20 December 2005
It’s taken me a little while to get used to being back, and journalistically things have been a bit slow. But I’m making progress in both areas.
On the work front, I sent out five pitches to editors in the US yesterday, including three to DaMN, which I’m far more hopeful about. In baseball, if you bat .300, you’re going to the Hall of Fame. I’m aiming to bat around .600, meaning I get assigned three of those stories. Of course, it’ll be one of those first-week-of-the-season batting averages that are skewed because of the meaningless number of at-bats.
Two are foreign stories, one in Uganda and one in Congo. I actually have to leave the country within the next three months because my trip to Connecticut to get the new passport cut into my time to get the fingerprints I needed for my FBI clearance to get a long-term visa. That’s right, in a country where one million people were killed in the span of 100 days – admittedly not by the people in power now, not including actions in Congo in the late 1990s – I need to prove that I’m not a criminal.
So I have to leave the country every three months. That’s okay. It keeps me on my toes, thinking of places to go and stories to do.
One story I pitched is poople power, and the other is a “development of philanthropy” story. The final story is inside Rwanda, and is really awful. But I’m not telling you what it is until I know if I can write it for DaMN or not.
But I will tell you a little about the person that gave me the awful Rwanda story. His name is Victor and he’s a Guatemalan who runs an orphanage out in the middle of nowhere. In Rwanda that’s saying something. Bec met him through work, and he was in town for a few days last weekend. We had dinner on Saturday.
Anyway, Victor lived in Europe for several years, speaks Spanish, German and English. No French. No Kinyarwanda. He says he speaks to his kids in the universal language of love (his words). He’s right. A good hug can go a long way.
Victor is an agronomist, and one of the projects he’s working on is creating a plantation on his orphanage’s sprawling property where he will grow papayas, mangoes, pineapples and other fruits to dry, get certified organic and send up to Europe. He also wants to start an eco-tourism business, and we may be spending New Year’s at the orphanage hiking and canoeing on Lake Kivu.
Because of his training, Victor knows a lot about farming. And he knows a lot about tropical fruit from growing up in Guatemala, which he says has a remarkably similar climate to Rwanda. He’s bringing in new species of mango and papaya to grow here. Right now only pineapples grow on his orphanage’s grounds.
He noticed that people were picking them while they were green. Victor said people told him green pineapples were the sweetest, and the best time to eat them. He knew this was nonsense, so he pressed on.
The people then told him they took green pineapples because they were sure the neighbors were going to pick them early, and they wanted to make sure they at least got a bad one. See, it’s that lack of trust I’ve written about before that keeps coming back.
Victor’s initial reaction to that and mine start out in the same place: it’s tremendously sad that Rwandans can’t trust each other.
But then they diverge drastically. Victor hired a guard for his plants and hopes that people will see that yellow pineapple is better, and that maybe they’ll start to trust each other. Mine is to just say, you know what, have fun with that. It’s not worth the frustration.
I hope that I lose this feeling. But every time I start to feel differently, I have an experience that just knocks most of my positive feelings out.
Yesterday, I was buying bread at the local store. This guy Jean-Baptiste, a Rwandan who lives near us and speaks English, was there. We have a little game. Every time I see him, he asks me for a job, gardening, doing laundry. Usually, I politely say we’ve got a guy.
He was sitting and drinking a beer in the store. When he saw me, he said, “How about that job?”
“Sorry, I don’t have one.”
“But I need a job.”
“You can keep asking me, but I still won’t have one.”
He persisted. “But I have a wife and kids. How am I supposed to feed them?”
“Why are you sitting here drinking beer?”
“But it’s Christmas, how am I supposed to buy presents.”
“I’m not Christian, and I still have no job to offer you.” (The first part was clearly not the right thing to say, but I had had about enough.)
He cursed at me in Kinyarwanda and I walked off. On the way down, the guards at the apartment building next to our house and one of its residents – you have to have money to live there – started in on “Donnez-moi du pain!” (Give me bread.)
I asked if they had self-respect, in English because that’s kind of where my French gives out, and kept walking.
To fight back, I’ve taken to walking around with headphones on. So when the Congolese moneychangers start in with their calls of “My friend, change?” they sound like Bruce Springsteen. As they get up in my face and continue, despite me saying no, they start to sound like Bono.
Now, to balance out my annoying Jean-Baptiste story, I met a new friend right before I left for New York. His name is Thaddee, and he just graduated with a degree in environmental sciences from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. He’s helping me with my environment story. And despite not having one, he has not asked me for a job.
We met up early yesterday, and he told me that he’s looking for work anywhere, and is learning Dutch because he just likes languages. He also started a small brick-making business. The government recently banned the use of wood in industrial ovens, like those for making bricks. Deforestation is a huge problem here. So Thaddee started using the shells and stalks from picked coffee beans. Unfortunately, that has gotten far more expensive than he can afford, so he’s looking for another way.
But that’s the key. He’s looking for another way. And it’s people like Thaddee that keep me from telling Rebecca that we’re getting the hell out of here and going home. I just wish folks like Thaddee stuck in my mind more than people like Jean-Baptiste.
It’s taken me a little while to get used to being back, and journalistically things have been a bit slow. But I’m making progress in both areas.
On the work front, I sent out five pitches to editors in the US yesterday, including three to DaMN, which I’m far more hopeful about. In baseball, if you bat .300, you’re going to the Hall of Fame. I’m aiming to bat around .600, meaning I get assigned three of those stories. Of course, it’ll be one of those first-week-of-the-season batting averages that are skewed because of the meaningless number of at-bats.
Two are foreign stories, one in Uganda and one in Congo. I actually have to leave the country within the next three months because my trip to Connecticut to get the new passport cut into my time to get the fingerprints I needed for my FBI clearance to get a long-term visa. That’s right, in a country where one million people were killed in the span of 100 days – admittedly not by the people in power now, not including actions in Congo in the late 1990s – I need to prove that I’m not a criminal.
So I have to leave the country every three months. That’s okay. It keeps me on my toes, thinking of places to go and stories to do.
One story I pitched is poople power, and the other is a “development of philanthropy” story. The final story is inside Rwanda, and is really awful. But I’m not telling you what it is until I know if I can write it for DaMN or not.
But I will tell you a little about the person that gave me the awful Rwanda story. His name is Victor and he’s a Guatemalan who runs an orphanage out in the middle of nowhere. In Rwanda that’s saying something. Bec met him through work, and he was in town for a few days last weekend. We had dinner on Saturday.
Anyway, Victor lived in Europe for several years, speaks Spanish, German and English. No French. No Kinyarwanda. He says he speaks to his kids in the universal language of love (his words). He’s right. A good hug can go a long way.
Victor is an agronomist, and one of the projects he’s working on is creating a plantation on his orphanage’s sprawling property where he will grow papayas, mangoes, pineapples and other fruits to dry, get certified organic and send up to Europe. He also wants to start an eco-tourism business, and we may be spending New Year’s at the orphanage hiking and canoeing on Lake Kivu.
Because of his training, Victor knows a lot about farming. And he knows a lot about tropical fruit from growing up in Guatemala, which he says has a remarkably similar climate to Rwanda. He’s bringing in new species of mango and papaya to grow here. Right now only pineapples grow on his orphanage’s grounds.
He noticed that people were picking them while they were green. Victor said people told him green pineapples were the sweetest, and the best time to eat them. He knew this was nonsense, so he pressed on.
The people then told him they took green pineapples because they were sure the neighbors were going to pick them early, and they wanted to make sure they at least got a bad one. See, it’s that lack of trust I’ve written about before that keeps coming back.
Victor’s initial reaction to that and mine start out in the same place: it’s tremendously sad that Rwandans can’t trust each other.
But then they diverge drastically. Victor hired a guard for his plants and hopes that people will see that yellow pineapple is better, and that maybe they’ll start to trust each other. Mine is to just say, you know what, have fun with that. It’s not worth the frustration.
I hope that I lose this feeling. But every time I start to feel differently, I have an experience that just knocks most of my positive feelings out.
Yesterday, I was buying bread at the local store. This guy Jean-Baptiste, a Rwandan who lives near us and speaks English, was there. We have a little game. Every time I see him, he asks me for a job, gardening, doing laundry. Usually, I politely say we’ve got a guy.
He was sitting and drinking a beer in the store. When he saw me, he said, “How about that job?”
“Sorry, I don’t have one.”
“But I need a job.”
“You can keep asking me, but I still won’t have one.”
He persisted. “But I have a wife and kids. How am I supposed to feed them?”
“Why are you sitting here drinking beer?”
“But it’s Christmas, how am I supposed to buy presents.”
“I’m not Christian, and I still have no job to offer you.” (The first part was clearly not the right thing to say, but I had had about enough.)
He cursed at me in Kinyarwanda and I walked off. On the way down, the guards at the apartment building next to our house and one of its residents – you have to have money to live there – started in on “Donnez-moi du pain!” (Give me bread.)
I asked if they had self-respect, in English because that’s kind of where my French gives out, and kept walking.
To fight back, I’ve taken to walking around with headphones on. So when the Congolese moneychangers start in with their calls of “My friend, change?” they sound like Bruce Springsteen. As they get up in my face and continue, despite me saying no, they start to sound like Bono.
Now, to balance out my annoying Jean-Baptiste story, I met a new friend right before I left for New York. His name is Thaddee, and he just graduated with a degree in environmental sciences from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. He’s helping me with my environment story. And despite not having one, he has not asked me for a job.
We met up early yesterday, and he told me that he’s looking for work anywhere, and is learning Dutch because he just likes languages. He also started a small brick-making business. The government recently banned the use of wood in industrial ovens, like those for making bricks. Deforestation is a huge problem here. So Thaddee started using the shells and stalks from picked coffee beans. Unfortunately, that has gotten far more expensive than he can afford, so he’s looking for another way.
But that’s the key. He’s looking for another way. And it’s people like Thaddee that keep me from telling Rebecca that we’re getting the hell out of here and going home. I just wish folks like Thaddee stuck in my mind more than people like Jean-Baptiste.
posted by Evan Weinberger at 11:51 PM
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