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.