On Friday, Jennifer had our housekeeper Consolee bring over 4 of her 5 children - Barrique, Parfait, Nice, and Magnafique to make Christmas cookies with us. Jen did a little demonstration in the beginning, and the kids quickly mastered the art of cookie cutter-ing and decorating. It was fun for everyone. There are no pictures of finished cookies because I am not sure if any of them made it past the icing stage. Every two seconds Anna would break a cookie and say "Mom, can I eat it?" Zechariah (our guard) also came in and did some decorating.

Cleanliness is a big issue with me, particularly with the feel of clothes. Consolee normally does all the laundry, but because we don't have a machine and everything is hand washed, and because there is a lot, it often takes a week to get it back. Also, because there is so much and it rains all the time, it takes several days to dry and will often smell musty.

I complain if I have to hand wash a delicate sweater. But I woke up and thought "be the change you wish to see in the world," so I decided to do my laundry myself. I have never hand washed my entire wardrobe before - oh boy.


Since hot water does not run naturally, I had to boil water in our electrical teapot, so basically half a gallon at a time, to fill the first bucket, which I put soap in. The second bucket I filled with cold water for rinsing. It took me about six or seven "loads" to do all my clothes, and four and a half hours (of labor). Do you have any idea how heavy a bath towel is when it's wet? Did you know those things are made to absorb water? I could barely left it out of the bucket, and wringing the water out was a ten minute process. Whenever you think you've gotten all the water out of a towel, try again - you haven't.

Times flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx.) It definitely feels like I just posted, but the site seems to be telling me that my last post was 20 days ago. Interesting. In these 20 days, my ballet school has exploded. I now have 53 students, and on Monday 17 girls showed up to one class (my max is 8 - spacing wise and sanity wise). It was mayhem. Still, everyone enjoyed it and the parents were thrilled. Classes are all going tremendously well and I am loving every minute of it - it has been really great to discover that I not only love teaching ballet, but that I am actually pretty good at it. I always know what to say next...that's an amazing feeling!


I have felt that I am not working with the street kids enough, but it's been hard to discern exactly how I would go about meeting them, talking to them, getting them to the studio, and teaching them. Please keep in mind that I do not speak a word of Kinyarwanda besides good morning, thank you, good afternoon, how are you, the response to how are you which I don't even know what it means, the word dance, and the numbers 1, 5, 6, and 8. Like, I am not lying to you, that is literally all I know (yes, I do not know how to say 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, or 10). The kids also don't speak a word of English.

So! Yesterday I decided to ask the neighborhood street kids (the ones who frequently come and play at our house and feed the bunnies) if they would like to come to the studio with me. Rather, Jennifer did the talking and said "you go to school of Carolina?" and I then promptly chime in with my great addition to the conversation and say assertively "kubyina!" (dance). We didn't have to ask, the boys will do anything we ask them. They all got very excited and said they wanted to wash up first. This is very respectful of them. They came back a bit later and Jen drove Danyire, Jiye, Christiane, Qwizera, Jacques and I to the studio.


I wanted to keep it a small group, and these are all the boys I have established relationships with already. Well, it was incredibly difficult to communicate and I think they were a bit mystified by the whole thing (especially since I started them off by watching Alvin Ailey's Sinner Man) but this is what we came up with after an hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQA5jD_4na0

(Sorry that it's an outside link, it's 18MB which takes over an hour to upload so I went with youtube so I could share it everywhere.) Hopefully next week will be more solid.

Otherwise, it's Christmastime, and here is our glorious tree that reminds me of very happy days in Portugal.



The new "bar" that went up a few houses down from ours. Yes, that is a shipping container. No, muzungus are not invited.



And here is a nice one of my friend Emmy (dreads) running into a friend while we walked to the main road to look for motos at dusk.


I am going to post on Thursdays and Sundays from now on. I know I haven't been keeping you up to date and I am sorry for this. No longer!

8 December, 2009
I am thoroughly exhausted, my body is fatigued in a way it hasn't been in a while, if ever. Today, for our day trip, we went to Ruhengeri, which is the third largest city in Rwanda and in the northern tip of the country - 30 minutes from both Uganda and Congo. We left at 6:45am and it took us about 2.5 hours to get there - maybe a bit more with the stops.

In the north you have the 3 major volcanoes of Rwanda - Muhabura, Karisimbi, and Volcano #3. There are a couple other small ones, but these are the big ones. You also have all the gorillas, and a huge lake in the province of Muhanze, where many postcards are shot.

The plan was to visit a cave and a lake. Guiding us on this tour was William, who can safely be described as The Coolest Person in Africa, and a strong contender as The Coolest Person in Any Continent. He is Rwandese, and was in the RPF starting in '91 when he was 18. He helped free the imprisoned RPF soldiers in 1991 and retreat back to Uganda to retrain the army. He took Kigali along with Kagame in June of 1994 to end the genocide. He marched to Kinshasa in 1997, and fought in Darfur. Now that he is done with the army, he takes people on treks through the mountains of East Africa, figuring out what they want to see and making it possible. He knows everything about the land and is like the ultimate McGyver. Obviously, he is Dano's hero.

The drive was completely stunning and after about an hour and a half we could see the volcanoes. It were so high up that we looked down on other mountain tops and clouds. I tried to get a picture of it but we were speeding by and nothing came out. There were several waterfalls along the way. The size of the volcanoes and the ethereality of the clouds was just phenomenal.


We dropped off the weaker ones at a hotel to walk around while we continued our journey to The Cave. I was pretty nervous about going because I heard it was a long, arduous trek in pitch blackness, and that there were thousands of bats that would fly around you. We all brought flashlights. We drove 10 minutes outside of town and then pulled over into a field. William pointed straight ahead and there was The Mouth of The Cave. There is no way to describe it except that there was a giant black hole in the hill. I began to get more nervous. I, of course, took the lead. (Behind William.)


The Cave was one of the most incredible things I have ever done, if not the most. The ground was slimy and rocky, a million times worse than climbing in anything I've ever climbed before. The darkness was something I wish I could describe - it was eternal. I could hold my hand in front of my face and I would not see it. I could hold a white piece of paper in front of my face and not see it. A couple of us were wearing white and you could not see them. Our flashlights were insignificant, at best. I have never, ever imagined darkness could be like that. It was so incredibly cool. As we climbed down deeper into the cave, I began to hear a slight hissing. "The bats!" I yelled, and William said yes, you could hear them. It sounded like a lot. A few of
the weaker wanted to turn back. We forged ahead.

The hissing got louder and louder, and soon you could pick out bat eyes hanging from the ceiling. Then you noticed there were bats flying everywhere, and more than you could ever imagine. They weren't in your face like I expected them to be, but I was grateful for that. We stood there, turned off our lights, and listened to the bats.

300 years ago, warriors would walk into The Cave and stay there for two weeks without any food - it was a rite of passage to prove themselves to King Mutara. It was a spiritual journey. In 1994, many Rwandese ran into The Cave to hide from the Interhawme. The genocidaires followed them in, and slaughtered all of them, then threw grenades in to finish the job. There was a "left turn" that would have led us down a 6 kilometer wing of The Cave, but the government closed it off because of all the bodies, and it is now a sort of sacred burial ground.

My camera died while in the cave, but I managed to get one of the ceiling and the bats (kind of hard to distinguish) and a very bad one of Oliver and I. The pictures almost ruin in though, because you can't tell the magnificence of the caverns and the flash is so deceiving - the blackness was not a color, it was a void. Insane.


The Cave was shorter than I hoped, because about two minutes in I was more into it than anyone. In only took us about 25-30 minutes to walk through the whole thing - we came up on the other side of a hill and walked back to the cars. I, of course, was the first man out. I win.

We then picked up the others and drove to the lake - a huge, huge lake I do not know the name of. There were many islands in the lake, and the volcanoes kind of surround it. We sat there for a while and relaxed. We skipped stones in the water. I was all about canoeing out, and got everyone excited about it, and William commandeered us a boat. He and I picked it up a bit down from where we were picnicking, so we oared it over to the people, and picked everyone up. Everyone piled in.


We oared for a while. I was starting to get tired, and really hot. We kept going, out, and out and out. My arms felt like they were going to fall off. The water looked so, so good. Kerry said she had an extra pair of pants. I flung off my flipflops, tore off my sweater, and jumped into the lake. Fully clothed. Everyone looked at me as I bobbed there and Jen said "I can't believe you just did that," and then about 5 other people jumped in.

It was glorious. Until I felt the current which was pulling me out into the middle, and I began to (attempt) to swim to shore. Perhaps swimming a half mile in a strongly currented lake after already hiking through The Cave was not a good idea. It must not have been, because I felt like I was going to die. My chest was burning and I couldn't breathe - Dano reminded me of the altitude and asked if I wanted to get back in the boat. Clearly he doesn't know me very well. I did not succumb to the pain, and pushed on, in a very slow combination of back stroke/crawl/side stroke - basically, whatever felt good for a few seconds. I think something may be wrong with me.


Either way, we all made it shore, and we were all also in a lot of pain from our ears - they were popping like there's no tomorrow, worse than any plane I've been on. So I sat there, sopping wet, feeling like I was about to have a heart attack and my ears were going to explode for about 10 minutes. Definitely the low point of the day. But it was all completely worth it.

28 November, 2009

Jen, Dano and I went to the Kigali City Memorial today - it's the biggest and "best" one - very much a nice, modern museum. (No fee!) It was, of course, prohibited to take pictures inside, but I couldn't resist sneaking a few on my phone. I took them after I had seen the whole thing and walked back to take them, so I didn't get as many as I wanted, and I didn't take any of the more gruesome scenes, or any of the room they had filled with bones. I didn't cry at all but felt pretty numb throughout the whole thing. All of the text was written pretty dramatically, but I thought it was a very well done exhibition. They had pictures and history, then a video in every section with interviews with about 6 survivors. Those were pretty intense. One guy whose wife and children were murdered said he could forgive them if he saw the murderers today, while one of the women who watched her sisters get killed said she could never forgive, that only God could, and she was only human. She said "I am not some sort of air." I liked that.

There was a whole section on how no one helped, how the Interhawme killed the five Belgian peacekeepers cause they knew all the whites would withdraw then. The UN sent 5,000 soldiers to evacuate all the foreigners, it was said that that would have been more than enough soldiers to stop the violence. Also, as you know, the whole Hutu/Tutsi thing was something determined by the Belgians in 1932 - if you had more than ten cows you were Tutsi, if you had less than ten you were Hutu.

(I am not really writing in any continuity - just what I think of.)

They had a nasty video of footage of piles of bodies and people's freshly killed bodies or rotting bodies. There was also some of survivors with massive open wounds in their head or somewhere in their body, and then some actual footage of someone being hacked and killed from a distance. It was disgusting. They had a whole case of machetes and clubs with blood on them, they had a room with blood spattered clothing, and as I said, a whole room with bones and skulls. It was all very exhibition and museum like, though, like, nice glass cases and well laid out. Out in the country there are some memorials (and the church at Natarama) where they left the bodies in the place they fell when they were killed, so everything is just laying there, and there's bloodstains on the walls and ground. Don't know if I could manage that. They also had a big picture of Natarama where the pastor accepted 2,000 refugees, then ordered the church to be bulldozed and killed everyone.


There was a room with eight little nooks where people could hang photos of their lost families members (lost as in dead, not missing). This was really sad. The pictures were so normal and personal. 80s and 90s fashion, kids at birthday parties, school photos, family photos, holiday photos, whatever they had - and there were so many. It was impossible to look at every one.


As if that all wasn't enough, they had another exhibition where they highlighted other genocides. (The museum is also a genocide research center, lots of graduate students doing work there.) That was pretty hard - it's like, if everything wasn't enough, let's show you how this has happened all over the million a few times over. So they profiled the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, the Holocaust, Armenia, the Hereros, and I think that's it. The Cambodian one was so gross - it was mainly about all the torture that happened. 2 million people died from 1975-1979, a quarter of the population of Cambodia. Pol Pot died in his sleep in 1998.


The last part before you were led outside into extensive gardens was dedicated to children. They had big photos of 14 kids (I took photos of every pair - all included) and plaques in front with their names, their hobbies, their favourite foods, their age when they were killed, and how they were killed ('machete to head' 'raped and beaten' 'bludgeoned to death' 'drowned'). Then they had another wall again where families had posted photos of children who had died. There was a plaque with the words "Children, you could have been our national heroes." That's true. We don't know what these kids could have been - they would all be my age now. The entire children part was painted yellow and close to the gardens, with light coming in from outside. The entire rest of the museum was dimly lit and the walls were a steel blue.


Outside there were a lot of gardens (wouldn't be Rwanda if it wasn't completely lush), and then some huge slabs of concrete that were mass graves - 1820 were buried in these 8 or 10 pits. That's the last photo I included.

This is quite long. I am starting to feel more negative as I wrote this. Hope you wanted to know.