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.