Nyabiheke

Today we visited Nyabiheke refugee camp, one of the sites where Jess works. We got there a little after noon, stopped by the office to pick up some things and greet everyone, then headed into the main part of camp. Nyabiheke is one of the smaller camps, with just under 5,000 residents, mostly from the Congo. UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) is in charge of these camps, and I must say, is running quite an operation, along with the ARC (American Refugee Committee), whom Jessica works for. Of course, the conditions are quite basic, but it is clear that the staff cares very deeply about the refugees and that they are supporting them as best they can. The head nurse showed us around their medical facilities, including the wards for men, women, and children, as well as the maternity ward (where, Jess tells us, they found a huge snake lurking not long ago – not a place I would choose to give birth - if I had the choice). The men’s ward was empty; in the children’s ward was a young boy who had injured himself falling out of a tree, as well as a couple other kids with malaria. Everyone in the women’s ward had either malaria or typhoid or both. (HIV prevalence in the camp is extremely low – well under 1% at last count – the main medical problem by far is malaria). The omnipresent UNHCR tarp that acts as floor, walls, and ceiling in buildings throughout the camp cast a greenish glow over everything, making our surroundings feel a little eerie yet somehow appropriate.

While at Nyabiheke we got to meet some lovely people, including Jess’ buddy Phisto, who was struck by lightning while fleeing the Congo to join his mother and sisters in the camp and speeds around quite well on his crutches, as well as a woman who has miraculously survived to 105 years old, and Kevin, possibly the cutest baby alive (and who turns out to be, in fact, a girl).

Today’s visit, along with our trip yesterday to the genocide memorials at Nyamata and Ntarama, really brought home the unbelievable strength and resilience of the people here. I’m so lucky to be able to witness, however briefly, individuals living lives of such extraordinary patience and courage.

Pictures from Henriette's Wedding (aka my stint as a Rwandese bridesmaid)

It’s So Easy

I met Sandrine last week outside Icyuzuzo, where we hold our legal clinic. I put her at probably 8 years old, maybe 10 at the most; it turns out she’s 13, but, like so many kids here, looks much younger. She told me, through Martin, that she has no parents, and is living with her aunt, who has two small kids of her own. She wants nothing more than to go to school, but her aunt can’t even afford to buy them all enough food, let alone pay for school fees. She completed primary 1 (first grade), who knows how long ago, but hasn’t been able to go back since.

I couldn’t get over this girl. She’s clearly smart, and it’s completely appalling to me that lack of money is keeping her from an education (especially considering primary education in Rwanda is supposed to be free). So Marianna and I are going to send her to school. We met with the headmistress of the primary school in Sandrine’s neighborhood, Nyamirambo, yesterday. She was a totally cool lady – she’s agreed to enroll Sandrine next term, which begins at the end of August, and gave us a list of all the books and other supplies she’ll need. She even offered, without us asking, to keep us up to date on Sandrine’s progress once we’ve left. The long-term plan is to hook her up with a local NGO that does education and/or works with orphans to help keep her on track so she won’t just fall through the cracks again once Marianna and I are gone. Hopefully we can also find a more sustainable food source for her family, since they’re clearly not getting enough right now.

Tomorrow afternoon we’re taking Sandrine to Remera market to buy her a school uniform, shoes, and books. I’m so excited about this, it’s ridiculous. I mean, I really feel like we’re doing other good work here, but this is something so much more tangible. It makes me really sad that so many kids can’t go to school just because they can’t afford uniforms, or don’t have shoes, or don’t have the money for books and pencils, but at the same time, I’m happy that it’s so easy to help at least one of them.

Oh, and for a little perspective, it’s going to run us about $20, total, to send her to school for two years. Unbelievable.

A neat bug in our house

Better Late Than Never

I realized recently that I haven’t really said anything about what I’m actually doing here!

My organization has its hand in a bunch of different things – our main mission is to provide VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing), psychosocial counseling and free medical care, and to ensure that women (especially those that were victims of rape during the genocide) have equity in access to these services. We also have a research branch that is following a cohort comprised of both HIV+ and HIV- women, a pediatric program, a (temporarily defunct) food program and IGPs (income generation projects), with other projects in the works all the time. Our office is in Centre Ville, but a lot of meetings are held at the house in Kiyovu, which is where I end up working from a lot of the time (not least because of the much more reliable internet connection and the presence of a kitchen).

The two main projects I’m working on are a Treatment Access & Food Security survey that Marianna and I designed together and a legal aid project aimed at educating community advocates to fight discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS. A major problem here is men who, upon finding out that their wives are HIV positive, abandon them and the children and take all the property. Often a husband will die and his relatives will show up to take back the land (and sometimes the children) from his widow. In some cases a woman who is HIV positive will not even be allowed to get married in the first place. All of these are illegal under Rwandan law, but most people have no idea what their rights are and so don’t fight for them. So I’ve been helping Megan, an international human rights lawyer, put together and run a legal workshop to educate representatives of our partner associations (nearly everything here is run through these associations, local grassroots organizations that represent particular groups within the population) about the law and to give them basic skills in legal advocacy & mediation, as well as connect them with local established legal clinics and legal aid & human rights groups that can help their members exercise their rights.

So far we’ve gone through the Rwandan Constitution (a pretty darn cool document, one of the most progressive in the world – highly recommended reading :)), international human rights law, mediation, marriage, property and succession. By the end we’ll have also covered children’s rights, the rights of women in non-civil marriages (e.g. those in polygamous households or regular marriages not registered by the State), confidentiality, the gacaca process, and laws relating to sexual violence. The first week I gave a lecture on HIV/AIDS (how I became the resident expert I have no idea) which was nerve-wracking but fun – especially watching Martin struggle to translate “vaginal secretions” into Kinyarwanda. I’m constantly giving him uncomfortable things to say in public :)

My other main project, the survey, is turning out to be incredibly interesting (if a logistical royal pain in the butt). Marianna and I put together a questionnaire (which we had translated into Kinyarwanda) to administer to the heads of all our partner associations – we have 25 of them right now – that (hopefully) will get at what kind of access their members, especially genocide survivors, have to VCT and treatment for HIV and OIs (the opportunistic infections that characterize AIDS), what obstacles to these services exist for those who have little or no access, and how best to fill those gaps. We also have a section on food security – a lot of patients are going off their ARVs because they have no food. This is obviously a complete disaster, both in terms of individual patient health and in terms of breeding drug resistance, so we’re trying to a) get the funding for our food program reinstated and b) find out ways to make people more self-sufficient after they graduate from the food program, whether through agricultural training and assistance, other skills training, or IGPs. Marianna & I are also doing some qualitative research, mostly interviews and focus groups (I love focus groups!) with nurses and reps from some of the larger associations.

ACD, who is back in San Francisco now, works nonstop and her brain runs at a mile a minute, so every time we talk to her she gives us eight new things to do – it’s amazing that anyone can keep up with her! So we’re pretty busy all the time, but I’m absolutely loving it. I think I may have found my new home away from home :) Plus I get to ride a motorcycle to work every day – what could be better than that??

Not to be outdone by Marianna’s actual engagement (see her blog for the story), I managed to get myself a little bling as well:

I Hear They Turn the Traffic Lights On for Dignitaries

Every day we learn more little lessons about Rwandese culture. Tuesday’s lesson was that coffee and tea breaks in meetings are unheard of. So for our legal training workshop, every Wednesday and Thursday at 10am, we will be having…Fanta and cake. Yup, Fanta and cake. Apparently this is entirely normal.

#2: Any transaction that should be relatively simple, such as ordering food for an event, withdrawing money from the bank, or buying office supplies requires at least an hour and a half of heated discussion and back and forth negotiations, in three different languages.

#3: According to popular theory, people who drink Fanta Orange are virgins. There is some debate as to whether, if you take a girl on a date and she orders a Fanta Orange, she is implying that she will or will not sleep with you.

#4: When Rwandans enter a room they say hello to everyone there before doing anything else. The standard greeting is three cheek kisses and a handshake.

#5: Eating on the street (or while walking or talking or working) is considered very rude.

#6: Most Rwandans only eat two meals a day – breakfast and dinner, or breakfast and a big lunch, but no dinner. This does not fit well with my lifestyle of constant face-stuffing.

#7: Doing business over the phone is not so usual. Everything requires a meeting and face-to-face negotiations, even if all you want is for someone to forward you a PDF that you need.

#8: There is no such thing as right of way. It’s a vehicle and pedestrian free-for-all out there! (Also, it’s in your best interests, as a pedestrian, to always assume that drivers have no qualms about running you over, because they probably don’t.)

#9: Though street names and addresses do exist for the main (paved) roads, no one actually uses them. Directions are always given by the name of the neighborhood and/or landmarks, and often depend on where you’re coming from. So the Kiyovu house is usually “près de la maison du président,” the apartment is “Kimihururu, après Papyrus et Médecins Sans Frontières, le bâtiment blanc a la gauche” and the office is “Centre Ville, en face de le BCK.” (Although this doesn’t help much if your moto driver doesn’t speak French, which happens a lot.) God help you if you don’t learn your way around PDQ :)


#12: Grunting and wordless exclamations of “ehhhh” are acceptable (and common) contributions to a conversation.

Other day-to-day observations:

* Everyone here calls me “sister” – I love this.

* Little hole-in-the-wall office supply shops have sprung up everywhere (a market fed by the plethora of NGOs here) – if you’re looking for something one of them doesn’t have, they will send someone off to who knows where, running all over the neighborhood until they miraculously appear, 10 minutes later, with just what you were looking for.

* The local minibuses are very creatively decorated, with huge and sparkly stickers all over them. Some of my favorites: “Goldigger,” “Beyonce,” “Tuff Gong,” and “What if God Was One of Us?”

* Any given day you are likely to run into several guys walking the streets, holding a single pair of pants in front of them, or a different shoe on each finger, trying to sell them to passersby. I always wonder what they do when they sell that one piece of clothing – do they have a stash somewhere where they just grab another one to walk around with? And is this actually a lucrative business?

* Little kids are overly excited by the sight of white people (we are kind of translucent and funny-looking, so this is understandable). Cries of “muzungu, muzungu!” are common on our morning walk to the main road.

* Queuing is unheard of. Everything is accomplished here via mad rush.

* The little girls in party dresses look is in, as are brightly colored rubber shoes and the widely popular short tie.

* And lastly, it’s amazing how well-dressed a lot of the people here are, especially the men (though there are some interesting pattern-matching choices on their part). And how do they keep their shoes so freaking shiny?? Two minutes after leaving the house our feet and shoes are covered in about 5 inches of dust and dirt. Marianna and I are at a loss, but plan to investigate further. Will update when we discover the secret to perpetually clean footwear.

Some addenda from roomie Jordan:

o Backpacks are carried on your head; babies are carried on your back
o One big print is good; two big prints is better
o It’s not in any way inconsistent to schedule two meetings, in two entirely different locations, at exactly the same time. No one gets anywhere when they say they will anyway!

Genocide

I was lying in bed the other night, trying to sleep, and thinking about Seraphine. She, like so many people here, is still horribly traumatized from the genocide. Every time something bad happens to someone else, she feels it as if it’s her own tragedy. (If you’ve ever read “The Secret Life of Bees,” I think she’s a lot like the character May in that way.) She cries all the time, even over little things, and she doesn’t feel safe in her own house. (Her next door neighbor is Tutsi, but killed other Tutsis to save himself during the genocide, which just makes things worse.) I can’t imagine what it must be like to live your entire life with the memories that she has, and to be afraid all the time.

Even though it’s been 12 years, you can still see the effects of the genocide everywhere. It’s perhaps easier for me to see than some, because my organization works specifically with genocide survivors, but I really think there are very few people in Rwanda that have not been affected in some way. Every time I see someone who is missing a leg or a hand, I can’t help but wonder if someone cut it off with a machete. Sadly, the answer, in most cases, is probably yes. Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I realize that the very place I am standing was once covered in corpses. Kind of a jolt, that. Henriette, my friend who is getting married in July, is excited for the wedding, but also very sad that there are so many people who should be there but are dead. Her fiancé and his two sisters are the only people left alive in his entire family.

Marianna, Nathan and I went to one of the genocide memorials last week – it’s very well done, and very moving. The last room was, for me, the hardest to get through. It’s called “Tomorrow’s Lost,” and it’s full of pictures of children who died in the genocide, all donated by their families in memoriam. Each picture has a caption that says the child’s name, age, favorite food, personality quirks, sometimes their last words, and how they died. Some died in their parents’ arms, others were thrown against walls. One little girl, no more than three years old, was killed when she was stabbed in both eyes by the Interahamwe. Now I can’t get her out of my head.

Sorry for the downer post…this is just what was on my mind today…

Think I can sell this to Fanta for advertising purposes...?

Day of the African Child

Friday was the Day of the African Child, which we celebrated by throwing a huge party for the kids in our pediatric AIDS program and their families. Diafuka and Bertin found us a great venue, a restaurant near the airport called La Palisse that had a couple of beautiful gardens and a playground. We had face-painting, hat & mask-making, and lots of other games and art projects, plus some traditional dance & music performances. Word got out that a couple of muzungus were handing out stickers, and Marianna and I literally got mobbed by little kids (and adults!) wanting to get in on the action. By the end of the party everyone looked like the victims of a great Sticker Incident, hands and faces covered in shooting stars, letters of the alphabet, smiley faces, and the occasional (and widely coveted) “great job! A+!”

…Joseph came into work this morning to tell us that the party was on TV and that it looked like a lot of fun – glad they didn’t show the t-shirt riot that occurred at the end…