My blog has become like an Egyptian slave driver, whipping me with guilt every time I remember that I have not blogged in the recent past. So here it is, get ready folks. I am just going to go through the past couple weeks in a summary-esque format.
Two weekends ago I went to Kibuye, a town on Lake Kivu, for vacation where we swam (us guys skinny dipped for a while which was awesome), hiked, climbed Bat Island where many bats crowded the sky, got caught in a torrential lake storm that froze us to the bone on our boat ride back to the hotel, and danced in this haunted house looking night club in our hotel’s basement. That last part was rather creepy. For some reason us three guys ended up there both nights, dancing to funky African beats and a funny remix of Who Let The Dogs Out? I had not heard that song since maybe 5th grade, so that was a trip. We also attended a local Free Methodist service that involved much singing and even some dancing accompanied by a traditional drum. So that was that and it was awesome. Saturday morning I helped some local Rwandan workers chop up a felled tree. Although I felt sorry for the tree, I wanted to give it a shot since I enjoy splitting wood. It took me twice as long as the wiry Rwandan man to finally slice through that tree trunk and my hands were worse off because of it, but it was totally worth it.
We arrived back in Kigali only to leave the next day for a research project in the Eastern Province. It is dry there, except for the two nights it rained like hell. We spent the week camping on a farm site in the midst of planting and clearing the land. During the days, we went into town and asked random families or individuals questions that concerned our qualitative research subject. Mine was the environment. Camping delighted me, even the night I spent cramped in a steamy van due to rain and a flooded tent. We also had translators to aid our interviewing process, students from Kigali Institute of Science and Technology who were quite personable and funny. We are now friends; tomorrow a group of us are going to visit them at their school and then have them over for dinner. Anyways, the interviewing went well and the people with whom we talked were quite receptive to our questions and thankful for our presence. But therein laid the problem. They thought we had solutions for them. They confided in us; they told us their lives, their lack of daily bread, how their children got chased away from school because they could not afford to buy them the proper school supplies or uniforms. Crops cannot grow without rain and they have been in a ‘drought’ (probably more of an unprecedented rain shortage) for two years. How can we make it rain? Am I even qualified to ask people questions, much less play like I have any sort of answers to their very real questions? I felt like a fraud, a masquerading liar. It got worse when we had to make our presentations to the community and its leaders, outlining our findings and proposed solutions. It is at this point that our fraudulent masks were removed and they saw our revealed inexperience and immaturity in the broad daylight. How shameful; they trusted us in the expectation of something, anything to help. We delivered them half-baked ideas; our ideas were shit, loads of bullshit. And they saw it clearly for what it truly was, for their questions to us penetrated our shallow façade and exposed our naïve ideas to the harsh realities of the Mpanga sector. Needless to say, I felt like I had betrayed the people I talked with, like all the smiles and cheery hand waves I had given people were all just a cover up for my own impotence, ineptitude and inability to help their situation. And they so desperately need help. Oh God help us.
On the way home, I saw a dead man. As we drove through a town in between the East and Kigali, we slowed down to find a figure lying motionless in the middle of the road. To the side of him was a crushed bicycle and up the road a bit was a parked semi. All around him, local people just stood and stared as if they were stunned. The reason became instantly clear. The man, with blood streaming from a gash on the back of his head, had been biking across the road when a semi plowed into him, demolishing his now contorted body and his bicycle. I felt as though I had become instantly sober, stoic and yet simultaneously vulnerable, confused, and desperate for something, maybe inner peace. Please God, help that man. His family too. Oh God help us.
So that has been my life recently, along with writing a paper (that I really do not enjoy) for the past few days. I still do not know how to deal with the reality of death I witnessed. We leave for Uganda on Thursday where we will go white water rafting down the Nile and go shopping at an awesome Ugandan market. I also get to hang out with Caitlin Torrence, a friend from Greenville! She has been in Uganda this semester and is coming down to see Erica and I. It will be so good to see a familiar face, especially one so lively as Caitlin’s. After that, I am off to Ruhengeri until March 25. I will be planting trees with my friend Devon; we also are doing some oral history interviews with locals to find out traditional Rwandan tongue twisters, origin stories, jokes and so on. I am looking forward to doing something productive, getting out into the rural country, and having some time away from our group. It can be too much sometimes living and doing everything in a big group like ours. So here is to life.
Christ’s Peace to y’all,
Joshua
PS I miss you Rachel
I miss you!
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