2025 Rwanda Delegation— Cameron Vitagliano

Rwanda

Jul 15

English Literature and Creative Writing ‘27

The first time I heard about Rwanda was in my 10th grade History Class, when my teacher showed us the film Hotel Rwanda in a unit about genocides. The film stuck out to me not because of the depictions of genocide, but because of what came before that. Unlike other media representations of Africa I had seen at that point, Rwanda was shown as a modern country. Paul Rusesabagina had a suburban house, kids who played hoola-hoop in the front yard, hosted dinner parties with his brother-in-law and his family, and a job at a nice hotel that he commuted to every day. The display of modernity, the familiarity of the setting despite it being in Africa made the events depicted in the film feel much closer than any other genocide related films. I ended up reading the book, An Ordinary Man by Rusesabagina years later, at around the time the controversy with the author was heating up. The first half of the book described his experiences growing up in Rwanda, gave general information about the culture, and made me think that I would very much like to see Rwanda for myself one day. At Buff State's orientation, I took a picture of the AFP slide that told me how I could.

Hearing more stories, learning more about the culture, puts into sharp relief that my understanding of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and Rwanda itself, is all coming from the lens of one person. I would like to expand that lens, see Rwanda for myself and come back with a more complete understanding of the culture and the story, which I see has many, many parallels with the political environment of today. I want to keep a mostly written blog, as detailed as I can manage with the schedule. This is my first time leaving North America. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Twendsday (6/3/2025 - 6/4/2025)

A year ago I might've gotten chills at the idea that I'm flying over the Atlantic Ocean, then Spain, then the Mediterranean. For two hours Greece was on my left, Egypt on my right, then underneath me, then I was in Ethiopia, Africa. Airports kind of look the same everywhere. My first impression of Rwanda, stepping out of the airport in Kigali, was that it kind of looked like Florida, maybe with Newark's hills, but much cleaner than either of them. The real difference between places seems to be the little -- and I do mean little -- details.

CANADA - We crossed the border into Canada at about 5:30 AM, EST. This was the part I was actually most worried about because I had imagined TSA would give us trouble or go through our bags. They didn't. They just asked us a few sardonic questions. I only got one. "Do you have any firearms?" "No." "Ok. You're good." The differences I noticed while the bus took us through Ontario, was that the telephone poles were placed on the street, and often doubled as supports for street lamps. In the US, telephone poles are set back, usually between the backyards of houses. Every once in a while someone from National Grid or whatever will walk unannounced into your back yard and insist that they have to chop your tree down. In Canada, they probably don't have to do that as often.

The other difference, globes. I saw a few businesses using globes in their logo. World Gym, I think, was one. It was still oriented around North America, like how it usually is in the United States, but unlike the US, this globe had a slight tilt to it, maybe to emphasize Canada, but not in a way that was overbearing. Canada might've occupied a little under a third of the space, the rest of North America filled the other third, then Europe snuck its way into the last third, while North Africa and South America squeezed in slightly for an honorable mention.

We arrived at Toronto (Pearson?) at around 8 AM. A much shorter drive than I had anticipated. There was one downtown area along the way that from a distance looked impressive, with a lot of high rises that resembled Jenga or toothpick towers, but ultimately took about the same amount of time to drive through as Buffalo, but then, just there, you see CN Tower (?). There! That's Toronto! We didn't go through it though. Pearson is situated a bit south. There's a tangle of about a dozen skyways in front of it which had a really interesting look.

There were two hours to kill in Toronto. A few other students (Alex, Riva, and Isabella) and I looked around for a place to get some breakfast and coffee. They had three or four virtually identical diner/bars, one Southeast Asian restuarant, a Tim Hortons and a Starbucks. I forgot I had packed a canteen and bought a bottle of water from Starbucks, then we sat at one of the bars. Isabella took one look at the menu and left, which was the smart choice. I ended up getting a mimosa and a BLT (with egg), while Alex and Riva got something similar. None of us got coffee. It was $38 but it seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Back at the gate everyone was just chatting. There was another group of students at our gate (this was the first flight, which was bound for Ethiopia), and many of them resembled characters in our group. "Oh look, that one's Cameron," someone pointed out. Oh-- oh no, I didn't want that person to be me at all. Do I give that guy vibes?

Boarding Call!

Maybe I shouldn't have had that mimosa just now?

Group A to start boarding!

Ok, actually it's no big deal.

THE FLIGHT - Was fine, given that it was 14 hours. Most of my luggage was actually in preparation for this. I brought five books with me: My Struggle Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, Writers at Work Around the World by The Paris Review, The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino, and Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis. And I'm mostly listing these because I want to sound like a sophisticated person. A grownup that doesn't need the internet, or in-flight movies to keep myself occupied.

I watched The Dirty Dozen. It was good.

I did also read though, mostly the Varoufakis book which is surprisingly entertaining for an "academic" novel. I was really feeling like non-fiction and was disappointed that the in-flight movies didn't have any documentaries, but they did have Mufasa, which Rena and I half-watched in the last leg of the flight.

ETHIOPIA - This is where I was starting to get irritated, or at least, physically uncomfortable. Some kids in some seats adjacent to me somehow managed to scream for the entire flight, the meals had made me feel, well, gross, and we were in a rush because our flight had arrived slightly late and was already boarding when we arrived. I put my backpack with all of my great, entertaining books up in the overhead bin-- Excuse this interjection, but there's a cat roaming around St. Paul's meowing very loudly outside my door. For some reason some of the other students named it Megatron, even though it's a female and obviously in heat--Oh, look! That's Drew, he's sitting in the aisle next to me. Maybe I can talk to him. "Hey." Wait, what do I talk about? "Uh, um... how long is this flight?" Drew, the professor in charge of our group, founder of the Anne Frank Project answered-- "About two and a half hours." Uh-oh, maybe I do need that book... eh. Really, I should have. The first flight in any trip is always the best, despite any inconveniences, but the next one, especially after a long flight like the one we'd had. This flight, two and a half hours, was uncomfortable and felt as though it would last forever. I shut my eyes, if I nap, I'll wake up when we land. Yes. I'm really tired. I had gotten up at 3 AM, Buffalo time on Tuesday. I didn't sleep much the night before, and it was now 10, maybe 11, Ethiopian time on Wednesday. It felt good, having my eyes closed -- Whoops! I almost lost consciousness, and felt myself slipping towards the person next to me. Isabella was asleep in the seat next to me. I could never nap on flights. With or without the travel pillow I always feel like I'll inadvertently slip onto the person next to me and make them uncomfortable. Had to keep myself awake for the rest of the flight. I could sleep in Rwanda. I'm writing this at 10:49 PM, and I am not, in fact, asleep in Rwanda.

I've been writing a lot here about the trip to Rwanda, using as much as I think is appropriate for a blog, then maybe a bit more, then dialing back. Jonise has to review all of these, and post these, and I don't think it's appropriate for me to bloat the AFP website, but also, this is my blog. I don't feel I have much to say about Rwanda itself yet that I haven't already said. My first impression, coming off the plane and walking down that final corridor on my way out of the Kigali airport, I could see the outside world cropped through the rectangular glass windows, the glass doors. The corridor itself was mostly dark, the floors, I remember were black. The walls and ceiling as well. It looked almost like a theater, which is interesting, since it was a movie I watched that got me into all this. But that first image I got of Rwanda, overcast skys, palms and bushes, slightly wet ground. Everything was richly saturated, as though it had just rained, or it was about to. If I didn't walk out the door, if we didn't take the bus and drive through Kigali, the only glimpse of Rwanda I had was that image, and the experience of traveling through Canada and Ethiopia, where the security check was more or less the same, with the same level of scrutiny-- my takeaway might've been that I had traveled for about 20 hours, and arrived in Florida.

Elephants

I feel I have to self censor this in a way that I wouldn't in a journal, which is difficult because that's how I'm looking at this. A public journal. In truth, my strongest feelings relate to my cohort. Not Rwanda. And I don't feel it's appropriate to air what I'm thinking about everyone. From very early in the trip, the sense of novelty of being in Africa was kind of lost on me (see Entry 1), but I felt an obligation to write about Rwanda. I wanted to paint some sort of picture (this entry is forthcoming). But when it comes to what I'm feeling... I'm a little stuck here.

Rwanda is a beautiful country. Undeniably. The food is good. My body isn't working quite the way it would in Buffalo. I'm experiencing a problem that might have something to do with my medications or the diet, but it isn't that big a deal. I'm not uncomfortable so I'll deal with it until I'm home. I don't know if I would say I'm "home sick", but I do miss a few of my creature comforts. There's a movie I picked up shortly before my trip that I want to rewatch. The wifi at the hotels has been kind of spotty so I haven't been able to check in with some of my friends and family as much as I would like, because some of what I'm feeling would be better bounced off of them than with my cohort, and since what I'm feeling relates to them I can't bounce everything I'd like to say off of them, and I can't put it in a public travel blog. What I can share is how I'm feeling about the trip. And I'm feeling matter-of-fact. The highs of the trip are in conversations I might have at breakfast, at dinner, after dinner, or the comedy-of-errors that was me at Urukundo, the primary school we visited over the weekend. This is what I would like to write about, but I need to get over a hump. Address the elephant in the room before I can write about what I want to write about.

I didn't feel anything at the genocide memorials.

It feels gross to say. It's uncomfortable to think about. I felt that I was intruding on a very sacred space. Like my being there was somehow voyeuristic. Didn't I come to Africa because I was touched by some movie I saw 10 years ago?

We visited two memorial sites. One in Kigali, the 1994 Genocide Museum, and one out in the rural areas, a church called Nyamata, the preserved site of an infamous massacre.

We went to the museum in Kigali first. There was a loosely guided tour, where we followed a map they handed us at reception, along with a pocket stereo and headset which would read out blurbs about each point on the map. We walked through the history of Rwanda, framed around the build-up to the genocide, then we walked through the history of the genocide, and finally... Three Rooms.

The Three Rooms exhibit is a hub at the center of the main building connecting the entry hall and each three room exhibit, separated by dividing walls. The history tour led in a circle around the Three Rooms area, then led into it. This is where the physical evidence of the genocide was kept. Skulls, femurs, clothes, weapons.

I would like to emphasize, this was a somber environment. There was no idle chatting at the memorial. Everyone was mesmerized in some way by what was in front of them. A few people--well, most people--were moved to tears. If not by the history walk--where a looped video collage showed images of victims of the genocide, a bloated, bloodied body in a river, children with huge gashes across their faces, left by the machetes--then definitely by the Three Rooms.

I, personally, just felt flat. Not indifferent. Not ambivalent, but flat. I'd studied this before. I've read about it, seen documentaries, and felt things from those activities, but here, confronted with it in the flesh, among young Rwandan students no less... this was their history right? Their families? None of them are untouched. My cohorts weren't untouched. I felt like I was somehow disrespectful for feeling... whelmed.

Now, I wasn't completely alone in this. A couple of my cohorts say they felt similarly. When we talked about it, they said maybe it was because we're desensitized to violence in the US, or maybe it wasn't personal enough? Or maybe we were just emotionally prepared for it. Maybe. That's probably the closest for me. The bones in the displays didn't have to belong to a loved one or friend to get my attention. If that was the case, I wouldn't have been moved by anything else, right? I probably wouldn't have gone on the trip to begin with. If the trip were to some other country in Africa, it probably wouldn't have caught my attention enough for me to actually follow through and go, so I did care, but I just wasn't overwhelmed there. I wasn't really sure what I was feeling. Jet lagged? Tired? Confused because the numbers on the map stopped corresponding to the exhibits once the tour moved outside? Fraudulent when we stood in line to put roses on the mass graves?

When we got back from the memorial, I knew I couldn't write about that. So I held off.

There is a vase at the end of the outside garden tour of the memorial. On it, the image of an elephant, an animal which never forgets, holding a cell phone so it can spread the message of reconciliation across the world.

The following day we went to the church, Nyamata, where 31 years ago a pastor brought his congregation into the building, promising them shelter from the genocide, only to lock them in and turn them over to the Interhamwe. Everyone who took shelter in that church was murdered.

Nyamata is in part a preservation site. Nothing has been altered about the building except to preserve the evidence of the massacre and to clear the bodies... only the bodies are still at Nyamata. In coffins on the floor. Coffins in mass graves outside. Some are accessible. You can walk down and see the piles of coffins resting in storage underground. Thirty bodies to a coffin. Some coffins are open, and you can see mess of skulls and femurs. In the church, where they have run out of room for coffins, they have set a row of blue buckets. No lids. Each one containing a pile of bones. The one closest to the entrance of the church, was less a bucket of bones and more a bucket of dust. If I wanted, I could have reached in and scooped it up with my hands. It's all that close to you, and still, I'm not feeling it. I could've been looking at sand there, but I knew I wasn't. In each bucket, each coffin, was thirty people. Each one a world unto themselves, but here they were just objects.

There were notes, written in Kinyrwanda by the families of the victims and stuck to some of the coffins. "I love you, forever!" Drawn hearts. Lots of drawn hearts. As we were leaving, we saw a funeral procession coming in 31 years late to bury their loved one, and a truck with more coffins in it. They're still finding bodies.

There's a building regulation now. If you want a building permit in Rwanda, you have to take necessary precautions to unearth any bodies that might be buried in the land, in a way that is respectful to the deceased.

Still, I felt surprisingly little. Even tempered. Like I was in my own little bubble of calm. Drifting through. Maybe there is a little detachment? Is this a defense mechanism or incidental? Neither answer leaves me totally satisfied. I feel like I should feel because I do care.

It really does feel like a thousand years ago that we were at Nyamata, but it was actually four days. We visited on the 6th. Today it's the 10th.

We drove to the Reconciliation Village a little while afterwards. Where survivors of the genocide live together with the perpetrators. Peacefully. Some with close friendships. This was the part of the itinerary I was initially most worried about, because I didn't know how I would feel about being around the killers. After my detachment at the two memorials, I actually felt more nervous about meeting the survivors. How phoney or gross I would feel by riding along in my nice bus into their village so that they could tell me about the worst experience of their lives and for me to not have anything to say.

As we approached the village, my heart sank because I realized there was another factor I hadn't considered. Much more terrifying and confrontational than any adult I might encounter during my controlled stay in Rwanda.

"Mzungo!" A little voice cried out as our bus approached the village.

Urukundo

Isabella said something very early in the trip, the first night maybe, about wanting to have children. She said she liked the idea of loving something so much, so unconditionally, that it makes the world make sense.

It gives life meaning, parenthood, for a lot of people. Without something to focus on, believe in or love, life is stripped to the act of existing. Falling into old age and then nothing at all. Thinking about it makes me crazy. It could lock me in my room and reduce everything I do to stupid habit or bare necessity. Eat the sandwich. Go to the bathroom. Go to bed. Wake up. You can’t sleep forever… yet. People need an anchor, a center of gravity to make it feel like they aren’t just falling. In Rwanda, in 1994, a lot of people found it in the form of petty, evil ethnic tribalism. That became their anchor. Love’s a great alternative.

I would like to have children someday too, mostly because I feel like I should. A million generations of microbes, animals and eventually people led up to me, so it almost seems like I’d be dropping the ball to not have kids, but that’s not the only reason. It’s like, my responsibility to the biosphere. In theory, I like kids. I like their energy, creativity, curiosity, unfetteredness and carelessness. In practice, they make me wildly uncomfortable for exactly those reasons. I try to ignore them as much as possible because I’m not really sure how to react to them and generally there isn’t a reason to interact with them anyway. When there is a reason, like if they approach me at work (I work in retail), I get the terrified sense that they’re judging something about me, and since they’re just a stupid kid they’ll shout it out, and it’ll definitely bother me and I won’t be able to do anything about it. Or maybe they’ll start making a mess in the aisle I’m cleaning up, or throw something at me or something, I don’t know, annoying. You obviously can’t physically stop them from doing anything, and you can’t really tell them to stop doing something either since they know you can’t physically do anything, and it’s culturally inappropriate to tell-off other people’s kids anyway. Then you’d have to deal with the parents too, and God help me I just want to be left alone.

Drew warned us in our first class that there would be curious, love filled children at Urukundo that would want to “hug us, sit in our laps, look at our phones, jump around and talk to us and ask us for money” and oh, oh God the horror! The horror! This isn’t the trip for me. I was at least hoping that our interactions would be controlled, and isolated to Urukundo, but no. They obviously had to live somewhere, and the Reconciliation Village was one of those places, and yes–– The thought of interacting with them put a much larger knot in my stomach than meeting a genocide perpetrator. The perpetrators were just old, spent human beings. The memorials were just museums and graveyards. Children are chaos incarnate and must be avoided at all cost.

“Mzungo! Mzungo!” (White person and/or foreigner. Non-Rwandan. Non-African.)

Crowds of them, CROWDS OF CHILDREN swarmed the bus as we drove through the village, with little smiles on their red dirt covered faces. The kids were dressed largely in western clothes, like t-shirts and shorts or pants or jeans. They looked second hand but I don’t think I should assume that they were. This is in contrast to the adults of the village, who dressed up in their best suits or traditional (or traditional looking, since I really don’t know what I’m talking about) tunics or dresses. When we made it to the village center, to hear the testimonies of the perpetrators and the victims, the children were kept out. Occasionally, they poked their heads in to take a look at us. I don’t believe this delegation has ever been to this village before. A horde of them had amassed outside by the time we were ready to leave, and they pounced on us the moment we walked out. One of them took me by the hand.

“What is your name?”

AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

“Cameron.”

“What?”

“Cameron.”

“OK.”

AAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

“Um… What’s your name?” I felt obligated to ask.

“Robert.” I made this name up now because I don’t remember what he said. I’m sorry.

“Oh. Well, nice to meet you.”

“Yes.” Short pause. “Give me money.”

“I–– I actually can’t do that.”

He let go of my hand and ran off to someone else. For a number of reasons, I was relieved. That was an interaction I could wrap my head around.

*****

The main reason of our trip, our work in Urukundo, had less to do with working with kids and more with teachers. The goal of the AFP Delegation was to bring Story-Based Learning to Rwanda, since it happened to coincide beautifully with the government’s Competency Based Curricular program. It’s an exchange. They get SBL training, we get to go to Africa. We were the 13th delegation, so at this point the teachers at Urukundo were already experts and we were there more to aid and observe as they trained teachers from other schools in Muhanga, a city in the Southern Province of Rwanda. For more information about Story Based Learning, purchase Story Building by Drew Kahn on Amazon using referral code: IPLUGGEDYOURBOOKINMYBLOGPLEASEGIVEMEEXTRACREDIT.

SBL, as I understand it, is mostly about getting the students to be present. Meeting them where they’re at and getting them to engage physically as a group to build trust, report, and connectivity amongst the group. Usually through group exercises that feel a bit silly at first but do, genuinely, work. They’re kind of like games, or theater exercises. We stand in a circle, breathe in, breathe out, hold hands, clap, jump and mimic each other. It gels pretty well with the village dances and practices that are already present in Africa, which before I kind of thought were antiquated stereotypes but are in fact, still very real, and probably informed SBL to begin with. There are a few prescribed activities, like Whoosh! That previous groups must’ve taught the Rwandans, but in the time since they’ve invented their own, like my personal favorite, Popiscop, which I’ll get to later. We would spend three days at Urukundo. Two with the teachers, and one touring the school, watching it operate on a normal school day… with children.

Day 1

We arrived at Urukundo, a large complex dominating the bulk of the hill. In Rwanda, a hill is essentially a neighborhood. The main entrance of the complex is near the hilltop, along with the pre-school classrooms. The higher the grade, the lower the classroom was on the hill. We entered a general assembly building, and spread out to try and sit amongst the teachers, who were mostly from other schools in the area. The headmaster welcomed us all, and opened with an SBL inspired presentation. A story, told physically, which I interpreted as the story of Rwanda. A group of people living peacefully, suddenly overcome by violence from within the group. Two of the actors attacked the other two, then a third group came in, stopped the violence, lifted up the victims, but invited the offenders back into the group. In the end, they held hands together. United once more as a single unit. The teachers were split into several groups, each one led by two Urukundo teachers familiar with SBL, and two students from our delegation. I was fortunately paired with Rusi, who speaks Kinyrwanda. (I should note that the official language of Rwanda is actually English, and the language of instruction at Urukundo is English and/or French. There’s a sign outside which reads: SPEAK ENGLISH OR FRENCH IN SCHOOL.)

Our goal for the day was to introduce the new teachers to SBL’s opening exercises, and create a three part story of our own with a central theme that the other groups would have to identify. Despite the language of instruction being English, most of the conversation was happening in Kinyrwanda, I would’ve been lost in the more abstract bits if it weren’t for Rusi, but I was familiar enough with most of the actual exercises to keep up. Until…

“Now, repeat after me…” the instructor began. “My hands are high!” He raised his hands. “My hands are low…” his hands were lowered. “And that is how…”

“And that is how…” we repeated.

“We popisco.”

“We popi–” what?

“Ohhh po-pi-sco! Ohhh po-pi-sco!” And the whole group marched around in a circle, chanting something which sounded vaguely English but also not.

I turned to Rusi. “What are they saying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they trying to say ‘pop a squat?’”

“No,” she smiled. “Just roll with it.”

“Ohhh po-pi-sco! Ohhh po-pi-sco!”

Pop a Scot? Like, hit a Scottish person?

(…)Lunch time. “Did you guys do that thing they made up? Popisco? Pop-a-squat? Do you have any idea what they’re saying?”

Most of my cohorts shrugged.

“I think it’s just nothing word. Like whoosh. Someone asked me what whoosh meant, and I just told them. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Oh, OK. I see.”

(…)Back in the classroom.

“Alright. We only have one hour…” Imagine him speaking in a Rwandan accent. I felt it’d be strange to try and write it as it sounds. “The story we were talking about before lunch, it needs something more. We’re going to add it.”

We had made a bare-bones story, about hard work and determination leading to success, but it was just a collage of ideas. What we were missing was a conflict, an inciting incident for the story and a reason for working hard. The group deliberated.

“What if we have an injury? Like a debilitating injury, and we have to work through it? Take little steps, then stumble, almost give up, but try again, with help from someone? Like a doctor or a physical therapist––”

“You’re talking too fast.”

“Oh, do I need to repeat?”

“No, they understand you, but you have to slow down.”

“OK.” I repeated, slower, per Rusi’s instructions. For her part, she also translated for me. “Then in the end, we’re able to walk again, and that’s success.”

The group deliberated. My idea was rejected. The conversation shifted fully to Kinyrwanda, and suddenly we were moving around.

“What are we doing?”

“Something about a bus crash. I don’t really like her idea, but it’s aight.”

Here they had completely abandoned English. I had to follow Rusi’s lead.

At the end of the hour, the Headmaster announced that it was time for all the groups to assemble outside, in a deceptively small dirt yard near the gate of Urukundo. Each group would present their story, then the others would guess that story’s central ideas. We resolved to go first. We went second.

I fell in with the group to create three lines. Two on the outside longer than the one in the middle, which had an additional man in front, who held his arms out in front of him and “vroooom”’ed. We vroomed along with him, and followed him in circles around the yard. We were a bus. The outside lines the vehicle itself, the inside its passengers. We drove round and round as buses do, but then a crash! All players fell to the ground. Those on the inside whined and screamed, lively victims of a horrible accident, while those of us on the outside laid still in the silence of objects. We were the bus itself. A mangled, ruined hull. Then the rest of our group, those on the periphery, moved in. They collected the wounded victims, carried them out of the imaginary wreckage, then started to pick us up–the walls and windows of the bus–and reassembled us. The bus was running again. We broke formation, and made another, much larger circle, and the Rwandans sang: “God is good all the time! God is good always!” (It took me by surprise just how deeply religious Rwandans are. I’ve always been an atheist, but for the sake of participated, I sang along through the discomfort. After visiting the memorials, and being in a group of people, some well over 30 who certainly remember the Genocide, it seemed weird that they’d really believe that God is good all the time.) We turned around, and faced the crowd. Our main Urukundo instructor addressed them.

“So! What do you think our story was about?”

“That God is good!” Someone shouted. Big laughs.

“Good guess!”

“Don’t drink and drive!” More big laughs.

Yes, Rusi. It was a bad example.

Day 2

If Day 1 at Urukundo was all about what SBL is, Day 2 was about how to implement it in the class room. SBL, as I said before, excels at meeting kids, especially younger kids, where they’re at and getting them engaged in the moment. Capturing their attention. Getting their bodies in motion and making them feel like they’re part of the group. I didn’t feel it’d be right to interject and tell professional teachers how to use SBL. In some subjects I wasn’t sure how it’d even be possible. SBL is pretty intuitive for a subject like History, but we were a bit stuck when it came to subjects detached from what you’d normally think of as storytelling. Something abstract, like math.

Besides Drew, there were two other professors in our delegation. Dr. S (Anita), and Dr. S (Gehan), who move between classrooms and observe us as we interacted with the Urukundo teachers.

“Can I interject?” said Gehan, the Mr. Dr. Senthinathan, whom I had noticed standing in the doorway for about a minute or two.

“Yes, of course.” Our Urukundo teacher stepped aside, and joined us in listening to Gehan.

“Now, I know that this can all get a bit weird with abstract subjects, like math, but it––”

“You’re going to have to speak slower.”

“Should I repeat?”

“No, they understand you, you’ve just got to speak slower.”

“Oh, OK. So… I know this can be weird with a subject like math…” And again, Rusi began to translate for him. Here, I am paraphrasing. “But it doesn’t have to be…” He writes out a number on the board… it’s pi! “Take pi,” He’d written 20 digits on the board. I only know up to the second 5. 3.14159265(…) “When I was learning this, I used to associate these numbers with basketball jerseys.” Big laughs. “See here? Lebron. And here? Kobe. And there’s a sing-song quality to it. You can ask a student, ‘what do you like?’ If it’s basketball, there you go! Or maybe it’s football? That works too.”

I learned those digits of pi from Night at the Museum 2, where the Einstein bobbleheads sing the numbers out. I’ll tell you, right there in that moment, Gehan was making a lot of sense. I think I have an example. I remembered a lesson I was taught in theater class, way back in the before times of 2019. The story of Dithyramb and associations with seasons. I turned to Rusi, who was sitting next to me.

“I think I’d like to present.”

“You should. What’re you going to do?”

“I––” I thought about it for a moment, and realized it would be culturally insensitive to use Greek mythology as an example to Protestant Africans with a colonial history. “Something about seasons maybe.”

“That’s good. It doesn’t have to be crazy. Last year we just did the… you know that thing with the water, and rain and evaporation?”

“The water cycle?”

“Yeah. We did the water cycle. You can just do that. Or seasons. Seasons is good.”

Well after Gehan was done, and had left the room, we were preparing to present our ideas to each other. We would role play as teachers, and everyone else would be students. Rusi grabbed the attention of the main Urukundo instructor.

“Cam says he wants to present.”

“Well, um… Yes. But I’d like to go second, just to see how the role playing works.”

“Alright, you will go second.”

We sat back down.

“Yeah, seasons. I think I’ll go with seasons.”

“Yeah. Again, it doesn’t have to be crazy.”

I don’t know. Something about seasons didn’t sit right. Gehan really made math work. I really want to show them something more advanced. Something more interesting than seasons. Anyone could talk about seasons.

The first presenter came in.

“Good morning class!”

“Good morning teacher!” Everyone shouted in unison. Oh God, they really meant it.

“Take a seat!”

We all sat down. Now, to be honest, I don’t remember a thing about what this guy was saying, or even if there was a lesson. I was too busy taking in the two way performance. One of the Rwandans raised their hands, and asked “Can I used the bathroom?”

“You may!”

And he LEFT THE ROOM!

“You! Take your seat! Behave!”

They were really acting like the pre-schoolers. Copying their little tones of voice and mannerisms, playing with their hair and periodically shoving each other or standing up. It was definitely funny, but there was the aching, sinking feeling. I was next.

I don’t want to do seasons, I thought. That’s too dumb. I remembered something from math class in the Fall semester. Math class was the example I wanted to see with SBL, and Gehan made it look so easy. I felt like I had to try and do something like that, to show that I was valuable in this exchange. I’d been mostly quiet and a weak link in the chain in our group. I couldn’t participate in our discussions, because I was nervous and didn’t know the language, but this was supposed to be an exchange, right? I couldn’t just do nothing? Or do the same things they were doing. Ideas starting coming in for what I was going to do. Wow, yes! That’s great! That’ll work! That’s genius!

The first lesson ended.

“So what do we think? What do we think of the lesson?”

Somebody raised their hand.

“Yes!”

“He did not take attendance, and he did not write the date on the board!”

“He did not control the class!”

I made a mental note to somehow incorporate these things into my performance. Then the talking stopped, and everyone was looking at me. I did not hear my name mentioned. I didn’t hear anything.

“Oh? I’m up next?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

For a moment, I didn’t move. Just looked around the room. All of my resolve had vanished. My voice and knees were unsteady.

“Alright.” I said. I swallowed, stood up, and walked to the doorway. Took my deep breaths. In and out. Good old, tried and true SBL technique for getting calm. It didn’t work. Oh, well. The sooner I start––

I walked into the room hoping for a sudden burst of confidence that never came. There, all twenty something Rwandans (and Rusi), all older, more experienced and serious looking educators stared at me. Thinking in another language, with a whole other cultural background and life experiences I couldn’t fathom. Here I was about to show them how to teach. And what was I about to teach them? Me and all my wisdom?

The Fibonacci Sequence. Numbers in Nature.

“H– Hi. Good morning, class.”

“Good morning teacher!” They said in unison.

“Good morning teacher,” said a stray.

“Um… it uh… looks like everyone is here.” Good move. Gets me out of taking attendance. Saves time. I walked over to the board, and wrote the date on the board. Checked my phone to make sure it was correct. It was. I turned back to them. “Alright, let’s make a circle.”

Everyone got up, and we made a circle. They were a lot quieter and less unruly with me, being polite and listening, but it also reminded me of my status as an outsider. They wouldn’t play around with me, not at first, because I’m not part of the group. Just a nervous western intruder. If Rusi were up here they might have been more playful, she was clearly more comfortable, maybe even at home amongst them.

“No,” I said. “This isn’t a circle. Let’s make a circle.”

We rounded out our square into a slightly rounder square.

“Good enough,” I cleared my throat. What am I doing? “So um… we’re going to play a little game… repeat after me.” I held for a moment, then stomped.

They stomped. I held, then stomped twice. They stomped twice. I stomped three times. They stomped three times. Then I changed it up––– I stomped five times. They stomped five times. Next was the tricky part. I stomped eight times, making sure I was correct by silently counting them out in pairs. I stomped eight times, and they stomped six.

“No. No, but close. Count with me…” I start over. “One.” Stomp. “Two.” Stomp. “One, two, three.” Stomp, stomp, stomp. “One, two, three, four, five!” Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp! “Did anyone notice what we did? Do we know what comes next?”

Silence, stares.

“We’re making a sequence. You add the two numbers before to get the next number in the sequence. One, then––” Oh. I suddenly realized I messed up my own lesson. The sequence should go one, one again, then two, then three, then five and so on and so forth, and once we got beyond eight, it would become untenable. “Um… let’s go over to the board.”

I walked over to the board, wrote out “Fibonacci Sequence: Numbers in Nature” and asked myself why? Why in the world didn’t I just do the water cycle?

“In nature, you’ll find patterns. Similar patterns, all around. Like on an acorn.” I drew an acorn, the example my professor had used in explaining Fibonacci, an object made up of a spiral of this pattern. One, one, two, three, five, eight… “You see?”

A whisper, “He is not including us.” I ignored it. How the hell am I supposed to include the class in lecture? I just want this to be over.

“In nature, there are patterns. Patterns which can identify. See?” I pointed to the board to make sure they understood. It didn’t look like they did. “But why is this helpful? Um…” It got me my math credit. “Um… so class is dismissed a little early today. Your homework is to practice your whooshes, and um, have fun I guess. Alright. Bye.” I stood still for a moment, waiting to see whether anything else would happen, realized it wouldn’t, then quickly walked back to my seat next to Rusi. They all clapped politely but unenthusiastically.

“You did great,” Rusi said.

“Oh my God, I thought I was going to die.”

Rusi laughed.

“I should’ve just done the water cycle.”

“Yeah. Yeah. They don’t know what an acorn is.”

“Christ––”

The main instructor from Urukundo got up and addressed us. “Now, I won’t comment on the lesson. I think the trouble, is that we do not know math––” Nice. “––but one thing I did appreciate, was the warm up with the stomps. Using that to introduce the lesson. Thank you. Let us all clap for Camlin again.” The Rwandans swap their r’s with l’s. A frequent source of confusion. Again, they clapped politely.

(…) “Guys, I think I’ve figured it out,” Gianna said at lunch. “I think they’re saying ‘popsicle.’”

“You think so?” asked Anita.

“Yeah, we have that song in the States. ‘My hands are high! My hands are low, and that is how I pop-si-cal!’”

“Oh, wow, that’s interesting.”

“Yeah…” I said, picking at my food. “I think I like it better as a nonsense word. Or Pop-a-Scot.”

“Tell them about Fibonacci,” Rusi laughed.

I’m a fraud. A bad candidate for this trip. Not only did I walk through their memorials and feel nothing, I actively try to avoid them and embarrass myself trying to show off how smart I think I am. I don’t want to dance. I don’t want to sing. I want to eat their food, drink banana beer and tell people I’ve been to Africa. What else am I really accomplishing? What else am I doing here?

Day 3

“Everyone, everyone…” We were riding on the bus, back to Urukundo for the third and final time. Drew was making a little announcement. “It is very important for us to be on time today. We are being greeted at the school’s morning assembly, and we will be given a tour. We’ll be going into classrooms, and seeing the teachers that you helped trained at work. Cameron––”

“Yes?”

“There will be many, many children.”

No.

“Yes. Many happy children.”

No!

“They’ll want to be near you––”

NO!

“They’re want to high-five you––”

STOP! KEEP ME AWAY!

“A brave few of them will want to hug you, and sit in your lap and talk to you.”

I shrunk in my seat. “Yes, wow, this sounds great.”

“So be ready. Later, we’ll be having lunch with the students––”

Sweet merciful––

“––And afterwards we’ll be sitting down with Mama, and she’ll tell us about her journey starting Urukundo. It’s a fascinating story.”

One which I won’t be getting too far into. “Mama” is the nickname of Arlene Brown, an American who came to Rwanda 2004 at the age of 65 and founded what would eventually become the Urukundo Learning Center. Nice woman. Super lively. Reminds me of my great-grandmother. For more details you can read her book, Hope Made Real. All the proceeds go directly to Urukundo, not her, and USD goes a long way in Rwanda. (https://hopemadereal.org/meet-mama-arlene)

We walked back into Urukundo, moved to a lower level of the hill than we had been to before, and there, sure enough, was a crowd of small uniformed students ready to cheer for us. And they cheered. Yes, they did. Cheered and waved.

“Oh. My. God. Look at them, they’re so cute!” Someone said.

“Yes, awesome.”

“Cameron, look out. Children.”

“Yes, I see.”

The assembly was pleasant. The Headmaster introduced us, Drew said some words, and one by one we all introduced ourselves to the students. Our names and majors. There was music and dancing and laughter. Urukundo radically different from any school I’ve been to in the US. Like I described earlier, it isn’t one building, rather an entire compound, with each grade level occupying one building in descending order down the hill. The buildings are kind of like motels or strip malls. One storey, each class its own room. There aren’t any hallways, that’s all outside. The kids stay in their room, and each period the teacher would move instead of the students. There are three breaks a day, where the children are allowed to go outside of their rooms and move apparently freely around the grounds of the school. During the first break, a little girl approached me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” I waved my hand. It looked like she wanted a high-five, so I gave her one. I was about to go say hi to another student, so many of them wanted to say hi and touch our hands, but she approached me again. She was clearly very shy.

“My– My friend said–– My friend said that you played in the movie Spider-Man.”

“… Spider-Man?”

“Yes. He said you are Spider-Man.”

Some other kids around me looked up to me in anticipation. I thought for a moment. Looked at their little uniforms. One boy’s collared shirt was torn up and dirty. “It’s true,” I said, and nodded. Their faces lit up and they started jumping around me.

“You’re him! You’re him! Spider-Man!”

“Yes. It’s true. I’m Spider-Man. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Spider-Man!”

I high-fived all of them, waved and made my way over to Alex.

“Alex… Alex!”

“What’s up?” She was distracted with a group of her own. I leaned in and whispered.

“They think I’m Spider-Man.”

“Oh my God, no way. That’s hilarious. I haven’t gotten one ‘Taylor Swift’ yet and they think you’re Spider-Man.”

“I know. I know. I’m a fraud. A menace. Damn, I should’ve told them it was a secret and I couldn’t tell anybody.”

“Too late now.”

Alex and I headed into one of the classrooms, incidentally the same room that little girl was in, the one that thought I was Spider-Man. I heard her whisper to her friend. “That’s Spider-Man.” “What? No way!” The teacher here was giving an English lesson. Alex and I observed, and were allowed to help correct their papers. They were completing sentences, but using British English rather than American, leading to variant spellings and word choices which I might’ve contested but chose not to. After the lesson ended I was a bit overwhelmed with all of the kids, so I made my up the steps to check out some of the administration buildings and the library. I told Gehan and Anita about my secret identity and got a good laugh. At lunch I noticed kids from that class looking at me and muttering to themselves.

We didn’t eat with the students per se, but on a dais in front of them in the mess hall. They didn’t serve meat at Urukundo, but I would assert that if the lunch they had was served every day they are being fed better than American public school students. Fresh sweet potatoes, rice, beans, vegetables and water. If one of my cohort took a picture, you’ll see that it’s a lot better than it sounds.

We talked about what we had seen there at the school, exchanged stories about our interactions with the kids. Haran was a magnet for them. So many of them swarmed Isabella that she fell to the ground. I told them my Spider-Man story, and how I was impressed with their English. Some of the content of their courses are surprisingly advanced. One group said that they were learning about sexual health quite early, way before puberty, unlike how or when it’s usually taught in the States. Maybe this has something to do with the CBC, Competency Based Curriculum, or maybe it’s just a cultural thing that these things are taught earlier. It seems practical. Not abstract. What they learn seems immediately relevant to the world around them. You need to know this, so we’re going to teach you now. They’re treated like kids, but being prepared for a real adulthood in a real world. I always felt that school in America was utterly removed from the realities of my own day-to-day life.

After lunch we had our visit with Mama at her home near the top of the compound, then we left Urukundo for the last time.

*****

This entry is getting pretty long now so I’m getting ready to wrap it up. I’d like to bring everything back to what Isabella said earlier, about children and love and finding purpose and all that. That’s what got me thinking about my relationship to some of these events on the trip. My flatness at the memorials, and my fear of children. I think I’ve figured it out.

At home I live a very predictable, stagnant lifestyle. I go to work, I go to school, I go home and I spend time with myself. I might watch movies, I might read, I might write, but all of this is time alone. I am a social person, but I prefer controlled sort of interactions with people that I want to talk to. It’s kind of learned, I suppose. When I was a kid, past a certain point, I stopped talking to the kids on my block because I really just didn’t like or get along with them. I turned to things that were more comfortable, like video games, movies, writing, etc. If I had a social interaction it would be through my electronics or at school, where again, I have a good amount of control over the interaction, but life doesn’t work like that. Life is chaotic and messy and not controllable. Trying to impose so much external order leads to isolation, like a social death. You’re not living, you’re just existing, living vicariously through mediums, but what are these mediums but death? Or echoes, ideas of people who lived before me? Going to the memorials for me wasn’t challenging because I was familiar with it. I knew what I was going to see and what I saw wouldn’t jump out at me, but life is what I’m actually afraid of. Living and running and leaving my comfort zone, and possibly failing. Children are like little avatars of life. They’re full of it, and they terrify me, because they’re open, unhinged and, I guess, loving. There’s such a positive atmosphere at Urukundo and in the Reconciliation Village, and even in our preparatory class for this trip that I’m really not used to. I’m not used to holding hands or hugging or dancing around. I’m used to ruminating and masking what I feel with sardonic humor, and just being on edge around my peers. Living people are way, way scarier than ghosts. I’m afraid of life. I’m kind of afraid of love too. It amazes me how a country with such a recent memory of genocide are this open with each other and Mzungo’s like me, that they’d even want to high-five or shake my hand.

An interesting thing about stories, since Story-Based Learning is the point of the trip, is how they end. Italo Calvino concludes his book, If on a winter’s night a traveler (thank you Dr. T), with an observation that all stories end either in tragedy, death, in which the story ends definitively, or happily. A happy ending, really, is life perpetuated. Not happy ever after, but happy for now that life keeps on going. You keep going and you try to keep it happy, and very often, the root of this “happiness” is love. Something you sometimes have to choose consciously to practice, not recoil from. When you’re looking for meaning in life, no matter what it is tangentially, love is generally what you’re feeling for that externality. You love the thing that keeps you going, or it wouldn’t be keeping you going. I worded this a lot better the night that we were reflecting all this, our visits to the memorials, and our work at Urukundo, as a group. But I think “love” could be the central theme of the trip–– Whatever I even mean when I say that.

Incidentally, Urukundo, in Kinyrwanda, means–––

Azizi Life

It’s been about three weeks since returning to Buffalo. I haven’t added very much to my blog in that time. Things pile up, and I’m getting reacclimated to my routine, which now, sitting down, puts into perspective just how busy I was in Rwanda and just how not busy I am here. Since coming back, I wrote my first post-hoc blog entry, Urukundo, and finished writing a script for my friend that I had been working on for several months before leaving. After that, I sort of crashed. Right now I’m unemployed and only passively looking for a job. I’m pursuing an internship, trying to get my inspection done on my car, seeing my friends when possible, and considering what my next project will be. Should I use the time before next semester to write something new? Or should I break out something I’ve written a while ago and edit that? Not really sure. I haven’t been in much of a mood to write, and have spent most of my free time reading Silence of the Lambs and buying Werner Herzog movies that I could easily have watched on Amazon with my subscription. In truth, even when I was employed, and even when I was actively writing, I wasn’t that busy. My day-to-day life in Buffalo, NY USA is excruciatingly dull, and often sends me into a sort of spiral. It probably makes me sound stupid or spoiled lazy. I was looking forward to returning home by the end of our trip. I missed the independence. Driving myself around instead of being shuttled everywhere, cooking my own food… that’s what I missed most, even though the food we were eating was objectively better. One thing I’ve noticed, after finishing the bag of coffee I brought home from Rwanda, I bought my usual go-to coffee, the Wegman’s House Blend, and couldn’t finish more than half a cup. Not only did it not taste anywhere near as good as the “Gorilla Coffee”, it almost immediately gave me a stomach-ache. I had that stomach ache for until probably last Friday.

Fortunately I didn’t have any of these problems in Rwanda. I didn’t get sick, the food was pretty good, and I absolutely didn’t have time to be bored or panic too much about the present or future. The schedule was so packed that everything had to be dealt with matter-of-fact, kind of like work, I suppose, and it did not change dramatically between the hotels. Get up at this time, and go do this until then. For this entry, I’d like to get into the routine of our delegation, or at least my routine, and then close with an account of our Azizi Life visit, where we lived a “day-in-the-life” of a rural Rwandan villager.

Days started early, and we typically planned to be on the bus by 8am. I’d set my phone alarm for 6, usually wake up a little beforehand, check the US news and respond to some texts and then get ready for the day. Before the trip it was really hammered home that we should not drink the water in Rwanda, and that there were no luxury showers due to supply at each hotel and a cycling system around the country. The way I understand it, sometimes a province might not get running water or electricity because it is needed elsewhere, so the first day, I showered and washed my hands out of a water bottle. I was told later on that this was unnecessary. Being one of the only three male students on the trip, I had a room to myself and didn’t have to worry about running out of warm water, but still I assumed that the hotel had some sort of common water source, so I took “military showers” anyway everywhere except for the hotel at Akagera.

After I got ready and dressed, I gathered what I thought I would need for the day and head over to get breakfast, by this time it would normally be around 6:30 or 6:45. The only people I really ever saw up this early were Professor Kahn, Riva, and occasionally Isabella. I would sit by whoever was there, grab some fruit and black coffee, maybe a crape if they were available, and ate with them. I opted for a light breakfast after the first couple days where I was determined to try at least a bite of everything. A lot of people preferred the African Tea, which was very milky and gingery and kind of reminded me of cream-of-wheat, but I still preferred my coffee. Black, no cream, no sugar. Usually there was a very tasty fruit juice, actually a bit closer to a smoothie, that was available. I liked that too. The morning conversations, or the conversations with my cohort in general, were my favorite parts of the trip. I liked hearing what people had to say about we were doing, hearing about what they had going on back home, or just talking about literally anything. If I was having breakfast with Riva, we would normally talk about how inept I was at something, like cooking rice. If Isabella was there, usually we would talk about the trip or our academics, and if Professor Kahn was there, we would ask him about academics, usually free academic advice, the theater, or just questions about the AFP. Bless his heart, he would very often find some way to introduce me to some new Yiddish word.

“Do you know what a mashugana is?”

“No. What is it?”

“It’s you,” he would say and point. “A troublemaker, or trickster.”

“What? Why? What do I do?!”

“I’m just messing with you.”

Later on I googled it. For all intents and purposes, “mashugana” doesn’t mean trickster so much as “crazy nonsense person.”

“How am I a crazy nonsense person? What do I do?!”

“Wow, Cameron, you are such a mashugana,” Riva might say.

It actually really drove me crazy. I’m up early, I’m no nonsense, I’m a good kid. I’m not a mashugana. A crazy nonsense person.

“But Fibonacci!”

Stop it! I just want to eat my breakfast in peace.

“Wow, you cook rice very wrong. I’m going to get you a rice cooker.”

Riva did get me a rice cooker for my birthday afterwards. It was very nice of her.

I would like to remind everyone that the plan was usually to get on the bus at 8 or 9, and one of the village rules emphasized punctuality, but we normally left later. I don’t think I would see everybody until 8am on the dot, and at that point most people had only just plated their breakfast. I guess they would eat in a hurry. Shortly thereafter, everyone was on the bus and we were off to do whatever it was we were going to do for the day. While itinerary was packed, we were usually done with the main thing by 3pm, and the time afterwards was either downtime until dinner, or driving to some new location. For a country so small we spent what I felt was a surprising amount of time on the bus. Granted, we were bussing all over the country. Kigali is more or less in the middle of the country. The Urukundo Learning Center in Muhanga is about an hour and a half south, while the two other big locations we went to, Akagera and Nyungwe, are on two opposite borders; Tanzania and the Congo, respectively.

Even though we were usually done by 3, what we were doing was usually mentally or physically taxing. Sometimes both, as was the case at Urukundo where we were jumping around and singing and trying to match the energy of children. We did a canopy walk in the jungle at Nyungwe, which was a nice stroll on the way in, but an exhausting mess on the way out. I’m out of shape, used to a sedentary lifestyle where the most straining thing I do might genuinely be getting up out of bed in the morning, so uphill climbing in a country with a massive altitude differential felt like it was going to kill me. I was usually so winded by the end of our adventures that I was in absolutely no mood to blog and simply wanted to read or hangout by the pool. Splendid had a nice pool, and here I liked to sit and talk with the rest of my cohort until it was time for dinner at 6 or 7pm, when the sun went down. Everybody was awake at this point, but most of the students were more responsible than me and chose to actually write their blogs. I chose to talk for as long as possible and put off writing my blog until after the last possible minute. I couldn’t connect to the internet most of the time to send my blog to Jonise anyway, and wasn’t really keen on thinking at that point in the day. I hate afternoons. Always have. It’s when expectations for work seems to be the highest and any opportunity to stop is furthest away. The sun is hottest and I’m the most anxious, and the most tired. I usually sharpen up again sometime after dinner, so in the meantime I talked to whoever wandered over, be it another student, Jonise, the Doctors S, or one of the hotel staff or perhaps one of our tour guides, like Ivan. I don’t think I ever saw Professor Kahn at this point in the day. If he was there for these kinds of conversations, I would understand him calling me a mashugana.

By 6 the sun was down, we gathered for dinner, and my social battery had also completely drained. I was consistently irritable and quiet at dinner time and just wanted to be alone for the rest of the night. Everyone’s voice started to wear on me, even if I liked them or would have otherwise wanted to talk to them. Later in the trip I did feel that there was an undercurrent of all of us being kind of sick of each other, but it never boiled over and as far as I know there were no real problems between everyone. We were just too together, too much. If I didn’t have a room to myself I probably would’ve lost it with somebody. I just wanted to get away, but sometimes dinner would seem to last forever, or sometimes we would be eating out at a restaurant, where we were stuck and usually after a long drive and everyone was especially irritable, and there would always be an announcement, about how well we performed during that day and what the expectations were for the tomorrow, what time to be up and all that. Once that was done, I could quickly excuse myself and get ready for bed. I’d read a little bit more of my book if I felt up to it, normally I did not. I would close my mosquito net, and go to bed.

We were warned that a side effect of the malaria pills was strange dreams. In Rwanda I didn’t dream at all. But last night…

I am sitting at the poolside at Splendid Hotel, with a number of the usual suspects. Notably Dr. S and Dr. S, as they are important characters in the dream. Often we would try new alcohol together, I don’t care much to emphasize this as it is not really in the spirit of the trip, but I felt it to be an interesting part of the international experience. What might they have in Rwanda that we don’t? Or perhaps, that I’m not used to? Example: their Fantas are leagues better. You may be able to buy a Mexican Fanta here in the states that approximates it, but they have a factory in Rwanda. My favorite is the lime, which they always had, but never seemed to understand when I asked for lime. In this dream, we were drinking Guinness. At Splendid, they had Foreign Extra Stout, which I saw at consumers recently. It has a slightly different flavor to it from the Guinness I’m used to. In the dream, we have this. Both Doctors S are there, and so is Alex. Mr. Dr. S is explaining to us how he is celebrating his 104th birthday.

“104? You look great!”

“Thanks, yeah. Cryogenics.”

“What?”

“We’re actually both 104 this year.”

“That’s insane.”

“We’re the first Canadian couple to go into space. We were cryogenically frozen in 1974. We started teaching at Wholedale after we thawed out.” Don’t ask me why, but that was the name of the university in my dream.

“Wow, that’s so interesting.”

“Dr. S is so cool,” Alex said.

The last three weeks of staring at pages and screens in my house have turned by brain into a demented mush. I am become mashugana. The silly, the foolish, the nonsense-man… So I decided it was time to update my blog, and Azizi Life seemed to be the appropriate anchor.

While we got a taste of a typical Rwandan villager’s day-to-day life, it comes in such a structured and limited framework that I don’t think I could really ever know what it’s like to live in that setting based on that experience. I only know enough to say that life is different for us in the states. Rural Rwanda definitely conforms to the Western stereotypes of what Africa “looks like”, but even within the village there are clues to things that break from those stereotypes. The villagers do live in houses and huts made out of what looks like dirt and mud with wooden frames, but I noticed that some of these houses have electrical outlets. They do have cows and chickens and pigs and what not, and beans grow on vines which overgrow their entire enclosed yard, but they also have a fountain. Running water. I think it operates by crank. One of my cohort (I don’t remember who) asked why they still had to fetch water from a pipe way downhill on the other side of the valley when they had a fountain at their house, and supposedly they answered that they use the fountain for washing. The village seems isolated, like it comes out of another century. It’s bizarre to imagine that some of them might have phones or outlets in their house, but some of them do and some of them apparently asked Rusi what the deal was with “that guy Donald Trump”, so they are still apart of our world despite these differences, but still, their day is packed with chores that most people in the West don’t have to do or think about. The things that drive me crazy at home are luxuries, but in such excess it feels like I’m stuck in solitary confinement, but a confinement borne of excess of directions, unforeseen roadblocks and my own inability to make decisions and the fear of committing to any one particular thing in front of me, because I know there’s something better, and have this delusion that those “better” things could become available to me if I’m patient and ambitious enough. In a lot of ways, village life is busier, but it’s also simpler. I guess. I can’t imagine the villagers we met feel ennui very often, but even that is an assumption I shouldn’t make. Many of the Rwandans I spoke to at the hotels, Urukundo, the tour guides, are students of prestigious Universities here in America, and have ambitions of moving. We’ve all got our little boulders to push, and they’re rarely romantic to us.

So yeah, we arrived at Azizi Life after a car ride that I felt was too short. I wasn’t really looking forward to this part of the trip, cause I imagined I’d just be making a spectacle of myself as an inept, out-of-shape American suburbanite, and I would have preferred not to. Also, similarly to Urukundo, it felt kind of weird to make an event out of going to these people’s homes simply to experience the life of a villager. It seems condescending to me. If somebody came to my house to experience the laborious life of Cameron Vitagliano and took selfies while performing very simple tasks, I would feel kind of weird about it. However, if they were also paying me for it, I would probably welcome it, with a smile on my face, cynically thinking that I was getting the better part of the exchange. It was another one of those moments where I wondered why exactly I even signed up for this, since I seemed to be a bad candidate for essentially the whole itinerary.

The Azizi Life villagers were very welcoming to us. I was put at ease very early on in the experience and did not detect that layer of cynicism on the surface. Like a lot of things, this could have been in my head.

We were led downhill through dirt roads and uneven stumps, through the village and past some more dreaded children and into the back entrance of a little house with a small enclosed yard. A small family lived there, and we were greeted by its matriarch. We were a little late from what I remember, so I think we skipped the welcome dance. We were led into the house and into the main room which had been cleared out for us. Benches were set up for us to sit, as we did, more villagers poured in––Maybe I was mistaken? Maybe there was a welcome dance. At any rate, we introduced ourselves by name and major and the villagers introduced themselves as well, they dressed us in their traditional tunics and gave us the day’s schedule. We were going to make lunch.

1. Peel and wash the potatoes. Easy.

2. Till the fields. (The farms are tilled into the hillside, not flat. No fun.)

3. Fetch water. (From across the valley as I described.)

4. Eat lunch.

5. Weaving.

6. Goodbye dance.

Peeling and washing the potatoes was easy enough and hardly worth mentioning––but I will. There was a shortage of proper potato peelers, so some of us (me) made due with kitchen knives, or the blades of kitchen knives, and tossed the peeled sweet potatoes into buckets of water from the pump. Yes, we still went and fetched water later. These sweet potatoes didn’t look very much like the sweet potatoes we have at home, rather they looked like large but otherwise normal potatoes with maybe a light orange tint, a lot like the potatoes we had at Urukundo.

Peeling didn’t take very long. When that was done we washed the potatoes, then our hands, and explored the house and got a good look at the animals. I saw the skinniest cow I had ever seen in my life, you could see the bone structure very clearly, that large hump and the ribs of the cow, but I noticed the eyes––At the milk bar downtown we were told that to say “You have eyes like a cow” is a romantic compliment––it did have pretty eyes. In a separate pen off to the side were a family of pigs, piglets suckling at their mother’s teets, and a juvenile kept in his own pen off to the side, presumably so he didn’t outcompete the others at feeding time.

Hoes were then distributed, and we walked a short distance to the field and told to till a section which, in my opinion, definitely had been tilled a day or two before we got there. The soil was soft and easy to move, though a little awkward as we moved uphill, and we kind of overlapped with each other. Towards the top were some left over leaves or stalks or dead plant bits or whatever that I wasn’t sure what to do with, and some large rocks that were also surprisingly easy to break apart, though I probably wasn’t supposed to. I think we finished this task a bit more quickly than they had expected, because they improvised another activity for us a little downhill which I didn’t really understand. We exchanged our hoes for some really, really small scythes and told to cut grass in clusters, or maybe weed? I felt it was a little unclear, but just nodded in agreement and did what I saw everyone else doing, which was looking busier than I imagine they actually were. I picked out what looked like weeds along the side of the field, between the tilled soil and the dirt path, and cut the weeds out. Apparently some of the villagers thought this was funny.

“Why are you doing it one at a time like that?” Riva asked me.

“I don’t know, I thought we were weeding?”

“But you’re doing it one at a time?”

“Yeah cause that’s not a weed, what do you want to do?”

“Grab like a handful.”

“Are we weeding or cutting the grass?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. I don’t know what’s going on.”

I turned in my little scythe, and took back my hoe. They had pointed out another patch of dirt to move around.

“This is like, really easy,” I’m pretty sure I told to Alex. I hadn’t broken much of a sweat yet. The sky was nice and overcast and it was quite comfortable. “I think they already worked this area…”

“Oh yeah, definitely.”

It was definitely tilled before us, I think. Either that or they crop cycle and the soil remains relatively soft between usage? I’m not really an expert in farming, but the activities so far felt short and not very challenging. Alex did point out though, that they probably didn’t do these things in such large groups and in brief one hour spurts the way we were. We’d be leaving the village at 3pm. They probably do the work until it’s done or the sun goes down. Azizi life was probably not az-easy to do every single day.

We headed back to the house, exchanged our hoes again, this time for jugs, and started walking to the water pipe on the other side of the valley. The sun was out now, and shining down on us. We passed some goats. The mother’s were tied to stakes so as not to run away, while the kids stayed near their mothers.

Filling the water jugs took up the most time. There were so many of us, so many jugs to fill up, and the water pipe which the village may or may not have been relying on poured a steady stream of water equivalent to the leak in my faucet at home. It took maybe three minutes per gallon jug. In the mean time, we sat in the sun and chatted.

Lunch was ready when we got back. Potatoes boiled, beans and that green spinachy stuff that is not, in fact, spinach. It was delicious. Best potato I ever had in my life, but of course, to eat it every day–––

The last thing we did at Azizi Life, that is, the last thing we did before the goodbye dance, was bracelet weaving. They showed us first where they got the material, a large leaf which they hacked and stripped away at with a machete, the result of which was a white, sturdy string, which they would then soak in a dye of their choice. In their example, they soaked it in blue. We paired up with a villager, picked out two colors of string, and followed their lead in weaving together a bracelet.

I was absolutely hopeless. I wasn’t sure when to take over from my instructor, whom I don’t believe spoke English, and I wasn’t nailing the pattern. I would start it, make my attempt, but then inevitably make my mistake and she would take my hands, and the string, back track and correct it. When I moved to try for myself, she kept trying to take my hand again, either to guide me or correct it but it was getting really annoying, since I couldn’t really even make a true attempt to begin with. I laughed about it a little to keep myself from actually getting irritated. I would’ve liked to just stop weaving the bracelet altogether.

“This is like doing Math homework with my dad,” I said.

I tried again, and again I messed up the pattern.

“Jonise?”

“Yes?”

“I’m starting to lose it.”

“We all have our talents.”

“Sure.”

A few more botched attempts later, and I stopped cutting in to attempt to weave the bracelet. I kind of let the instructor complete it while awkwardly finding ways to look like I was having a decent time. I always mispronounced “thank you”, to the point where I was saying something different, and couldn’t really communicate with the villagers directly, but I didn’t want to look unpleasant so I tried to joke around and chat with my peers and say “thank you, thank you” anyway and talk with the tour guide a little bit. When the bracelet was finished it fit alright but it was hard to take on and off and was pretty itchy and uncomfortable. I’m not really sure what I’ll end up doing with it. I don’t need or want a memento of the time I failed at weaving a bracelet in Rwanda. It does remind me of doing homework with my dad, or dealing with an exasperated teacher. I hate being reminded of that. I said thank you anyway, a few times.

It’s rough looking back at most of this trip because I wish I could frame it as though I was having a better time, but really I felt clumsy and out of place during a lot of it. Kind of like the SBL presentation back at Urukundo. Totally out of my element and alien, but the environment was at least friendly as far as I could tell. Some kids came over while we were “working” and looked at us. When everyone was done with their bracelets we started getting ready to go. We returned our tunics and/ or dresses, and the villagers started their goodbye dance, which led back into the house. They pulled some of us in, again, frightening at first but as long as you move and try to dance a long it’s more fun than it is embarrassing. It’s worse to simply refuse to dance, so I danced along as well as I could.

Our dance was way worse.

Unlike with the Reconciliation Village, here we had a dance of our own kind of prepared to show to them. I guess it would have been rude to take a dance from them and not give one of our own, but when I say “kind of prepared” I mean that we practiced it one time on our last in-class meeting before the trip. We did the Cupid Shuffle. You know? Down down do your dance? To the right to the right to the left to the left––– We did that at my prom and somehow everybody knew how to do that so fluidly. Where to people learn this stuff? I survived by watching the person in front of me or next to me, depending on where we were with it, we danced along to music from Drew or Jonise’s phone as the villagers watched. What fun, then finally, the dance was over.

We made our way back to the main road and waited for the bus to meet us, it was parked a little ways down the road. While we waited, we tried a few times to take a group photo in front of one of Rwanda’s breathtaking hilltop views. Some students from a nearby school were just getting out and wanted to wave and talk and take pictures with us, but we were starting to run the clock and were hurried–not so hurried–back to the bus.

So that is the story of our Azizi Life trip. Considering we got there at 10am and left at about 4pm, it didn’t feel like we spent the whole day there. The chores were actually pretty light and manageable, not the overwhelming drudgery I might’ve expected, but still, this was probably not the best representation of what village like is “really like.” We all left at 4. We went back to a nice hotel.

Could I imagine getting up every morning and having to do everything we did that day every day? No. Could I imagine doing all of that every day without my creature comforts at home? No. I like my morning coffee. I like my meal variety. I like not mowing the lawn in handfuls, if that was what we were supposed to be doing. Occasionally, once in a blue moon, I like sitting down and writing. I like reading and having lights in my house, but I also like the closeness I saw in their community. A dozen villagers crammed into the house to meet us, and most of them didn’t live there. Everyone seemed close, it would probably have been odd to encounter a real stranger in the village. I don’t know the names of my neighbors here. I’ve exchanged maybe two words with the family living on either side of me in the past year. Through quirk of fate, I live in a reasonably large house now by myself. I don’t own it, I can’t do whatever I want with it, but it’s a home and it’s a lot more than many of my peers have, even if I’m envious of them in other areas. Maybe it’s a tacky to boil this whole blog down to some cheap comparison between my life here in the states to the sliver of life I saw through Azizi, but I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to take away from that experience. Be grateful? I suppose. I could be less ennui if I tried and counted the things I like about my living situation, rather than seeing all of the areas in which I feel I’m lacking. What I really hate is the monotony. The sameness every day and not knowing what to do next or how to get out of it, but that in itself is enviable for people. A lot of people here in the US would like to feel bored for a minute, and overwhelmed by options, never mind Rwanda… a place most Americans don’t get to visit even if they wanted to.

Maybe I could calm down a little bit.

Mille Collines

While the first week of our trip was packed with emotionally heavy visits to memorial sites and the Reconciliation Village, or physically demanding tasks such as our work at Urukundo (yes, I consider SBL to be physically demanding), the second week of our trip focused a little more on recreation, without completely abandoning the overall “mission” or tempo of the trip.

We did visit another village, where we made signs for an early elementary school classroom and brought school supplies, and our trip to Azizi Life was in the latter half of the trip, but we also did the canopy walk through the jungle and the Safari. Ironically, the canopy walk and Safari were probably the most difficult days, for reasons I described in the previous blog, but the Safari was rough because we woke up the earliest for the best chance of viewing the animals, and also stayed up the longest. I want to say we got on the jeeps––sorry, the Toyota Land Cruisers––at 6am, and the Safari lasted until 4pm, when we drove from the park to the restaurant in Kigali for dinner 4 hours away, add two because of dense traffic. On Safari we saw baboons (lots of baboons), some rhinos (from way off in the distance), a variety of birds, one which resembled Zazoo from The Lion King, Zebras, two lions, hippos and some young crocodile, and an awful lot of impala (antelope). Impalas are fiercely competitive when it comes to mating. They’ll challenge each other, staring off in showdowns, or fight with their horns. The winner of these confrontations will travel around with a large haram of female impalas while the loser will saunter off to join the pack of other loser males (I have a Chevy Impala here at home and I would consider it a loser). There was another animal, maybe another type of antelope whose name I didn’t catch from the tour guide. It resembled an impala but it was more muscular, and would stand in the open for hours at a time like a statue. We drove by the same one a few times, and there it stood in the exact same position, with a hide so dark that it seemed to cast a shadow on itself despite standing in direct sunlight. It looked kind of like Satan.

The Safari was cool but also tiring. We were cramped in the car all day, and then sat down for dinner at 9pm, at which point all I wanted to do was go back to the hotel and sleep. Here we were probably at our worst. Some of us were motion sick from the car, all of us were tired, many I assume, were home sick, but we stuck it out because this happened to be Father’s Day, and we had a gift that we planned to present to Drew there at the dinner. Drew’s birthday, I believe, fell on the day just before we started our trip to Rwanda.

The last two days of the trip were spent shopping. At the hotel in Akagera there was a group of authentic African dancers that put on a show during dinner. They stomped, they danced, they played the drums and at some point broke out this big, black horn, which produced the most incredible, bone chilling, predatory, the owl’s are not what they seem type sound I’d ever heard.

I had to get that horn.

Later I learned it was called an Ikondera, and it became my mission to find that when we went to the market in Kigali, but everyone I asked about it seemed confused. Maybe I wasn’t using the right word, and I got some conflicting information about that, but at the very least people understood that I was looking for a horn, but most shops had hollow animal horns as pieces of decoration, not musical instruments. Eventually I was able to find a wooden version of the Ikondera. It had a large hole at the base with a small indent. One would cover the larger hole with their chin and blow into the small indent to produce a sound, which would come out of three holes at the lower side of the instrument, which could be covered to make different notes. The bottom of the horn had no hole. It resembled a fat, close ended wooden flute. Resigning my search for the animal horn Ikondera, I decided to buy the wooden one.

Another mission I had was to procure some “banana beer,” or urwagwa, which I read about years ago in the opening chapters of Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man. More than just an interesting, Rwanda specific drink that I could never find in the states, there is a cultural significance to the drink that I think connects to the trip’s themes of reconciliation. Supposedly, if there was some sort of conflict in the village, the villagers would hold “Justice on the Grass”, in which the aggrieved parties would meet before the elders under the shade of a tree and make their cases. The village elders would reach a decision on how the conflict would be resolved, and the two aggrieved men would share a banana beer as a show of good faith and renewed friendship. Reconciliation. It’s so emblematic of the central theme of the trip, and so oddly central to old Rwandan culture and the culture they’ve had to embrace in the wake of 1994 in order to rebuild their country, that it almost feels like it’s out of a work of fiction. I thought it would be a great little memento, and to be honest, since reading about it I always wanted to try it, even though I was warned many times that it would be gross.

Banana Beer is not beer, and many of the locals made sure to let me know that. This might be a more recent thing, maybe so many westerners have asked for it and complained about it, but many of the locals would say, “Oh, Banana Wine?” But it isn’t really wine either, at least, not the home brewed stuff that you might get from a bar or one of the hotels, which was served out of a white jug that I absolutely would not have been able to take with me on a plane. Drew would describe it more as a liqueur. This home brew stuff is probably on a par with liquor in alcoholic content. It feels like 80 proof, but it’s served in a wine glass. It’s kind of a dark grey color, milky and you can sometimes see little banana seeds floating around in it. It’s thick, and tastes like a bitter, browning banana with notes of chocolate that seem to come out of nowhere, since as far as I know, there is no chocolate. This banana wine was also a tough find at the markets, for whatever reason, but our guide from GEI, Françoise, was able to bring us to a Catholic monastery which brews fine banana wine, much better than the stuff I was able to get at the restaurant. Much more palatable to westerners, but still very sweet for my taste. I bought three bottles, two for gifts, and one to share with my friends.

I have to thank Françoise two more times, since she was able to get the ikondera for me, and helped me with one more Rwanda bucket list item, albeit incidentally. Our last meal in Rwanda, on the day we were scheduled to fly out, we were supposed to have brunch at Java Kigali Height, but had to cancel because it looked like it would be too busy. Françoise quickly rescheduled, for brunch at the Hotel des Mille Collines.

Hotel des Mille Collines was the real life hotel which inspired the film, Hotel Rwanda, which I saw back in 2015 as a Sophomore in High School. It was that unit where I first learned about Rwanda, and the 1994 genocide, and it’s through the lens of Paul Rusesabagina, the lead character of the film, that I learned what I knew about Rwanda prior to joining the AFP Delegation. Regardless of how true or untrue the story really is, I wouldn’t have gone to Rwanda if I hadn’t seen the film or felt some kind of connection to it. When they showed the AFP slide at Buff State’s Orientation, I probably would’ve thought, “Oh, that’s neat, I guess,” and then never thought about pursuing it. It’s because of the film that I bought An Ordinary Man, and it’s because of An Ordinary Man that I thought that I might, maybe, like to visit Rwanda some day. So I thought it was pretty cool to visit.

It doesn’t look very much like the hotel in the film. It stands at about six stories, an L shaped building on the side of a hill (like most buildings in Kigali), with a great view of the rest of the city. From the outside it doesn’t look all that special, given that it was built in the 70s and much of Kigali has been developed much more recently. There’s an “M” Hotel down the street which looks a lot more impressive, and perhaps a dozen others, but when you go inside the Mille Collines still projects opulence. It used to be a central hub for the Rwandan elite and government officials, a venue for big business conferences and diplomats–– but not so much anymore. Now, according to our guide Ivan, it is most popular as a medium-high end luxury hotel and brunch spot for local business men. We walked through the lobby, down the stairs to the lower ground floor which was not accessible from the main entrance because of the hill’s incline, and out to the back, towards the restaurant separated from the pool area by a bungalow roofed bar (at least, that’s how I would describe it.) A man working there, who guided us to the roofed patio of the restaurant, bore an uncanny resemblance to Don Cheadle, the star of the Hotel Rwanda film.

Lunch was excellent, maybe the best meal I had in Rwanda, particularly the peanut sauce on the chicken. The rest of the meal was pretty similar to what we’d been having every day, but I felt the quality was a bit higher and there were a few extra morsels to snack on. Great desserts too. All great. Everything was great, except for my mood. I was pretty much over everyone’s company, anxious to get on the plane, anxious about the 17 hour flight ahead of me and hoping to get back to writing, not really in the mood to write the blog yet, unsure of how to frame or tackle certain things and how not to tackle others, and I made the dumb decision to write it in this long prose like I was writing a novel, which didn’t help when I sat down to work on it during the trip. I was pretty annoyed with Professor Kahn, and really just in the mood to be alone. I was sick of being on other people’s time, sick of being shuttled around, and feeling kind of like a child, and after I was done eating, I was sick of staring at the leaves draped from the upper floor, creating a kind of screen which blocked the view of the city. So I decided I’d get up and check out some more of the hotel while I had the opportunity. First, I sat on a couch, under an umbrella looking towards the hotel, the bar, and the pool.

I looked around. The events of the film, the events of the book, the elements which were true, took place here, I thought to myself, as if trying to evoke some sort of strong emotional reaction. Whatever I was feeling intellectually was still being overshadowed by my frustrations, or the nagging urge to look at my phone while I still had wifi. I resisted that, and looked around to try and take it in. Regardless of Paul Rusesabagina’s role, embellished, partially true or completely untrue, 1,268 people sheltered here in 1994, 31 years before, and survived. I wanted to try and feel that, or at least think about it while I was there and not let my frustrations with the trip ruin it. I was still upset or disturbed about my reaction to the other sites. Maybe I was trying to make up for it, but also worried that if I felt anything here that it might be for shallow reasons. No matter what I’m sure I’d find some way to feel bad about how I was feeling or how I wasn’t feeling, so I tried to at least think about where I was. Not the news back home or my cohort or anything else. Just try to be present and observe. I looked around the perimeter. No walls. Just some fences. How did they fortify this? Was it fortified at all? Maybe there used to be a wall here, and maybe it was taken down to expand the yard? I looked at the pool. People drank out of this pool. They scooped it out with buckets and rationed it for months. Boiled it and drank it to survive. Lots of empty chairs by the pool. I saw Jonise and Rusi laying in benches by the back corner. Maybe I’ll sit by them.

I stood up and started walking over. I saw Alex laying on another bench that I hadn’t noticed before. Kept walking towards Jonise and Rusi, and waved at them––

“Hey, guys––”

“No, no, no, stop waving stop waving!”

“You don’t know us.”

“What?” I asked.

“You don’t know us. Just sit down and don’t say anything.”

“OK.”

I slowly walked past them, leaving a bench empty between myself and Rusi, and laid down. Thought about it for a moment, then kicked my shoes off. A man who I didn’t notice before either, an employee of the hotel in an all blue track/ jumpsuit, walked past and into the pool house.

“Oh my God!” Jonise and Rusi howled.

“What?”

“Ok, Ok,” Rusi started. “You see that guy who was right behind you? The guy in the blue?”

“Yeah. Does he work here?”

“Yeah, OK, so Jonise and I sit down––” Before I continue, I should establish that Jonise, Rusi, and this hotel employee are all black “––and not thirty seconds later this guy comes up. ‘The pool is for swimmers only.’ Nobody’s in the pool. We pointed to that lady over there. She’s not swimming. He says, ‘I mean it’s for guests only.’ We point to Alex, we’re like, ‘She’s not a guest either. She’s with us, we just had brunch. You didn’t say anything to her.’ He walks over to Alex, and tells her to take off her shoes, then he walks away. That’s it.”

“Oh, wow, that’s messed up––”

“Oh,” Jonise added, “That’s not it. Min and Haran tried to sit down over her earlier, he sent them away too. Told them they couldn’t sit here. Still didn't say anything to Alex.”

“Right,” said Rusi. “Then you come over here, you sit down, doesn’t stop, doesn’t do anything.”

I laughed, I wasn’t sure how to react to that. I just thought it was really, really funny. At best, there is a policy that the poolside is only for guests of the hotel, which I would understand, but to make a point to only check on the people of color out of my cohort, while I sat down completely unbothered––

“I guess he just assumed that I’m a guest, cause I’m white?”

“If there were actually people trying to swim here that’d be one thing, right? But nobody’s in the pool, nobody’s here ‘cept us.”

“That’s crazy.”

Jonise and Rusi didn’t seem so upset to me so much as incredulous, but I was a little unsure whether I should feel upset on their behalf, guilty about not being bothered, or kind of amused. I was more amused than anything else because I thought the whole thing was absurd. I also had just sat down and didn’t really want to get up. Everyone was still sitting down, so it wasn’t like he actually successfully kicked them out. Then I saw some other people from the cohort. Gianna, Cadence, Rena (I think), and maybe Riva. That same employee quickly marched out of the pool house and approached them, telling them they couldn’t be there, that they had to leave. Again, completely ignoring me and Alex. Suddenly, it seemed like a good time to head back to the brunch tables, where everyone else was about ready to leave anyway.

We packed up on the bus, told the rest of the group what happened, laughed and talked about it as we made our way to the airport.

Rwandan airport security stopped me briefly because of a small pair of scissors in my first aid bag which I didn’t realize I had, but they said it was fine and didn’t make much of a deal out of it. We sat around and waited for the flight, and so, our trip was about over.

The flight back is always more exhausting and laborious than the flight to. You’re tired. You’ve been away from familiarity for so long. The control over your environment, the creature comforts. My bed at home has gotten hard with age. The pillows are flat. The beds in Rwanda are more comfortable. I wasn’t really looking forward to a return to much of my routine, but I wasn’t going back to the job I left behind. I’d have to find a new job. That’s terrifying in its own right, but also a little exciting. I’ll have a new routine. Better or worse. In the interim I’d have time to wrap up the script I was working on. Read some books that I couldn’t during the school semester. See my friends. I wanted to share this extremely sweet and off-putting banana wine with them. I knew nobody would like it, but that’s not the point. I sat in the airport and let my mind wander for a bit. Some people chatted. Some exchanged melatonin pills to help sleep on the plane. Mostly, people were quiet. They put their earbuds in to listen to music, retreat into themselves.

I didn’t take a melatonin pill. I don't like trying to sleep on flights regardless of how long they are. The more I try, the more uncomfortable I feel and the longer the flight seems to take, because my brain is trapped in the inbetween space, being active, but trying not to be. I overpacked my bookbag with books that I wouldn’t end up reading. Instead I watched Stand By Me, A Few Good Men, The Shawshank Redemption, and Goodfellas.

I was feeling a bit better, and much more sociable. I wanted to have one last conversation with somebody before I sat down on the plane for the long haul, so I turned to whoever was on my left, still at the airport.

“You remember The Hunger Games?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how the country is called ‘Panem’? Like ‘bread?’”

“Sure.”

“It should’ve been called Panam. With another ‘a’, like ‘Pan-American.’ Since the country is supposed to be all of North America.”

“Um… yeah, I guess.”

That was about it. That was all I had to say. Those books are really silly.

I did miss North America. For the last year I was sick to death of it. I was dying for travel and wanted to see the world. I had these fantasies of moving to Europe, getting away from the U.S., being a more international person. A world citizen, like Salman Rushdie or all of those cool, multicultural writers I might read about in my lit mags, or those artsy filmmakers we look up to with interesting backgrounds. Or like our tour guides, many of whom are students at more prestigious American Universities than I am, but still have a home in Rwanda and work there with tourists in the summer. They have a mystique, a worldly mystique that I wanted for myself. More than anything, I think, that’s why I wanted to travel. I wanted to see the world. It didn’t have to be Rwanda, but I don’t think anywhere else would have caught my interest enough for me to actually pursue it. Not even Europe.

My family is two, three, maybe four or more generations from whichever distant grandparent actually made the trip to the U.S. on either side. My last name is very Italian, but I’m not really Italian American culturally. I’m American. Consumerist. And a disillusioned one at that. I don’t feel I have strong cultural roots, or real camaraderie with anybody. I’m kind of a nobody here. I don’t have a village. I don’t even know my neighbors. In many ways I’m lucky. I at least have an idea of which countries my family came from. Not everyone can say that. And to me, my “cultural background” doesn’t matter so much anyway. It doesn’t matter to me whether my family was Italian or Russian or Puerto Rican or whatever. It’s a lack of community I feel. Silos. This is something about Rwandans that I’m envious of, and I’m surprised by how closely knit their communities seem, given the recent history of genocide. Or maybe I’m naive. We were only in Rwanda a short time, and under very controlled circumstances. Whatever trust is keeping Rwanda together in the wake of all of that is hard-earned and probably still tenuous. 1994 was only a generation ago. It was really tough to not think about the news at home. I’m uncomfortable comparing and contrasting what’s happening in the U.S. right now with what happened in Rwanda. It feels disrespectful as I type it out, but I think the parallels are so in-your-face it’d be almost cowardly not to look at them in the face. That’s what I thought about in Rwanda so it belongs here in my reflection of the trip, doesn’t it?

But still. I missed the U.S. I wasn’t feeling quite as strongly about needing to travel or needing to get out. Some of the worldly mystique of travel had left by the end of the trip, because as I surmised in the beginning of my blog, people are more similar than they are different, even if externalities are very different, but how I feel about travel and people, seeing the world and meeting people from all different cultures, or wanting to shut myself in and stay away from it all, I don’t know how I feel. I feel a contradictory mix of everything. I wasn’t home sick, I missed the land. I missed the humid air and flatter expanses. I didn’t miss the people. I missed my friends and family. I want to meet new people, from all over the world. I don’t like people. I don’t trust them. I want to trust people. I want to meet people. I don’t know what I feel or want. I want to live, I want to change, I want to stay the same. I want to go to sleep. I want to live simply. I want to do everything.

And now I’m rambling. It was nice to be home for about twelve hours. Then I cried because I was overwhelmed with everything and nothing at the same time. I don’t know what I want.

*****

I know that a lot of my blog has focused so much on my anxieties and situations I found myself in that I thought might be amusing to write or read about, but not so much on Rwanda itself. My blog might come off as negative, like I had a bad time or perhaps like I shouldn’t have gone there at all. I am glad I went. I may not have been a perfect candidate for training SBL, but since the teachers at Urukundo are now experts and perfectly capable of training others as well, I don’t think SBL is the point as much as it used to be. Otherwise, yes, I probably wouldn’t have been selected. I can’t say exactly why Professor Kahn felt I was a good candidate, but I am glad he brought me along. It didn’t feel, in the moment, like a life changing experience, but maybe in time I’ll find that I’ve gotten more from the trip than I realized. I’m grateful that I was allowed to go, and I’m grateful to my sponsor for providing the plane ticket, and I’m most grateful to my father, who actually paid for the rest of it. Without him, Professor Kahn, Jonise Hall, Professor Youngstrom, and Dr. Twagilimana, who encouraged me to go and put in a good word, I would not have been able to go on this trip. So I give again, my sincerest thank you.

I downloaded a lot of music on my phone so that I could listen to it on the plane or on long car rides during the trip. One of the songs, Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, I downloaded simply because I wanted to play it for two and half minutes out of the 7 hours it would take to cross the Atlantic, which I didn’t get to see because of the clouds and the closed windows and the sun setting and God I wish I could’ve looked at it, but still, I brought it along, and played it at least once on the flight. I played it another time, as we were driving from the Splendid Hotel in Muhanga and towards either the Canopy Walk or Akagera. One of the verses of the song:

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly

From the aeroplane over the sea,

But for now we are young,

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

At the risk of being corny, I’d like to quickly list off some of the things in Rwanda that I thought were great, and there were many, whether I’d previously mentioned them or not.

1. The hills. The landscape. The landscape and the hills. Everywhere you look outside the hills crop the most beautiful view you’ve ever seen of your life, and there’s a thousand of them, so right there, that’s 1,000.

1,001. Goats. I was a fan of seeing the goats. A lot of them tied to little stakes, but the younger ones allowed to roam around, since they would stick by their mothers.

1,002. The Milk Bar. In downtown Kigali you’ll find these pulperias which only sell milk. Fresh milk from that day. Young people, students, would hang out there after school or on break and drink fresh milk. I tried a few sips, but don’t think I would’ve been able to finish a glass. The fresh milk allows for some of the most delicious ice cream you’ve ever had, but vanilla retains that fresh dairy flavor that I’m not used to. I would recommend chocolate.

1,003. Megatron. A cat which lived at the St. Paul’s Cathedral, where we stayed while we were in Kigali. My cohort mistakingly assumed that the cat was male, and named it Megatron. Megatron was female, and I think she was in heat. Others have guessed that she was pregnant.

1,004. Spiders. There is a fly buzzing around my room right now that I haven’t been able to catch. Spiders eat the flies.

1,005. The Antelope. To avoid outwardly listing “Satan,” this was my favorite animal from the Safari. If only I remembered exactly what it was called.

1,006. The Ikondera. The large, black horn instrument that they used during the traditional African dance at Akagera. The one that made that incredible sound.

1,007. The Slow Brew Rig. There was a coffee shop we visited on the day we visited the market, with a highly sophisticated rig for slow brewing coffee. It looked more like something out of a mad scientist’s lab. Dr. S could explain perfectly what it was and how it worked. Email him in droves and drive him crazy about it.

1,008. A truck which had flipped over on the road to Nyungwe National Park. OK, so this isn’t “beautiful”, but it was interesting to see. I feel bad for the driver, and hope he survived. We saw a few notable things along that route. Soldiers and military vehicles.

1,009. Can I make it to 1,010? The food markets in Kigali were very interesting to see. The juxtaposition between modern looking buildings, at least from the outside, with wood and mud huts filled with piles of produce. Fruits and vegetables. The streets of Kigali really are something. They’re dense. New world meets very, very old––or old looking. I would imagine most of Kigali, even those houses and huts, are fairly new. I guess I don’t know though. The city has a vibe, a character to it not quite like any other city I’ve been to.

1,010. The cows, the pigs, the rest of the animal life. Dogs, that’s it. Pets aren’t very prominent in Rwanda. Probably just an extra mouth to feed, but occasionally you’ll see one. The dogs in Rwanda seem to have no fear of death whatsoever. They’re scrawny. I saw three while I was there and they’re all identical. One ran directly into the street and stopped traffic for at least a full minute because it wouldn’t budge when cars honked at it or approached it.

1,011. This also isn’t a beautiful thing, but an interesting moment. A family of ducks were crossing the dirt path in Akagera as our Toyota Land Cruiser was zooming by. I stop for animals or try to avoid them. Our driver did not. We approached rapidly, and I expected the driver to slow down or stop, or for the family of ducks to hurry up. Two had yet to make it to safety when they disappeared beneath the wheel. I heard a soft “squawk!” As we drove past them. I wasn’t very happy about that.

1,012. How many ways to describe the views? Maybe I’ll use this one as an extra shout out.

1,013. In the airport, in Kigali, there is one terminal with maybe half a dozen gates. When they’re ready to start boarding, they call you over to the gate, but the main hub is where everything is. There’s a little souvenir shop, and it sells books written in Kinyarwanda. I might’ve bought one, I really considered it. I don’t think I’ve seen a book in my adult life not written in English. On this trip I saw these, and Isabella had brought something written in Spanish. There’s a bit of a novelty I find in that. Being on another continent? No. Crossing the ocean? No. A book printed in a language other than English? Yes. Show me that please.

1,014. There was a stone statue that I bought from the market in Kigali. It was a statue of a family of four; Two adults, two children. I bought it as a gift for my parents to bring back, but dropped it immediately when I got back to the hotel. It shattered, but in large enough pieces that it isn’t too difficult to glue back together.

1,015. The divots in the streets, the walls and the drains, the methods they use to keep the terrain of Rwanda from turning into a driver’s death trap when the rain starts.

1,016. There is one KFC in Rwanda. They call it “Kigali Fried Chicken”.

Update: I got the fly.

1,017. Mt. Huye, “Owner of the Chicken Rock,” which overlooks another one of those valleys that are so commonplace in Rwanda. Here, ancient Rwandan Kings would meet with their commanders to plan for war. There is a throne carved into the rock. It’s tiny, and not just because of the erosion. Even in its original grandeur the throne would have been too small for me to sit in.

1,018. Mt. Huye Coffee. I love coffee. I almost wrote an entire blog entry about it. We learned the origins of coffee, how once upon a time an Ethiopian goat herder noticed how his goats would eat wild cherries, and then seem to go crazy. He decided he wanted to try some, but the elders cautioned him that the cherries might be possessed by demons, so he roasted them first.

The people were great. Soft spoken, friendly, amiable. Thank you again to the staff, the tour guides, the folks at GEI. You were all wonderful.

Jonise Hall

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