The Long, Hard, and Stupid of It

A1: I'm a stubborn person.

Sure, I can be easy going. I don't seek conflict. I find it easier to agree with someone on topics that are not near and dear to my heart, or even topics that are, than to argue with them in situations where there's nothing to gain by arguing. I consider myself, all in all, kind of a softie. And a nice guy too, I hope.

That said, when somebody tells me I can't do something I don't want to do, or when someone tells me I'm an idiot for trying a certain path rather than another, easier path, or when I set my mind on a cool plan that is less than practical, well, it'll take a hell of a lot of persuasion, browbeating, and good logic to dissuade me from sticking to my plan. Actually, it will take clever, quiet diplomacy; the browbeating is only going to make me all the more likely to keep to my foolishness.

Qs: Dan, why did you decide to take the bus across the United States instead of flying? Why did you do this without a phone? Why do you make things so difficult? Why do we grow old? What's it all for?

Other possible answers:

A2: I was struck with a two week fear of cell phone signals and flying.

A3: My time in Rwanda inspired me to do more with less - this is also the reason I ate nothing but rice, beans, and potatoes (occasionally garnished with rabbit) on the trip and why I slept four to a room every night, which boy let me tell you created some weird situations.

A4: I did not have a bicycle, nor a unicycle suitable to such a journey.

A5: I thought it would be a good way to get a quick catch-up course on the country, the most practical way to visit the people I wanted to visit scattered across this great land, and an interesting story full of peculiar anachronistic circumstances that might say something about where I am in the 21st century, if not anybody else on a broader scale.

A6:


(As always, take Answer 6)

Whatever the case may be, I took the second half of October and traveled across the U.S.A., following the following likely route: Burlington MA-Boston MA-New York City-Washington D.C.-Durham N.C.- Nashville-San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco. The longest stop was a four day conclusion in San Francisco. I was blessed enough to have people to visit in all those cities (well, I guess I wouldn't have stopped by Nashville if I didn't), seeing 16 people in all from various phases of my life, not including assorted spouses, partners, friends, roommates and hangers on who welcomed me just as well as the people I visited. I traveled on this route without a phone (but with a Skype-equipped laptop), on a bus (except for a morning cruise up the California coast from San Diego to Los Angeles), and with no urgent priorities in my life except to get to the next place and to let the people who care know that I was still crazy.

As I hope you can imagine, there were interesting things that happened to me, and interesting things I noticed about our country and various people contained therein on the trip. I would like to share these things. Without further ado and no specific order, some of the notable occurrences:

- Arriving in downtown Washington, DC on a Saturday night in the middle of October is a cold experience, a collection of wide, empty streets deserted for the weekend, a surprising jolt after the bustle of New York. An ill omen perhaps for a city I may someday soon work in.

 Cold D.C. Street.

- In Nashville, on Broadway downtown, on a warm Wednesday afternoon around 3, you can find almost every single bar, country-themed of course, hosting a musician hopeful of finding a career in music city, strumming out a tune on their acoustic guitar; some of the musicians had somebody else to accompany them, some of the musicians had nice voices: none of the musicians had an audience of more than three or four people, including the bartender. There was something about this that was both depressing and life-affirming.

 - The Colorado River is dry at the border of Arizona and California. I believe I read about this before. I don't know that it's a good thing.

- Also in Arizona-related observations: in that fine state there exists a town called Gila Bend.

- One way to stand out as a weirdo in New York, no small feat, is to walk around the city with your towel wrapped around the handle of your suitcase. Even if this is a perfectly reasonable way to air out and dry your towel before putting it in your suitcase without it stinking up your suitcase, people will look at you strangely. Or at least, your NYC implanted cousin will.

- The bus system in Winston-Salem, NC carries ads for Rush Radio 94.5, featuring Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.

- The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has free entrance on Fridays, sponsored by Target. The line stretched down 53rd, up 6th, and back up 54th. A bakery gave out free food, their girls dressed in a zebra-striped outfit with orphan Annie red hair. Also, Max Beckmann's Family Picture was the only painting name I wrote down in my notebook besides the classic, hallmark works (Picasso's Les Mademoiselles D'Avignon, Chagall's I and the Village, Van Gogh's Starry Night).

Here's a set of observations specifically tied to riding the bus. For those interested, I rode Fung Wah to NYC, Megabus to DC, then Greyhound the rest of the way (except, as mentioned above, the Amtrak train from SD to LA):

- The Fung Wah stopped after the exit leaving the Mass Pike. The driver pulled us over to the right side of the road. I read my book. He pulled us over to median. I continued reading my book. A din of confused voices rose around me as we sat on the median for two, three, four minutes. I looked up and noticed our driver running back to our bus from the other side of the highway, where there was another Fung Wah bus. He entered our bus, shook himself off and took off his jacket, and returned the bus to the road. The Fung Wah.

- I rode with this guy from Durham to Nashville. He was probably about 5'10'', and had a pretty solid frame with a little extra layering. He was probably about my age, wore his brown hair in a pony tail, and wore a wispy goatee to go with it. He wore just a wife beater most of the time, unless he went outside and it was on the colder side, in which case he added a sweatshirt. He offered me fish which he had brought for his three day journey from coast to coast. Boasted of the healthy nature of his fish, too, and how he used to bodybuild, but that these days he just lifted a few weights that were in his yard every day.

  This is not the guy I'm talking about. Just a funny sign in Waynesville.    

This guy was an interesting one, and very much displayed some of the common behaviors and attitudes of Greyhound customers. He kept his bag splayed out on the seat next to him in hopes of dissuading anybody from sitting next to him: they would have to ask him for the seat, and his imposing stature and affected scowl would prevent that. Except that somewhere between Asheville and Knoxville, the bus filled up, making it impossible for him to achieve his objective of no neighbor. When somebody did sit down with him at last, a young man, he was nothing less than courteous in conversation and in offering his treats to his new neighbor. In fact, for all his stature and intimidating looks, he was bursting to talk, looking around with his big brown eyes to find anybody he could open up to about his trip to Phoenix, or the fact that his half-brother died somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, or about what he thought about things. To wit: "TV brainwashes people, it brainwashes you, I don't watch any of it."

He also told me, upon seeing me reading, that, "I read books. I got a stack of 'em."

You don't get that on the plane, I tell you what.

- You also don't get cologne on sale in the men's bathroom on the plane. You do get this in the men's bathroom of a rest stop gas station somewhere in eastern Oklahoma.

- On my first Greyhound leg, from D.C. to Durham, I paid $3 to a vending machine to get a Nestle Crunch bar. That is, I paid $1.50 for a bar, received no bar as the ring in front of the selection was empty, which I did not recognize beforehand, and so I paid another $1.50. Needless to say, the candy bar was worth it.

- On that same trip, we had a last stop before Durham in Raleigh. I needed to use a phone, so I got off the bus. My ticket suggested we might change buses, so I went to the driver to make sure that I didn't have to get my suitcase or anything, leading to this beatific statement: "It's going to Durham." He said it with a laugh, with an incredulous smile, as if he told me that I would be getting a Christmas turkey after all. "You don't have to change buses, it's going to Dur-ham." I thought I saw his wizened head bathed in light.

- On the leg from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, there at some point coalesced an earnest group of young men who had a serious discussion about just what the pot laws were in different states, and what implications those laws had for their lives.

 

- I also sat next to a guy from Flagstaff to Phoenix who told me quite a bit about his life as a pot farmer. He reported that, living in California and growing weed on six prescriptions, his life would not change either way with the coming referendum on marijuana laws in CA. He said that he had been a bricklayer in Arizona ("That place has ridiculous laws,") but that he lost his job after 7 years to illegal immigrants, and this was the best option left to him. "I don't like society too much," he said, "I try to keep to myself as much as I can." He was thoughtful and well-spoken.

- For one short stretch, I think from Knoxville to Nashville but I could be remembering wrong, I found myself without a seat and had to ask a guy if I could sit next to him.

"Shit, I was waiting for a pretty woman,"

Seeing as there were not really any other seats available, all I could think to say was, "Well, I can smile nice, if that helps." He ended up being nice enough to me, anyway.

- There was another afternoon stretch where I was sitting alone when a young mother joined me. Here four year old or so boy sat across the aisle from her. They were clearly a Hispanic family, so I stewed in my seat, thinking of how to ask her in Spanish whether or not she'd like to sit with her child. I finally stammer, "Quiere sedir...do you want to sit with your child?" She said yes, gladly.

Somehow, the burn I felt for my cultural patronization equaled out whatever good feelings I had for my deed for a while. It's strange to be back in a land where English is the language, I guess.

- One has to get used to waves of smells passing over one's breathing space. Most of these smells are unpleasant. Such is life in the bus.



- The Ft. Smith, Arkansas Greyhound station was probably the cutest I saw on the trip, adorned with paintings depicting the consequences of and reasons against drinking and driving.

- In the southwest (Texas and beyond), each state has a border office. It feels like you're entering a new country, to a degree. In response, I presume, to frequent drug trafficking and illegal immigration, these states set up inspection booths and have border guards on patrol. In California, two border guards actually got on our bus and checked passports; I said I was from the U.S. and they trusted me, meaning I didn't need to flash my passport. Little did they know...

                                                                An illegal immigrant in Calexico.

- The one incident that led to trouble on my long trip happened on the first day, before we entered Tennessee. One man of pickled complexion and wearing bad cowboy-style attire (a yellow button-down shirt with red lines and cactus tree designs that screamed the southwest, and big ol' boots) had a bottle of wine and a little stereo. He allegedly improperly touched the teenage girl he sat next to. A few other, bigger passengers stepped in to encourage him to sit at the front of the bus, alone. We stayed a little bit longer than planned at our next stop in Waynesville, and he found himself confronted by a police officer at the front of the bus.

He stayed in Waynesville.

Some 30 hours later, I saw the same man in the bus station in Memphis, holding the same stereo, dressed in the same clothes. He had caught the same bus schedule a day later. While he didn't necessarily look any more sober, he looked glummer, in the least.

- Speaking of the Southwest, apparently Albuquerque is a major depot for drug trafficking. Our merry bus driver warned everybody that the bus would be searched during our layover there. "If anybody has anything they don't want found, better give 'em to me!" he said. All joking aside, several of my companions on the bus were quite unnerved. We passed through Albuquerque without incident, however.

- The scariest thing I heard came right before Nashville. Sitting behind me were two kids who were in either high school or college and appeared reasonably intelligent.

They were discussing Microsoft Office 2010, and specifically some of the new features on Word.

"Yeah, when I write my papers on Word, now," one said, "I can just copy-paste into the document, and then you go and you right-click on it, and you can paraphrase!"

"Oh, dude, that's sweet!" the other replied.

I shed a couple tears in my seat for my educator friends and my student days.

- In my whole time on the bus, logging something like 80 hours total including the final leg to San Francisco, I only peed on a moving bus twice. The first time was in New York, where my cousin rushed me to the bus after deciding that we didn't have time to stop somewhere. The other time was a cheapie in Gallup, New Mexico; the bus driver had earlier announced a stop, scheduled for about 2:20 am, but at the station itself we made an in and out two-minute quickie stop, hardly enough time to pee legally.

I figured we weren't going to get a chance, so I lodged myself in the bathroom, did what I had to do, and ambled back out to my seat...just in time to get up as we stopped at a KFC/McDonalds gas station site. Ahh, sigh.

- Between Memphis and Little Rock overnight, one woman in her 30s or 40s, black, full-bodied, and pretty, spoke to a younger girl straddling the ages of 18 and 22, skinny, less pretty, also black, about finding God and getting out of her troubles. There was something in her speech about the various plagues of lesbians and homeless youth. Eventually, when either one got off the bus or when one of them decided to go to sleep, the older woman pledged to continue the conversation on Facebook.

- The one bit of funny business I had to pull was getting on the bus in Nashville. I arrived just 15 minutes before the scheduled departure, and waited in line behind a minor who needed permission to buy a ticket, its own mess, pushing me dangerously close to being late for my bus.

At last, he finished his business and the attendant at the counter was ready for me. After printing my boarding ticket, she insisted I weigh my bag to make sure it met the 50 lb. limit. Despite my efforts to play with the weight, ultimately it was 6 pounds over. With no time to make it go run laps, I took out a few books and put them in my backpack until I made the weight. She printed my info and I was on my way to San Diego.

Except that I had enough time to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, and conveniently switch back all the books I had just added to my backpack. No problems for the rest of the trip.

- I was late for one bus all trip: the last one, from LA to San Francisco. No one's perfect.

- I should mention that Megabus has wi-fi on their buses. This felt like a big deal at the time.


View Directions to 797 Cole Street, San Francisco, CA in a larger map

- On that Megabus from NYC to DC, I was lucky enough to sit next to a one Miss Shania. Shania was probably about 4 years old, a cheery little girl who taught me how to draw. Specifically, she shared with me her technique for the Pollock-esque masterpieces she churned out page after page: grab the pen (in light blue, pink, or green for boys), and go like this (bring the pen up and down the page in varying thicknesses and no discernible pattern, just an endless sprawl of lines) and you can do it. She was considerably prouder of having taught me to draw that than she was to have learned to draw a heart from me.

- And as a subset of interesting bus events, here are all the things I had to do to make phone calls without a cell phone:

1. Buy a pretzel from a street vendor across the street from the New York Public Library to get the change needed to call my cousin from a pay phone.

2. Call from Skype numerous times, most memorably using the wi-fi of the Megabus.

3. As DC's streets were void of pay phones as well as people, I ended up having to ask my cab driver for a phone to call my friend. This turned out well, as my cab driver wasn't sure how to get to my friend's house.

4. Using pay phones along the road at various times, with mixed success. Many of the pay phones in Greyhound stations are a little bit more expensive. Many more do not offer a long-distance coin option; you can only call locally or collect. You cannot call cell phones collect. I was mostly calling cell phones. This caused problems.

5. In one of those tricky situations, I ended up borrowing a fellow traveler's phone, after asking a few other fellow travelers for phones who didn't happen to have one.

6. It goes without saying that I borrowed my friends' phones very frequently on the trip.

7. In LA's Union Station, I had the microcosmic phone experience that summed up my macrocosmic trip. I needed change, so instead of asking someone for change, I bought something. Since I needed at least 40 cents to make it to a dollar, I bought gum, even though I don't chew gum. I thought it would be an ok sacrifice. I went to the pay phone, now with about $1.10 of change.

The pay phone required $2.00. I only found this out after I tried the first two of four payphones, which did not have a dialtone, and the third payphone, which did not accept coins, and then at last put my dollar in the fourth payphone. The return didn't work.

I went to a ticket counter, where I received a polite $2.00 in change. Change I could have received at step 1. Not my best traveling moment.

- But despite the bumps, and despite the moments where I spent more than I might have - a flight purchased in advance between almost any of my destinations, and certainly for the long distance ones would have been cheaper than the bus fare - the trip had a sense to it, and a reason. Beyond seeing the soft dew hovering above the grass on the side of the road in the Arkansas morning, and beyond realizing that Texas's skinniest part is 170 miles across, and beyond having the time to read and write or not have to fly on a plane or have the freedom to eat just peanut butter sandwiches, bananas, and the occasional candy bar for two days on a bus.

I can't imagine doing this same trip eastwards. It could be that I am an easterner, and any journey that way would feel like going home, which one does not want to do on a bus. It could be that going west gave me a chance to open a new world, to experience new places in a way that going east would not have.

The trip, the bus trip, hit its logic after Texas. There was our descent into the sunset, a sense of oneness descending back onto me. After Phoenix, crossing through the desert in the morning, ripping through a new barren scenery that was not so distant from Jordan or Israel, for example, but still new; and then entering California and seeing how the landscape slowly grew gray and then green as the road emptied out to the valley before San Diego and the sun falling in front of us; there made itself felt every justification for taking the long way, the hard way, the stupid way.

Here's to the Long Way.

Here's to the Hard Way.

Here's to the Stupid Way.

Three Last Thoughts on Rwanda

I don't pretend to be able to summarize in a few pithy words what my/our trip to Rwanda was like. Actually, I can easily pretend to be able to do it, I just don't feel like it. Enough internet ink has been spilled on this site about the trip to Rwanda, I think: this post will bring me over 14,000 words. So anybody who is reading this and cares about what my overall impressions on the trip were should be able to pull something together based on the seven (including this one) posts and all that is contained therein.

At the same time, I want to write one more post about Rwanda. Not only because I promised it in the first post on Rwanda (more to myself than to anyone else), but because there is more I can say. And more I want to tell. So in lieu of any grand conclusions about the trip or huge statements, I give to you three little snapshots, events from the trip that encapsulated much of what happened as a whole, while also providing some entertainment. These events are not in chronological order.

Live at Gisenyi

Lake Kivu the morning after the storm.

The trip was harrowing; twice I have mentioned the thundering rains that could have ended our trip prematurely. We rode 10 passengers in a van designed to carry 14 passengers max in theory, but a van with bulky but thin cushions that did little to hide the feel of the steel bars beneath, a van with seats too close together so that there was no leg room even for the midgets like me, a van that had a multi-colored lamp inside that could do the disco rotation as needed, and a van that came from Dubai, where it was apparently the van for a hair salon. Riding in the van for four hours already that day (with stops), we were worn out as it was, and in no condition to weather the storm peacefully. We were saved by the steady driving of our main man Pascal, a driver who switched on to our group with the new van and who, on his first day, wore a bowling shirt with the name "Baker Hughes" stitched on the back. Maybe a code name? Or his bowling nickname, ala The Jesus?

In any case, the trip was harrowing. It led to our only night out of Kigali, a small hotel on a hill overlooking Lake Kivu, a Great Lake (Africa style, obviously) on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. We arrived shortly after dusk and, after divvying up rooms and unpacking, a few of us went out on the porch and talked and watched the lightning storm. I brought my guitar out and provided quiet and (I hoped) non-intrusive background music to the more serious conversations around me.There was an uneasy beauty of the moment.

We went to a relatively lame hotel restaurant by the water, mosquitoes infiltrating the overpriced dining hall, but our bonds were tight and the chocolate mousse cake I ordered (for dinner) good. Indeed, though I was weary from the car ride and the trip in general, hitting its 11th and 12th days, and though this trip marked the final high water mark before travel and group fatigue wore on my experience, we were at a high water mark at that restaurant, and the glow of our mzingu bubble on Kivu preserved that positive feeling.

We returned to the hotel just shy of midnight. I was most interested in going to sleep, but there was a general clamor for some music. And so I pulled out my guitar and played some tunes, pulling from the back catalog of hits ("Barcelona," "Ain't No Minivan Mama"), the fruitful summer of 2010 writing I had done ("Cellulite", "Stuck at the Start"), and the two Rwandan-inspired tunes I had written ("Any Given Day," "Hey, Mzingu", and yes, I did just cite a bunch of my own songs that most people have never heard. It's my blog, roll with it). My lovely audience that I would have liked to take home supported and enjoyed cigars, waragi, tequila, and the company, as well as the scenic backdrop, one of the nicest I will ever play in front of in my amateur musician career. The beauty here was easier, more exhausted, but joyous, a true cap on the high water experience.

An hour and a half later, I woke up in my bed in the hotel room to the evil sound of a nearby buzzing mosquito. My roommate was not on anti-malaria pills and had avoided vaccinations and in general was doing things all naturally to protect his body (we enjoyed watching him put together his herbal cocktail each morning at breakfast). No problem; I had all the respect in the world. And when we roomed together in Gisenyi, with two beds but only one mosquito net, I said, "No problem, you take it. Mosquitoes don't like me much anyway." My macho stubbornness striking again, as you see.

So when the mosquito woke me, I lay still for a few minutes, thinking I could wait it out. I slapped at the air aimlessly as well, or not aimlessly since I could hear him, but with very poor accuracy. The quiet desperation of hearing a mosquito buzzing around you and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop her, and knowing that the noise (definitely the noise and not so much the fact that she will bite you) would not let you sleep, and that sleep is the thing you most need to preserve your calm, your patience, and your sanity, this quiet desperation set in for me.

My roommate, fortunately, is a good sleeper. Fortunate, because my solution was to turn on the lights, sit as still as possible in a poor lotus position, and kill as many mosquitoes as necessary to allow me to sleep. There is always the illusion, after all, that it's only one mosquito that is buzzing around your head; their buzzes sound the same. I killed one mosquito. A buzz returned. I was not fooled. I killed another mosquito. I swung and missed at a few more. Somehow, my roommate stirred but did not wake. I imagined myself to be a modern day Mr. Miyagi with a lower hit-rate. Much lower.

In the end, I killed about 10 mosquitoes over 20-30 minutes, turned out the lights, and pulled the sheet over my head. I slept soundly if incompletely until the morning.

The World's (or at least Rwanda's) finest football pitch (Or backdrop)

A group photo of the memorable pitch.

East Rwanda, on one of the rare spaces in the country flat enough and big enough for a football (i.e. soccer) pitch, with 25 some-odd (we played about 13 v 13) boys aged from 16-24 or so who were ostensibly sophomores in high school, all orphaned or made vulnerable by the genocide, in the sunny but fading late afternoon light, with a beautiful vista to the east that suffered not at all for the fact that we wouldn't be able to see the sunset over it.

That was the scene. We were visiting the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, and as part of our visit, we got to play football with the kids (or basketball, or volleyball, but I chose the footie). The village is an oasis, of sorts, for the aforementioned vulnerable and/or orphaned population of Rwanda, operating as a high school for these kids. So far they have 250 students, admitting a new freshman class of 125 students each year to hit a maximum of 500 students in two more years.

But enough about the technicalities. On the pitch, the kids are about what you would expect them to be: talented, able, but lacking savvy, teamwork, or foresight that comes with coaching and paying attention to sports. Understandable, of course, considering they have a lot more important things to deal with than being good at football; this isn't a factory or even a competitive high school. It's just a place for kids to play the game.

So a couple of us joined in the game, running up and down, making a couple plays here and there and getting frustrated from time to time. I learned the appropriate words to call for the ball, "Karibu" (meaning "welcome") and "he-he" (short e's; the word means "here"), and called for the ball plenty, but didn't really get many touches - there were a couple sweet crosses I made that didn't lead to goals, but ah well, I screwed up plenty times too. Meanwhile, the light grew hazier and the beauty rose to match it.

And then we had to leave. The game was still going, and we had to leave. My unfortunate response was to fall into "Cheese Fries or nothing" mode*. I ignored the first several calls. Then I turned in and gave up, gathering my t-shirt, walking sulkily off the field and probably spitting to the side a few times more than necessary. I entered the car and, making sure to voice my frustration, said, "Tha's some bullshit."

After a pause, somebody asked what this so-called "bullshit" was.

I hemmed and hawed as I got the words out, then said, "When will we ever get a chance to play on a field like that in a setting like that? We can eat in Mzingu restaurants for the rest of our life," in reference to our rush back to Kigali.

Well then.

Another lost temper. Another blown fuse. And though I won the battle this time - I got the cheese fries, so to speak - I lost the war, failing to make it two weeks without losing my cool. Haval, as we would say. Haval.

But it was a good line. And a pretty place.

Our Redemption From the Children

The scene as I first saw it.

I sat in Nyamata church, the second of two churches on the day. We had been to the Nyabarongo River earlier, where genocidal killers dumped their victims' bodies to "send them back to Ethiopia", via Lake Victoria. We had been to Ntarama church, of the bloodied Sunday school wall of the previous post. Whatever one might say about the reasons for our trip, the futile nature of it, the inability we faced in plumbing the depths of our or others' trauma, it can at least be conceded that we had not had the most pleasant day.

After writing a poem in my journal and sitting inside the church on my own for a few minutes, I heard a harmonica play. Evan was blowing out a tune; "Love Me Do" it sounded like. In an otherwise solitary and silent moment, it made for a pleasant break. I went outside to see where he was.

When I got outside, I found that Evan was not just playing on his harmonica, but playing on his harmonica for twenty or more schoolchildren. Others from our group were out there dancing and smiling and talking to the kids, taking pictures and then showing the kids their image on the camera. No better balm in this world did God invent than the smile and laughter of a curious child.

We spent the next hour walking around the village, chasing after different groups of schoolchildren and picking them out, spinning them around, hugging them, and laughing with them. We drank over-sugared Coke and broke into sprints after the over-cute kids. We alternately terrorized and brightened everyone's day. On my trip in Europe,

Ben made the point, in Hamburg, that no matter how unsuccessful we were in achieving our objectives, or how annoying our requests might have been, we certainly made everyone's day a little bit more unusual and, dare I say it while trying to avoid sounding arrogant, more special. Well, that was at least ten times as true in Rwanda, and even more true in Nyamata village.

But we, of course, were the bigger beneficiaries. I talked about the dissonance between visiting terrible sites and experiencing beautiful people and scenery: this was the greatest dissonance we felt, and the loveliest. It was the most special moment we had on the trip, I feel, and I doubt my companions would protest too much.


Ah hell, one more bonus note from Rwanda - the last night


Our going away party featured a long round of speeches from everybody we managed to rope into our goodbye circle from our friends in Rwanda - potential sugar daddies, sons of reggae stars, good friends we had met in Israel, our friendly hostel security guard, our guides, friends from our blog we weren't as close to - and from us. Then I played on my creaky guitar, loud enough over the roar of the fire to bother the other guests in the hostel and lead us to leave the hostel and go to a nearby traffic circle. Where, after waking up the guard on duty sleeping in the fountain itself (no running water), we proceeded to run through a few more songs. Then a few more goodbyes. Then a giddy, solemn march back to the hostel, I on an improvise-ready little riff with Evan accompanying on his harmonica to a little ditty while the others reveled in the beautiful possibility and sadness of Kigali's night sky, together for the last time. The trip was everything it was supposed to be, even when it wasn't. It was every happiness we could hope for even when we were sad, every calm realization we sought even when we (I) lost our cool. It was certainly a success, a victory, an experience, and something to remember. And, almost a month later, I can still say with certainty that I don't think it'll be a last time, either in Africa or Rwanda. No, one way or another, this was just a beginning.







The Chorus of the other Rwanda related song I wrote, by the bonfire.

Looking Where The Blood Once Flowed

Trauma is a weird thing. Experienced, it leads to all sorts of repression, covering up, avoiding, or compensating, as well as growth, change, dealing with the experience, sharing, and recovering. Witnessed or observed, trauma can be both easier to understand and sympathize with and harder to grasp fully and empathize with; one can tell how awful an event is, but at the same time there is a distance, a barrier that prevents one from appreciating how deep that awful event goes.

I'm not sure what the difference is, exactly, between experiencing and observing trauma, having done both. I would suspect that when you experience it, you feel the depth of a trauma and then seek to paper it over and avoid it, hoping to get on with your life at whatever cost. When you observe it, you seek to get to that depth of the trauma as much as you can so as to appreciate the pain others felt and to help them whatever way you can. In both instances, the depth is lost, either under an inability to sink down and explore others' watery trenches or a struggle to steer away from one's own undertow.

There's no way for me to tell you that I now understand the Rwandan genocide or that I can relate to you what Rwandan survivors and normal people actually feel 16 years later. No more than there is a way for me to tell you that I understand my mother's death 6 years ago or how I actually feel about it 6 years later. In both cases there is a sad depth, and occasionally the tremors that those inner plates set off reach the surface - in grinding teeth at night or respectful silence as a survivor sheds tears when telling her story again - but a lack of the necessary knowledge, understanding, and even courage to get plumb that depth.

I can point out some of the interesting tremors I observed in Rwanda's memorial process and in the way people live with the legacy of genocide. So let's go to that.

As I hinted at in the previous post, the way the country preserves the memory of genocide is hitting a period of transition. The main effect of this change, it appears, will be to bury all or most of the bones and change the experience from one of evidence and thrusting the visitor's face in the horror to one of teaching the visitor of the genocide. We still got the evidentiary, horrific version, so let me tell you about it.

Nyamata church with 16 year old clothing deposits.


Having the horror of genocide thrust in our faces was both jarring and numbing. Jarring in the sense that we saw the skulls, saw the clothes, saw sites of genocide as they were 16 years ago. The clothes in the photo above, that is, were the clothes those who died in the genocide were wearing. The big dark stain you see in the corner of the building below is one of blood. The building is a Sunday school at Ntarama. Children were hiding in the Sunday school and children were the victims therein. I leave it to your minds to tie these sentences together as you wish. This was, for many of us, the most affecting memorial site.

But, as with so much of life's experiences, the subtle display was more effective than the over the top. We later went to Murambi, a memorial site closer to Butare, a major university city in the south of Rwanda. There the display was somehow more graphic than skulls or clothes. The history, in short, was that Murambi had a church that was the site of genocide - many Tutsis fled to church, which had been safe havens in previous times of violence, only often, too often, to be betrayed by either church officials or just the predictable nature of their actions, as militias and the army found their victims more easily - and then a base for French soldiers who came as part of Operation Turquoise, the UN sponsored "peacekeeping" mission I mentioned in the previous post that kept peace mostly for those who inflicted genocide and war. The French soldiers buried the victims and then set up volleyball courts and other activities of leisure over the graves, per the current Murambi memorial's info. After the war and RPF assumption of control throughout the country, the graves were exhumed and many of the skeletons were preserved in lime and placed on display in 20+ barracks-like rooms on the grounds.

This is really gross, both in numbers and in effect. And it could be viewed in two ways. I subjected myself to every room, to the lime smell, and to the relentless pace of genocide site-seeing, to at least witness what they wanted to show: child skeletons, baby skeletons, bodies on top of each other, children in parents' arms, tufts of hair on some skeletons, clothes still on the skeleton, a baby in the arms of an adult, and most of all the look of horror frozen on all the faces, and the defensive, helpless poses they ended their lives in. I thought I had no right as a foreigner, as a visitor who claimed to be interested in Rwanda and its past, and as a representative, unwitting or otherwise, of an international community and western world (and the U.S.) that failed to do anything productive to prevent this genocide, to look away.

Others in our group, coming from a Judeo-Western perspective, found the display disgraceful to the memories of those people and all sufferers, and felt that the preservation of the bodies was self-defeating: the bodies did not look authentic enough to serve as evidence against genocide deniers they thought, so what's the point? (No photos were allowed inside any of these sites largely to prevent more foreigners from sneaking photos of the sites and then claiming the photos served as proof of a fabricated genocide). I understood their point.

Ntarama Church.

Something else spurred me on at this site and others; the strange willfulness of the guides. In this case, I mean the guides representing each site, though it could include our young Rwandan guide - he claimed that anyone who didn't look at these things was showing weakness, though that stance was part of his own repression and recovery from his trauma, an incredible story that saw him and his polio-stricken mother tramp across Rwanda to Congo, a 3-week journey undertaken when he was only 4 years old. So his stance, considering his experience, is understandable.

And that stance and similar experiences may be what was behind the way our guide at Murambi kept pushing me and a couple others along the site. She, a cute woman in her 30's with a bright, toothy smile, walked a room ahead of us, waiting for us to advance, and barely concealing her disappointment when somebody else peeled off and stopped looking at the rooms. I sensed that she almost deliberately pushed us into this experience, as if to say, "Here, you silly Mzingu. You want to visit Rwanda? You want to understand the genocide? Keep looking then. Here it is. Welcome to the bed that everybody in the world helped us make. Sleep well." But she did all this, as everybody does, with a smile.

A chalkboard in the former outpost for Belgian soldiers killed at the beginning of the genocide in a ploy to get the UN to pull out their mission (which they did). The writings are angry notes left by the affected Belgian families for commanding general Romeo Dallaire, who is generally viewed as a noble man in his conduct regarding the genocide, hamstrung by the bureaucracy behind him.

This same sort of dissonance emerged in our meetings with survivors. We met with a couple kinds of survivors, in terms of mentality. When volunteering, we painted houses for young (20s and 30s), relatively cheerful and recovered men and women who were unlikely heads of households, orphaned 16 years ago and forced to lead their families. They were eager for our help and almost rehearsed in their thanks and happiness at our being there. Especially considering the narrow amount of time we had to help them, I felt that something was off; it could have been just me, but I wasn't sure that we were helping as much as receiving an opportunity to help, and while the side benefits of hanging out with these survivors were there for both us and them and us, there was a strangely unsatisfying, self-absorbed taste left in my mouth.

When we visited survivors who were not as well off, there was a stranger dynamic. One young woman in a survivors' village on the outskirts of Kigali broke into tears while recounting her story. We sat and listened sympathetically, eager to be as supportive as we could and to show our gratitude for her sharing our story. Our interpreters, young men who worked in an organization dedicated to helping survivors, were strangely nonchalant and even jovial as they listened to the survivor's testimony for the proverbial nth time. I suppose they didn't need to be shedding tears or donning dour looks, and the survivor didn't seem to care, and maybe they even cheered her up, but there was something slightly off about this scene.

 The woman second from left is the one described below.

But in our visits to survivors we also saw incredible things about Rwanda as a land and as a country. We visited a widows' village (also on the outskirts of Kigali, a major flaw in Rwanda's survivor aid program), where we met one poor woman who couldn't leave her room from depression. The guide who brought us there, a woman in her 40s, was better about bringing us together in the appropriate tone, and perhaps we brightened the widow's 10:00 hour for a few minutes, but there was not much we could do.

We did marvel, however, at the cheery garb of the other widows in the village, and even more so at the workers in their village. You see, amongst a village of mostly women between the ages of 35-55, all survivors of the genocide, the people repairing a house that recently lost a roof in a storm were genocide perpetrators. Criminals, prisoners, in other words, who were from other areas but who nevertheless inflicted crimes on other people that these widows suffered from themselves. "The prisoners depend on the women," our guide told us. "They get their water from the widows, and so they have to work together." We all thought this would be a grave security risk and a frightening thing for the women, but apparently it works out.

Our man was also adorned in cheery garb, I might add.

There is one last major, stunning inconsistency in visiting genocide sites and survivors in Rwanda. Perhaps it is not an inconsistency, but the universe's way of leveling us out and reminding us of who we are and how life is never just one way or another. Each site we visited was set in natural beauty, in gorgeous vistas and amazing scenes. And beyond the natural beauty offering a stark background to the human horrors, there was also the human beauty: each place we visited had people around who either worked at the site, or lived near the site, or went to school near the site, and their kindness lifted us up out of whatever funk we fell into. Whether or not we had a right to feel that funk, whether or not we could appreciate the trauma of the country on any significant level, and whether or not any of this mattered, the beauty that came after each sad experience added a clear gloss over everything we did. We didn't forget what we saw, and the horror did not diminish, but we did at least feel a little bit better. Each little bit counts in dealing with trauma, one way or the other.

The view from Murambi.