Notes From the Field - Stories For Hope Rwanda

2011-09-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

Stories For Hope Rwanda, September 2011. Why was it hard to write and blog in Rwanda, as I planned? That kind of reflective time was rare on this 17 day trip for Stories For Hope, and its new initiative, Life's Melodies.

A little like the many women and children in the fields, bent completely over their bean, potato and cassava plants, the work was constant. Not for survival, like they are, dawn to dusk. Not on the giant and gritty hills, nor the dense banana trees and sugar cane plants in the narrow valleys, or on the narrow pathways trod by men carrying grass, wood, bananas, and white sacks of potatoes.

In Rwamagana, I worked with Donna, Zoe, Carol, and Chad on the literal ground, and in the small meeting rooms of organizations trying to improve life in Rwanda. Carol and Chad taught business skills in a large classroom off the dining hall of Agahoza Shalom Youth Village, designed for 500 orphans.

Donna, Zoe, and I held workshops for mental health staff in a small conference room at the yellow-painted Health and Wellness Center at ASYV. Long sheets of white paper dotted the room, titled "Narrative Psychology, Ambiguous Losses, and Caregiving Burnout." I had long conversations with Sonia, the Director, after how to help orphans make the transition out of the Village next year, and keep them connected with elders.

I counseled students in the dark, sitting with a boy with severe ADD on some rocks and ledges ("why does my mind wander so much in physics class? Does it mean I'm crazy?") and a girl grappling with PTSD ("Is it unhealthy to skip hearing genocide testimonies in April?").

In Byumba, at Eglise Anglican au Rwanda, with a Rwandan team comprised of Tambo, Sam, Veronique, Bernard and Bishop Emmanuel, I presented our research findings with two pairs of former participants, and did some strategic planning to scale up Stories for Hope, along with Sociotherapy into the Gicumbi District.

Zoe spent a day collecting more intensive interviews from six young people. Donna was our able assistant, darting between our little bedroom with massive mosquito net and sparkling white bathroom with no running water, and Sam's modern office with computers and printers.

Back in Kigali, Zoe and I with the Rwandan team, worked feverishly to convert our Stories For Hope audio tapes from 95 WAV dialogues into mp3 files, and assemble them into a collection for the National Archive, where we delivered it on Thursday. I met with the new Minister of Youth, Sports, and Culture, Protais Mitali,and set Stories For Hope on a new course for more widespread implementation.

On the next to the last day, I interviewed four youths more extensively about their survival stories, hinted at in their SFH dialouges. Two of these youths have forgiven the perpetrators of their relatives and wounds, and do small kind things for them. (Hyacenth: "I see him in the market, and sometimes give him small things. Better than to store anger and harm myself like he harmed my father").

I came away with more questions than answers about how genocide happens and reconciliation is possible. At the end of 17 days, I remain committed to passing on to these young people's admirable beliefs, their amazing qualities of mind and heart, and many talents, like Nadia Hyacenth arising every day with determination, and finding hope in humanity.

2011-08-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

HOPE IS NOT AN ACTION PLAN

Seven and days and counting until we leave for Rwanda.

Today, unfolding from an all-day computer crouch, something struck me. Truth and wisdom-- and I don't mean the stuff found in dog-earred books, or in the p values of inferential statistics, or other such pulpits I've tackled lately-- truth and wisdom show up where you least expect.

Take, for example, the 100 incredibly rich stories from ordinary Rwandans who trudged from fields,tiny shoppes, and tin-roofed three-roomed homes, to record their dialogues with young people. Read them at storiesforhope.org.

Take my father, Ted. Age 91 and an ex-engineer, not a book lover nor a deductive thinker, and, especially not a conversationalist. When I told him in 2009 about my project in Rwanda to build hope through dialogues between youth and elders, he shot right through the warmsie stuff, and offered not a word about the eye-popping audacity of his daughter even going there in the first place.

Ted's reaction was, 'Are you sure you want to build hope in young people who may not ever get a chance in life? Won't that be depressing to them?'

After some sputterings of uh--well, uh---I said, 'We'll see. I have to try.'

Now, two years later, after a small stab at measuring our program's effectiveness with 22 young adults, I am ready to face my father's question.

On one hand, after being interviewed (not by me, and we didn't pay them), all the young people who talked to elders got A LOT. (We'll post that report on http://www.globalgiving.org/6238.) Not just hope, but strength to ask elders more questions, resolve to finish high school and behave well,drive to give more to the community, a sense of real belonging and stronger identity.

On the other hand, when we used paper-and-pencil measures to track six months of change in goal-seeking, hope and resilience, goal-seeking increased, hope stayed the same, resilience decreased A LOT.

In two weeks, after I sit down with some kids and staff, and we puzzle through this together, I'll know more about WHY resilience fell. One clue: between the dialogues with an elder, and our evaluation, Rwanda--foreseeing a glut of college grads without jobs-- decided not to thoroughly fund able college students. Many will not be able to graduate, and maybe THAT has been depressing. Or maybe Dad was right. Hope fades quickly without an achievable goal.

Our new initiative, which we begin in 10 days, isn't hedging any bets. Based on the idea that 'hope is not an action plan' my colleagues Carol and Chad will be teaching business skills to some Senior Five orphaned students at Agahoza Shalom Youth Village in Mwaramagana. Hope--and a secondary school certificate---may be necessary to raise your sightlines and go forward, but it needs a focus. An action plan.

2011-08-17T05:29:00.000-07:00

Deliver an Anti-Atrocity Tool-Kit to a Rwandan Orphan

This summer President Obama created an Atrocities Board, a rapid-response team that will advise him about what to do in the next genocide, to avoid what happened in Rwanda.

Totally the right direction. But tragically, for millions of scarred survivors and perpetrators that makes no difference in their own lives, nor in the lives of their almost grown kids. That’s where Stories For Hope--and you-- comes in.

IN EXACTLY 2 WEEKS we’ll bring a team to Rwanda to work with some 15-18 year-olds, orphans traumatized from severe loss and violence. We’ll spend a week at an American-funded orphanage delivering strength-based business skills to 135 youth before they graduate, and help train staff to prepare them emotionally and economically.

WHY? Under the care of Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, they have been greatly healed and educated. They have high hopes for the future. They ARE Rwanda’s future. But hope is not an action plan. Without ways to survive economically, many will return to poverty and hopelessness, restless and demoralized.

On flash drives and hard copy, we’ll deliver all kinds of customized, good tools for these kids to access at the many Internet cafes now across Rwanda. How to make goals, business plans, resumes, and college applications. How to use your strengths, raise funds, partner with others, give a good interview.

TODAY Donate any amount towards the mission, and we’ll digitally stamp your name on somone's flash drive, and let you know who you've helped. Call them little anti-atrocities boards.

2011-07-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

As we head to Rwanda in a few weeks, I like to remind myself of the project's origins, the moment it was born. It continually inspires me to return there, again and again.

On a warm day in a Rwanda hotel, I sat transfixed, and heartbroken. For a leadership training exercise, a high Rwandan official, Jean Pierre, in charge of youth and culture , began telling a story that no one, not even his 20 colleagues, had ever heard him tell before. As a young man hastening from the Congo in July 1994 Jean Pierre found most of the villagers he knew from childhood, buried in mass shallow graves. Discovering a familiar athletic shoe, he assumed three of the decomposed remains were his parents, and brother.

This moment, he said, is when Jean Pierre recognized he was a leader. Urging on his peers, they first rescued thousands of starving, wandering orphan infants, tots and kids, even crossing back dangerously into Burundi to reclaim some who had been whisked across the border and stashed in an orphanage.

Then they reburied all the people they could find. He was able to help others override their horror and trauma, he said, having been steeped in Rwandan culture, by his parents’ and grandparents’ stories. Those became an internalized conduct code which dictated the critical importance of burial rites, and taking care of orphans.

Later that day, as we sat in a darkened courtyard during a funeral wake for an official’s father, Jean Pierre mined my psychology background. “Should I tell my own children my story? They are beginning to ask why we don’t visit their grandparents and relatives during the holidays. We all struggle with what to tell, and what to leave in the past. How do we give the next generation hope, after all that has happened here. What do you think? ”

Thirty years as a psychology and family therapist, and I had no easy answers for a country where over one million died over 100 days, often at the hands of trusted neighbors, priests and ministers, and teachers. Instead, I pledged to bring back some ideas for his Ministry. Stories For Hope was born at that moment.

2011-06-30T05:17:00.000-07:00

In exactly nine weeks from today, five people from Ann Arbor will be sealing up suitcases bound for Rwanda. Malaria pills and plane pillows: check. Zip drives and DVDs for Rwandan staff: check. High hopes and the gnaw of nervousness: check.

A veteran of eight trips, I will be toting four people who have never been to Africa, let alone a tiny land-locked country packing a giant reputation.

Carol and Chad feel called to use their business acumen to help vulnerable orphans.

Donna, a long-time friend and hospice social worker, has coached me through many downturns in spirit as I sought to launch Stories For Hope. http://www.storiesforhope.org. Now she wants to see Rwanda for herself, and offer her skills and talents.

Zoe, an eager university student, wants to begin her anthropology career by experiencing an African country with cultural practices of 'love and help thy neighbor' that fly in the face of the 1994 genocide.

Stories For Hope has facilitated over 100 dialogues between elders and youth in Rwanda about the past, and ways to use those cultural and family stories positively for the future. This, as we discovered through evaluating our project, is the stuff of hope. http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/help-100-rwandan-girls-overcome-a-violent-legacy/updates/.

But hope isn't an action plan. As Langston Hughes once wrote: A dream deferred/Dries up like a raisin in the Sun. What good is hope without a way to the future?

So at Agahoza Shalom orphanage of Rwanda's most vulnerable kids--an amazing place judging by what we read--we'll offer some resources for a group of 125 Senior Five students. http://www.asyv.org. They soon leave the protection of the Village and school for a uncertain future.

We want to help them, and their teacher/mentors charged with preparing them, with the tools for survival: basic business skills, ways to use their family and cultural backgrounds positively, coping mechanisms when grief crops up, as it may well do as they lose their peers, protecting adults, and security.

We fly a bit blindly, not only over the Atlantic, but into the lives of these kids. No doubt, our eyes will widen at the daunting challenges they face, but I'm equally sure that'll also happen to our hearts and minds.

2011-05-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

We have been so gratifed and humbled, going through the evaluations of our storytelling project. The report from the elders and youth interviewed is overwhelmingly positive that having dialogues with the past:

'It has settled me....now I have a base from which to compare my present progress, and know if I am on the right track.'

"My family and I and some of our neighbors listen to our CD every Sunday. It tells so many important stories about our culture that we thought went into the grave with our relatives."

"Now I know the truth about my father and who he was before he left us. I feel relieved, very free because I have the whole story now."

"This has strengthened me. Do you know, I now feel free to talk to the youth, when before I was quiet, not knowing what to say about our terrible past."

2011-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

Sand speckles the bottom of the suitcase I'm packing for a trip to New York. It's from Florida, the site of our holiday break from the shattering chills of Michigan in December. They're not going anywhere--I see you no point to throwing away any sensory memory of walking along the beach, stepping around mounds of shells washed up after a midnight storm.

I like finding the detritus of past travels In the early morning hours, now that January is rounding toward February, I hear a bird of two. I'm back in Africa, in a tent perched on a hill in Uganda, nearly upright with a burst of song-birds weaving and darting over the lake to suck up insects, and small larvae crowding the forest floor, or hovering over the water.

It's a mind-fuck. I'm in Michigan, and that lone bird is a cardinal, just looking for a little winter company. Unmistakenly though, I crave these links to the past: sand is Sanibel Island, birds are Africa, and Rwanda. Until I return, I have to settle in other, more ordinary ways.

Finding traces that my relatives once lived, settles me.Monday night, tired, unable to relax after a day of 9 appointments, I keyed in ancestry.com, and put my grandfather's name in the 'Search' box. I know how to find him, done it before dozens of times.

There he is! Pio Carino, listed on the 1910 census, living on the USS Mohican, a steward-training destroyer docked across from Manila Bay in the Philippines. I like seeing his name on the list, along with 20 other Pilipino men, like imagining the white man who wrote it down, bent over a shallow desk in his quarters, the chatter of voices in the narrow hallways, speaking Tagalog or Ilocano.

A small knock: it's a trainee, maybe my grandfather bringing in a rattan tray holding a small silver urn filled with coffee, perched upon a white starchy napkin, it's corners draped over the edge of the tray. The trainee is deferential, not making eye-contact, and his hand shakes as he moves to set it on the pull-down table, because he knows the Captain is eyeing him, watching for an small mistake.

A spill perhaps would be the worst; it might mean being taken off the ship, walked down the gangplank, onto the packed-earth paths leading to the same building where they all took their tests to enter the Navy. But this time being led in disgrace past all the new recruits, his duffle emptied at the gates of Cavite, and he's returned to the Islands, from which he has tried to flee.

2010-05-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

What is the name of I how feel after just learning that a creative non-fiction submission, a set of letters written by a Rwandan friend, Celestin, a piece that we worked on together, will be published in a literary journal, Memoir (And)? A burst of exuberance and joy that comes after an award of sorts, was followed by tears. These are letters my friend wrote to his sister, Gloria, after pursuing the search for her remains in Rwanda, where she was murdered in the 1994 genocide I spent an evening with Celestin and his family last night, contrasting Africa with America, with him and his friends, while the two babies were passed around and played with. The kids are so vividly alive; it's tragically sad they won't know their Aunt Gloria

I feel a kind of a bitter triumph over those who never wanted Gloria or anyone like her, to be found. Relief for Celestin comes into to as well, relief that people feel when a deceased relative is properly and lovingly memorialized. Celestin and Gloria, as orphans, cared for each other deeply and were driving influences for each other. What else is there after we're gone, than the stories of how we made a difference for someone else's life?

2010-05-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

My new home for the first week is Kigali is a two-story brick dwelling in a walled compound on a bumpy dirt road. All residences in Rwanda are reached by a reddened packed road, even this house of 8 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. It sits on the back side of the hill where the US Embassy perches. Correction: something that looks a bit like a Pentagon building does not have the lightness and grace of the large African bird that just flew over my head, hurrying home before darkness pours into these hills. Nor does the Embassy have the view I have from my private balcony. At the moment, my first night here, cooking fires in the lowland have begun to layer the pale grey dusk with tense, slow-moving clouds. In the distance I hear a goat, traffic from a nearby busy road, and a drumming corps. A few minutes ago, a roar of male voices went up, likely a soccer goal from the very large white tent I see on down the hill.

This is good for me, to live with another family in a real house. The mother has a food distribution company and drives a Mercedes van, but still they have no hot running water, and at times no electricity. The working kitchen is a tiny affair - sink and small fridge--because all the cooking goes on in the back of the house, on charcoal. Televisions are galore, so is really nice furniture, tons of family photos and momentos, a beautiful front garden, two great porches upstairs and downstairs. In contrast to the usual cramped hotel venue, I have a whole suite of rooms. The family is wonderful: a savvy, warm mother and lively and lovely daughter,a marketing manager. I've met a great-aunt who dresses in traditional wrapped gowns, two young male cousins who are often on Facebook, and two househelpers who laugh and smile a lot.. They have a;; helped me feel at home with fresh fruit, heated up water, and the space to come down from a really long trip up in the air. Rwandan hospitality is world-famous, and I'm a lucky recipient.

2010-05-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

As I arrived in Amsterdam, I hesitated leaving the plane: look at all the earphones laying around the empty seats. I could really use those; rather, the storyseekers who are about to receive CD players from me, would benefit. So I lingered, the last one of over 200 out the plane door, and scavaged around the seats, picking them up. The flight attendants didn't seem to balk. On this,my 8th trip to Rwanda, I have a different sensibility about waste and want.

2010-04-22T05:01:00.000-07:00

Thrice now, our Stories For Hope team has encountered spikes of cynicism from historians and political scientists. "Yes, recording and Web-publishing dialogues between youth and elders seems a worthy project, but how can you separate the stories from a political climate in Rwanda that is growing increasingly repressive of oppositional ideas? Aren't people just telling stories that the President wants to hear?"

I bristle, and not just because this project is close to my heart. How does anyone separate a narrative from its intended audience? As a communicating species, don't humans always tell stories with the intention of affecting their listeners? It's impossible to unpack the many influences upon one's story and motives for telling it.

True, no one with an intention of disrupting the government in Rwanda, is likely to sign up for our project. So far the storytellers are generously answering questions of their younger listeners. What happened to our parents and relatives in the genocide? Why was I born in Uganda, or Tanzania, or Burundi, or DRC? What should I do to ward off the advances of young men? Will you still accept me if I don't finish secondary school? How did you keep your marriage together? What must I do to survive poverty? How do I resist youthful temptations, since life can abruptly end?

Out come stories of genocidal loss, violence and ethnic conflict, or strife as a refugee or living through poverty, interrupted schooling, or a difficult marriage. Alongside are stories of how these elders coped best, through faith, family, friendship, remembering Rwandan proverbs or tales, having determination, never giving up.

No one supposes that young people, like young people everywhere in all eras, will strictly follow the advice of their elders. Many story-seekers are orphans who have lost their original families. But the stories may plant certain positive seeds that will be harvested in very hard times. And, at a deeper level, the stories help with knowing where you come from, even if it begins like: "I found you as an infant laying in a field," or "I took you as a baby to your uncle, to be hidden for several years."

Do participants pull a veil of silence drawn over certain stories that are politically dangerous to tell right now in Rwanda? Surely. As Rwanda maintains peace and prosperity, over time these stories will undoubtedly emerge. But why wait for that time? Are the only stories worth telling the stories that emerge from free, democratic states?

2009-09-11T03:44:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing: coming back to the US from Rwanda is difficult.

Task One: Adjusting to the fact that I live in a mainly white community, and most of us don't have a clue that we are, by skin color, extremely privileged. Rob and I sat in the living room of a prominent Rwandan businessman, discussing why American don't differentiate much among Africa's 53 nations. For most US citizens, people in Africa are just 'Africans.'

Task Two: Making work just part of my life, not my whole life. With a many-faceted mission in Rwanda, Stories For Hope work became my only activity. No exercise, little reading, scant time relaxing in nature. Now, I am drifting about the house, feeling lost, almost useless.

Task Three: Not talking endlessly about Rwanda. Thank God Rob came on my third week there. We can talk together. While my many beloved good friends and family members really want to hear about my work in Rwanda, how do I summarize, without drawing up too much detail that has no context for their own lives?

Like the story about the janitor who cleans our Rwanda office, and gets us Fanta Citron from the local mart, or MTN minutes for my phone. Most of the time, he said very little to me or the Rwandan staff, just waved and smiled hi, and got to work. He 'just' cleaned the toilets, often plugged, took out the trash, and wiped the floors of Rwanda's red dirt every morning with a rag stuck to a stick. Shame on me. I never even knew his name, because Evas, our in-country manager, dealt with him.

On our last day of recording in the office, he asked, could he bring his own brother to the project, to tell him some stories? I agreed at once.

His name is Emmanuel Niyigaba. When he showed up for his storytelling session, with his younger brother, Jean Rene Rugira, he was suddenly transformed: alert, energized, taking in every translated word I said, slightly nervous, but eager--a young man with stories to tell, and undoubtedly, like everyone here, a family story of sorrow, and survival.

His will not be the last story I want to see transcribed, but the first. Who so wisely said, the last shall be first?

2009-09-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

My body and baggage have returned from Rwanda. Too passive? Hey, all I had to do was show up at various airport gates with my conspicuous camera bag, steel-gray pull briefcase, and Ghanian purse. Then several massive airplanes took me out of Africa, dipped briefly into Europe, then flew against East-bound air currents across the Atlantic. Suddenly--clunk--like Dorothy, my body is home.

In about a week, the rest of me will arrive. I still hear the rooster that crowed every morning at six, still smell the cooking fires, still taste the freshest scrambled eggs I've ever eaten, and feel my fingers wander automatically over my Nokia cell phone in search of Hassan, our driver, or our friend Celestin, or Benon, the young man so involved with our program.

I see the verdant hillsides speckled with banana trees, woven through with earthen red footpaths. I see thousands of kids and young people striding to school on Kigali's neat sidewalks, and motorbikes taking adults to work each morning, helmeted women in business suits. I feel the warm handshakes and cheeks of so many Rwandan men and women thanking us over and over for the chance to tell their stories.

One of my suitcases is packed with consent forms, contact sheets, and evaluations from 50 pairs of storytellers who came bravely to talk about the past. My computer is heavy with the weight of their audiotapes, and video testimonies. In the able hands of Never Again Rwanda, the largest youth organization in Rwanda, and the Episcopal Church of Byumba, I leave behind 16 trained Rwandan facilitators, over $1000 in equipment, plus an agreements to do more training and recordings in Kigali, Byumba, and Nyamata.

We are a small project, mainly a spark for more talking between the generations. We will not impact poverty, or disease, or the political process. We won't create jobs. But we hope to catalyze change in a couple hundred of families who just may keep talking, or tell others about why it's worth sharing between the generations. We wish to be mainly perturb the silence that has fallen upon this incredible nation, and insert some positive stories among the many horrific ones.

By next week, I'll be more present in Ann Arbor, but for now, I'm still in a commercial district of Rwanda, threading myself between a local phone kiosk and a plumber's store gleaming with shiny new toilets, walking through a passageway to the back of a three-story building, stepping carefully across an abandoned lot, heading up the stairway, and turning left, to find Stories For Hope.

2009-09-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

The US Embassy in Kigali looks like every other building in Washington: squat,and imposing, and grey. It seems void of any architecturally interesting detail. Maybe someone decided that, since it will need a huge, tall fence around it, why waste the money on art?

Fences, and security pods. There are several of those, all alike. Heave open a hugely heavy clear door, sidle up to a high counter manned by security guards, surrender your passport and cell phone, get phone clearance from the person awaiting you, pass through a metal detector, and you're in. America the Beautiful.

I never got over my cynicism for American government, and so I smirk as pry open another thick door, and walk into the next grey building. Inside it's all high ceilings, and tasteful burnt sienna furniture grouped around a glass coffee table. On the walls are quilts from American artists, nothing really grabby. I'm like so disdainful. Why not art work from Rwandans? I'm like where were you America, in 1994? I'm aware that I have grown Rwandan skin over my own.

Until a photo catches me. It's a very large photo of Barack Obama, just staring at me. He is not America's President. He is my President, and I suddenly feel tears rising. I take a deep breath, inhaling this moment, and holding it as long as I can, like a joint. My own newly minted patriotism sends a tingle over me. I am just so proud. And I am now, once again, proud to be from a country that would dare elect him.

A Rwandese man in blue jeans appears to my left. It's Gilbert, from USAID. Okay, Gilbert, let's do some good for Rwanda. Let's talk.

2009-08-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

We arrived this morning for our first day of story-recordings in the hill-top town of Byumba. I was nervous. Weaving north, as the night mists lifted themselves over Rwanda's bigger and greener hills, had been a stunningly beautiful journey. But as soon the stark white tents of the Gihembe refugee camp came into view, I felt worried.

Two weeks ago, we had made a bad, first impression in Byumba by arriving almost two hours late. The car had overheated, twice, taking us up steep roads to this most northern province. We rushed flustered into the meeting.

Local leaders had been polite, of course. But by now, after six trips to Rwanda, I could sense undertones of distrust. Since I had been in Africa for less than 24 hours, I was still adjusting. There was little time to get used to translation, and I knew I had talked too slow, and too loud. No one approached me afterwards, over our sambosa, Fanta and Citron.

The car eased around groups of uniformed children heading to school.Byumba is a busy, bustling, and very orderly town. Storytelling among 3-4 pairs of local people was planned. As we called Emmanuel and Elissam to find the recording site, I wondered if we would have to start all over again to build relationships up here. Had word spread among the citizens that the Americans were unorganized, and brash?

Emmanuel and his staff had found a wonderful place for us to work, an solid, empty thick-walled building in a compound, with lots of small rooms adjoining a larger one. The low ceilings, and curtained windows made it cozy for people coming to share their stories.The front and back areas of the structure were softened by neat gardens. It was quiet, except for a low bellow of a cow next door, which the archivists would hate. But the cow made it feel homier. This whole set-up would feel safe for people, and familiar, better than our modern office building in Kigali, on a street screeching with motor bike noises.

People arrived almost immediately: a man and his son, both dressed in their Sunday clothes, another father in a crisp white shirt who awaited his daughter's arrival, and a old woman in a beautiful green panga and headwrap, who came with her daughter.

I wanted to start right away to bestow my reputation as an American who respected that they had left fields, pastures, jobs, stores, and schools to come, that it was costing them precious time.

But the participants had come early, the daughter was still closing her storefront, and the facilitators were a bit late, so we ordered tea and coffee and snacks, and tried to make small talk, with Emmanuel translating.

Rob, Laurette, and Elissam had quickly and efficiently organized the interview and debriefing rooms, and the recording and photo equipment. We were ready.

But in Rwanda, care is always taken to include others, and be social. So when facilitators Canisius, Veronique, and Agnes arrived, they too joined in the small coffee klatch outside. The morning sun grew bright and hot, and small boys peeked around the gate. We were two hours behind schedule.

Schedule: that ugly American word driven by goals, timelines, and the drive to get things done, no matter the cost to human wear and tear. I took a deep breath, and reminded myself that this long preamble to our work day would only make people feel comfortable.

If we had to drive back to Kigali in the dark, so be it. Even though there were many accidents on the this steep, twisting road, the only one coming from Uganda, Hassan was our driver, and I trusted him explicitly.

Before I had a chance to gulp down a second cup of coffee, the servers cleared everything away. It was time to begin.

2009-08-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

In 15 minutes, I leave for my sixth trip to Rwanda. Going there has overwhelmed at times, like today. Will we really accomplish our goals of training facilitators, and collecting 50 stories? I'll be spending every penny of money from the government that isn't even in the bank yet. What about the future?

When I was a teenager, I used to feel the slow creep of truth.

That's beginning to happen. The truth is, this is too much for one person to do, even as I have able assistants along. This may be my last trip for a while. I need to rest, rebalance my life, write about what I've experienced, and consider what place Rwanda will have in my life.

I've already faced THAT truth. It happened on a patio one evening, as I dined alone. I love this country, and I am overtaken by admiration for what the people living here have survived. Rwanda will always be with me, and the friends I've made there will have a permanent place in my life.

2009-05-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

I will not have the chance today to attend one of Rwanda's 10,000 gacaca courts. The friend who invited me was someone who has, since 2006, been telling me his story. In Rwanda, where 'story' is mainly code for 'genocide story,' there are millions of these stories. Nonetheless, each one is excruciating, and uniquely horrific, and totally unfathomable. "You think your story is the worst, and then you hear another one that seems more horrible than yours."

This man's parents, and several others in their household, were killed as the genocide exploded in the South in 1994. He now knows who the genocidaires were. Were? Are? Aren't they still murderers? What tense do we use when the events of the past are so immediately telescoped in the present? The grammar of genocide is still being invented.

So is the issue of 'forgiveness.' The man accused of killing is now asking for forgiveness, even though he continues to deny he was the actual murderer. My friend doubts he is telling the truth because the perpetrator did not correctly name the weapons of murder. At the first hearing, my friend said to him, "You are saying they died by machete, yet two children survivors who crawled out of the killing field say they heard gunshots ."

The other shattering fact is that 11 young men came to the compound to kill, and only now, since he has seen them, he knows that several were this man's childhood playmates. We sit in his office to chat, me about to start a project, he about to play a tennis match. "One of these guys taught me how to drive a car! Several years later, he allows that my parents be killed??"

I cannot offer to shed light on his rightful question. In Rwanda, particularly as an outsider whose own nation turned its back on this tiny nation in its desperate time of need, I have learned that to bear witness to a story, human to human, is sometimes the most important thing I can do. All I can do today, wondering about how my friend might feel not being able to attend the gacaca (frustrated? relieved?)is pass on his story, and keep wondering what being human is all about.

2008-09-10T03:07:00.000-07:00

"The arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

This hopeful idea comes from Theodore Parker, a US abolitionist against slavery, from the 1850's. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to repeat it.

It showed up again in the media swirl around the Democratic National Convention, and because the idea is essentially about hope, I passed it on to Joseph. He and spoke today while he awaited the deliberations of the local court council in Kimirama, a very small rural village in Rwanda.

But can it really be a comfort to those, like Joseph, who lost beloved family members to genocide?? He and I speak while the court, trying suspects in his sister's murder, deliberates on their innocence or guilt. The arc is indeed, very long.

"When I arrived here, they had nine people in custody. They lived or worked at the house where Immaculee was killed. Unfortunately, the four brothers escaped, the ones who are said to have enslaved and raped Immaculee, then dumped her body in a pit toilet. They fled just as the authorities were about to hold them over, for this hearing. The others now in custody say they saw her at the house, but will not offer anything else.

...So its' very, very tough. I am maintaining myself emotionally strong, but I am very discouraged."

I can hear this in his voice. Even though his strength endures, I hear strain, fatigue, sadness, and outrage. But, Joseph, soon to be a leader in Rwanda, has a way of rising above almost any situation. He knows he is not the only one to be suffering.

"There are many families like mine, survivors who only wish to know where the remains of their loved ones are buries, who just want to know some little detail of their relatives' last days. We do not wish justice in order to hurt the perpetrators, but justice that might pressure them to tell more."

At the end of the day, we speak again. His voice has lifted. "They are all guilty but one, including the mother of the four escapees! This gives me some satisfaction in knowing that some justice has been served. They will appeal, of course, but perhaps in the meantime they will think twice about being silent."

I offer that the arc must be bending toward justice, since the local justices must have included Hutus, since the villages in the Southern Province are peopled largely by people of this background. If they had to come to judgment by consensus, there is hope that justice in Rwanda will prevail.

In any event, Rwanda is ahead of the world curve on justice. In this country, not telling what you know about genocide crimes, is a crime in itself. The people in Kimirama being sent to jail today apparently committed more than silence. They have been accused of Category 1 genocide, the worst offenses, bringing life imprisonment. They are feeling the pinch of the arc right now, an arc that has suddenly bent into their souls. May God help them find some inner peace, and if they are guilty, come forward to help Joseph and his family.

2008-09-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

To call Africa, I arise before dawn, and bird-song. My dreams have scurried down the narrow hole leading to unconsciousness. The vacancy leaves my mind deliciously sluggish for the minute it takes to walk my body into the kitchen, slide open the door to the porch, and greet the day.

I love the barely awake state of being. It feels almost ape-like, or early human primeval. This is the state before thoughts, and emotions, and the words that drive them. It's the state before intention, or hope, or dread.

The darkened dawn air jolts: a chill has crept into Michigan, hovering over ground still warm from a scorching late summer's sun. My first thought is Rwanda, nestled into the center of Sub-Saharan Africa and, by all accounts politically, socially, and physically , still hot.

My second thought is my friend Joseph. Right now he is back in Kimirama, a minority among mainly ethnic Hutus, some of whom once hunted, herded, hacked, and killed Tutsis like his sister Immaculee and their father's relatives.The children in Kimirama are innocents, but carry a heavy legacy.

After the spring, when Immaculee's remains were found, Kimirama is reeling again today with the aftershocks of the genocide. Inside one of the earthen buildings at the village center a local justice court is now in session, trying to shed light on Immaculee's murder. I see Joseph sitting on a side bench, waiting for his turn to testify, his eyes resting on the accused suspects, including a mother. I see the shadows of small children peering through the window, their hands shading the beating, overhead sun.

The suspected killers have remained free since April, when they were released from an initial jailing after Immaculee's bones were found in their home. The release was strategic, in the hopes the suspects would cooperate with an investigation into the murder. To date, only one brother has talked, maintaining his innocence by fingering his brother for her rape.

Yesterday Joseph and I chatted on email, and commmunicated haltingly and imperfectly on a trans-Atlantic call. He sounds mobilized, and says he feels strong. His goal is to continue piecing together Immaculee's story from the shards of small memories and stories he knows about her demise.

Some local officials took into custody the 3-4 suspects in Immaculee's case, to prevent them from escaping the hearing. Joseph will see them all, two for the first time. I'm in the dark about who they are, or their family name. By not using their names, Joseph says, he stays more removed from the reality that real people did really bad things.

He is prepared, he says, for the task ahead, which is to try and extract more information from these suspects. They face long prison terms unless they recant, confess, and ask for forgiveness.

Our plan is for me to call while he's in the South. He'll be holding his feelings in check, during the glaring light of the hearing. Maybe I can be a quick release valve, or support, for the inevitable pain that comes with the territory of resurrecting a murdered sister, and trying to bring the dark truth into the light.

2008-08-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

Almost every day, a certain question swims upward to consciousness, like a tadpole needing air at the pond's surface: 'What am I doing working in Rwanda?' I'm supposed to be writing articles about being Filipino American, drafting a book proposal about turning sixty, and expanding a short story into a collection of stories about cousins. I'm supposed to writing stories, and publishing them for fun and profit.

Instead, I'm in the middle of a totally unexpected chapter of my life story now, unsure how it will end.

Instead, I'm about to bear witness to a set of family stories dredged upward from the rubble of civil conflict, genocide, and forced diaspora. Next week, I will launch a fund-raising initiative for an intergenerational storytelling project in Rwanda, for the benefit of the next generation. I just spent 13 days on the ground, hosting 32 meetings, spending thousands.

Suddenly, I have a non-profit corporation, an international NGO (non-governmental organization) a country director named Evas, and a lawyer named Bosco. At least two dozen Rwandese, from a Minister, to a former street boy, have invested a relatively vast sum of money, and a huge amount of hope. I intend to turn Stories For Hope into a book at least, and make my way back to writing.

Would I be in Rwanda at all, save for the unlikely, deep friendship I have with Joseph, a Rwandan, and his new wife, Nadia? Their wedding last week was an extravaganza of family ties. Cousins were embraced as sisters and brothers, elders came from the Diaspora to honor the coming of a new generation to be born in Rwanda, and the bride's side and the groom's side role-played a humorous opposition to one another. All gave gifts: money, cows, baskets of grain and beans, bedding, brooms, lamps and cases bottled water.

Would I have been at this wedding, save for an extraordinary visit last Spring to support Joseph? I bore witness to the resurrection of Joseph's sister's bones, from the pits of the genocide, to a proper burial on a high hillside. It was a final reenactment of a filial tie between a brother and sister, long separated, but always beloved of one another.

Joseph's story gives me hope that one day I will be reunited with my own brothers who have recently gone away from me. I never thought this estrangement possible. The true story of why it happened is buried, and may not surface until our parents are gone from this earth. I sometimes feel drowned in sorrow.

But right now, this storytelling project is a positive force in my life. So are Joseph, and Nadia. We--country to country, friend to friend-- have adopted one another, crossing boundaries I never thought possible.

Like my Filipino grandfather Pio, I have left the safe shores of home, and certainty, to reach toward something unknown and untested. Pio risked everything; I risk only a small sum of money, and ego. He never returned to his Motherland; I can do that easily.

The project is striding ahead. I'll know what I'm doing in Rwanda after I reach this new unexplored shore, put down some roots, and as I look back over my shoulder to see how far I've come, I'll remember the way homeward.

2008-07-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

What does it take to work day to day in Rwanda, as a foreigner?
1. Tough skin. So what, high government officials don’t get back to you, or stand you up? It’s not personal. They are extremely busy. No one delegates for fear of mistakes (and if they’re big mistakes, they’re gone in this country), and the ones just below them have most of the work of the Ministry, and they don’t delegate either (same fear).
2. No staring. Paper lunch sacks full of money sitting in the bank waiting area; an armed guard pacing the backyard that my bedroom window looks over, five floors down; an older infant strapped to his mother’s back who reaches through the sleeves in her dress for his mid-day snack; packs of Chinese, and Brits with their young assistants huddled over papers and Blackberrys on a hotel patio.
3. No political dissecting. This is not your country; you are a guest here. You did not live through genocide, nor have to share your village with people who killed your parents. Therefore, you do not have the right to criticize the government.
4. Shameless networking. Calling a lunch meeting of high officials; chasing down a former Minister you know who is walking out the door; asking a lawyer, ‘Does the government approve of you?’
5. Excellent fine motor coordination. Texting is second to talking.
6. Patience. A group of young people scheduled to show at 9:30, do not appear until 10:30; the transformer adaptor for my computer must be in the wall JUST SO; the bank lines are 20 people deep and they have a queue system no one will explain.
7. No junk food, or extreme drinking. I have not had one potato chip, ice cream cone, pistachio, chocolate bar, or oreo cookie. Anyone caught drinking and driving goes to jail for 2 years. This is true.
8. The ability to pinch yourself. To be in Rwanda is an honor. You have way more to learn from this nation about peace, reconciliation, optimism, and hope, than they do from you.

2008-07-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Today, in a modest but artfully conceived building in Nyamiramba, a suburb of Kigali, 8 young men and women, a mixed group of formerly Hutu and Tutsi, sat around at a handsome polished pine table, and patiently answered our questions: How much storytelling goes on in your family? Do your parents speak with you about the genocide? Do they tell you what happened, and why? Can you ask them questions about it? How has genocide affected you now?

For three hours, they spoke through their leader, and clearly and fearlessly articulated the dilemma of their generation. They don’t want only lessons from their elders; they want the stories of what happened. In this way, like all young adults coming of age, they will apply their own reasonings, and come to their own conclusions about what happened, and what will never happen again.

2008-07-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

I am happy to see 'Joseph.' (I have shielded his real name). He is shining with the hope of a bright, promising future with his intended, and we greet each like long apart friends.

It's true. While it's only been 10 weeks or so since my last trip, so much is behind him. With Immaculee's resurrection and proper burial, he can go forward knowing her spirit has been freed. This must be a good feeling.

We talk about the wedding. I interview him a bit about the family gathering in the couple's honor next week. What is the family tree, anyway?

I am abruptly stopped in my tracks. Joseph cannot easily give me names on branches. 'We're all in the same clan; these are all my cousins and brothers and sisters.' In fact, he seems to resist putting people on branches. Why?

I realize that in the US we have probably inherited some notion of lineage that is rigidly organized around direct descendants. Many Americans can tick off the names of their great-great-grandparents, and can draw family branches easily. Doing so seems to matter to us. Why?

Our little meeting ends with a story about how Joseph and his family walked two months, with their cattle and belongings, from Uganda to Tanzania. Another war, and conflicts between Ugandans and Rwandan refugees, forced them to leave.Some days there was very little food, or any shelter at all. Joseph's schooling was entirely disrupted; he was only 8.

It is dawning on me that, while the genocide was horrible and traumatic, losing one's country, and roving around East Africa as a refugee was awful too. If I am to publish something about this family, the piece must include descriptions of how being refugees not once, but twice -- altered their lives forever.

2008-07-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

One reason why I love being in Rwanda has to do with New York City. Both are thriving urban landscapes teeming with people trying to do more than just survive. They are striving to create something. For NYC, it’s buildings, stock funds, plays, music, schools, businesses, careers. In Rwanda the focus is on similar goals, but with a critical addition: reconciliation with one’s neighbors, after nearly wiping each other out.

Valerie, my friend and host, told me one of those miracles stories that are told time and again in Rwanda. Where she taught during her six-month stay heres, a private secondary school, a young man, Daniel had a question. He put this question to his mother, who is a principal at another school for girls.

“Mom, I have just learned that two boys in my schools are good friends. They are from different backgrounds; one has Hutu origins; the other is from Tutsis. The thing is, their relatives tried to kill one another in the genocide. But now, they get along, and do not hate one another. How is that possible?”

I have no doubt that Daniel, and his generation, will answer that question very soon, by word and deed, and we in the West will stand back in awe.

2008-07-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

Passing through Nairobi on the way to Kigali is supposed to have the effect of acclimating me to Africa, but it doesn't quite do the trick. Compared to Rwanda, urban Kenya needs a huge facelift. It's wrinkled with pot-holes and sagging with the weight of chaos and disorganization. Driving from the airport, it looks like Manila in fact, a city which never fully recovered from World War II.

Barbara's house is a study in contrasts. With a staff of 5 (driver, day guard, night guard, cook, and gardener), Barbara maintains a stately, white-washed home surrounded by gardens, which are surrounded by a fence. We had a lovely meal by candlelight, modern African art glowing on the dining room walls, and polished mahogany furniture.

The last to bed, (well, there's this blog) I broke the mood by hitting the alarm instead of the light switch. Barbara rushed downstairs and explained: 'This switch is in case you're attacked and need the guard; the one next to you is for the security company.' (In case the guard has been attacked?)

I suspect I'm overtired and extremely jet-lagged. I now have a phobia for any light switch whatsoever, and I plan to sleep tonight with all the lights in my room. This is ironic: I'm more afraid of setting off the alarm, than being attacked.

2008-07-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2008

I have been weeping much of the last 24 hours, as I ready myself for another trip to Rwanda.

An aunt started it. She called from Nashville, not only to wish me well on my trip to Rwanda, but she said, for the first time in our relationship, ‘I love you.’ In my tiny downstairs office, trying to fit little trinkets for kids into my suitcase, I choked up, and started to cry. My mother’s sister is not well known for sentimentality, yet here was her love, unhinged from its Southern gentile restraint, expressed in a simple string of words, words that have moved nations, started wars, and the conceptions of new lives.

Saying good-bye to my parents, brave souls watching their little girl child travel 8000 miles from home, was difficult. The words, ‘I love you,’ catch in my throat, and my words are tinged with have a husky sadness most people never see in me.

‘Good-bye,’ I say. ‘I love you.’ I feel a special push for the world’s most powerful phrase, because they are older adults who feel each year , maybe each, is a special gift. I rush into the bedroom where Rob is dressing, and weep into my hands like a child.

My sons. What do they make of their mother, leaving the nest so dramatically to care for others and pursue her craft? I hug Dan, thinking I will see him again on my departure day. I do not, and so I must memorize the feel of his strong back as we hugged goodbye in the kitchen yesterday. I feel an urgent need to call Adam, to hear his calming, confident voice. To each, I say,’ I love you.’

My husband. Rob has successfully faced down fears of loneliness, worry, and resentment, and given me full support for this trip. We say good-bye not just once at the airport curb, but once more right after I board. As the doors close, I sneak in a second good-bye.

Our dog. I say good-bye to our old Jack Russell, and cry, knowing full well that she is aged enough to pass at any time. I am rushing so madly, all I can do is to lean over her dog bed, and stroke her back, and thank her for what she’s given to me, and our family.

Now, flying over Canada, awash in sadness, I have a thought that helps me pull myself together. I’m going to a country where people are remembering, with terrible pain, the last words they spoke to relatives and friends before they were murdered, fled the country. Even though the miles between me and my family increase with each minute, I will return ,and so many in Rwanda did not.

2008-05-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

Part Three

Saying a last goodbye to someone has died, is one of life’s saddest moments. We trail out of the makeshift little office/church, and out onto the wide porch. A great, overdue honor had just been paid to Immaculee’s shortened life, and, one critically important task—steeped in both symbol and necessity—is finished.

The brilliant mid-day Equatorial light, and the sound of singing in the church down the lane, lifts my spirits. A small crowd of children and mothers awaits, drawn by the event, and eager to peer at the mugundu and Rwandese mourners from Kigali.

They had circled us when we first arrived, these Sunday-dressed villagers, then stood vigil outside during our brief ceremony. I ask in hand language (hold out camera, give a thumbs up, and a shoulder shrug), for permission to snap away at the kids. They smile and move themselves forward, as if to say ‘snap me too.’ And so I do, thankful for something to do that is about life, and life in the present.

Abeid’s car arrives, and we bid goodbye, with a promise to send the photos to one of the officials. I look over my shoulder to wave, aware of a small affection growing between me and these children. True, I love kids, and the children in Africa are so appreciative for anything, even a handshake. But are they not also Joseph’s allies, since they live in a village which has guarded Immaculee’s remains since the digging?

Bumping along the two-track lane, silence blankets us once again. We, this band of brothers and sisters, need re-grouping. Someone asks Joseph how he is doing, and whether it all happened the way he wanted it to.
“It’s fine, “ he says. “ Now I know she is safe.” Before I can puzzle about his comment, he produces a key from his pocket. “I have the key.”

Of course. For Joseph, locking down the coffin was a critical act as Immaculee’s brother, protecting her in ways he and others simply, tragically, could not, 14 years earlier. The genocide was like a giant scourge, an all-encompassing pestilence that ran over the entire country.

No wonder officials in the sector had been scurrying around in a small panic, to find this key, which someone dropped while the coffin was placed in the make-shift altar.

Now, as we head for Kirirama, up and down roads divoted by rains, I try to imagine what I’ll see, and how’ll feel, being in this next village. This is where Imaculee was held captive, raped, and murdered.

The road twists and turns up a hill. ‘Hills’ in Rwanda are really small little mountains. The small rectangular farms and fields are spiked with banana plants, their tops like green helicopter blades, the green bunches of bananas dripping with the most beautiful coral flowers.

In less than 15 minutes, we encounter first one, then a second, and finally, the last of three ‘centers.’ A center is a very small village of probably 10-20 two-room or one-room houses, all grouped together. It feels like an outpost, which it is. We see a occasional storefront, and in a darkened space about the size of most American closets, dry goods stacked on shelves. Groups of people stand about, in their age groups; small goats and children dart about.

“We’re there,” Joseph says, in a voice so flat and resolute it snags my attention.

Meaning, we’re in Kimirarma. “Stop!” he says to Abeid. Joseph rolls his window down hard and fast as the car draws up close, beckons to a group of middle-aged men. They obey immediately and approach, their faces serious and drawn. Joseph barks out some English and Kinyarwanda, with a voice again so intense and forceful, I go on red alert. Is something physical about to explode?

Before I can absorb this, the car is lurching forward. As we barrel down first side road, and then another, Valerie bends toward me, and says quietly, ‘Back there was one of the suspects.’ And, before I can ask her to describe him, the car has stopped, and Joseph has bounded out, and is now walking toward a house. We hurry to follow him.

What unfolds in the next horrific hour, I will remember and re-remember, over and over, probably for the rest of my life. What we saw was not just the scene of a brutal crime, but the closest I will ever get to Rwanda’s genocide, and the challenges facing the nation as it seeks to reconcile the killers with the family members of victims.

‘My god, oh dear god,’ I say softly. A mud and concrete house, a compound really, is dwarfed by a gaping hole, made by digging away a huge wedge of earth. What we see is the cross-section of a 25 foot deep pit latrine where Immaculee’s body was dumped

My mind reels, and tips in an odd direction. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in the Egypt room , a large pyramid has been reconstructed, and a wedge removed to allow visitors to enter the inside, and visit the tombs of kings.

That is my immediate association, and I see it now as a defense against horror. I had seen the skeletons of Murambi, a genocide memorial, but that did not compare to seeing the tomb of someone whose life I had heard so much about.

By now, villagers have made their way down the path. Three middle-aged men, file past us, like we were hosting a receiving line. Each shakes our hands, and, rotely, we shake back. Joseph, watching this parade-charade, strides down to us from atop a dirt pile. In one motion, He points to a man in a blue patterned shirt and tattered baseball cap and says: “That one, there, he is the killer.”

I freeze in a deer-in-headlights position. I am standing only five feet from the man. His hands begin to shake. He pulls nervously at his left cheek and beard stubble. Children and mothers in peasant garb, standing up the hill nearer to the house, seem to freeze as well. No one speaks, but everyone gazes hard at the scene about to unfold, and its players: the muzungu, the urban, Western-dressed Rwandese men from the capital, and the local man standing accused.

The villagers have been schooled in gacaca. They know the drill: be serious, listen carefully, and search yourself for any information you might have to give. Or, if you are a hiding perpetrator, wonder if, this time, you will be exposed.

The man with the stubble appears to anticipate he will be confronted and pressured yet again by the victim’s brother. Joseph begins to talk emphatically in Kinyarwanda and point and gesture toward the accused. This goes on for 15 minutes. The man has something to say initially , but then grows very quiet. His silence seems to fuel Joseph’s voice and tone. I assumed—wrongly, it turns out-- he was angry, and yelling at the man for his part in the killing.

Joseph turns to tell us that the man has just confirmed that he was ‘around the house’ during the genocide, and that his brother did indeed rape Immaculee. On one hand, the information, while horrifying and damning, helps fill in this young woman’s story, which needs telling. But I am sorrowful for the confirmation she was brutalized.

As Joseph turns back to confront the man, a small circle forms around these two antagonists, including a survivor in the village, the Americans, and our driver Abeid, who wept openly when he saw the tomb.

Soon we are spent. I have taken the requisite photos. Joseph has grown tired to talking to a wall of silence. It is getting very, very hot. We have other places to visit, as we reconstruct Immaculee’s life in 1994, and imagine her final days.

As we drive off, the youngest children, now released from the tensions wrought by the scene , begin to cavort, chasing the car for a free ride on the back bumper, a dangerous act that might end their lives quickly. We shoo them away.

Watching a little boy recede in the distance, I cringe with a disturbing, shameful thought. While I felt drawn to the children in the sector village where Immaculee’s remains will be kept until burial , I do not feel warmly toward the children in Kimirama, where the remains were hidden, then dug. In fact, I ignored them. But all were born considerably after the genocide. They bear a difficult legacy, but have not committed the same brutal acts of their ancestors, and are unlikely to do so. Yet I have an instant dislike for these children, and this troubles me.

The roots of prejudice are ugly, and deep. When exposed to violence against oneself and one’s family, we all have a tendency to blame, and harden our hearts. This is a protection, of course, and a way of dealing with disturbing, destructive behavior. For an instant I had a sense of just how that happens, even among people who are proud of their intellect, empathy, and reasoning capacity.

Rwanda has much to teach the rest of the world about tolerance, and reconciliation. Take the fact that Joseph and the killer/suspect can try to have a conversation about Immaculee. Take the fact that Joseph and the authorities could successfully insist that the village men, including the suspects, should dig the pit latrine.

And consider that fact that, later back in Kigali, Joseph translated his words to the killer/suspect. ‘Weren’t you being angry with him?” I asked.” –No, not really. I was just trying to convince him that I wouldn’t have him jailed if he told me the truth of what happened to Immaculee. What’s important to me is not what happens to him—only God can judge him—but to know about the end of my sister’s life. I cannot bring her back, but , with time, I can know her story and keep her memory alive. That , and not punishment of her killers, is what matters to me."

2008-05-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

Part Two

The road south is lush. There seem to be fewer small patches of farm, and more expanses of forest. The scenery, and the hum of the tires on the road, lull us into quiet. It ‘s hotter as we move south, and I doze.

More than an hour later, we reach our turn-off. Miles and miles of red-orange roads lay ahead. At Joseph’s direction, we’re taking the direct path to the village where Immacule’s remains have been safeguarded for 10 days. Valerie and I are in the rear seat, our knees against our chests, using the hand straps to help us ride the bumps.

On the narrower roads, the children can almost touch our car as we pass. They see David, tall with his bush hat, and yell Muzungu…..Muzungu….., the Swahili word for ‘white person.’ The boys gesture that they want our water bottles. Some call out for money.

It becomes very hilly, and then suddenly, Joseph begins counting down the tiny village centers: “We’re almost there, just three more centers.”

I’m alert now, and my stomach tightens. I try to catch hold of my anxiety, and stash it. What is about to happen needs my full attention

“We are there.” This village, a sector headquarters, is lined with neat, two-room mud homes. The car eases past women and children in their Sunday clothes: bright pattered skirts in greens and deep reds and yellows, children in shorts and tops. As we turn left, the street widens and broadens. Here is the center. One set of buildings looks very modern, and is artfully designed. I see what looks like a park, and beyond is clearly a small church. I like this feel of this village, especially when we step out of the car.

A small crowd of perhaps two dozen villagers seem to know why we are here. They keep a respectful distance, but stare and smile. Three muzungu are a novelty out in the districts, away from the larger towns and tourist sites. We may be the only white people some of them have ever seen, up close.

Two men immediately approach Joseph, and the three of them confer on the concrete porch of a three-room government headquarters. The rest of us, including Nadia and Abeit, stand apart. At the end of the road, a church choir is singing out. How sweet, I think, to have music for a funeral.

Joseph has asked me to take photos; it gives me a good feeling to know I’m doing something useful, even as I feel awkward with my many dangling cameras.

The short meeting is over, and the men come over to introduce themselves to us. One speaks pretty good English. These are the men who have teamed with Joseph to dig the remains, question the suspects, and arrange for burial. A woman with short-cropped hair, wearing a beige suit stands nearby.

“What’s happening,” I ask Joseph. “They are bringing the coffin here,” he says.

I wonder if a truck will come, or a group of men will be carrying it down the street. Time seems to slow, or stand still, as we wait. The sight of a coffin often fills me with a wave of sadness. I remember the last one I saw, containing Rob's aunt.
Just as someone is giving me a tour of a green-walled office, Valerie comes behind me and says, “It’s here.”

A small 30 X 40 foot room, seems set up as a classroom on one side, and storage area everywhere else. In moments, this will be funeral parlor. On the right, rows of old-style school benches face forward to a back wall. On the left are piles of construction materials: long, silvery sheets of tin lay along the window wall; high stacks of dusty gray sacks of concrete line the back. Several bookcases are crammed full and overflowing with records of some kind.

Just near the doorway a small, stained-red wooden coffin has arrived, and is balanced on a table. Joseph inspects the empty cavern, then he and the other men carry it to the front of the school-benches, in a quiet corner away from the windows where small boys have lined up to peek inside.

It seems Joseph is building a little altar here, as if we were in a tiny church. A small crisis ensues: where is the key to the coffin? Who had it last? Where has it been dropped? A few people frantically search, including Joseph, among piles of papers on the floor , between tin sheets, and under cement bags. Finally,the woman in the beige suit comes up with it.

Joseph now moves quickly across the veranda to an office, which an official unlocks. I follow with the camera, to record this part of the funeral for him, and for his relatives who cannot be there.

A large 18 X 18 X 18 white cardboard box sitting on a chair is tightly wound in clear packing tape. Joseph quickly and deliberately goes to work undoing it. Inside are several bundles wrapped in white gauze. He lifts them out gingerly but carefully, not like they are objects, but as if they were alive, almost like tiny little swaddled infants just born and needing immediate attention.

We follow him to the coffin and the table it sits upon. The small group gathers around the makeshift altar , Joseph at the center, Nancy, his fiancee close by; the several officials, and the beige-suited woman, and us, three Americans.

Joseph works unwrapping things, narrating quietly . He wants to show us what are the bundles, but continue his important, critical work. There is so much care, focus, and deliberate and sacred feel in Joseph’s work. I think of him as a extremely kind country doctor, bent over a tiny patient he needs to mend quickly.
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He briefly reveals the short, darkened pieces of bones (“these are the remains”) held in a white cloth streaked in soft pink and blue, and holds up two articles of dirt-soaked clothing (“her skirt,” “her blouse”). The remains are re-wrapped, and Joseph moves to the coffin.

People stand by to help. One hands him a soft piece of very white cloth, which Joseph folds carefully to fit into the coffin as a liner. Next go the wrapped remains. For a time-stopped moment, Joseph gazes at the remains, then closes the cloth around them. These he places in the center of the coffin. Finally, in an act which is among the most poignant I’ve ever witnessed, he moves his hand over the cloth, and spreads out the bones, as if to re-make his sister into a human form, one last time.

At each end of the coffin go Immaculee’s skirt, and her blouse. Someone produces the flowers we brought, a small bouquet of pale pink roses, and Joseph puts them on top of the remains.

And with that, Immaculee has been returned to dignity, and grace. Joseph’s caring, deliberate work has restored her somehow. We take one last photo of him with his hand on the flowers, and he closes the coffin.

I’m still thunderstruck by what we have just witnessed, and barely notice that Joseph is taking a key from his pocket, and locking the coffin with a padlock.

When he finally stands, a solemn quiet blankets our little corner of the room. We gaze down at the close coffin. Joseph's small, deliberate acts has transformed Immaculee from a set of remains to a person. I sense that, as witnesses, each of us are just now allowing our deep sadness to surface, for this young woman, and her loving brother.

Valerie asks quietly, ‘Should we say a prayer?’ Joseph responds “Sure, we can do that,” but the silence that follows seems to ask, What prayer? What faith? In what language?

I offer to say the Lord’s Prayer in English, the only one I think I remember, and the one I think Joseph knows, because he is Anglican. David and I say it together. After the “Amens” I struggle against an outpouring of tears. Nancy is crying silently. Joseph’s eyes are sad and glazed, but his jaw is firm. Valerie says the Kaddish to herself, the Jewish prayer for mourning.

Joseph then composes himself to give a short speech of gratitude to the people in the village, and reminds us all that he and his family are one among hundreds of thousands of families strewn across Rwanda, hoping to bury the remains of their loved ones. The implication is that Joseph's family is among the fortunate, since they have found someone, and can now say a proper good-bye.

I flash to something similar I heard from a father of a young man, a firefighter, who died at the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11/2001: "We are so, so lucky, he said. We are among the few who recovered our child's remains." The father, himself a retired firefighter, was standing next to a glass case holding his son's uniform and helmet.

As we turn to leave the room, I am struck : as David and I recited the Lord’s Prayer, I stumbled awkwardly on the one phrase that drives home why we were all there: “And forgive us our trespassers, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The next stop is the village where Immaculee died, was buried, and then risen.

2008-05-02T04:16:00.000-07:00

Part One

Only now, as I write about what happened a week ago, do I realize that the trip to Nyanza had a familiar feel to me right from the start. Greetings, warm but restrained. Talking, minimal. Laughter, out of the question . I now recognize these as the instinctual, hushed behaviors of people on their way to a very difficult wake, shortly to see the stark, sad remains of death by genocidal murder.

Abeid, our driver, and his large jeep, were carrying a somewhat unlikely group of mourners southward . In addition to Joseph and Nadia, his fiancee, were three Americans: myself , and Valerie and David Canter.

We Americans had different reasons to be in Rwanda, but one common denominator: our friendship with Joseph and Nadia. This was carved from my previous trip a year ago when Rob and I met Joseph.

Then he had been in the Ministry of Infrastructure. Now he was a project manager for Cisco, one of the Ministry’s partners. We made an email connection with Joseph after we left, and when the Canters arrived for their six-month health fellowship, I invited Joseph to call them.

The friendships multiplied. When I heard a lot by email about Joseph’s plan to recover his sister’s remains, I accelerated a planned trip to be a witness to this unusual, powerful journey.

We were now on that journey. But I was afraid. Sure, it was partly about seeing Immacule’s remains, after being buried in a pit latrine for 14 years. But I more feared how I might react being in the village where she was killed, a village peopled surely by those who knew she had been captured, knew she was against her will and killed, and may even have helped carry that out.

Because we were meeting government authorities at the village, and we had three strong males among us, I had no real rational worry about my own personal safety. But if I ever find myself at a prison, I will probably feel similar to what I was beginning to feel silently in the car: wary, vigilant, and judgmental.

The silence lasted but a minute. Joseph, perhaps sensing we needed a focus and a mission against our fears, pulled out a picture of his sister, the first we had seen. Here she was, a younger Immacule, maybe 16, clearly a beloved member of her aunt’s family, since she is crouched between her two girl cousins in the front row, and smiling, playful. Her pretty face does not reveal what Joseph has told us about her: that she was smart, “brilliant,” he thought, and very caring.

Soon we all turn back to our thoughts, and watch the landscape unfold: the verdant, brilliant banana trees, crops of coffee, tea, and beans, neat rows of new plants, all against the red-brown soil.

David is talking about the rivers, how we’re actually going to cross the Akanyaru River, said to feed the Akagera River, the origins of the Nile.

Joseph re-tells a story he shared with me the day before, about how his father, beaten and severely injured in the first anti-Tutsi wave of violence, threw himself into this river, and let himself be carried to Burundi, to safety.

Crossing a little bridge, David’s keen eye miraculously picks up a brilliantly blue kingfisher, just below, looking over a small stream. Forgetting our somber mission for just a moment, we twist our cameras out the window, to photograph her. An amazing creature, and so steadfast in her mission to find a little bug or tiny fish for her lunch, even when a diesel engine hummed above her.

Because I believe that human spirits sometimes transform into birds or small animals after their bodies are gone, I wonder if she was Immaculee incarnated. The quick turns of her elegant head, her beautiful plumage, the determination to stay her course, all remind of what Joseph has told us about his sister. She, like the bird, stands out , and maybe she is following our journey.

2008-04-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In the first weeks of April 1994, a young Rwandan man named Joseph, reluctantly left his secondary boarding school in Tanzania, where he and his family were refugees,, long exiled from Rwanda's 1959 genocide. A top student, tireless, and driven to succeed, Joseph had fallen suddenly seriously ill with mysterious fevers, and devastating weaknesses, and pain. No one could discover what disease had overtaken him. For weeks, he lay in bed, unable to be roused to health. Finally, it was pronounced in his small village, where he lived with his father, that perhaps he had been bewitched.

Sometime between April 17 and May 6, 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army moved into the Southern Province of Rwanda. They approached the very small rural village center of Kimirama, now in the sector of Busoro. A devastating, horrific genocide had been underway for 11 days, especially in this southernmost region of Rwanda, one heavily populated with Tutsi minority, and Hutu refugees from Burundi. Already, hundreds of thousands Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Abandoned by the United Nations, and its members , the RPA was fighting to put an end to the genocide. It vowed to take the country back from extreme Hutu leaders in the government and their murderous armies and squads.

But mass killings were already underway in the area. The Ntongwe district commissioner had ordered all Tutsis to come to the district offices, supposedly for their protection.

This was a ruse. The plan was to kill them all, by any means. By nightfall, people who gathered at the district offices were surrounded by Hutu militia. For two long days and night, they fought back for two days, simply with stones. In the end, they were overtaken by machetes, grenades, pangas, spears,and guns. Nearly 700 tutsi men, women, and children were killed, some instantly, other from wounds.

The few people to escape, made their way under cover of darkness to an occasional refuge with Hutu moderates, or fled south to Burundi. If the escapees were young women they often were taken, and kept.

As word passed in the village that the RPA was entering the district , a Hutu mother and her four young sons decided it was time for the final solution. They had captured a Tutsi and kept her as one of the men’s wives. Before they fled, the girl was dumped into a deep pit latrine. It was quickly covered with dirt and rags, and boarded over. Immaculee disappeared with a trace.

In June, 2007, 14 years after the genocide, a very elderly Hutu woman stood to speak at gacaca, one of Rwanda's many local justice courts. Villagers sitting on the grass, and the panel of elected local judges, waited expectantly. In the early days of the killings, her daughter, who had married a Tutsi, was ordered to kill her own husband, and having refused, was killed with him. The old woman, a Hutu moderate, had actually hidden a young woman for several days after her escape from Kinazi. But, in a house-to-house search for Tutsis, the girl was found and taken. Later the old woman saw her at a water-hole over the course of several days , and then the girl disappeared.

The elderly lady’s gagaca story led an elderly man to rise. He once lived in the house that shared a waterhole with the old woman. Estranged from his wife and four sons, he had moved several meters away. In April, 1994 hunger drove him to return to his former home. One of the latrines, he noticed, had been boarded up.

On April 15, 2008, a Rwandan project manager for Cisco Systems, with a Master’s Degree obtained in Illinois on a Fulbright scholarship, made his way south to Kimirama from Kigali, Rwanda's capital. For a year, Joseph had wrestled with rumors about his missing sister, passed to him from a cousin who had heard the old woman and old man speak at gagaca. Sleepless nights, and a strong longing for his sister, told Joseph it was time to act on the rumors. His own family was returning one by one from exile; he would soon start at family of his own. It was time to address the missing.

Over the next month, he would descend into a world of unspeakable horror, forestalled grief, and ultimately resurrected love for his sister. She was 19 years old in 1994. Her name was Immaculee.

2008-04-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

For better and worse, the world’s attention has shifted from Rwanda. Its once warring ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, while not exactly forgiving each other, are reconciled to living together, and many are dedicated to peace and prosperity. The government is promoting One Rwanda, and has enacted any number of daring social experiments: reconciliation, land reform, power-sharing in the government, and equality for women.

Rwanda, under inspired leadership, is now the rising star of Africa, and stable across in all sectors.

Now the cameras and microphones, books and articles, transfer images from Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia, the world’s other genocides. Daily, we are riveted upon the lives of individual men and individual women killed, maimed, and ripped from their livelihoods, homes, and communities. This is what political violence does to nations, and people.

Strangely, few stories tell us what disasters like these do to families, and relationships. We like to call families the bedrock of civilization. Wars and conflicts erupt over families, and their competing claims to resources and rights.

Yet while we have more and more accounts about how people die, or live through, genocide, little is written about what genocide does to the fabric of a family. A family, like a person, has a life of its own. It has a rich history, a set of values, and cultural practices. It is, more than nation, about why we are who we are.

I'm setting up to tell the story of one family, with Joseph. While many have died at the hands of political violence, this family has survived, migrating from Rwanda, to its border nations of Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi, and even to Europe.

It'll also be the story of a brother and sister who defied time and space to sustain love, even after death.

2008-04-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

I am returned to the skin I wear in Rwanda, a familiar layer I first grew when I was perhaps five or seven years age. Then, I was turned out of the house to play in the woods and dirt-piles of our brand-new home in a housing development in Suffolk County, New York. To meet the challenge, I became daring, adventuresome, curious, a leader, and entirely lost to my own play-dreams.

This Rwanda skin, which I have come to love, is semi-permeable. Out go a worn-out set of guards. Even as I take extra measures to ensure my safety as a solo woman traveler, I release these supra-logical, perfectionistic guards, who keep watch for what others think of me. In come my new surroundings, which I bid to challenge me.

And here is the first. Background: I jumped to Rwanda very suddenly: first, for the burial of a friend’s sister’s post-genocidal remains, and,second , to advance my projects: Stories of Hope, an intergenerational storytelling project for Rwanda’s next, new (and vulnerable) generation; a small book about Rwanda’s top 100 leaders, and two school tuition projects. A fifth, new project, is to help a 34 year-old friend of a one year to write the story of his sister, killed in the genocide.

The friend I will call Joseph, not one minute after he picks me at the airport, reports that the government wishes that he bury his sister’s remains in a different sector, a plot reserved for genocide victims, not on the land in Ruhango where she was brutally murdered and dumped into a pit latrine. And, he says, that funeral should be May 18, not this Sunday, as planned.

Instead, he and I, and another American couple he met through me, will travel to the house where the sister, aged 19, was raped killed. There, we can almost re-construct what happened, and view both her deep grave and her remains. While this will be saddening, and fearsome, I welcome the chance to bear witness to Joseph's courageous search for his sister, and her killers. The newly scheduled burial may allow his sibings to come from Tanzania and Uganda. This is how it should be: he should be surrounded not by Americans, but his family, as they lay this young woman's remains to finally rest.

Hearing this news my eyes widen, and I smile. Being in Rwanda requires an extra gear, a bigger capacity to downshift from my Western high-gear, go-gettum way of being. Rwanda asks me to listen, consider, adapt, be patient.

And so I will. Three trips here have trained me in this. I am sitting on the patio of the Novotel Hotel, chuckling at the familiar sounds: the mosquito zappers, silverware being shuffled for tomorrow’s breakfast, a soft rain, the drone of a tour guide at a nearby table as he describes what his client, a white man aged about 60 in plaid shorts and hiking boots, will see tomorrow in Volcanes, where the gorillas live.

I smell the cooking fires several kilometers off, and see a white tent near the pool where tomorrow’s conference will buzz with Rwandese and their economic partners. In a few moments, upstairs in my hotel room, I will switch the fan to high, then double- and triple-layer my clothes on the few hangers in the closet, and before bed, step out on the balcony, and feel, oddly, like I’m a bit home.

2008-04-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

What draws me? Why have I suddenly given way to a set of urges, all pointing to Rwanda? It's late to decipher the puzzle. I am on enroute to Amsterdam, passageway to Nairobi, stopping at Barbara's flower-laden compound, then Kigali.

We are passing over barren stretched of very Northern Canada.

My contemporaries and I, we all have deep desires; the age is rife with them. By age 60, most of us have felt surges of wanting. Among my friends, one is taking up Spanish and linguistics; his wife, an advanced degree in English criticism. Two have uprooted to New York City. Another began an intense career as a hospice social worker. A long-time friend is seriously competing on a crew team, and has started a travelers’ health business. So, too, this thing of mine, this love affair with Rwanda.

We are over the nondescript Atlantic.

Last night, Rob had to wake me. I was wailing. It was a bad dream in which I was in a small room where dozens of small birds were flying about. They knew they didn’t belong there, so they were panicked, exploding into walls.

What gives? Is part of my life the room, and am I one of the birds who are struggling to be free of it? Or is this trip to Rwanda, or my fledging project, going to hit so many walls?

We are four hours away from Europe.

In a daze, I will walk off one plane and get on another, without so much as a glance at Amsterdam. In less than an hour, we will head south over the rest of Europe, cross the Mediterranean, and be over wide the Saharan. Around me will sit Africans, some in suits, some in native cotton shirts. The instructions from the flight crew will be in English, Dutch, and Swahili.

As we come into central Africa, the storm clouds will swoop upward toward a deeper blue sky. It's the rainy season. Below, villages and villagers, sparse crops and animals. I'm soaring, temporarily free and of the room that has so defined my life, but anxious about being so out of that box.

2007-09-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

This Ministry official is tall, and lean in the way serious athletes look once their muscles soften from the demands of parenthood, and 18 hour work days. I meet him at his office at the Stadium. As my driver's car roars away in a cloud of dust, I have a faint recollection of reading what happened here at the Stadium right after the genocide, when Rwanda put scores of perpetrators to death. They had to at first. The victims' needs for revenge ran too high, and some had to be sacrificed for the sanity of many.

That is so very over. I climb some wide concrete stairs to the third floor. The meticulous office is large,high-ceiling, and painted white. Rwandan art and posters dot the walls, and the room is furnished with stylish desks, a long oval conference table, and bookcases, all made of high-polished dark wood.

In three quick moves, Jean-Pierre strides in, greets me warmly, and immediately plugs in a second cell phone into an outlet. "That's in case the Boss calls," he says smiling. I assume he means his Minister, a man whose leadership story I remember, a harrowing tale of narrow escapes and incredible personal courage. By protocol, I take a seat opposite Jean-Pierre at his desk, and eye a flickering laptop and whirring fax machine.

We begin. It's our second meeting to discuss the coming new generation of Rwandans. He, as Secretary General of Sports, Youth, and Culture, is charged with their well-being. I, as a visiting psychologist, am hoping he likes my proposal to bring a version of StoryCorps here, to help the next very vulnerable generation positively cope with the legacy of the 1994 genocide.

I have Jean-Pierre's attention for a short time, but in the space of an hour, he concentrates with intensity. This is how it is with most high level officials in Rwanda. At work, they focus fiercely on the task at hand. They are driving themselves very hard, and the sheer quantity of work, coupled with the high standards set by the President, barely allow time for reflection. And, as a genocide survivor taught me, to stop is to remember, and thereby be overcome by waves of grief, anger and fear.

I ask Jean-Pierre about his family, his three children, and especially the oldest boy who, I learned in my last visit, had begun to ask more about what happened to the extended family in the genocide. Both of Jean-Pierre's parents were killed, along with a brother. 'I've been telling him more of the story,' Jean-Pierre says. And then I gently prompt him to tell me more about what happened.

In Rwanda, especially as an outsider, to hear stories of the genocide means asking very carefully, going slow, and getting permission at each step. 'Can we talk about this now?' Is it all right if I ask about that?' 'Do you want to tell me more?' It's like you are leading someone along a high ledge, trying to get coax them to keep going, at their own pace, until safer ground is reached. As a witness to the tale, you must handle your own feelings exquisitely, neither betraying too many, nor locking them down.

Jean-Pierre's story stills me. I scarcely breathe hearing the horror of how he learned where his parents were buried, and how they lived out their last days. He looks away, out the tall windows overlooking Kigali, when parts of the story threaten to become too emotional for him. His voice rises when he talks of the killers, lowers when he describes his parents, and siblings. When he looks directly at me, his visage quickly becomes a stare, and I know then that he is looking into the past.

Jean-Pierre seems to have finished for now. He takes a breath, and pledges to take me to his family's graves in Butare on my next visit, and I vow silently to myself to do so on the next visit. We are on safer ground now, and we turn to the proposal, which, thankfully, he likes.

The second cell phone rings across the room, and he jumps up. "Hello, Boss," he says, looking over at me. This is my signal to leave. Someone must have had a view into the office from a secret window. As I rise, a whole coterie pours into the room with papers to sign, and sports marketing posters to approve. Before I can think, someone has persuaded me to compete in the next day's half-marathon event. And so, I will join the fray of madly running people, racing along with them to put Rwanda on the map--positively this time.

2007-05-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

This is now Africa has come with me, back to the States. I saw a huge frog in my pond this morning. Brown, mottled, spotted, it seemed to have some darker brown fungi growing on its back. At first I thought it was dead, just floating there at the edge, its front and hind legs bobbing in the murky water, its nose below the surface of the water. So came the dread at having to scoop it out, using antidote for sadness, some Darwinian philosophizing. So came the long fish net we used crabbing in South Carolina.

But no, it was alive, and that little darker shelf on its back was a baby! When I lifted them out of the water, and turned them onto the garden path, the underside of the mother glistened white and fresh.

Africa is on my back, clinging for dear life, and I do and don't want to shake it off. Or is it the other way around? At night, I dream of Africa. By day, I read of Africa, or polish the leadership stories I'm collecting from government officials. The suitcase of letters from African children, to kids in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Ida, is still unpacked. The carefully written letters in pencil spill onto the study floor in their tidy brown envelopes. They are alive with the dreams of young Kigali students, most of whom know full well that this penpal project may be the closest they ever get to the United States they see weekly on television.

Truth is, I am very happy in Rwanda. I am not Rwandan, yet I seem OF Rwanda. We have co-adopted each other. And, over the course of three trips, the attachment has grown. Like the frog I took for dead but was alive and reproducing itself, Rwanda has come up from the grave and is in full-scale recovery. Me? Retiring my practice, leaving a profession which was deadening me, has meant more energy than ever. My frog, myself? Oh, too hoakey.

2007-02-05T07:09:00.000-08:00

I cannot refrain from dreaming about Rwanda. It's always the same one: I'm packing to leave, but haven't left. Last night's dream has distilled itself into an image of a small suitcase full of wires and cords. This large black and grey tangle needs me to pat it down before I can close the bag. Rwandan friends are standing around; no one is pleading for me to stay, yet I am having trouble zipping this second trip closed, and moving on.

The symbols in the dream are there: multiple connections and bonds which I'm reluctant to sever. Was the suitcase holding one long, tangled cord, or several? Just what exactly was flowing from Rwanda's pracenta to me while I was there?

Judging from the repetitive dream, it was something life-sustaining which, like a umbilical cord, is bringing nutrients to me, in a one-way stream. Rwanda doesn't need me in the same way I need Rwanda: is that another message from the dream?

Look: I keep the artifcacts close by. The cow-dung painting, an art called Imigongo, is on the mantel.

Each day I don African jewelry, and we eat avaocados and mangoes. I look at the photos several times a day. I look for return emails every other other. Rob and I are quarreling, out of sorts. I refuse to get a manicure, preferring the stubby, short nails of people who work the earth. With friends and family, I talk ad nauseum about our trip, way past the moment when their faces are glazing over.

And more: Rob is talking a deeper committment there: at least a half-time job, a house. I left with a mission to explore the possibilities of organizing a needs assessment for Rwanda, focused on the mental health of children.

Incubated, ironically, by the frigid cold air descended upon the Midwest, I'm in slow motion about returning to my old life. Two stacks of email addresses and business cards await some transfer to a decent document. I haven't costed out the trip, nor taken care of reimbursements. Even the laundry with its African dirt remains in the hampers.

A weekend with old-life distractions didn't really helped my longings: we went to an Art museum, saw a Spanish-sub-titled movie, had dinner with friends on Superbowl Sunday, worked out, talked to family members, saw Dan, tried to catch up with Adam and Kelly, supported my parents over their tornado trauma.

But last night I dreamed the dream again. Africa and Rwanda may have transferred something across the placental barrier to me, and may be with me forever.

2007-01-28T03:03:00.000-08:00

Rwanda. Nshuti (Minister of Public Service) Ngunweye (the National Forest) Mwiriwe (word for 'good evening'). These words with two consonants at the start wrestle my Western tongue to the mat. I want to add a vowel-- Ra-wanda, Na-shuti--just like I fight against wanting to 'improve ' the way things are done in Ra-Wanda: You mean, the streets are simply CLOSED on National Work Day; how we will get to the travel agency?

Everyday, I have to check my tsk-tsk impulses. I have to wratchet my superior, high minded chinny-chin-chin back to neutral. Face it: it's just my anxiety at being a stark minority, a white American who thinks she knows the best way to do things. This tendency is deeply held in some little to big pocket within my brain.

But my gut tells me that we American have much to learn from this new government order and rule of law, built upon ancient rites carried out from mountain to mountain, carefully honed to defeat the human tendency toward despair after trauma, and revenge after murder.

Take Work Day: on the last Saturday of each month, the WHOLE country shows up in its small communities to tidy up. Every man, woman, and walking child, from President to poultry seller, from Minister to water-toter....streets are swept, trash is taken away, buildings are repaired and painted.

I squelched a small inkling to find a small village and join in. Instead, on my last full day in Rwanda, I argued with Rob about our coming journey to Nairobi. Finally, I plotzed down in the patio along with a throng of other white people biding their time over brunch.

Later, I lashed myself for this kind of indulgent behavior.

Face it: I was just afraid of venturing into a village without an invitation, a terrible Western habit. In Rwanda, no one closes their doors; neighbors come and go freely into each other's homes.

Face it: I was ashamed of not learning more French, which would have eased my way into the villages. Every Rwandese is working to learn English, one of the world's most difficult languages.

Face it: I was more attuned to the perceived inequities in my marriage than to the chasm between rich nation(we have municipal workers for cleaning a city) and poor nation(the country MUST rely on its people to keep the city clean and bright, which it is).

One of the major reasons for Work Day is social integration of the richer with the poorer, and of the genocide's survivors with its Level Three and Four suspected perpertrators, a large group of bystanders or people forced to kill, or be killed. Rwanda has no choice but to integrate, and Work Day is a genius.

It brings to mind the last scene in Romeo and Juliet, when both families rise up from their grief and shame at the lovers' deaths, and join forces to carry them away. Everyone in the audience cries, because, finally, we get it. We are all fellow men and women, more similar than difference, and desperately in need of one another.

2007-01-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

Culture is a slippery concept. Like air, and light, and sound, it’s all around you, inseparable and indivisible from you, in you, with you. And more: it’s alive, active. Like something you’ve digested or breathed, it changes you, connects to you, plays with you, attacks you.

Something about Rwanda brings me to myself. Does the country and its people stir some primitive, genetic impulses and longings?

I can’t reasonably argue that my mitochondrial DNA has been re-activated, that I am re-connected to some ancient Mother, although Central Africa is where humans got their start.

But when I close my eyes, as I am doing right now, in frigid Michigan, all grays and whites and smudges of black, I see the red earth of Rwanda

I see polished dark brown skin.

Rain pellets are the size of quarters, flowers the color of white and turquoise, wet plants explode with oversize leaves, camifloging monkeys

I feel the touch on my wrist of every person standing close and talking to me, the warm smooth cheeks kissed once, twice, then thrice, as is the custom. I see the eyes of people deepen and grow still as they try to absorb what I am saying in English, and the playful glances as I practice my Kinyarwanda.

Why I love Rwanda is not simply explained by psychology, a mind-set inclined toward helping, or being needed, easily set in motion by a country untethered by bureaucracy. I grow fearful at times that my whiteness affords me some sense of colonial superiority, but I do not hear the echoes of judging or a patronizing sensibility.

The love comes from a deeper place, perhaps some pull from the blend of tropical origins with mountain farming,

from my Carino heritage high in the rice steppes of Benguet in the Philippines.

I shall see. Oddly, an affinity for Rwanda leads me toward the Philippines, another trip out of the United States, in search of myself and my origins. Yesterday, I grew excited hearing from my Filipino friend, Cora, who has returned from Luzon with pictures from the Dimayuga sister’s photo album.

If the Philippines is not my next trip abroad, it will be the second.

2007-01-25T00:21:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2007

Awaking to an African dawn, the sun rises over one of Rwanda’s thousand hills, and immediately begins to mix with the soft blue haze streaming upward from the thousands of small fires lit by thousands of women stooped over black cooking pots.

By noon, I am sitting in the Presidential offices of Rwanda.

The room is softly lit on three sides, and on the fourth side is a curtained wall, beyond which is a patio and pool and gardens. The walls of the room are square panels of light brown wood. Graceful black chandeliers grace the ceiling.

A large translation booth holding two ever-talking translators, one speaking English, the other French, is at my left shoulder.

At my right is Dan, awaiting the next moment when he needs to jump to attention, for the sake of the workshop.

Nora sits in the center of the room, typing onto powerpoint, Rob is near her, microphone hand, talking and gesturing.

Seated around a rectangle is the Cabinet, and Ministers of State.

Rob is holding forth, saying what the government needs to do to change…..what he says is bold: “Rwanda has a small window of opportunity to attract believers. The world will move on to Sudan, to Thailand……You must not have departments that overlap one another…Rwanda will never be a leader in astro-physics.”

This is chutzpah talk which I am incapable of, so I just gulp, and look over at the Prime Minister.

Could Rob--and the rest of us-- be locked up, or deported, for such audacity?

Neither. At the end of the training, the Ministers stand, applaud, there are speeches of gratitude, and the Prime Minister himself leads the group in a traditional Rwandan chant and dance, in our honor.

We stand there, fixed in awe, me in tears, and try to sing along. One of the female Ministers comes over the hugs me: 'Yes, you are emotional'

But it doesn’t take these huge accolades to feel good in Rwanda. A hair-salon owner I know stops me in the hotel lobby to comment positively on my Rwanda scarf, and offers to fix it on my shoulder in the proper way.

Eric, our driver, who may never see us again, wants to buy us some Rwandan CDs, and take us to the airport himself, to be sure we get off OK.

Constance, an artisan and shop owner, insists that we send her the money later, for her son's paintings on tree bark, and the many other items we purchased on our way to the airport (and without anymore money).

What does this mean? That Americans are touted here, for what they might be worth? A vestige of colonialism? Perhaps.

But, having born witness to many groups of Rwandese speaking among each other, at the workshops me or Rob conducted, and out of the many conversations with the hundreds of people I’ve met, I’ve concluded something different: hackneyed as it sounds, today’s Rwandans are highly committed to peaceful, generous, and loving exchanges with each other, and that extends to foreign visitors and partners, like ourselves.

I know things were horrific here in 1994. But what they have here, right now, is liquid gold, like the sun which rose this morning, setting everyone in motion. For Rwanda, a new dawn, a new day. Priceless.

2007-01-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

How COULD genocide be carried out by a life-long neighbor, a pastor, a trusted teacher, even a beloved spouse? As I work and travel in Rwanda, that question is never far from me. But do I need an answer?

The full explanation of the genocide remains a mystery. As Malcolm Gladwell said in recent column in the New York Times, mysteries defy simple explanations. The genocide is not a puzzle to be solved, by assembling all the pieces.

One cannot simply add up the factors contributing to those 100 days: colonial-inspired ethnic divisions, plus legacies of African and Rwandan genocidal violence, plus violent leaders in the government and media, plus the collapse of the coffee market which increased poverty, etc. etc.

What happened in Rwanda currently defies our comprehension. Few people here have the time or luxury to scratch their chins about this. They are busy capacity-building, changing the country’s brand from (from Hotel Rwanda to Rwanda: the new African dawn), empowering the people to become educated, healthy, and self-motivated, and attracting tourists and investors.

Now the carefully planned and implemented strategy for dealing with the genocide appears to be this:
• in place of hate and revenge, incite in the people a determination to show those who would be their enemies, that they cannot be beaten down; in fact they can become even better than they were
• acknowledge and remember that the genocide happened and one million people lost their lives, brutally, and horribly
• reduce poverty, and increase employment

• administer justice to the perpetrators, and promote social integration
• help those who suffered: love them, keep their hands busy to dull the pain, empower them economically, give special treatment to severe cases
• restore order, hope, peace, security
• empower women and girls, seen as purveyors of peace

• take measures to ensure that the cycle of genocidal violence never happens again in future generations.

2007-01-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

I have never been knocked flat nor driven mad by overwhelming, protracted grief. Strong sorrow, yes, at the loss of family members and friends to death or disability, and sadness at what will never, ever return: my own girlhood, certain dreams, my boys as infants and little children, life with my grandparents and older relatives, the optimism and idealism of youth in the sixties and seventies. This is your garden-variety sadness, hardly that brought on by the grotesque monsters of genocide.

I have never had to wrestle with the death grip of panic attacks, flashbacks, rages, and suicidal urges. Never have I had to hide or crouch in fear, and confront the high likelihood that I or my family members are going be hurt, then die an agonizing death. Nor have I ever been seriously attacked, beaten to the ground, raped, or cut—or seen that kind of unspeakable violence perpertrated in front of me. Or had to bargain with a murderous gang to please, please shoot us instead of hacking us. Not even close….

I believe that my great-grandparents in the Philippines lived and perhaps died at the hands of these experiences in the Philippine-American war and World War II. I know that my mother’s grandparents lived through the Civil War’s end as the North came to the South. But few stories exist about what that was like. Like me, my mother and father have never known violence personally, nor terrible peril.

In Rwanda, 70% of the population has known unimaginable loss and violence. In many Rwandese, grief is complicated by the simultaneous need to block out images of remembering terrible physical pain and fear, of watching family members of all ages tortured, killed, maimed, and even buried alive. These survivors are working very hard to hold on to their sanity during moments of grief.

Despite this, the people we met are having normal, productive lives: working, having relationships and families, aiming their dreams into the future, helping others, developing their resources, like rich Americans. In what is some kind of miracle wrought by the current government and busy array of international, capacity-building aids, most Rwandese have hope and peace. Night seems to be another story, when the demons return. Insomnia is a major, major problem, brought on by unstoppable images and feelings.

Eric, our upbeat driver and new friend, has his demons. At Murambi, which he thought we should see, he lagged behind us as we moved from one skeleton-filled room after another, but finally appeared outside one of the doors. Eric looked in, then looked down. He leaned against the half wall lining the outside corridors of the school building, looking defeated and in pain.

Later, in the dim light of the kitchen in his ancestral home outside Gitarama, I told Eric that his parents would be proud of what he and his sister had accomplished in raising the nieces of his dead sister, and taking in children orphaned by the genocide. He leaned down over the kitchen table, and gripped its edges, steadying himself.

When I went with bpeace to interview Jeanne about her hair-salon business, she was unprepared by my colleague’s misguided lead-in question: “We are here to hear your story.” Jeanne’s genocide story was already known to us; we simply wanted to hear about the story of her business.

But her emotions were already surging. Twelve years after the genocide her face, contorted into sadness like it was yesterday. She rose quickly and walked toward the door, hurrying to keep her tears from being seen. A few minutes she returned, and told her story. She and her children were left to die by her Hutu husband. Miraculously, she survived. As she got to the part of being beaten by French soliders in the chaotic days and weeks after the genocide came to a halt, she was seized by weeping.

Only when we eventually turned the subject back to her business, did she find her sanity again, bolstered by her large blue business book which she gripped tightly and held against her, like a shield.

On the last day of Rob’s training, I sat at a luncheon table on the patio of President Kagame’s offices with three of his cabinet, two middle-aged women and one older man. We chatted amiably, and I asked innocently about whether they had children and families. One of the women,said that she had two sons, and then gestured toward her male colleague. In matter of fact tones, she spoke for him, seeming to spare him from having to tell his story: “He lost his wife, and some of his children.”

The man seemed to absorb this description well; he looked over at me, as I leaned across the table to say that I was terribly sorry. He nodded without expression. Then we went one with our chatting lightly about my attempts to speak Kinyarwanda. He is a linguist by profession, and now the Minister for Communication.

Ten minutes later, as someone else took the floor, I looked over at him. He was staring hard at a spot just beyond his plate, gripping the edges of the round table. In his face I thought I could see the unmistakable signs of grief. By the time dessert was served, it seemed to pass, and later he and I stood by the pool and he gave me a primer on the structure of the government.

As Americans we are open to hearing these stories, and we come from a culture where telling stories are part of the healing process, and it's easy for us: most of us live in safe surrounds, far from the madding crowd, continents away from chaos, time-distanced from trauma.

In Rwanda, the reminders of the genocide are as simple and powerful as the house where your mother was shot, and as complex and powerful as the sight of your neighbor, the son of the man who shot her, bicycle-taxi-ing bananas to the next village. Telling your story may be a necessary ingredient for some degree of recovery, but sharing it leads to pain, without the tools to contain it.

2007-01-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

Why do I feel so at home in this country? These are not my people. I don’t speak their languages. I’m used to speed, not the agonizing time it takes for things to get done. Have a new rule: the easier the task in Rwanda , perhaps the harder the implementation. It took me 30 minutes to get someone to close the stage curtains in the auditorium where Rob was speaking today.

I’m used to air conditioning, a car, a cell phone plan, eye glass cleaner, mouthwash under $12.00, using dollar bills issued before 2003, streets without major divots, Tylenol, roads without security checkpoints manned by guys with machine guns.

Still, I am so at home here, I’m thinking of becoming a Rwandan citizen, just for the symbolic meaning (easy to do: just roll up to immigration with your US passport), just to say, ‘This is a great emerging country.’

(Wake up, you say: what about your kids? Check to see if you --or they--have to pay taxes and serve in the military).

(Like right, you say. You’re staying in a luxury hotel, dude. Try living in the villages for a while, and wait until you have your first really rude encounter.

(And while I'm at it, you say, don't you think you've got the whole self-important, they-love-me-here fever? Of course they do. You have what they want)

All voices said and heard, I feel comfortable here because, while these are not my people, and my lifestyle, the government’s mandate seems at one with my values and temperament: gender equity, collaboration, positive vision, generosity, doing what’s right, community, justice.

And this: in the U.S. I have grown terribly cynical about government. Here, I can relive the idealism of my own youth, and feel mobilized again, Just the thing for a 59 year-old woman, just the ticket.

2007-01-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

I live most days in two worlds, one that I’m experiencing, and one that I’m reliving in words. Actually, add a third, the life on hold in Ann Arbor. Being in Rwanda ignites many urges to see and do, and the urge to re-capture it on paper.

Today, in Dan and Nora's absence (game park) I was playing wife, running Rob's powerpoint, and taking notes on a projected Word document while the participants in his training spoke. Aside: This was payback for Rob running MY slides when I spoke at the Smithsonian (on pain of death should he screwup, which he did not).

A Director General in Rob’s training raised his hand during the topic of time management. It is a huge issue here, clearly the other elephant in the living room alongside the genocide. Really, the Minister to give opening remarks was one hour late. Plusl, the participants themselves—all heads of huge, important departments like Security, Army, Electricity,Taxation, Hospital, HIV-AIDs, Gender Equity—were given one day notice for this mandatory training.

Probably, in Rwanda, like in the Philippines, or any other mainly agrarian culture, being on time matters little. The sun and the calls of your livestock keep time for you, not the time-minder on your cell phone.

But someone else shed some light on this for me. The man, in a trim black suit and wire glasses, was a senior official, used to commanding attention through his wisdom. All heads turned when he spoke. In response to a class-generated plan to fine late participants, he said, “I don’t think we should be so harsh on latecomers. Rwandans feel that time is a gift from God, not to be given up so easily. You say, Professor Pasick, that time is money. Not in Rwanda. Time is life itself.”

Interesting idea. As Americans, are we so time-pressured that we forget what time really means? Every moment that passes, signals that we are alive.

If you watched many, many people die, and felt life draining from you, would you let time pass easily without noticing it? Truly, would you keep glancing at your watch, or walk slowly to your next destination, placing your hand on your chest to feel your heart beat?

2007-01-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

In Murambi, where a genocide memorial has been constructed on the site of a technical school, and where, over a few days, over 50,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered. The dead were buried in a mass grave next to the school by the killers. A few survived by hiding under bodies, and they were able to show where the grave was. A year later, the grave was excavated, and the remains of several thousand people, unidentified by family members, were preserved for the memorial.

We stopped by there on the way back from hiking in Nyungwe National Forest. Rolled up to a newly built memorial building, standing in front of rows and rows of empty classrooms, some standing open, some with closed doors. A single caregiver, an older man, a survivor, gave the tour.

Before we began, maybe to postpone the inevitable horrible sights we were about to see, I gazed beyond this mountaintop at the warmly lit, pastoral sight below us: postage stamp farms, sun-baked, red dirt roads, the helicoptered tops of banana trees....incredibly beautiful, I thought. So very strange that these hills bred this much violence.

Behind 24 of the closed doors are the remains of thousands, laid carefully on large benches. The guide opened the doors, one by one, and we stepped in. One of the rooms is the children’s room. The evidence that they all died painfully and violently are obvious. The rooms have an odd, time-stopped stillness about them. The remains seems to speak out:

‘See us here? This is what can happen. Do something about it.’

Our driver, Eric, lingered outside, looking very sad. I was immediately regretful that we were subjecting him to this, even as he had agreed we should go to Murambi. His story to us about his family suggested the loss of his parents and some siblings, to the genocide.

I reached over to touch his shoulder, and murmur something about this being very hard. Later, as we drove away, I felt that finally, we should ask him directly about what happened to his family, so as to be able to give him some little comfort, after Murambi, not too far from his home.

Yes, my parents, he said, and brothers and sisters. He was working for the ICRC at the time, the International Committee for the Red Cross. As the violence began, they got him out of the country, to Tanzania. An older sister was working for the embassy, and she also was whisked away, for her safety. Some of the other family survivors were hidden by neighbors. Some of the neighbors killed.

His parents and dead siblings, are buried on the family farm, and yes, he would be happy to take us to see their graves.

Later that night we did. Under a huge blanket of stars, he pointed outward, toward the hills behind, to where all but his mother are buried. His mother is buried in the house. Eric pointed to a door behind a plain wall. As the top of a rectangular formation of rooms, it stretched between the living and dining areas on the right, and a row of bedrooms. This had been her request, to be buried in the small chapel she used to pray in, to stay close by them, never far.

2007-01-19T08:14:00.000-08:00

The girl has probably been standing in the principal's doorway for several minutes, before we acknowledge her. I turn slowly in my chair toward a still figure silhouetted against the strong equatorial sun, to find a thin, tall, still prepubescent young girl. She smiles down at the cement floor at first, then flashes me a broad smile. In five seconds she is transformed: from a frail, dark brown leaf blown into the room by a small gust of wind, to a near-adult sapling standing strong, proud, and, above all, hopeful.

The girl is Nadia Iradukunda, from Kimisagara, and today is the start of what we both hope is a long relationship.

Minus the small adornments of a simple necklace worn by lots of girls, and without the the bold smiles of the older, wiser students I've gotten to meet, Nadia is unassuming. I resist saying 'sweet' since it's a label often given to girls who do not seem to threaten anyone. There is much beneath this shy surface, I'm sure.

Nadia's poverty, like that of many needier girls at the school, is not obvious. That is the design of the program at Girls' FAWE School, which aims to integrate girls of all classes, and de-emphasize both wealth and female guile. The idea is that female adornments, and the competition among girls on the basis of beauty and class, dilutes the girls' power. I remember the many machinations and gyrations of my own girlhood, just to look good for boys, and stay up with the good-looking girls. At FAWE, 'good' means being a good student and good friend, and giving good service to the community. I daresay 'great' service, since that's what the country is demanding from its citizens, what President Kagame wants from the school, when he blessed it.

Nadia wears a clean, pressed white blouse over a thin, flat chest. In the style of most of the girls, her hair is short, showing off her pert ears. Only her olive-green skirt nubby with wear, and a pair of worn grey shoes and socks, give any hint of poverty.

I resist the urge to stand and show my respect the way I usually do in America, when a newcomer enters the room. Instead, I offer my hand up to her, mirroring her shyness. This imbalance-- her standing, me sitting--is a way to correct another imbalance--I'm rich enough to put her through school for the next five years; her family is poor enough to need that kind of assistance.

Ten minutes earlier, I was happily surprised to hear I could actually meet the girl I would sponsor. Wisely, the principal had waited until I made my way to the central office in downtown Kigali, to pay the Rf 165,000 in native currency ($300.00 US) Only when it was clear I was serious, did Elizabeth Teeka, the principal, dare to select someone to be the recipient. When Elizabeth said, "I have chosen someone for you," I felt a small rush of pleasure, and a nudge of anxiety: what if she didn't like me? What should I say to her?

Our language barrier actually helps mediate the natural tension between young and older, American and Rwandese, richer and poorer. Nadia is not fluent in English, nor am I in French and Kinyarwanda, so Elizabeth has to translate for these first, tentative communications. I already know a few things about this new student: she is an orphan (as defined by African culture: no father), she cries when speaking about her family, her father died in the genocide, and her mother is an itinerant house helper, moving around from village to village to sustain herself and five children. In thesse circumstances, without boarding school, and without money to pay for it, Nadia's future as a student is in real jeopardy.

We speak softly, aided by Elizabeth.

She says she is thirteen, her birthday is April 19, 1993, she is the oldest of three, a sister to two brothers, Rene and Blaise, and two female orphans, Consolee and Godeliexe. Her school marks are exemplary, and she wants to become a doctor to help Rwanda be a great country. We promise to write each other letters before my visit the next week, and I reassure her that writing me in French will be perfectly fine. Elizabeth presses me to write Nadia's letter in English, to improve her skills.

And so I do. This afternoon in my hotel room, I carefully pen two pages about me, our family, and a little about our life in the U.S.

What I didn't make clear to Nadia is that one of my small losses in life was not having a third child, a daughter. And when I was thirteen I too wanted to be a doctor. In 1961, that would have been a rare career for a girl. Not until I was 40, and only after my mother passed me a little essay I wrote in the 9th grade for a career counselor, did I remember this early wish. But it was a very, very faint memory, as significant and insignificant as a faded brown leaf under a bare tree in winter, blowing about in the wind.

2007-01-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

Day..six? Already? Rwanda, with its energy, Rwanda, with its challenges, sweeps me up, and I am not alone in reporting how easily this happens. Talking to one person—say a kind and smart driver named Eric —leads to discovering his parents were victims along with some siblings, leads to stopping by his family home on a night so dark and so filled with stars that they transmit light, and meeting his college senior sister, Claire, two nieces…and their three orphans….and cows..and eating some delicious cassava and beans made in a stone kitchen with two wood burning fires.

Cashing an AMEX travelers’ check at the bank means convincing the young well-meaning bank manager that the signature at the top doesn’t mean I have spoiled the check, and then going over it all again with the French-speaking teller, who has never seen an AMEX check, and looks so forlorn that a nearby customer comes over to convince her himself, in French, that it’s okay. This draws in others. Soon a whole group rushes to my aide, since I am now have my head in my hands, late for my meeting at the Ministry of Education.

Inviting the on the ground program director for an NGO you will attach to in the next week, 27 year-old Richard Niwenshute, inviting him for drinks at the Novotel , leads to meeting his friend, Geofrey on the ground for Rwanda Knitting Associations =
"A quality man believes in equality," and that leads to a long, interesting conversation about fair trade, Geofrey’s trip to NYC, to try and sell knitted scarves to Macy’s, and a talk about how to forgive and forget at the same time.

Setting up to leave on a trip to a forest preserve with monkeys leads to several frantic calls from government assistants that we can’t go there with a chaperone because of ‘security.’

We suck in our adamancy once we are reminded that if any white person, especially an American, comes to harm on a tourist excursion, it could be the end of tourism, and an economic collapse in that sector.

Time…just…evaporates, like the sweat on my skin in this unseasonably hot sun. Everything is at once slow (hailing a cab, getting coffee, or my email), and fast ( after a casual idea dropped into a meeting—“It would be nice to see everyone again, for followup”-- tomorrow a dinner for 70 is being planned for us and the participants from Rob’s last training).

Today I began my own projects in earnest.

At the Girls’ Fawe School Elisabeth, Marie, and Matthew helped me unpack about 40 books from Ann Arbor, many of them donations from Shaman Drum, some from Borders, Dawntreaders, the Pasick library, and Greenhills School, from Moliere to Earth Science, from Twain to Frederick Douglas, from Kinkaid to Austen. They were very pleased. Marie: “Many of the girls like reading books.”

Her words gives pause- at first. What is eduation if it isnt' books? Then I understood. The girls here are so busy studying, doing homework, and math and science, that simply reading a novel is, well, novel. Where is the place for fiction and fanciful thinking, for sheer imagination when there is so much work to do for the country? These girls are headed for leadership, like my new sponsee Nadia, a 13 year-old orphan who wants to be an engineer, or a doctor. Would that more American females would embrace their mottos, like ‘Education first—marriage last.’ And ‘To educate a girl is not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.’

2006-09-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a novice to poverty. Not that it's something you want to practice until you're good at it. Chances are rather excellent that poverty will never darken my own life, and that is just my accidental fortune.

What I mean is that I went to Africa afraid, uncertain, and very anxious about what to do when a small, emaciated child walks alongside of me, or a lame man sitting on a sidewalk eases his hand toward me and murmurs, 'Madame...merci, madame.'

Backtrack: I saw poverty in the Philippines--the children pressed against my car windows, the slums barely shielded by the concrete barriers alongside the freeway, the old women crouched over the smoldering fire astride their tin shanties.

But I was shielded by a car, by being whisked around so fast you couldn't look twice, by companions who took my arm and steered me around trash, potholes, and squatters. And the Philippines, in most regions, is rather developed. There is electricity, plumbing, clinics, transportation.

Rwanda is different. It's clearly a developing country. Sixty-percent of the people live below the poverty line, for Africa, and spend their days gathering up their basic needs for survival: water, food, and shelter. The average yearly income is around $300, less than $1.00 per day. Eight million people live together more densely than in any other African country.

2006-09-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

What did I hear in Rwanda, beyond the quiet, insistent talk of development needs and stories of both resilience and horrow? Not much. Unlike the Philippines, Rwanda is relatively quiet, given its reputation as the most densely populated nation in Africa. True, in Kigali, a large city of one million people, noisy vehicles cruise the streets everyday, including the occasional dreaded motorcycle.

But most people walk everywhere they have to go, causing few ripples, as sound waves go. And when they walk, they seem lost in thought, not chatter.

The sound of the large black, white-throated Pied Crow is unforgettable: a squawk followed five second later by a hollow thunk, a sound you can duplicate by uncorking a wine bottle.

The silence of the silverback gorillas is deafening. They may grunt and growl with one another, but with humans around, they are tight-lipped. On our trek,the only primate sound was the friendly warning growl made by our guide, Eugene, as we approached a group of gorillas we tracked for three hours. Eugene's gorilla growl (meaning "we're here-- don't worry") sounded like someone trying to clear his throat of a fishbone.

We had heard that the people of Rwanda have a natural reserve, and this was borne out. The ordinary Rwandese must be drawn out for conversation, and when speaking begins the words stay close to the mouth, and resist escape. To the English-speaking ear,and for the American used to umteen varieties of blaring speech, quietness in a foreign language can be difficult. I hated to repeat my questions, beyond a single, Pardon?

Even the street beggar-children are soft spoken. One little boy caught up with me as I was leaving a store carrying bottles of water. He was no more than six or seven, dressed in brown, tattered clothes. Please, he uttered. Hungry, he said, without pleading.

I kept walking, since the parking lot was dotted with small children, and I worried about attracting a crowd. He kept up his pace, in a voice no more insistent or urgent with each utterance: Please....hungry....please....Finally, my companion, Kelly, wisely reached into her bag and pulled out some bananas. At the sight of them, he left off, reached up at once, and took them. Thank, he said.

Rarely did I hear adults laughing out loud. Even the children make noise only when they are directed to do so, although, granted, my presence as a strange American probably inhibited just about everyone. At the Kigali Parents' School, the children sang gustily for me when their teachers asked them to. And the sound of children in unison, especially singing songs of national unity and forgiveness ("There is no provocation in my heart" and "We are one")-is very moving.

One late afternoon I was taking photos of the grey-necked cranes striding confidently through the eucalypsus trees behind our hotel in Ruhengeri, lost in my own photographer's haze, when I thought I heard someone saying 'hello' very faintly. It was so quiet, I wasn't sure that it might not be a high-flying bird, or the wind in the leaves. It was hearing the faint single sound of a boy in a boy choir from the back row of a huge church: the voice was high-pitched, pure.

I kept shooting, changing cameras, focused on the rapidly falling light, and my increasing hunger for dinner.

Again, 30 seconds later, the sound, more clearly now a child's voice nearby. It was a single word of 'hello' that was neither an invitation to be friendly, nor a pleading request. Just a plaintive, dignified 'hello.' I looked about for the source. Behind a tree? Up the pathway? Where?

Finally, I saw him. He was 40 feet off, behind a low wall barely visible in a little stand of trees. The wall was made of 12 inch lava rocks, amd it separated the property from the village. I only saw his head, but the sound was unmistakenly coming from him : hello...(and then 20 seconds later).....hello...

It was a hello that did not demand a response, nor sound desperate, but one that put the responsibility squarely on me to do something back in acknowledgement. I did nothing.

To this day, I feel guilty I did nothing, but make a note about this later in the evening. I think the wall, and the child's distance, gave me insulation from the grinding poverty all around me, the way a parking lot in the city does not.

Luckily, sound carries beyond walls and borders, and the child's voice penetrated. Do I wish he knows that I heard him? Or do I hope he doesn't?

2006-09-19T03:20:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to grapple with the incongruous.

How, how could the genocide have happened among people who lived cooperatively among each other, even warmly and affectionately? Neighbors and friends who murdered another other neighbors and friends, priests who stood aside to watch parishioners slaughtered, teachers and physicians who turned machetes and hoes on children, and patients?

Only 12 years and several months later, tell me how are people who witnessed unspeakable violence to themselves and others, able to function without terrible depression and animosity?

At this early point, only days from my departure from Rwanda, I can only surmise this: the incredible capacity of the human mind to embrace beliefs that run counter to the emotions. If you believed that the Tutsis were no more than cockroaches, you could kill them. If you began to believe that the government brainwashed ordinary, decent people into killing, then you can forgive those people.

...as long as they confess their crimes, and ask for forgiveness themselves.

The local genocide tribunals have helped a great deal, according to the people we spoke with. So has poverty reduction, internal security, and very good leadership from Paul Kagame, the President. Plus, many of the hutu perpertrators left the country for good, opening the way for a reverse diaspora back into Rwanda by people whose parents fled earlier, in 1959m during the first outbreak of genocide.

At Kigali Parents' School where I visited, the children sang 'We are One.' They may not understand why they are singing this song, but their parents do.

2006-09-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Another new, yet-to-be-mastered part of my writing: going directly to my mind and seeing what bundle of quivering sensory data is stored there, without engaging my cerebral cortex to organize that data, or to search for what I SHOULD be storing, what I OUGHT to report out.

So here is the data. Here's what images emerge if I just walk over and open the door to the pictures in my mind, in no special order of importance, with no regard for time ordering:

The undulating hills of Rwanda. One is never standing on natural flat land, but either walking up, or down. Whatever happened, geologically, is wondrous. Most of the country is like a land version of the waves in the sea, on a windy day. How people farm on a 30 degree slope is a question I want to answer, as the granddaughter of farmers.

The gorillas. I'm not sure they make the list because of (1) the money we spent to see them, or (2) what everyone will ask me about when I get home. What I recall first is the sight of how oblivious they were to people. This is what habituation to humans looks like, and it makes me wonder how much I've been acclimated to in my life.

Second is the sight of 400 pound gorilla sleeping on its side just the way my husband sleeps next to me in our bed: knees drawn up, feet parallel and ankles touching.

The graceful, grey-crowned cranes. These large, funny-headed birds provoke: what the hell is THAT? I shot a whole roll of film when I happened upon these soon-to-be-engandered birds just walking behind our hotel.

Heads carrying everything. Heads are a third arm, and totally the best way to go to carry, say, 80-100 pounds of bananas or a rice sack of that weight.

The little begging boy who put on his shoes before he approached me.

Men in suits without part of their legs. Shopgirls with indentations in their foreheads.

People walking on the side of the road, in the pitch dark, illuminated only my occasional headlights.

Children pushing worn-out bicycles up the hills, using them as wheelbarrows for bulging yellow plastic containers of banana beer.

Men standing in the back of a pick-up truck, wearing pink, prisoner uniforms.

A nine year-old schoolgirl in red-checked uniform, whom I identified as a child with Down's Syndrome, for the principal who was perplexed by her difficulties with learning and speaking.

Rwandese press photographers at a large UN function who walked around snapping mainly pictures of white people.

Eggs for sale alongside the road, gathered into in neat bundles made of banana fibers.

A French teacher reading a French-version of Goodnight Moon I brought to a class of little kids.

A four-foot dish drainer outside a straw hut, made of four upright sticks and a flat piece of banana matting, shown to me proudly by a very old, drunk, man in a black tattered suit jacket.

A large 3 feet by 4 feet colored sign and poster depicting a man weeping, surrounded by a comforting group. The words are in Kinyarwanda and I saw it at Avega, an organization of widows of the genocide, reading: "Help those who have problems in the their heads. It's everyone's responsibility."

2006-09-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

One of my writing goals this week is to get further away from writing about people and relationships, my life-long career focus. I have to become more adept at describing. So here goes:

To describe the role of smell in Rwanda, I might start with the 8 X 10 plastic card our congenial guide, Eugene, held up as our motley group of six gathered outside the Parc Nationale headquarters. In an English thick with Kinyarwanda, we strained to hear him describe how they ultimately identify the gorillas.

“Newsprint. Here are the unique newsprints of each of them,” he said, pointing to an arrangement of dots and slashes next to each of the gorilla’s names.

This confused the mind. Are there newsprint posters all about in the jungle? Or do gorillas smell like the clean newsprint that our primary school teachers used to hand out in the afternoon when they had had it with teaching?

I had to follow along a little farther, listen a bit more intently, stop myself from saying, “Pardon?”

Ok, OK! —NOSEprint, not NEWSprint. Each gorilla is identified by the configuration of its nostrils, and nose bridge, in relation to the mouth. Cool! Human noseprints would be blobby to the point of boring, just a circular smudge, with no sign of nostrils. Our noses have somehow evolved to hide our nostrils, not a bad adaptation. Maybe we needed to know less when an enemy was near, and sense more often when the food we were about to eat was rotten, or poisonous.

And, hey, here’s the proof of my theory: don’t you pick up your head and use your nostrils like headlights when you really want to identify a smell?...By the way, contrary to my expectations, the gorillas don’t smell at all. I should know. A little column of big gorillas passed within 6 inches of me one their way from one clearing to the next.

Let’s get the most obvious smells out of the way first. First the incredible stomach-inspiring smells of brioche and croissant and pastries of various tall heights, in the patisserie in our hotel. To top it off, these delights are sitting ever so expectantly in well-lit glass cases, or heaped delicately in French baskets tilted toward my mouth. . It takes my WHOLE will-power every morning…..

Second obvious smell is to be found in the small elevators that take us to the fourth floor. ANYONE who is travel savvy outside of the United States, where we are fetishistically opposed to natural body odors of any kind , knows what I’m talking about. End of story. And the third obvious smell is that of auto fuel which is particularly overwhelming when you’re behind a truck CARRYING fuel. And there’s no passing, because the roads are extremely curvy. End of that story as well.

The most pervasive distinctive smell in Rwanda is that of burning wood. At first I thought the smell might come from a dump, but no: in Rwanda, like probably every developing country, very little food or garbage is thrown out, and there is practically a ban on using plastic of any kind.

The smell of burning wood is everywhere because most of the one million people in Kigali, and the other seven million are cooking outside. Consider, that even in a city where high-rises are going up weekly, and the whole country is accelerating, no one at the poverty line or below (90%) has electricity, running water,or indoor plumbing. One cooks outside, or under little covered sheds built of sticks, or, in the more rural areas, in round ‘cooking houses’ made of thatch, with the smoke vented to the top of an inverted cone.

Later I read in the New Times, the major rag in the city, that in Kigali, the government is encouraging people to use little clay pots set into the ground, for cooking, instead of wood-burning fires, the major source of fuel for cooking food. Pollution is big concern. It must be about the kind of wood, but when it’s burned near you, you could swear someone is smoking weed. Really, no kidding.

(And to confirm the power of placebos, the other night as Rob and I sat on the terrace in the dark, for the few minutes we were convinced someone was getting high, we in fact got high…)

The other dominant smell in the city is pluminaria, that heavenly flower I last smelled in Hawaii. The smell is floral (duh), very very sweet. When you hold a pluminaria flower up to your news, the odor makes you close your eyes and swoon.

Second most lovely smell , are the eucalyptus trees in the rural countryside. The landscape is pleasantly dotted with this blue-green leaved tree. Our guide, William, told us they were brought by the Australians and they are important to Rwanda because people use them medicinally (“for the flu”), and, because they leaves are thick and sturdy, the leaves are layered and compacted for walls of houses.

Actually, my eye fell on an article the next day in the paper. Apparently, the planting of eucalyptus and pines trees in arid soil drains the water resources from the land. So said the ICRAF. (Note: in a country flooded with UN type organization and many,many poverty and health initiatives, people apparently know that ICRAF stands for, World Agoforestry Center, but how they got to ICRAF from THAT is beyond me).

What I thought I might smell in a developing African country—waste—is not to be found by the tourist eye, or smelled. Rather, the Rwandans are very, very clean, always sweeping, and wiping. Women in long skirts sweep the street. The last Saturday of every month is a nationwide clean-up day. Even the president gets out there. In a small village last weekend, people are sweeping up the dirt and leaves on dirt yards.

So that’s the news about newses. I feel faintly embarrassed writing about smells, that dark horse sense that we have written out of daily discourse. That seems odd, since humankind came from this very area, and if we hadn’t sniffed things out, we’d be at some deadend line on the evolutionary chart. Let’s put smell back where it belongs!

2006-09-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

When we finally came upon the gorillas yesterday , it was mildly climactic in the way that major life events are anticipated, feared, and then happen rather gloriously. Thinking here of the moments just before you graduate, get married, give birth (well, maybe not that one), begin a race: here was all this planning and excited apprehension, and—wow—it’s happening RIGHT NOW.

I wouldn’t call it transformational, but ‘wondrous’ fits the bill. The guides had already directed us to leave our packs about 50 feet back, and we were pushing slowly through the tall bamboo and thick red-hot-poker bushes, in single file, cameras dangling from our necks.

Suddenly, on our right, a round jet-black mound sitting on the thick forest floor came into view, about 10 feet away. Beyond her, another one, partially shielded by the forest canopy. The guides growled like a silverback, to signal that we were there, no worries. But she never looked at us, just kept at her activity: grooming her small baby with one hand, and eating bamboo leaves with the other.

For an hour, we followed and watched this mother and baby, and about six of her clan, including the giant silverback. Turns out there were several young gorillas, who frolicked openly in front of us. Another infant could be seen clinging to its mother’s chest as she walked past us on all fours. We only heard two others, who had climbed the bamboo and sent it cracking and crashing down not far from us. The silverback (300 pounds), seemed to want no part of the circus, nor the heat of the day. He lay under some bushes, in various postures not unlike a man in bed, catching some Zzzs.

Only the little gorillas seemed interested in these camera-toting, bush-hat wearing humans. One seemed rather determined to catch the eye of one of the trackers. Two others played at aggression with each other. The adults kept a watchful eye, snatching them if they moved too far off, that is, when the grown gorillas weren’t yawning, stretching, itching themselves in unabashedly in all the usual places, and swatting at flies.

What struck me was their grace and beauty; absolutely shimmering coats, graceful hands, expressive faces. They seemed quite at peace, protective of one another, secure. Kind of like the people of Rwanda. Kinda cool.

2006-09-08T00:53:00.000-07:00

Charles Mutazihana is a very tall, angular Rwandan with an incredibly wide smile. He is the principal of Kigali Parents' School, educating over 1000 students of working and middle class parents, and so his visage can quickly turn sober as he counts down the challenges in the school: 50 children to each small classroom, the dire lack of books, especially reference materials, a significant number of children with mental and emotional problems, paucity of writing utensils, some older girls with tremendous self-esteem issues.

And yet, his school is the best performing school in Rwanda, according to national examinations, and so parents clamour for their children to attend.

This is how it goes in Rwanda if you have time and interest: Within 15 minutes of hearing my proposal for a friend to friend connection between his school and the University Preparatory Academy in the heart of Detroit, he says, "Yes, this will work. We can do it. We would love to do it." An hour later, I am driving away with a set of new, unforgettable memories of young children in classrooms greeting me in unison, and then singing. Two three year-olds are called to the front, and show off their English diaglogue.

I am simply overcome by this, a pinch-me kind of experience, a vision coming to fruition. Fifty nine year-olds in an orderly, plain, one-story school will become friends with United States peers.

Flash to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kigail, the site of a UN-sponsored conference on the new phase of capacity building in Rwanda. I am tagging along as part of the UM delegation. Rob is training Secretary Ministers (not to be confused with secretaries to the Ministers; these are Under-Secretaries of the Rwandan Cabinet with high access to the Prime Minister and President).

Picture long skirted tables and chairs arranged behind an inner U-shaped row of tables stocked with microphones for translation, packets of information, tall water bottles, African-designed baskets of candy, pads of paper. The inner two rows are clearly for dignitaries, so Kelly, Rosemary and I sit discreetly in a third-tier row.

Rob, of course, sits at an inner row. He is not intimidated by decorum the way I am. This gets him a place next to an older white woman who has come with her staff. They sit down the row from me. The woman chief is the head of government giving for the UK. Her name is Judy. Rob learns all this, and more.

This is how it goes in Rwanda if you have time, interest, and guts. In the course of an impassioned speech to the many hundred attendees, Charlotte, a very highly placed Secretary Minister of Labor and Public Service, mentions 'Professor Rob' and his message that 'Rwanda is a good country now; soon it will be a great country,' one that the US and other countries will learn from.

At the coffee break out on a lovely, spacious lawn, near white tents of coffee and sweets, Charlotte calls Rob over to meet the Prime Minister. And of course, he finds a way to include me. I stumble over my greeting, having not said 'Your Excellency' to anyone in my whole life.

We are simply gaping, Rob and I, at the access here to people who are impatient, eager, and extremely happy to be joining a world of nations which only recently thought of Rwanda just in terms of genocide. They are far from it, and, quite frankly, we are awed and privileged to be here,on the ground as they say, bearing witness to these many, many efforts.

2006-09-03T13:50:00.000-07:00

Day two in Rwanda is nearly over. By 6 Pm, as the sun sets over the one of the thousand hills near and beyond our hotel, it grows cooler and people reach for their wraps or shawls. I am on the fourth floor of the Novotel Hotel in Kigali, a fan on m right shoulder (no AC), overlooking the lights of the adjoining hillside. We had heard of blackouts as late as Thursday, and have our pitiful little flashlight at the ready.

The big news today is both old and new Africa. The old: there is a problem with the water supply in the city, and people walk about with yellow fill cans, some on their heads, to find the nearest water source. Passing a field in front of the Ministry of Defense today, we say three shirtless children prying up the sprinkling hoses to drink from them. A very little boy begged us today while I was at a little market getting--bottled water. We gave him several bananas we just bought from a 10 year-old who scurried over to us with a whole bunch of bananas balanced on her head-basket. Later I thought, he wanted water. Duh.

New Africa? We awoke to the sound of unmuffled car engines revving in front of the hotel, and thought: ?Philippines? Nope. Just the last round of a Road Ralley thorugh Rwanda. If I didn't have a friend who once raced (and won) road rallies in Canada, I wouldn't have the foggiest. The rally has drawn teams of Europeans and Africans into the hotel, where they sit in teams, trade horrow stories about 'scary' roads, and sit around in uniform. Very Southern California.

Yesterday, less than three hours after we landed, Kelly, the U-M staffer, urged us toward the genocide museum, which is sober, thoughtful, and very meditative. 250,000 Kigiali Rwandans are buried under 5-7 large, flat, adobe-colored cement slabs, except for one which is partly exposed for people to see several draped coffins. Lest you lapse into abstract thinking....

Other signs of the genocide are hard to find, unless you're looking. An occasional well-dressed 20-30 year-old comes into the hotel balancing obviously on artificial limbs. There is a seriousness about the people, an expression of their faces that says, 'You have no idea...."

And we don't. Today, we strolled through an orderly, peaceful Sunday-emptied city well on its way toward rebuilding (bank after bank afer bank), stopped to pause at the Hotel Mille Collis, paid to take some pictures of women street cleaners.

I am using every once of my French and wish I had more. We dare not use much of our Kinyarwanda, because we don't have a clue what people say back to us. Our hotel hosts an armed guard standing discreetly off to the side; the elevators are watched by guards as well. But children, and Americans, scamper happily off to the pool

Tonight we had dinner on a bamboo-topped patio, in front of an African Reggae band, eating African-French food, drinking red wine, our conversation with the U-m team drifting toward Michigan, the economy there, the coming governors' race...we could have been at Palio's...

Tomorrow will convince us we're not: the training begins. More New Africa. Rob and crew are ready, and eager, and only slightly anxious about how it will go. I will attend the morning, as an extra hand. Tuesday the whole shebang will retreat to a UN conference on capacity building where the president may speak.

I am set to call my contacts in order to try and arrnage a school visit. I have 25 French children's books (thanks to Borders) with me, buckets or crayons and pencils, and hakesaks. I feel like Cherry Ames, Visiting American.

It's all in front of us. We're excited, and happy to be here.

2006-08-23T04:42:00.000-07:00

How Not To Be A Colonist.

Given the scarcity of response emails, I will likely land in Kigali without a plan for volunteering my time. This is not a disaster. Yet I'm oddly unsettled, and disappointed.

Worse, I'm irritated: with myself, for not rallying for this cause earlier in the summer, and even with the short list of Americans and Rwandans who are not getting back to me about how to make an ATM withdrawal from my vast talent bank.

Why wouldn't someone rush to embrace my brilliant (though unoriginal) idea about an arts-based cultural exchange between a primary school there and an urban Detroit school here?

These attitudes are, of course, so obnoxiously American I can hardly stand to write them down. I am not God's gift to the Rwandan people, after all. How do I exactly know what people need there, without asking them, or meeting them?

Remember: in therapy, the work goes best when it's driven by the stated needs of the client-country, not the ideas of the therapist-colonist about what should change. Need we even talk about what has been wrought from America's best ideas for developing nations...

Remember: in the Philippines, earlier this year, nothing happened quickly. Of course, I had to establish trust before anyone would help me in my mission to find Pio's family. That meant just sitting around, letting the tropical heat strip me of my will to achieve this and that. I had to be patient (not an enduring American trait), and await the fruits of ever so many meals with Filipinos, plus an innumerable exchange of stories.

The loud silence from Rwandan email is my first lesson. I must be content to just show up in a country that promises to deliver a rich experience, in exchange for my honesty and humility, without all the pompous American side-dressing of 'you need me.'

How Not To Be A Ramar in Rwanda

2006-08-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

"Ramar of the Jungle" was a television series I watched from 1952-54, as an impressionable six-to-eight year old clamoring for new media beyond the 3-D glasses you could order off a Cheerios box.

The plot is this: Missionaries' kid Tom Reynolds returns to the jungle as a doctor where he treats natives ("Ramar" means "White Medicine Man") and takes care of badguys, aided by Prof. Ogden.

So here I am traveling to Rwanda in less than three weeks, a doctor-professor married to another doctor-professor, each of us trying to help out a country that is still putting the badguys on trial for genocide.

No doubt, watching Ramar has saddled me all kinds of negative stereotypes about Africans (like the whole 'savage' idea). These will come flooding back the second I step off the plane in Kigali. More to come there.

But I have Ramar to thank for his stamp on my unconscious. Thanks to him and his creators, I spent an hour this morning on the phone with an acquaintance who runs a school in Urban Detroit, and began to develop the idea of a school-to-school partnership between African-American kids here, and some children in Rwanda. Hopefully, more to come there.

As the period shortens before our departure, I am beset with excitement and apprehension. Not the facing-a-rollercoaster type of feeling. Whereas I am reasonably sure I will be thrown out of a rollercoaster seat, I know I can survive in Rwanda easily.

It's more like climbing up the steps to jump off the high dive, which I eventually did through peer humuliation and torture.

Yep, it will be scary (to gently control the clamor of begging young streetchildren, go into the genocide museum, go anywhere alone without a guide, walk into a classroom or a village for the first time) but I will do this without dying, or anything awful like that.

The tricky part right now is balancing two competing interests: 1/ do what other upper-middle-class travelers to Africa do (see the Virunga gorillas and other rare game, sleep in a guarded air-conditioned tent, have a porter carry my camera equipment); and also 2/ do something meaningful while I'm there, as a psychologist and former educator.

How much did I really relish for years and years the experience of diving with sea turtles in Hawaii, compared to interviewing two, toothless, elderly women in the Philippines who may have been related to me?