift both of my bodyguards high up in the air and swing them down the descent. Their fingers lock together as they giggle the high-pitched squeal of happy children. Their skirts, passed on from older sisters and much too large for their tiny bodies, flutter like royal flags, blue at high noon but cobalt in the exaggerated lighting of the pristine, fogless morning. Laughter from behind us – a small crowd of jealous students is following our every steps.

A scary moment – a small three-log bridge marks the bottom of the convex gorge, below which sits a rocky and rushing brook. The girls usually hold hands and stare through the gaps as they make their way across in pairs, a small line forming behind them. Today, I lifted up my arms and swung their tiny bodies around in a circle over the crevice as they laughed and screamed.

By the time I made it to the school a small horde of primary students were following in our wake. Usually, I try to be manish and tough in front of the construction workers who have been at our school for almost a month now, but there was no hiding it today: I love my job.

—

Urgwagwa is made in the same troughs that they use to feed their cows and chickens.

That sounds disgusting.

Urgwagwa is made in the same type of shallow, long wooden troughs that farmers use to feed their cows and chickens. Surely the people who make urgwagwa do not simply give the dirty, feces-covered dugouts a simple washing over before making the drinkable derivative of sorghum and yeast and bananas that hundreds of people will proceed to drink from over the next week. Surely.

Urgwagwa is served in a glass bottle, ranging from recovered bottles of Primus that have been made brittle by their use to nearly-untouched bottles of Martini mixer, or it is served in a jerry can, the small ones that used to hold some form of cooking oil but were washed thoroughly with boiled water, sloshed around a few times, dumped out (the resulting mixture similar to a Kraft mac-and-cheese cheese packet simply poured in to a cup of water and left to dissolve) and then immediately refilled with the opaque beverage.

One does not simply drink from the bottle. This is disgusting, unhygienic, and plainly rude. One drinks from a straw, often the plastic kind that people in America now find fashionable to protest against the existence of while they drink their chilled beverages made by underpaid artists and produced by people who, at some point, had their hands threatened to be cut off. Sometimes, a thin reed is used instead of a straw. These are prized possessions, seeing the insides of dozens of different urgwagwa containers and hundreds of mouths, passed between drinking sessions or carried by the most prepared of older men as they await for the product to be churned sufficiently in the wooden trough. These are more difficult to use and require a sucking of such force that the entire face contorts with the motion, as if having recently tasted the most sour thing imaginable and become and cartoonish caricature of a face as a result. Reed straws are always long enough to reach the bottom of any bottle, but the socially-anxious plastic straws rarely are, and one can often see a second, smaller straw wrapped around the hilt of the first straw that acts as a stalwart guardian against the loss of your drinking device, an event that is guaranteed to happen if the first straw is not long enough and a consumer has consumed urgwagwa for over two minutes.

There are two types of urgwagwa drinkers.

The first are social drinkers. Making up close to 85% of all urgwagwa drinkers, the social drinkers sit in circular or semi-circular formations and share bottles of urgwagwa amongst themselves. It required to share a bottle with a second drinker and somewhere between thoughtful and cheap to share the singular bottle with a third drinker, however if a fourth drinker enters the fray, a single bottle is simply inexcusable and the denial of a second bottle is clearly a faux pas. Often, a group of seven or eight people will share five bottles, all passing in a circle at a pace somewhat equal to waiting to hear your name called at the local DMV, the straws touching the lips of all present at least once. Bottles are offered to any entering stranger with great enthusiasm, doubly so if such stranger is clearly not familiar with the local urgwagwa canteen (as such establishments are romantically, in the author’s view, named). Strangers and new arrivals are then invited to join the growing encampment, another bottle is brought to mark their arrival, and the circle of life continues.

The second are professional drinkers. Professional drinkers are a minority of consumers and mostly consist of old men who wear wide-brimmed cowboy hats and tattered suit coats and walk around town with long carved sticks somewhere between a staff and a cane. On the inside pockets of their suit coats – oversized and baggy, usually pinstriped, always worn black – are the reed straws. Professional drinkers drink alone and often, moving between urgwagwa canteens in a circuit known only to members of their clique. Professional drinkers typically polish off a bottle before breakfast time and ride that wave to the next canteen, where the owners have prepared a bottle in preparation of their arrival the night before. Professional drinkers are typically married to the older women who run the community, sitting on the cement stoops of their homes tossing beans or just fermenting in the sun, and who wear a permanent scornful scowl no doubt influenced by their relationship to this class of drinkers. While professional drinkers occasionally partake in the ritual of bottle sharing practiced by social drinkers, their presence at urgwagwa bars is generally ignored like we might ignore distasteful internal décor at a popular lunch spot in the States, and when one of the weaker-spirited male social drinkers causes a stir with an inappropriate comment, it is the professional drinker who stands up, makes stony eye contact, and leaves, signaling that a connoisseur of his constitution will have nothing to do with the alcohol-induced mistakes of spry children.

Urgwagwa is the cause of many alcohol-induced mistakes, the quality of mistake correlated to the quality of urgwagwa. Higher quality urgwagwa, at maybe a thousand francs ($1.20) a bottle, is distilled slowly and contains a thin film of banana-based silt at the bottom that is unfashionable to drink. High-quality urgwagwa is reserved for professional drinkers and the village wealthy, who own the urgwagwa troughs. The guiltiest professional drinkers are absent-minded, empty-eyed drunkards who rely on that cane to take the next step and generally act as walking advertisements for futures away from the village. Medium-quality urgwagwa is cooked in vats larger than anything you’ve seen outside of a prison or military kitchen and is much thicker than its classier cousin, having an almost soupy consistency. At 500 francs ($0.60) a bottle, this is consumed mostly on market days when the husbands of hard-working entrepreneurs set up shop in one of the larger canteens and catch up with their buddies. Urgwagwa brewed hot, served warm, and drank hastily may cause a fight or disturbance in public, but aggressors are generally shamed and dismissed without second thought.

The cheapest, most vile urgwagwa is laced with ikigagi, or country gin. Moonshine is the most identifiable western relative. Cheap urgwagwa – several days old, thinner than nail polish remover, served in small jerry cans at 200 francs ($0.25) a bottle – is dangerous. It can make people blind and often causes vomiting because of the conditions of its unholy creation. Sharing cheap urgwagwa is disrespectful in proper company. Unfortunately, the makers of cheap urgwagwa care the least about its effects and typically share their product with children and the most desperately lost. When I wake up in the middle of the night and hear domestic violence in a neighbor’s thin-walled home, this bile is typically involved.

Finally, a note on the nature of the drink: it is unlike any other alcohol you can imagine. Regardless of quality, the thick, auburn liquid is sweet and tastes like a country side family preparing a picnic. The aroma of fresh bananas floats in the air of any canteen. Unlike hard liquor, the power of urgwagwa is not instantly felt; rather, the drink slips in to and soaks the body like syrup on warm pancakes and encourages stillness as one’s own body similarly seeps in to the surrounding universe. This near-zen affect is shattered upon standing, when blood rushes to the head and makes straight vectors unfriendly. Thankfully, Rwandan culture is a neighborly one, and urgwagwa is very conducive to the cross-street greetings and approaches that characterize any rural village – dozens of adherents to the soma can be seen merrily waving, clapping, shaking, and grasping hands on hands on any day of the year. It’s all rather silly.

—

Walking to Nyanza this morning. Need to stop using the word “hike.” Hike is what people who have the freedom to walk somewhere for no reason do. The actual action of walking becomes hiking when an expensive backpack is involved and rarely-worn shoes are dusted off before their use. I’m walking to Nyanza because I can’t afford a moto this close to pay day.

My brother’s advice was useful – swing your hips when you walk. Save your energy on flat stretches and fire out on steep ones to maintain pace. Clasp hands over head when tired to bring in blood if needed.

Nice woman near the prison opens her door for me. Her baby is enraptured. I’m probably his first. Woman and I talk about life. Small crowd of children gathering outside rickety fence. Do they see a ghost?

Getting brighter. Need to go.

—

No, sir, I do not want to talk to you this morning. I want to walk. I want to listen to my music. I am aware that my attempts at empathetic generosity at site is currently being exposed as a geographically specific character quality. I am aware that it is beyond rude to ignore the kind advances of a stranger who is only trying to practice his actually impressive English. Do not say to me, “Maybe if you talked to someone you would be happier.” You are correct, and I am wrong, but Americans possess the quirky quality of enjoying being wrong and you can call this interaction we’re currently having a cross-cultural exchange to your friends. I wanted to be in Nyanza an hour ago and now I have to find a small nook unseen on the side of a major thoroughfare where I can relieve myself for the umpteenth time in relative peace. Keep walking.

—

Every day thirty men in matching thick blue jumpsuits, each unzipped to the waist revealing an assortment of undergarments, set to work on the fence. The fence, once constructed, will wrap around the school and church property. Two large gates are reinforced by stones and cement at the entrance near the church. The fence then wraps just behind the poisonwood bush that currently encloses the school, the two-meter red metal posts each with a welded elbow and two rings at the crown through which barbed wire will pass through. The fence posts are sunk in to cement an continue to round the property, past the large murals on the side of the most distant rowhouses of classrooms, towards the health center, always visible from the road. It cuts sharply near the sullen, dry corn field behind the school, cuts right again, and zags with right angle certainty at the rear of the property, navigating a rocky alcove where students usually hide to kiss and smoke cigarettes. The last run of the fence cuts through a dirt path on the western edge of the school buildings, loops behind the church, runs next to the accumulated clay brick, roofless housing near the school politely described as a neighborhood, and then connects with the two gates at the front of the school again. Hundreds of thin metal trees, unconnected, elbows bent outward, standing around the school like silent sentries.

These thirty men carry stones the size of chairs on their heads and their shoulders to be broken up by other men with small hammers that chip away at the pink quartz to strike a dazzling rainbow of blues, reds and yellows within. The stones are carried on heads and in half-sawn jerry cans to moving mounds of cement, which are mixed by hand and folded in to themselves by cement mixers with the same affection and attention given to making pasta from scratch. The slate-gray cement is picked up on triangular tools and slapped with exciting force in to the smallest of crevices in holes, dug for the foundation of the metal fence posts but eventually built in to small ziggurats of drying rock, chunks of colorful quartz denied luster inside the cement tombs like strawberries in a dusty fruitcake stowed in the hallway closet.

While one team of jumpsuits is methodically digging, carrying, planting, mixing, slapping, burying, and relaxing every 2.3 meters along the perimeter of the school, another is busy with the façade developing in the front of the school. Here the older technicians in their more wisely-ruffled blue jumpsuits (maturely zipped to the breastbone) are building a stone buttress against the raisined, dried dirt that makes an impromptu ledge at the front of the school. Like its hundreds of sentried cousins, the stone buttress is a mix of colorful quartz and slate gray cement and each day the shades of progress differ only in their degrees of ashen dustiness accumulated during the night.

Large stones are carried by two men at a time, arms rippling like steel chords beneath the blue, and placed methodically on top of each other, less like wooden jenga blocks and more like a hyper-sized example of the rigid, patterned growth of a plant’s cell wall in high school biology class. The older jumpsuits stand back and converse in hushed tones about the exact angle and location of the most recent addition, nodding in unison or shaking their heads in hushed agreements, while gray-painted cement men slap their rocky paste in the spaces between colorful stones and try not to pay attention to the commentary of their elders.

Concurrent motion: men in formless brown rags wheel dirt and waste between areas of activity with bare feet landing on rusted nails and broken glass, unflinching. Stout women in colorful skirts balance five-meter beams of steel on their heads, six at a time, focused in their movements, their eyes darting and calculating their third, fourth and fifth steps with the precision of a supercomputer, baby tied on their backs of course. Dozens of students stand by watching with supreme interest. When the white man walks through the commotion, every head turns and watches. So this is where the money is coming from.

—

Tomorrow I’ll be at the ATM and the bread of life will flow forth from the machine and I will be able to eat without guilt for a day before eventually returning to the same frugality of life here, but today I am broke. Just for a day. Worse things have happened.

Leonas owns a small store on the side of the only road in the only hamlet within sight of the hamlet that I live in. He sells fried, stiff amandanzi that break apart easily enough and wraps the leftover dough around goat meat and fries that too. Those are comandes. In the morning he sells the thick, sugary igikombe and near the afternoon, after the goat has been slaughtered and left to drain at the neck like an overripe tomato and the comandes are sizzling, the rare scent of cooking meat attracts a small crowd in the dark interior kitchen.

Today he passes me a cup and I pour out a measure of dark, unsweetened coffee and lets me eat two of his amandazi from yesterday on credit. I pour him a cup, too, and we laugh about never sleeping again. I turn and my grip on the tumbler slips and it turns over and the succulent oil inside pours on to the floor.

I grab the dirty rag and against his protests mop up the mistake. He poured his coffee in to my cup and we laughed some more. Outside, one of his brothers dragged a goat behind the house.

—

Felix spent all day inside the stunningly colored décor of the renovating church painting the likeness of Saint Jean Marie Vianney on a curved stretch of cement near the apse. “Felix,” I said, “that is the most beautiful white man I have ever seen.” It was pretty good.

—

Late at night the lights of Kigali are magnificent.  Not like the natural stars of the deep country hill-licked night sky and not like the unnatural stars of a million lives elevated above cement in reflective towers; no, these lights are the signs of life, bubbling to the surface of a city whose sunsets sink slums in to nothingness as the big light switch in the sky gets flicked off.

From the church parking lot we can see a hundred thousand bright bars of solar-charged domestic lights washing unseen doorways in that eerily hygienic glow and the floating tiny suns of street lamps illuminating empty, newly paved roads like illuminated bones of a beached whale.  Car lights flicker in and out of existence as they slide slowly between Kigali’s hills and then find a place to sleep.

From the other road, the one that veers off from the main one (and is really only visited when looking for beer after midnight on a Wednesday), the silhouettes of the hills are freckled with white and yellow but the glow of highrises and heatsinks is not with us here and we can see the stars too.  The infant sparks of progress and the ancient already-dead explosions of gas billions of miles away lose their context and become one, like the flecks of ants carrying grain across the pavement or the pulsing veins of my vision when all the blood rushes north.

Inside the only bar open during this random evening neon blues and seductive reds replace the distant twinkling blazes and color us completely.  Eurotrash plays on repeat from the juke box near the gambling machines and R2-D2 is beeping on the television near the fridge beyond the wall but I can’t look away from this spectacle of color and neither can she.  What ifs remain unsaid and silence is filled by the longings of alternate realities where weeks are measured in years and months in moments.  The lights in the bar flicker as an unseen man rises from his table-top resting place and casts a shadow across our frames and it is time to go to sleep and let the lights do the talking.

I’ll see you soon.