Church, Rwanda-style

So I went to church today. Henriette, one of our trauma counselors, is getting married in July, so she invited us all to a “pre-wedding” party-type thing. Little did we know this included pre-party church attendance! (There are a few Muslims in Rwanda, but the country is largely Christian and very, very religious.)

The church itself was in a sort of converted warehouse, and the service was lively, to say the least. Picture the Pentecostal services we have in the States – with an African flavor – complete with singing, dancing, crying, fervent praising of Jesus, and spontaneous ululation. It was pretty cool, actually. Here are some pictures I managed to swipe from Megan’s camera…

Gorillaz!

On Thursday morning Heidi and I got up at 3:30, stumbled around in the dark for a bit, and were miraculously ready to go at 4am when our driver came to pick us up for the trip to Ruhengeri. Luckily it’s about a two and a half hour drive, which gave us a little extra time to sleep on the way. Our driver, Eric (a lot of Rwandans here have either been given or have adopted Western names) was a really nice guy and a big fan of both the Eagles and mid-nineties boy bands. Quite the soundtrack for an early morning drive!

The route to Ruhengeri is stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful scenery in my life – it may even be on par with (gasp) Croatia! If I had been more awake I would have taken a ton of pictures (and yet I still ended up with over 200 by the end of the day. Good lord). It’s amazing how many people are out between 4 and 6am, already working. We passed probably hundreds of people on the road, many of them carrying impossibly heavy loads on their heads – even some of the little kids were carrying huge bags over their shoulders!

When we arrived in Ruhengeri we stopped off to sign in and find a group to join for the trek. While at the base camp we ran into Jesse, a med student Marianna and I met the day before at ORTPN who is going to be getting his MPH in my department next year! I love those small world moments :) Heidi & I wanted to see the Susa group, since it’s the biggest gorilla family and is the farthest hike. The hike itself is beautiful – about 2 hours up one of the mountains in the Parc National des Volcans (part of the Virunga Volcano Region, a larger park shared by Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo), then another hour or so through the rainforest. (The hike is different every time – there are trackers that go into the jungle every morning and follow the gorillas, then radio the guides to tell them where to go.) We’re talking some serious jungle trekking here – the guy in front kept having to hack away at stuff with a machete, just so we could get through! In some places the vines are so thick and tangled that you end up walking on top of them, several inches above the ground, instead of on the ground itself.

There are only about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, and they all live in the wild. I couldn’t get over how close we were to them, and how human they are! I could watch them for hours. They didn’t seem to mind us being there – I swear one of them was actually posing for us! One of the highlights was seeing the twins, Byishimo and Impano, who are almost two years old. Apparently they are inseparable. When we found them they were snuggled peacefully, their mom just a few feet away. But soon they got into a sibling tiff, which started when one twin, without warning, smacked the other on the head. (Did I mention they seemed human?) Tussling ensued, with some tumbling and biting thrown in for good measure.

This trek was truly a once in a lifetime experience. Mountain gorillas are, for the most part, incredibly gentle. They mostly just eat, nap, play, groom each other, and chill out – I couldn’t help thinking, while watching them, that they represent the best side of human nature. (We do share 97% of the same DNA!) Maybe we could all learn a few things from them…

New Digs

Three more people arrived at the house yesterday: Mardge, our medical director, Mary, a psychologist and trauma counselor, and Roseanne, an art therapist. With the new arrivals we now did not have enough beds in the house for everyone, so Heidi, Marianna & I were shipped off to an apartment in a different neighborhood, Kimihururu. Despite Henriette’s assurances that this new place was walking distance to the old house, the office, and the clinic, it’s very clear that she meant “walking distance if you have some really comfy shoes on and a good two hours to kill.” So I guess there’ll be a lot of moto-riding in our immediate futures! The three of us were a little pissed off, because a) we had no say in this decision and b) it would make a lot more sense if some of the other people in the house had moved over here instead, just logistics-wise. But whatever – the apartment’s actually pretty nice, and we’re apparently in NGO-central. We’re just down the road from the MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders) office, and there are a bunch of other orgs nearby.

Oh, one last thing. We have no electricity. All our lights went out dramatically last night, leaving us kind of up a creek. (Our lack of power also meant that we had to give up on our “boiling water so we can drink some” project.) Luckily I had a flashlight stashed somewhere in my bag, so the three of us headed down the hill, light in hand, to see if we could rustle up some candles and a couple cokes at a little tin roof hut-type place that had appeared to be a store when we passed it earlier on the road. No luck - it was closed, and we didn’t really want to venture into the sketchy-looking bar next door, so we headed back to our place and managed quite well, if I may say so, in the dark.

p.s. in true polite Rwandan fashion, all the ads for Sprite say “Please Obey Your Thirst” – how nice of them :)

Goma

Goma is not a nice place. Just over the border in the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Goma was the home of one of the largest and most awful refugee camps for Rwandans during the 1994 genocide. (By awful, I mean awful – living conditions were deplorable, and members of the Interahamwe, the extremist Hutu militia responsible for the genocide, terrorized the refugees living there as well as mounted raids into Rwanda from inside the camp.)

The DRC is very unstable – a lot of it is really still a war zone, and the trauma that Rwandese women went through 12 years ago is now being inflicted on Congolese women. Because my organization has a lot of experience dealing with sexual violence and HIV, they’ve been acting as consultants to some newer organizations across the border trying to follow our model in the Congo. ACD (my boss), Heidi (a law/business intern from Northwestern), Megan (a lawyer from Toronto) and Rebecca (one of the daughters of my other boss, Kathy) spent the last couple of days in Goma, taking testimonies from Congolese women who had been raped and visiting a hospital that does fistula surgeries. (So far this hospital has performed about 600 of these surgeries, and has been able to reintegrate most of the women back into their communities.)

Not surprisingly, it was a very intense trip. But the group's most dramatic story came from their attempts to get back home. On their way to the border on Friday afternoon, they were flagged down at a roadblock by what turned out to be an extremely drunk, belligerent Congolese policewoman (she literally hissed at AC several times) who took all their documents, stuffed them in her bra, and tried to leave with them. AC had to coax her off a motorcycle several times, finally putting her hand on the driver’s keys so he couldn’t take the woman anywhere. Meanwhile Rebecca, who was pretty sick, was on the side of the road, dry heaving over the side of the car. In the end, they had to bribe this woman with all the money they had (about 60 USD) just to get their papers back and be allowed to leave. It’s safe to say that everyone is very happy to be back home in Kigali!

I'm here!

I often forget, when I’m not in the middle of traveling long distances, that I don’t like it all that much. It’s fun and exciting at first, but after about two or three days, when you haven’t changed your clothes, brushed your teeth, or gotten any decent sleep to speak of, it gets pretty old. My breaking point was right around hour six at the Nairobi airport – my plane to Kigali was delayed for unspecified reasons (later we found out there was some mysterious “technical problem” – not really what you want to hear when you are actually on the plane) and all of us Rwanda-bound passengers had to sit and fidget while every single flight to every other part of Africa (and Turkey!) except for ours was called to board through our gate. Luckily, we finally got our turn to wander aimlessly across the tarmac (how the people in front of me knew which plane to get on I do not know), just in time to avoid me losing my mind entirely.

The rest of the trip was fine though – everything else was on schedule, and none of my flights were more than 7 hours or so at a time. Virgin Atlantic has great movies and great food (Katie, they served me cheesecake!) and Kenya Air is actually pretty decent. I had an 11 hour layover at Heathrow, so I left the airport and tooled around London for the day, managing to get a wicked sunburn on my face from napping a little too long on Turnham Green. Also, in case anyone is planning a trip there anytime soon, here’s a little info on what $20 gets you: two single ride tickets on the Tube and an iced mocha. Seriously. This cements my intense dislike of the British pound.

Anyway, so I’ve been in Kigali now for two days, and I LOVE it. The city is much bigger than I expected, and really beautiful. Rwanda is pretty much entirely made of hills (it's known as "the land of a thousand hills"), so everywhere you go has a great view. It’s also pretty good exercise just walking around! Life in the house is great too – we have a wonderful cook, Seraphine, and a guard, Isaac, who I also like a lot. AND I get the top bunk of a bunk bed. I love bunk beds! Turns out the mothballs were a good call though – our old friend the cockroach is no stranger to Kigali.

My driver met me at the airport on Friday afternoon (I can’t tell you how grateful I was that he didn’t give up on me and leave!) and took me to the house in Kiyovu (the neighborhood in Kigali where we live), giving me a good tour of the city on the way. We live just down the hill from Paul Kagame’s house/compound (he’s the Rwandan president who, by the way, is revered here) – it turns out we’re in a pretty wealthy area. Marianna, an intern from U of Michigan who is getting a joint degree in public health & social work, was at the house when I got there. (Everyone else was in Goma, just across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – more on that later.) Marianna’s been a great hostess/tour guide, and constantly saves my butt with her excellent French :) I also finally got to meet a bunch of the other people I’ll be working with when they returned to the house this evening – I’ve already learned a lot about NGO/government/development politics, and I’m really excited about the projects I’ll be working on – it looks like I’m going to have a ton to do!

There's so much more to tell, but this is already overly long and I need to go to bed. But the point is, so far, so good! Now if I can just figure out how to not keep shocking myself on the power cord to my laptop…

Ok...

NOW I'm excited. Kigali here I come!

The fun of packing

I’ve compiled a short list, based on previous experience, of essential items to pack when traveling to your less well-developed vacation destinations:

String (one should always listen to one’s father on the topic of string and its potential uses)
Mothballs (indispensable for keeping the roaches from crawling out of your drains)
Duct tape (because you’d be hard-pressed to find any situation in which duct tape is not useful)
Purell (probably futile, but a nice gesture nonetheless)
Mosquito net (for, um, keeping away mosquitoes. That one’s a gimme.)
Rolled up newspaper and a bad attitude (see above re: roaches)

Things to leave at home:
Cute underwear

This last one annoys me. Every time I go someplace where someone else is going to be washing my underwear, I have to leave the cute stuff at home. Where is the fun in that? Peru? Granny panties. Bangladesh? Granny panties. Rwanda? Sadly, granny panties again. (Ok, they're not that bad...but it is weird having one's butt covered when one is not used to that!)

Of course, if feeling frumpy is my gravest concern, I’m doing pretty damn well. ...And I never promised this blog would be deep!

Old hat or cold feet?

I somehow thought that by the time I got to the third round of rabies shots it would have sunk in that I’m going to be in Rwanda in less than a week. (Now I almost want to get bitten by an emu, or some equally exotic, crazed animal, only to justify the $513 beating my credit card took for this vaccine.)

But no. I’m actually still feeling strangely ambivalent about this trip. It almost feels like I’m not really going, like I’m just going to be spending the summer in Boston, bumming around and buying furniture and dish towels. (We won’t get into my slightly pathological love for home goods & hardware stores.) Maybe I'm just too calm. I kind of miss the nervous energy I used to get before traveling - it's a little unnerving. (Can you be unnerved by a lack of nervousness? Hm.) I don’t know if this is the way I felt before I left for Peru. I’m pretty sure I didn’t feel like this before Bangladesh, but it’s so hard to remember. Maybe it’s because I have so much stuff to do before I go, or because I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of other exciting and happy things to concentrate on lately, or because I’ll be leaving before I’ve really settled into my new apartment. (Side note: moving into this studio has so far turned out to be a completely brilliant decision. Despite the odd, somewhat dorm-like feel of apartment-building living – someone is playing acoustic guitar nearby, and it’s possible my upstairs neighbors are having loud sex, though they could also just be playing an early-morning game of badminton – I wouldn’t go back to sharing my space for anything in the world.) Anyway, that aside, I think a large part of my ambivalence has to do with how unplanned the next two months feel. I'm actually a little envious of Melinda’s more defined and practical water technology project (though not her carry-on luggage). Damn engineers.
I’m sure things will fall into place once I get there. They always do, eventually.

So pretty much the idea is to not stress out about getting everything done (it always does get done, though this surprises me every time) and seeing everyone I want to see (note to self here: not going off to war, can see people in August!) – why does it seem so important to finally write to Nieves, my Peruvian mom, right now? Even I have no idea how I set my priorities sometimes. I am feeling better now that I’ve divided my to-do list up by day & time though. Being anal has its advantages sometimes :)

Everyone needs a name...

Inspired by Melinda's cheesy blog name, I may have actually managed to find one that's worse. (Is this possible??)