Adrift in a Sea of Rolling Hills
My time in the Pays des Mille Collines
December 4, 2008 at 8:56 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Well, there’s no Whole Foods in Kigali, but there is Nakumatt and while browsing the store the other day I noticed a very small natural foods section. It’s true that I had seen this tiny kiosk before, but I always thought it just sold vitamins. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something that challenged everything I thought I knew about Africa - Tom’s Deodorant. I mean, even in the US it’s not like this is a standard product at most supermarkets outside of California, New York, and college towns. And it’s not even Tom’s most popular and original product - toothpaste. Instead, it’s deodorant that doesn’t even really work well for $18. Eighteen Dollars?!
Luckily, I brought a year’s supply of this stuff. If I have some left over when I leave, looks like I can make some decent pocket change.
By the way, Rice Dream? $10. Good thing I’m vegan around here.
That was all I saw in the way of American health food store goods.
Oh, and by the way, the headline comes from Lewis Black on The Daily Show who, after showing a clip of a CNN reporter in Zimbabwe buying 3 cans of beans for 1 Trillion Dollars back in August exclaimed, “I didn’t know there was a Whole Foods in Zimbabwe!” (Zimbabwe has 600 million percent inflation).
Well, there’s no Whole Foods in Zimbabwe either, but there may very well be a Nakumatt.
December 2, 2008 at 10:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
My meals here are pretty simple. Usually they’re very good - the chefs are excellent - but there’s not much for variety. Every meal has rice and beans, a rotating starch (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, or cooking bananas), a mash of vegetables, and a sauce. There is also meat, but I stay away from it (usually chewy goat - inedible I’d say - hanging out in the sauce). I’m like a vegan. Finally, I’ve one upped by mother.
Anyways, today, at lunch, there was no rice and while at first I was thinking it was a nice change - finally, maybe a little variety - I soon found myself missing it. It was like my beans had been stood up, it didn’t make any sense. And the usual mash that all the ingredients soon become seemed runny without the rice to soak it up and give it form. Lunch just wasn’t the same.
It turns out what I originally thought was an inspired decision to switch things up - before I turned sour to the new state of things - was in fact just because somebody had forgot to buy rice.
What a relief. And sure enough, come dinner, the rice was back, mixing it up like salt to pepper with my trusty beans.
December 2, 2008 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A couple weeks ago, this freelance photographer I know was telling me about his trade - about the politics of news. He regularly shoots for major papers and news agencies and had just returned from Goma.
He told me about a plane crash in Cyangugu, Rwanda about a year ago. One of the news agencies - maybe Reuters - called him and asked him how long it would take him to get there. He told them that Cyangugu was 5 hours from his house in Kigali and it would be dark by the time he got there. He could have a shot for them tomorrow morning. They said they’d call him back.
2 hours later they called back: “Only 18 dead, so nevermind.”
December 1, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Observations
Yesterday, I hung out by the pool of the Novotel Hotel as I do most Sundays. A friend of mine came and we played tennis on their red clay courts. We almost had a ball boy too. We told him he could be our ball boy, then he asked me if I wanted a new grip. I told him I didn’t, but somehow, lost in translation, he then left. So we picked up our own balls. After we finished, we returned to our friends at the poolside and ordered another round of beers. It was all very colonial.
Next week we’re going to play again. This time with the ballboy and the lines judge (Apparently, you get the package deal for $2, so why not?).
November 25, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Observations
Here is a recent conversation involving our chef, Hilam, and our director, Nir, who is trying to learn Kinyarwanda:
Nir: What’s the word for breakfast?
Hilam: Chai.
Nir: But that’s the word for tea.
Hilam: Right.
Nir: So it means breakfast too?
Hilam: No, it means tea. The word for breakfast is tea. Breakfast is tea.
Nir: Oh, right.
I guess breakfast is a foreign word for people not lucky enough to feast on eggs, bacon, and/or cereal every morning.
November 22, 2008 at 2:55 pm · Filed under Stories
In September, I had the chance to accompany Jean-Pierre, the Director of Informal Education at ASYV, to interview some of the candidates for the village. Jean-Pierre has spent the last month or so traveling to schools in all corners of Rwanda to interview these orphans; on this day we went to the south of the country. First to a school in the royal capital, Nyanza, and then 25 minutes along a bumpy dirt road beyond the city of Butare to Runyinya and a school whose population is 90% made up of Genocide survivors.
Below is a story of one of the kids we met. I’ve omitted his name to protect his privacy.
It was at the first school that we met one young boy. His father died in 1990; his mother was killed in the genocide. When we asked him where he lived, he couldn’t tell us. He said he has been rejected from homes many times and he has trouble finding a place to live. When school lets out for the holidays and everyone returns home, he doesn’t know where to go.
Despite this lack of permanent residence, he’s found the time to both sing and compose. The song he sang for us was called “C’est comme ca dans la vie,” or “It’s like this in life.” The lyrics are a compelling riff on life from a orphaned survivor of brutal genocide. He sings:
It’s like this in life/
In this world we cannot live without problems/
Some people have friends and some people have enemies…
Maybe it’s just a song he wrote – I shouldn’t read too much into it – but its simple sentiment is piercing. “In this world we cannot live without problems” - problems which include genocide, war and poverty – is a sober reminder of just how much these children understand the imperfect world we live in. “Some people have friends and some people have enemies,” he sings. It’s reassuring to know that for a people that have come to know so many of their enemies, so many friends like ASYV keep showing up.
We surely cannot live without problems, but we know that there are problems that we are capable of living without. Hopefully soon, ASYV may be able to make it so living without a home is no longer one of those problems with which he must live.
November 22, 2008 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Observations
Hunting water is awfully tiring. Yesterday I spent much of the first half of the day watching two Indians and their three Rwandese workers survey several patches of nearby fields in search of water. In this age of technology and electronic gadget wonderland, what these tests consisted of was two cables attached to a briefcase, where two men, one with each end of a cable, walked ten meters, hammered a stake attached to the cable end into the ground, and then the head Indian pressed a green button on his briefcase, typed the number it spat out into his calculatior, and then used a pen to write down this new number on a pad of paper. They then walked ten more meters and repeated, for like two more hours. All the while, just yards away, I played games and skyped with my friends on my iphone. If I can connect to the internet on my phone in the middle of nowhere, someone needs to give me a good reason why they’re still doing geological surveys with pen and paper.
Anyways, what we were doing (other than feeling like you were watching a first season episode of “Lost” where they have to keep pressing the same button every 60 seconds) is searching for a place to drill a borehole. As it stands now, it would be charitable to refer to our water supply as “unstable.” In fact, much of the time they don’t pump water to us and we have to fill our tanks from trucked in tankers. When they do manage to pump, it is at an absurd cost.
Indeed, one of the greatest and most pressing challenges facing Africa is access to water. While few outside of the fancy rich have any access to running water, more and more Africans are connected to water by daily, sometimes many kilometer, hikes to a community well/ spring/ water supply. While we in the West consume and waste water like it grew on trees, African consumption is rarely more than a jerry can’s worth. Apart from better access to water in the home, one thing that an improved and connected water supply could mean is irrigation and improved agrarian productivity.
So in the spirt of James Bond and “Quantum of Solace”, where Bond’s newest villain declares that water is “the world’s most precious resource,” here is a link to a great New York Times piece on how “Blue is the new Green” and what we can do to lead the world to solve these challenges instead of recklessly proliferating them. Because, after all, water is life.
November 22, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under Observations
After much delay and great difficulty, our village is finally connected to the internet, by way of CPE WiMax antenna mounted on one of our houses. Just as cellphone technology leapfrogged landlines in Africa, wireless networking is doing the same for internet. So we mount an antenna on top of our house and connect to a signal 8 kilometers away, which is itself connected by microwave link over 50 kilometers to a giant satellite in Kigali which receives its internet connection by satellite from outer space. Pretty soon, landline fiber cables should catch up with the reach of wireless networks, but in the meantime, all this means is that internet in Africa is ridiculously expensive (and slow).
While the average household broadband internet connection in the US is 150 megabytes (for about $30) and the Japanese can now connect at home at speeds up to 1000 megabytes for just $56 a month, here in Africa, we’re paying $600 a month for about a third of one megabyte (split up between up to 80 computers). So we have about 384 kilobits (if all goes according to plan with our internet provider, which it usually doesn’t) for let’s say 38 computers (an underestimate). That leaves us with about 10 kilobits per computer, compare that with the 56 kilobits you used to get back in the day with your dial-up modem and you get a sense for how crazy slow things can be here.
So while the rest of the world zips along in the hyper-productivity of cyberspace, Africa is left lagging behind, footing an absurdly huge bill for a service that won’t even let you connect properly to Gmail, YouTube, or (gasp!) Facebook. How deprived we are.
But there is hope. Two submarine cables, carrying our fiber connection to the world, will “land” in East Africa within the next two years, connecting us to the global fiber network, replacing a system where bandwidth is delivered by too few satellites at extortionary costs. Internally, Rwanda is setting a torrid pace at laying their own fiber network of cables, to take advantage of this new marine promise. So if everything goes according to plan, Africa (at least parts of it) may just come out of the digital dark age soon enough. Now, I wish the same could be said for water…
Update: Here’s a link to an intersting article about the two submarine cables. Rwandan authorities say these cables will bring the cost of 1 megabyte from $3000 to $25.
November 8, 2008 at 12:27 pm · Filed under Doing Good, Uncategorized
It’s difficult to overstate just how much the world cared about this election. Everyone I met, ex-pats from all over and Rwandese themselves, had an opinion on the election and were always quizzing me for my “expert” (read: American) opinion on what would happen. Throughout this election cycle, CNN International and BBC World News, those very sober news outlets, obsessed about the latest election news. The conventions and debates could be seen live on no less than 4 channels here (and there are only 14 channels altogether!), and come election day, whether you turned on the radio, switched on the TV, or walked down the street, all you heard was that America was going to vote. We say it often in America, with some sense of presumption it seemed, but people around the world honestly believe that the President of the USA is the most powerful person in the world and, this year, just like many Americans back home, they were deeply enthralled by the possibility that Barack Obama might next be that person.
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November 3, 2008 at 10:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Regular readers of this blog (if any do exist) will have caught on by now that Rwanda is a country transitioning from French to English (all the while with Kinyarwanda dominant). There are many logical reasons for this, but the one that the Education ministry has chosen to explain their formal shift in schooling from French to English is that the textbooks are cheaper.
Said the Education minister (from the New Times):
Mutsindashyaka said that the adoption of English would make education cheaper in the country.
“The cost of French textbooks is much higher than that of English books,” said Mutsindashyaka. He also criticised those who are rejecting the policy.
“What is the complication in this? The question instead should be why did the government delay in coming up with this policy!” he argued.
The State Minister also strongly denied relating the issue with the ill relations between Rwanda and France. “This Issue should not be politicised at any point,” he said.
Apparently it’s that simple, so we needn’t overthink it and start inventing other reasons (Like the Ugandan English speaking Rwandan refugees of the RPF replacing the francophone and french backed genocidaires, their firm belief that the language of IT - their chosen path to riches - and business is English, or their desire to be part of the East African community of English speaking Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania and not the conflict ridden francophone community of Congo and Burundi).
So there you have it, cheaper textbooks are a compelling enough reason to retrain all of the country’s teachers, replace all the old textbooks, and completely rearrange a nation’s school system.
If you hadn’t already figured it out, the language of instruction at our school at ASYV will be English.
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