1 November 2005

To lighten the mood of the story I'm posting (http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506187.htm), I thought I'd give a few random thoughts:

1) My favorite building in Kigali is, I think, a church. It looks like an airplane hanger and has the words "JESUS CHRIST" written in bright blue along the length of the roof. The first time Bec and I passed it with her driving, I screamed, "Jesus Christ!" She didn't find it nearly as funny.

2) I think I'm becoming a Rwandan. I saw a bus filled with umuzungus yesterday. I stopped. I stared. And I thought, "Who are all those white people?"

30 October 2005

One month from today, we land in New York. In the meantime, we survived Oktoberfest without me embarrassing anyone, and I had another story published by the Catholic NEws Service:

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506160.htm

28 October 2005

Rebecca and I went to our first Rwandan wedding yesterday. Mark and Jordan, Heather and Kevin, I hope you’re taking notes, because nobody knows how to throw a party like the Rwandans.

The celebrants at these particular nuptials were Steve, the English newspaper columnist, and his new wife Alphonsine. Steve looks to be in his 50s and Alphonsine, who is Rwandan, is in her 20s. They also have no common language. She speaks Kinyarwanda and French. He speaks English. But they seem smitten with each other, and I’m sure Steve will treat her better than many Rwandan guys would. At least that’s how I think of it so it doesn’t keep me awake at night.

The ceremony was very quick, in a municipal hall. Alphonsine and Steve were among a group of four or five couples to be married yesterday, and the officials who were supposed to perform the weddings were an hour late. Since the ceremonies were in Kinyarwanda, it’s difficult to describe what happened. But they took place in a building that doubled as a police station, and nothing says love like a man in red coveralls carrying a Kalashnikov.

Anyway, from the service we went to the reception. As we walked in, Jesse, an American who has lived in Rwanda for two years, turned to Rebecca, our friend Laura and me and said, “Get ready to sit.”

I wasn’t sure what exactly he meant. But sure enough, as we walked in, we saw people lined up in rows of white plastic chairs on someone’s porch, just sitting there. No music, no conversation, no mingling. Just sitting.

The sitting presented many questions of etiquette that no one appeared able to answer. If umuzungu guests happen to see older folks who need the chair they are sitting in, is the white person supposed to get up? (The answer appeared to be no. In fact, able-bodied Rwandans didn’t appear to stand up for their elders.) The more important question we never fully answered was whether it was like musical chairs. If you didn’t get a seat, did you have to leave?

I decided to test that last theory out when I couldn’t bear sitting anymore. I took the bold move and I stood. This was controversial. I was offered chairs five or six times. Why would I want to stand? Why would I want to talk to someone other than the folks directly on my right or left? People were flummoxed.

After a brief toast by Steve, it was time to pass the banana beer, which was one of the foulest libations I have ever sipped. It tasted like a carbonated combination of rotten banana and something I couldn’t place. After someone explained to me how the beer is made, I realized what the taste was I couldn’t place. Feet. Smelly feet. The face I made when I drank it may well have been the funniest thing the people of Rwanda have ever seen, given the amount of laughing. Of course, they laugh at everything umuzungus do. Rebecca taking a dignified swig through the bamboo straw, without a look of disgust, was just as hysterical as the pained look on mine.

Anyway, after the beer the sitting continued. Few people moved, and if they did, it was to another chair. I continued to stand.

Then it was time for food. First came the cake, which wasn’t bad. A person could only take a small morsel and there were no forks. Bec doesn’t like it when her hands get sticky, but she seems to have handled the cake just fine. Dinner came next.

Steve promised a Kenyan feast, because Rwandan weddings don’t usually feature food. My French teacher, who is Congolese, says few, if any, Rwandan gatherings involve food. Steve tried valiantly. He had goat ribs, salad and other goodies. But we have a feeling the Rwandans didn’t make enough, and maybe on purpose. I’ve never left a wedding hungry.

Waiting on line at the buffet, I witnessed more instances of possible Asperger’s syndrome. As I waited for Bec and Laura to take food, the guy behind me took all of the paper plates. I hadn’t yet taken one, and he knew it. I looked at him. “Oh, I thought it was the last one,” he said. I took the stack of plates from him. I noticed that the stack was thick. So I took one for me, and then separated all 10 other plates and handed them individually to the guy who thought there was only one. “Oh,” he said. There was, however, only one fork left, and he grabbed that before I could get it.

We went outside to eat, and sit some more.

This shouldn’t have surprised me. Laura lives in a house she shares with Jesse and a number of Rwandans, so she has visitors, at all hours. But a Rwandan visit works like this. The host asks the visitor questions, the visitor answers yes or no. And then they sit in silence once all questions have been asked. Laura says after a few minutes she just gets up and leaves because it’s so boring.

I know that you’re looking for some great analysis of this. What does this all mean? Honestly, I don’t know.

In other news, I have become one of you and finished The Da Vinci Code. I had held off because I thought nothing so many people liked could be any good. I’m such a snob. I honestly believe there is something morally wrong with liking some things, like Yanni or Billy Ray Cyrus (Achy Breaky Heart). I once decided I couldn’t date someone because she liked Garth Brooks. I just knew it would work because there was obviously something terribly wrong with her.

That’s what I thought the book was, but I was wrong. And because of it, I am now the Kigali library. One of the guys who runs an Internet café I frequent saw my book and begged me to bring him some. Right now he’s reading the latest Nick Hornby, and he’s getting Da Vinci on Monday. My friend Igor has some of our books, and a guy in my French class asked for some as well. It’s a good development since this is not a country known for reading.

So, that’s it for now. Tomorrow we’re going to Oktoberfest here. I can only hope it’s as much fun as when my friends and I got thrown out of the Hoffbrauhaus in Munich for breaking things. Junior year abroad certainly was an education.

25 October 2005

They're coming fast and furious now. I contributed to this story from Catholic News Service on the Belgian priest being held here. I had to call bloody Belgium. Here's the link:

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506053.htm.

And apparently Nicholas Kristoff had an editorial yesterday sort of along the same lines of what I wrote on the same day. So, if you're willing to pay $50 for columnists on Times Select, be my guest to and take a look.

Thanks, Norah, for pointing that out. (See, if people write to me, they get their names on the World Wide Web. Norah can now Google herself. If you send me e-mails, you can too.)

24 October 2005, Part 1

The problem with this site is that postings get put up in the order their posted. So you're going to read me winging about my story not running in Dallas after I've posted the link to it, here http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/world/stories/102305dnintburundidog.2404d2c0.html.

Sorry about that. I got the e-mail after I wrote the blog post.


24 October 2005, Part 2

My friend Steve told me his daughter works at Harley Davidson in the UK. She sent him the new Harley t-shirts, complete with what is reported to be a new design (I haven’t seen it yet, so don’t know if it is in fact new). The shirt cost something like 19 pounds. Steve said that he was tempted to send his daughter an old Harley t-shirt he bought at the market here in Kigali, a used one he got for 500 francs, less than $1.

The Harley shirt is not particularly interesting in and of itself. But the pallet after pallet of used clothing is. Some of the shirts are funny. Rebecca said she saw a guy walking around with a t-shirt that said, “Bob’s Birthday” and had a picture of Bob. The fat, bald white guy on the shirt didn’t look like the guy apparently.

The sheer number of hockey jerseys – old ones that are from recreational teams or old models of Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys – points to the generosity of Canadians, and the number of times the Leafs have changed their looks just make a buck. Boys and men walk around with old soccer jerseys from the English Premier League, and they know the players whose jerseys they are wearing. There are a good number of American football jerseys and baseball shirts floating around as well, although I doubt the Rwandans know those players. And Rik Smits should move to Africa. I’ve seen at least 10 people wearing the number 45 of the Dunking Dutchman of the Indiana Pacers. His fame will live forever in poor countries.

I recognize the generosity involved in sending old, used clothes to Africa. I also recognize that there are some people here so poor that they couldn’t afford clothes otherwise. If you don’t want the shirt, people here probably do.

I know this will sound heartless, but STOP SENDING YOUR OLD JUNK.

I think I stole that from OxFam, so sorry about that. But anyway, the old clothes are actually not helping anyone. Yes, someone has a shirt on his (or her) back. But other people don’t have jobs. Countries in Africa need to develop their own industries, especially in textiles and clothing, or they won’t develop. I live near the Salvation Army headquarters in Kigali (although with all the rain they probably should have sent the Navy and Marines) and am always tempted to go in there, hijack the computers and cancel all the old clothing shipments.

I guess that’s problem with international aid. Donors mean well, they really do. And I understand that people need to clean the old closet every once in a while. But does some poor Rwandan have to suffer with your old Yanni t-shirt? Does anyone need to suffer with your old Yanni t-shirt? While we’re at it, do we have to continue to suffer Yanni? But I digress.

If handouts keep coming, people lose the incentive to make their own industry. Really, if all it costs to get clothes in Rwanda is transport costs for old junk, paid for by the charities, then what incentive do people have to go through the time and expense of putting up factories, paying workers and producing fabric? I certainly wouldn’t see the incentive. The cheap used clothes coming in from the US, Canada and Europe undercut the prices of anything that can be locally produced. So people don’t work, and countries stay poor.

I recognize that that’s only half the equation. Western governments need to stop bad trade policies that protect their farmers and dying industries while hurting farmers in developing countries and killing those economies.

But someone has to make the first more. So, if you don’t want that old I’m With Stupid t-shirt, throw it out. Don’t foist your old junk on other people.

Now that I’m done ranting, here’s what’s new. I may be doing another story for the Dallas Morning News in the next few weeks, on the basket weavers in Gitarama province, which is nice. But they still haven’t run my bloody Burundi story yet. And while we’re at it, that first story I wrote from Rwanda, about AIDS drug distribution, well, CNS still hasn’t run that. It’s only been two months that it’s been sitting there. Ugh.

Rebecca is off visiting more orphanages in Kibungo province. (I’m not 100 percent sure where it is either.) She has to drive herself, which meant that we had to drive around in one of the CRS jeeps all weekend so Bec could get in some practice. She did great, and I am pleased to report that all parts of the jeep that were attached to the behemoth when we pulled out of CRS headquarters on Saturday afternoon returned this morning attached to the truck. (A rearview mirror didn’t make it the first time Bec had to drive one of those things a few months ago.)

We went to our first US Embassy function on Friday, which meant that I had to wear socks. I have these great shoes that are meant for water sports. They have vents and a built-in aqua sock. But they have become my default shoes. The vents are like air conditioning, which is important for someone who couldn’t wear pajamas with feet because his feet were too sweaty when he was a kid.

Anyway, the event was the opening of an art show that my friend Jean-Claude arranged. He runs a project that teaches art to kids affected by HIV – they either have it, were orphaned by it or their parents currently have it. There are 35 kids aged 5 to 16, and they each got to put up a picture in the embassy’s library.

The exhibit was exciting – the other artists from the traffic circle show also have paintings up – and our friend Jjukko from Uganda made a surprise appearance. The kids’ artwork was really advanced, but you can tell that kids produced it with just a little help, not adults guiding their hands.

But the embassy staff left a lot to be desired. They didn’t even show up, except for the public affairs officer and the charge d’affaires, the level below ambassador. We asked about that and were told it was a weekend. But shouldn’t diplomats always be on duty? Shouldn’t they always be working on public diplomacy, getting to know the locals, rather than just going to work and then going to bars with other Americans? Bec and I hadn’t been impressed with the embassy staff here up to this point, and we’re definitely not now.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Sorry for being so whiny today. I’ll have more to write about soon.

20 October 2005

Is it possible for an entire nation to be mildly autistic? I doubt it. And before you think that I’m going into some neo-colonial Rwandans are this and that kind of rant, here me out.

Every once in a while, Rebecca wonders out loud whether Rwandans suffer collectively from Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism where people function almost normally but fixate on one particular thing. We met a kid who had an obsession with cheese. He knew what every cheese went with, and how it was made. Others become fascinated with trains or fire trucks. Anyway, aside from the fixation, Asperger sufferers are unable to think outside of themselves, to see the world from another perspective.

Every time Rebecca says this, I helpfully say, “So you think Rwandans are all functionally retarded.” (I know they are very different things, and recognize my unfortunate habit of using a word that describes a very specific and serious medical condition recklessly. I should stop.) She either rolls her eyes or explains what she means.

Now, neither of us really believes that Rwandans have Asperger, which is not spelled Assburgers. Wouldn’t that be so much more fun? But there is an argument to be made that many Rwandans are unable to see, or choose not to see, how their actions affect people around them.

You see it on the road, where people find lane markers to be advisories at best. Or the jeeps that drive with their brights on at all times. Or while they are slaloming around potholes without slowing down and look at people walking as far away from the road as is humanly possible as if they’re insane. That’s usually the UN drivers. People answer their phones in my French class and have conversations at full voice without leaving the room. Or everyone just talks at once so that no one is heard.

How’s this for an example. The other night, Rebecca and I went out to dinner after French class, and there were two guys leaning on the car. They were having a conversation, not menacing in any way. We walked up to the car, and they didn’t move. We opened the doors, and they didn’t move. I said, in French, “We’re going to drive now.” They moved just enough so that we wouldn’t run them over, but not enough that we didn’t think that we would.

Here’s my favorite. One night, a couple of weeks ago, we were dropping off a friend of ours. She lives on what she says is a fairly impassable road with no lights, but within walking distance of a gas station on the main road. So we left her off there. Laura had already begun walking away, and I was sitting in the car. A taxi driver sidles up to the window, as Bec has started to pull away, and says, “Taxi.” He stood there for a few seconds and I guess thought I was going to get out of the moving car. He kept looking. I finally couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m in a car,” I said.

So those are small examples. There are larger ones as well. The majority of the population farm on small hillside plots. Outside organizations had to explain that terracing the land would make fields more productive. That would require people to work together in creating the terraced land, and then farming together.

And that may be where we get to the heart of why people are unable to think outside of themselves. Even before the genocide, Rwandans didn’t trust each other. They farmed their little plots, and often figured that their neighbors were working their family plots, and their nefarious ones. There wasn’t much of a village culture, the way other African societies are famous for. People just worked their own land.

That’s the society from where the genocide grew. And the genocide has, for obvious reasons, only heightened the mistrust. There are constant refugee flows between Rwanda and Burundi. Usually Tutsis come into Rwanda, and the Hutus in Butare province get it in their heads that the government is bringing those Tutsis back for revenge attacks and a reverse genocide. It’s been 11 years, and if the government wanted to do a mass retaliation within Rwanda’s borders it would have already. (There are arguments that it did carry out a mass extermination of Hutu refugees in Congo in the 1990s. There were genocidaires mixed in with the refugees, but there were many, many refugees killed during the fighting. There is some evidence they were targeted.)

Anyway, back to the current refugee flows. The Rwandan Hutus who flee to Burundi are unable to see that the Tutsis are coming across the border either out of fear for their own lives or to get extra supplies and materials they’re not entitled to from the ever-efficient UN.

It’s not a mental disorder, just a lack of trust endemic to Rwanda. It is different than anywhere I have ever seen or heard of. The Cambodians don’t have it. The Burundians don’t have it to the same extent. It may be particularly Rwandan in that it didn’t necessarily come out of government policies, but was always there.

Now – and you knew this was coming – this is just a generalization. Our Rwandan friends don’t tend to suffer from this mistrust. They are trying to build it. Joy, who runs the basket weaving company, told her weavers that she didn’t want to hear Hutus are this, Tutsis are that, the women all had to work together. Eric does the same thing with the folks he works with. My friend Igor in Butare is the same way. Jean-Claude, the painter, doesn’t care about the ethnicity of the painters and kids he works with.

They all have one common denominator. They are all returnees. They left Rwanda, or were born outside of the country. They had different experiences. Let’s hope that their efforts are successful.

19 October 2005

I have some corrections to make from the last entry.

First, I got the rainy seasons all screwed up. The one we’re in now lasts until mid-December. The second rainy season lasts from the end of February until June.

So what does that mean? Well, what it means is countless more experiences like yesterday, where in a fairly sudden storm I found myself huddling with six other people in a booth smaller than of one of those 24-hour photo booths that used to be found in mall parking lots. For those of you who remember these things, the Libyans chasing Marty McFly in the Delorian crash through one of those in Back to the Future. I was stuck there for over an hour.

Rebecca sent me a text message saying, “Aren’t you glad you use Dial. Don’t you wish everybody did?” Well, they didn’t. I can’t complain, though, since the guys who work in the booth invited me in. The other choice was swimming into town.

And the other correction comes from my mom. I think she says it far better than I ever could:

"Just so that you have my famous quote correct it goes like this: 'If you can't baffle them with brilliance.... dazzle them with bullshit!'" Words to live by.

On other fronts, I’ve sent out a batch of pitches to the Dallas Morning News. Hopefully they’ll publish the story they’ve been sitting on soon. I was talking to a friend of ours who I bumped into. Her boyfriend (she called him partner, so I immediately thought Laura had a girlfriend) is a journalist and freelanced for a long time. She said the same thing used to happen to him. He’d write a story, editors would sit on it, and then sit on paying him. I felt a little better, in that I’m not the only freelancer this happens to. But it doesn’t make it fell right.

Anyway, that’s all from here for now. I see clouds starting to billow out my office window, and I want to get to town before it pours. Wish me luck.

14 October 2005 – Confessions

I think that it’s high time that I confess to some of the things that have been going on around here over the past few weeks. I’m not particularly proud of them, and Rebecca doesn’t know all of them. I hope that you don’t think less of me after I bare my soul.

Here we go.

1) Rebecca has been out in Butare and Kibuye provinces here since Tuesday morning. And I’ve spent every night she’s been away with another woman. Hey, I was lonely. This house is too big for one person. Oh, I guess you’re probably wondering who the home-wrecker is. Princess Leia.

That’s right. Over the past three nights, I’ve destroyed the Death Star twice and seen my friend Han frozen in carbonite. And you all thought marriage would tamp down my wild side. I can’t be contained by societal conventions.

2) My watch died, and I continue to wear it. I wasn’t really paying that much attention to it until one day I noticed that the face was fogging up. I figured, well, it’s humid here. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary that my watch face would fog up. And then I noticed that it was stopped at 8:45. I checked my phone’s clock, which said about noon. And then I looked at the date. It was stuck on the fourth. Of September. I made this discovery some weeks ago. The battery must have dropped out at around 8:45 on September 4, which explains the fog and the big hole in the back.

Rebecca keeps telling me to buy a cheap here that will last for a few weeks until we can get a better one in New York. I keep saying that I will, but I just never get around to it. I just check my mobile’s clock. Occasionally an interview subject will notice that my watch is stopped, and I say it just happened, and that yes, I’m getting a new one. Sometimes I’ll act surprised. But do I do anything about it? No.

Partly I don’t think anything I get here will work, but mostly it’s just because I’m lazy. And I’m too vain to show off the watch tan. So I go about my life with a dead watch.

3) I think I’ve reached the stage at two or three months in a new place where things are just annoying. It’s hard work living here. Things often don’t work, people usually don’t speak French no matter how much they say they do, there’s not much art or culture. I want to watch the Rangers. I’m in a lull where I’m busy thinking of my next stories to do while a few others I’ve started are still happening and not ripe to write up yet. Things aren’t slow, but I’m casting around in several directions. It’s much easier to work when I’ve got a few projects with deadlines rather than trying to work on ideas. I’ll have some pitches out on Monday, and hopefully some deadlines after that.

Freelancing is fun. I like being my own boss. I like doing the stories that I want to do, rather than what I’m told to do. But Rebecca said it best when she told me that it was hard to be self-motivated all the time. I’m doing my best, but sometimes it’s good to have an assignment or two while thinking of ideas.

I don’t know if I want my entire career to be this. Staff jobs are nice and cushy. Even the work I’m doing for the local paper here doesn’t have a deadline, so of course I haven’t started it yet. They apparently see me doing a series. Somehow Steve got it in his head that I lived in Cambodia for a couple of years. I’m not sure how that happened, because I told him it was a couple of months in between sessions at grad school. It’s time to employ Evan’s theory on being an expert. The theory is that as long as a person claims to be an expert, it’s almost impossible to prove they’re not. So, apparently I’m an expert on Cambodia. Except I didn’t claim my status as an expert, so this is going to be hard. Well, my mom once told me if you can’t impress them with knowledge dazzle them with bullshit. I’m pulling the shovel out of storage.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog. I had my first run-in with the Rwandan army yesterday. My bus stop is down the road from the Ministry of Defense, and there must have been some sort of officers training yesterday that let out at about 2 p.m. Because when I went to the stop hundreds of officers in their natty green uniforms and American-modeled (if not supplied) camouflage were walking to the stop with me. Each time it looked like there was going to be a break, another brigade came strolling down.

They were all unarmed, and most of them said hello in English. They were incredibly polite, but they wanted on those buses. And I let them go, because there were a lot more of them than there was of me.

It was not the stereotypical African army. In Kenya and many other countries on this continent, an encounter with a group of soldiers will often end up with the civilian’s wallet empty, I’ve been told. Not here, which speaks well of the country.

And now for the weather. The first of two rainy seasons has either begun or is about to. Those of you reading in New York have apparently headed into the rainy season as well (who knew) so will not be impressed. But the rains here make the Cambodian rainy season look like a low-pressure shower, like the one in my bathroom right now. And it’s unpredictable. In Cambodia, the rain started at around 2 p.m. every day. It was almost like clockwork. If it didn’t rain at around two, then it probably wasn’t going to.

There’s no predictability here, other than the rain is going to be hard. You sometimes wonder how it’s possible there could be any more for the next storm. But there is.

It could happen in the morning, in the afternoon, at night – hell, all three even. I got caught under a gas station overhang for over an hour on Wednesday with raindrops as big as my head falling all around. I was with half of Kigali at around 5 p.m.

It rained three times like that on Wednesday night, and our balcony got so full of water that it seeped underneath the door into the bedroom. At first I thought the ceiling was leaking, which has happened before. Nope. It was a flood. Other days the rain may come in the morning. Who knows? Just get out of the way when it starts.

The rains last until January or so when we get a brief reprieve, then they continue until April. Things are green, and the flowers are all blooming. The country truly is physically spectacular. But it is wet.

That’s all for now. Hopefully the water in the shower is working now. I’m stinky.

10 October 2005

Holiday! Celebrate! Day off from work! Well, it would be a day off for me if I had a proper nine-to-five. Rebecca, however, has the day to herself. CRS gives its staff 12 days off each year, Rwanda doesn’t really do holidays, and all that adds up to Happy Columbus Day!

So I’m sitting under a bamboo lean-to at the Novotel pool while Bec gets in a brisk swim. I actually have no idea whether the swim will be brisk or she’ll be fighting the water. But I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt. When are the Olympics? 2008? I hope they’re ready for her.

It’s been a while. I hope no one thought that I had pulled a Dr. Livingston and disappeared into deepest, darkest Africa.

Nah, I’ve just been busy. Our friend Liz, who Bec met right before we came to Rwanda, was in town, and I was busy doing some reporting on a few stories I’d like to do on her company and the work she’s doing in Rwanda. Liz is the founder of a company called EDImports, and she brings products from women’s collectives in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda into the United States. In Rwanda they’re mostly hand-made baskets woven from the innards of the sisal plant – which looks like an aloe plant except instead of hand lotion the sisal’s leaves are filled with strands of a strong fibers that look like long corn silk. But I digress. What makes Liz’s company interesting is that she is doing all of this as a for-profit business. She and her partners provide a small banking institution, distribute goats and do all the things that a traditional non-government organization would. They even provide all of the materials so the women – genocide survivors, widows and the wives of men who killed, among others – take home every franc they earn from the project. But Liz and her partners’ main purpose is to make money. If everyone makes money, they think, the country will develop. And it won’t be dependent on handouts, the typical international assistance trap. (By the way, here’s Liz’s Web site. http://edimports.com. Her business right now is purely wholesale, but she has links to places where you can buy the baskets and other things. You’ll also be able to buy them at a major department store that will remain unnamed, because I want you to buy from Liz.)

Liz partners with two Rwandan women, Janet and Joy (I won’t trouble you with last names here) who are hard-core businesswomen and sisters. They know everyone in the government, and like many of the successful people here returned following the genocide. They were both in Uganda, but Joy lived around Washington, DC for 15 years or so. Along with their desire to build their businesses (Joy also runs a furniture store and Janet is getting back into catering), they are the type of business people who really feel a responsibility to their employees and their country. They’re a breath of fresh air, and they’re really funny. The two of them bicker the way you would expect two sisters who work together would bicker.

Anyway, I went with Liz and the sisters – den mothers really – to Gitarama province to see the basket weavers on payday. I also went to see another group Liz works with called Rwanda Knits, genocide survivors who do mohair scarves, ponchos and stuff. A small number will be sold at Diane von Furstenberg’s flagship store this fall. Like 100 of them, and they may be on sale now. They come in a basket made in Rwanda, so it’s quite a little item. And if anyone can help me spell Diane von Furstenberg’s name, the help will be greatly appreciated.

On the work front, CNS is backed up on my stories, and they’ve asked me to hold off for a few weeks. Right now there’s only one foreign editor and a conference in Rome, so not much time for Africa. They’ll be hiring a deputy soon, so hopefully they’ll accept more stories from me. They want to, and I’ve got a bunch percolating. But hey, we don’t want to get rid of them too early. I’m here for a year, right.

I think I’m in the process of being recruited to do some work for The New Times, the local pro-government paper. It’s independent, not a state organ, so I don’t have too much trouble contributing. I won’t accept censorship, so if I’m critical of the government, they’re going to have to accept it or not print it. I’m not censoring myself.

The one thing they’ve already mentioned is a piece comparing and contrasting Cambodia and Rwanda. I’d better get started reading up on Cambodia again. Plus, I’m asking to do some press training with the reporting staff to get them to be more aggressive reporting on their government. It won’t pay much, but it’ll keep me really busy (although I’m also making it a condition that I leave to do my stories whenever I feel like it) and will hopefully give the folks that work there some backbone.

The paper’s British columnist, Steve Buckingham (no reason to know his name, but it’s so typically British), also appears to want me to help out on a project that is really exciting. He and a human rights advocate here are going to be putting together genocide survivor stories. This has been done before, but not in the detail they appear to be working on. They want to have people tell stories of life leading up to the killing, and also deeper stories about what happened. They figure 11 years on people might be ready for it. I’m not sure what they see me taking doing, but it sounds like a project I want to be a part of.

Finally, I’m having a moral dilemma. One of my first reactions to the Pakistan earthquake was that my story for Dallas would be pushed back again. And then I started to think of the carnage. I’m not sure, but that feels wrong.

Anyway, that’s the news and I am out of here. We’ve bought the tickets for our two-week jaunt to New York in December, and I will post details soon so you can arrange appropriate festivals and think of the best ways to show just how much you miss us.

5 October 2005

Burundi wasn't all fun and games, folks. Here's the first of the two stories I wrote from there on the peace process.

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0505616.htm

CNS will also be publishing at least one photo. I'm still waiting to hear what the story is from Dallas. I'll post the links as I have them.