25 November 2005

It was when I started to wonder whether I could jab my pen into a colleague’s eye, escape the conference room and slip past the soldiers on the compound that I knew I had to leave a meeting last night.

The president’s communication advisor called Wednesday night to invite me to a meeting of journalists to discuss how to work together better. At first I didn’t want to go, it was Thanksgiving after all. But it was at 4 p.m. and I was able to do my part of the prep work for the big dinner beforehand. Plus, they told me it was only supposed to last about an hour.

So I arrived at the president’s compound at 3:30, figuring that arriving early to get through security was a good idea. The soldiers at the gate had no idea what I was talking about. I tried in English and French. Finally, one of the soldiers told me to walk down to the fourth gate and I would find the meeting no problem.

I did that, except the fourth gate was at a different building, which was closing. The guards there saw me and, rather than asking what I was looking for, said “umuzungu” and laughed. “Yes, I am a white person,” I said. Then a guy who spoke enough English to tell me the office was closed walked by.

So I walked back to the soldiers and, although I tried to remain calm, told off the man with the machine gun. He sent another man with a machine gun who spoke French to show me where I was supposed to go. We walked past the second gate, then the third. And then we hopped over the drainage ditch, walked along the dirt path, across the basketball court down to where there was a group of cars, and the fourth gate. There were few people around, so I of course thought this was the end, part of some dastardly plan.

We were let into the conference room at 4:15. The meeting started at 4:30. There were four or five presidential advisors, representatives of Rwandan news organizations, Rwandan correspondents for the AP and Reuters and a few other foreign media outlets, the French Radio France Internationale correspondent and me. Since some Rwandans spoke French and some English, the meeting was conducted in Kinyarwanda, and the president’s speechwriter gamely translated for the RFI correspondent and me.

The meeting started out well, with reporters asking questions about access to sites, ministers and information and getting good answers in return, for the most part. But then the meeting turned. It is then that I fully comprehended the Rwandan capacity to sit and listen to each other blather on beyond any point of being useful.

Rebecca often tells me about her hours-long meetings at work where her colleagues all have to have their say, even if it’s repeating what the person next to them said. I always tell her that someone would have to die if I sat in those meetings, and it wouldn’t be me.

The RFI correspondent left our meeting a little after 5. She asked a question in English about taping at a judicial ‘earing. Most people didn’t understand what she was talking about, and she kept asking why she couldn’t tape the ‘earing but Radio Rwanda could. She claimed she had an interview when she left, but I think it was frustration. I figured I would stick around a little while longer, to see how the meeting ended.

The speechwriter kept translating, either by writing in my notebook or telling me what was going on. The questions people asked were long soliloquies, the answers 20 times longer. My translator kept getting called away from the meeting so I was lost most of the time. It felt like I was there for hours. But I had no idea because the soldiers were holding my mobile phone hostage for security reasons. I’m still wearing my broken watch you see.

I finally snuck a peak at someone’s watch. Five forty-five. I had been there for nearly two hours. But the speechwriter told someone he’d call them back in 20 minutes so I thought I could hold out a bit longer. Our guests were arriving around 6, so I’d just be a little late.

At 6:15, they said last question. Which turned into two last questions. Which then turned into three last questions, which then turned into my friend James raising his hand and my thoughts about making my bloody escape.

Instead I just got up and left. As I walked into the night, Arthur, the Reuters correspondent, said to me, “Leaving already.”

I spoke to my friend Gabi this morning, and he said the reporters were kept there for another hour after I left. He also said I looked like I was going to explode. Originally I thought the government was going to do something terrible to me on the way into the meeting. It turned out they were trying to bore me to death.

Anyway, I got home around 7:15 to find out that our cooking gas had run out while the turkey was cooking, so Rebecca’s boss donated the canister from his house. But despite that, and the scrawny but fatty turkey, Rebecca did a fabulous job cooking the bird. Our friends all had a good time, and overall it was a happy Thanksgiving.