15 February 2006

Yesterday was one of those days where all you can say is, “Well, at least Dick Cheney didn’t shoot me in the face.”

Shyaka and I kept calling each other, playing a game of “top this” with our bad news. Shyaka started. We have to move. The VOA heard from Washington that they have some sort of training coming up at the end of this month, and they need the office we squat in. So he spent all day trying to figure that out. Since next week is also deadline week, and I won’t be here, this was unbelievably bad.

So then I topped him. We’ve been working hard at getting stuff done early so that Shyaka and Vincent and I don’t have to stay here until 2:30 in the morning when we’re finishing off the paper. So Vincent had finished seven pages out of the 40 we’re putting out. We were cooking along.

And then yesterday, Vincent said that five of the pages were gone. The virus had killed them. As you may have noticed, the Fonze was not mentioned in the above paragraph. The Fonze has jumped the shark, you see. Among the many things he did wrong – even worse than not showing up for work when he said he would, not showing up with the business cards we asked for – he infected us with a computer virus he knew he had. Worse than that, the Fonze gave us copies of the layout and photo programs we needed that were infected with a virus. That’s considered homicide in some states.

So that’s what happened to Vincent. The virus ate the files he did since the end of last week. So that’s when I topped Shyaka and told him. “Ohhh man,” was all he could say.

I then called the Fonze. I explained to him, as calmly as you would have imagined, that he gave us a virus and he needed to come to fix it. He said he was sick. I said I didn’t care. I then explained what the virus did. “My virus doesn’t do that,” he said.

And then I grew even calmer, as you would have expected. I explained to him, calmly, that he had to get down here, that he was responsible for the paper being up against it and that he was a terrible person. All of this, I assure you, calmly. So he hung up on me.

Well, I had to tell everyone that all he said was, “My virus doesn’t do that.” And it got a laugh. The staff all said he was drowning in a bottle of Primus, one of the local beers. The IT guy from the Internet café downstairs redid our systems. Of course, my computer may have the virus, too. Ah, the sacrifices for journalism.

I spent all day yesterday trying to hold the place together. We had a good laugh that no one on the staff could spell Big Paul’s wife’s name. J-E-A-N-N-E-T-T-E. And then I crashed when I went home.

So of course we thought things couldn’t get worse. And then there were rumors that Alex, our society columnist, got beat up last night while taking pictures with my camera. His mobile phone wasn’t working all morning, so I had visions of getting a camera case with smashed-up pieces of glass and plastic back. That’s when I thought about leaping from the balcony.

But he was not beaten up, and the camera came back okay. I was a little concerned that I was more worried about my camera. Shyaka found us a new office and we’ve got pirated versions of the software we need on the way. The Fonze is officially no longer a member of the Focus team. Ah, life is better.

Anyway, I’m off to Uganda tomorrow morning and will be back a week from Friday. So if I don’t post, Jordan, don’t worry about me. I’ll be reporting during the day and night, and editing even later at night.

Remember when I said I was considering breaking the law when I went? I’m not doing that. I will register with the government. It’ll just cost an arm and a leg.

Happy early birthday, Moms.

9 February 2006

So, I bet you all were expecting a posting tomorrow. Ha! Fooled you.

The Focus media empire is starting to grow. I think we’ve hired two more experienced reporters and one more cub. I say we think we hired the two experienced reporters because Shyaka and I both made it clear we wanted them to start up with us today, but they didn’t show up. I’m wondering if they misunderstood when I asked for copies of their work. I just want to know with whom I’m working.

Our cub is a person who has never done journalism before. Hell, I don’t know if Leilah has even written anything before in English. She’s just out of high school, waiting to start up university. All we wanted from her is to know she’s aggressive enough to ask questions. I can turn her into a writer and journalist. I wanted two cubs originally, but I figured out that was going to be too much work.

We’ve also hired a society/gossip columnist. We had to take photos of him to put on top of his column. I actually got to start shouting things like, “Work it! Work with me! Come on, give me something!” and mean it. I felt like Austin Powers. Or Mo. Shagadelic.

We’ve got a circulation/advertising manager and an office manager. I think we’re hiring a second designer named Khaddafi (no, I’m not making that up. Next up I want a copy editor called Kim Jong Il). Once we have it in our budget, I think we’re stealing Rwanda’s one and only news photographer from the New Times. His name is George, he’s got the best camera in Rwanda and the best part is he actually bears a striking resemblance to George Jefferson.

So, now that we’ve got our mighty reporting staff of potentially six, plus Shyaka and me, we’re ready to take on the world. We just need to figure out whether the people we hired yesterday are actually working with us.

Our interview process is not as rigorous as one might want. Essentially, it’s three questions:

1) Do you have a pulse?

2) Do you really speak English?

3) When can you start?

Of course, if an applicant does the Rwandan Grand Entrance, where someone walks in the door, stands there and waits for someone to talk to them, they’re automatically out. We want aggressive reporters.

The Rwandan Grand Entrance is one of the most annoying things I’ve found in this country. That’s saying a lot. A person will just stand there for a good 30 seconds before saying anything. Usually they don’t. And people move so quietly that sometimes they’ll come up behind me and scare the hell out of me.

Sometimes the person will build up the courage to actually speak, but by that point I’ve already started. So they stop. And then I stop and ask what they said. But they won’t say it because I’ve already started. It’s like walking down the street and bumping into somebody. And then the person steps to one side at the same time you step to the same side, and you go into the who-goes-where dance. That’s the Rwandan Grand Entrance. Why can’t people just come in, introduce themselves and say what they want? How is this so hard? Even the Kenyans think it’s insane.

Now, we just need an office and more computers. We’ve got three-and-a-half; two bought by Focus, my laptop that I hope makes it through the experience and one of VOA’s computers that we have to get off of when VOA needs it. We’ve now got sign-up sheets for the computers so people don’t kill each other.

Shyaka said the VOA is starting to get tired of us being here. I hope we don’t have to move the whole operation to my house.
So, as I said earlier, we’re making it. How do I know we’re making it? We’re the subjects of vicious gossip around the small but petty Kigali journalism world. The other papers are saying that it’s written by white people, that the copy-editing is so good that the RPF must have paid for it (although I’m not sure those guys actually read what we wrote if they think that the governing party is paying for this paper). As Shyaka said, “That means we’re doing something right. When they see the second issue, they’ll think the World Bank is funding us.”

Focus is following my motto, although it wasn’t adopted. Our enemies are being crushed. We are driving them before us. We hear the lamentations of their women.

5/6 February 2006

I saw a Rwandan wearing a Vassar T-shirt on Friday evening while I was walking to a movie at the American Club. I ran up to him, screamed “Go Brewers!” (Vassar’s mascot) and walked off calmly. It scared the bejesus out of the poor guy.

That was apropos of nothing; there’s no story that pops out of that. Just thought I’d share with my loyal readers my chance to say something random and annoying to a stranger on the street. It was cathartic, like I was exorcising all of those stupid “muzungus” I hear. It felt good to have the shoe on the other hand there for a second.

And now for something completely different. The first edition of Focus is out on the street, although the streets are shut down because today is Election Day for local officials. There are literally no people out on the streets, and the Internet café we borrow access from is shut down, so we can’t get on. Anybody know who won the Super Bowl?

But we return now to the business of newspapers. There were some problems with the printing, so it’s not as colorful or well designed as when it left our office. But people who read the paper seem to like what they see. I’ve heard reports that the directors of the New Times are saying that they’ve got a real fight on their hands. That makes me feel good. Imagine what we can do when we are fully staffed.

The reporters were excited about the paper. One of them, Teta, who had never seen her name in a newspaper before, called all her friends and family. And then she said she needed to scream. So she did, and jumped up and down waving her hands.

That was Thursday. On Friday we were back out on stories again. The news watch never stops, as they say. I had to go take photos at a meeting of the Batwa council. For a little background, the Batwa are Rwanda’s third ethnic group and are better known in the West as Pygmies. Although the Tutsi ethnic group lost the largest number of people during the Genocide, the Twa lost the largest percentage of their population. It’s sort of the silent Genocide. Historically, the Twa have been the most discriminated-against of Rwanda’s ethnic groups, hunted almost for sport in this country and the surrounding countries that also have Twa populations (Congo, Burundi and Uganda).

In the regional languages of Central Africa, Ba signifies a group of people. So an individual is a Tutsi or a Hutu or a Twa, but the ethnic group is the Batutsi, Bahutu and the Batwa. Only in Rwanda, however, are the two letters Ba a security concern. The Rwandan government, on their anti-ethnicity campaign (no Hutu, no Tutsi, just Rwandans) is now threatening to cut off all the aid, from governments and NGOs, to this population of around 33,000 people unless they change their name. The government wants the Ba taken away from the Twa. So this group, perpetually put-upon, is trying to figure out what to do. Bahumbug.

The money goes to pay for school fees and other essentials, because the Twa are barely educated and essentially have no income. Most of them live in the forest, hunting and gathering. Fortunately, since this is Rwanda, the Ministry of Local Government (no, that is not a typo. In Rwanda, even local government has a central ministry in Kigali) does not know that the Ministry of Justice is forcing the name change. So Local Government recently sent a letter asking how much money the Batwa need for school fees. That letter came soon after the Justice letter saying that all funding would be cut off unless the Ba was cut off. So the Batwa representatives are all understandably confused.

This is where our story comes in. Helen has been reporting on the funding threats. We were joking around in the newsroom about how our Twa story was really standing up for the little people. I’m sure when I said that the Batwa were better known as Pygmies, a certain picture came to mind.

When I went to take pictures with Helen, I was expecting to see Willy Wonka’s Oompa-Loompas, or at least no one over four- or five-feet-tall. Boy, was I wrong. They were pretty much all taller than me. It must be understood that one of my favorite parts about working in Cambodia was that I was a giant among men. Literally. My stature had nothing to do with my job as a reporter or role as a white person in Cambodia (most of the Khmer could care less what color I was). My stature had everything to do with being taller than almost all the natives. So having the “little people” of Rwanda looking down on me was deflating.

Anyway, I’ll get over this. I think. Or I’ll just ask Rebecca to get a job in Cambodia. It’s good to be tall.

The streets of central Kigali, where the businesses are, are absolutely dead. When the government decides to shut down the country, the country is shut down. What a stupid thing. They want to turn Rwanda into a customer-service call center. Do they think they’ll be able to just shut down the country whenever they want and still be able to do this? Do they really think that someone trying to get their credit card fraud taken care of in the U.S., Europe or South Africa will sit back and say, “Oh, I guess that thug will have an extra couple of days to play with my card because the call center staff has to do umuganda”? Or they have to vote? Or they have to plant trees?

Of course, shutting the country down for Election Day is not all that weird. It might even increase voter numbers in the U.S. if elections were held on Saturdays or Sundays. We might even get a leader that more than half the country wants to elect.

There are two disturbing factors to local elections in Rwanda. The first is that there was no campaigning. Sure, this is pretty much a one-party state, or, as Shyaka wrote in the first edition of Focus, a progressive dictatorship like Singapore. But there were no campaign posters, no rallies, nothing. Everyone just knows who to vote for.

The second disturbing part is that only certain people know where to vote, or who to vote for. Apparently, although there is universal suffrage at age 18 in Rwanda, unless one goes to umuganda or Gacaca (the traditional courts that hear Genocide cases), one does not know where the polling station is or who is running for office. So there are essentially two categories of Rwandans: full citizens who do everything the government tells them, and everyone else. Considering that an estimated 80 percent of people don’t do umuganda or Gacaca, only 20 percent of Rwandans are full citizens.

What an odd little country.

2 February 2006

Yesterday was Heroes’ Day here. It’s a holiday to commemorate the Rwandan Patriotic Army, Paul Kagame’s boys and girls who started their war in 1990, stopped the Genocide in 1994 and have ruled a progressive yet single-party state since then.

Despite what you may have heard, Rwanda, my friends, is not a representative democracy. For example, the RPA, whose political arm was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which is now the governing party here, won the war in July when they stopped the Genocide. Yet Heroes’ Day is celebrated on Feb. 1. No one knows why. One theory in the newsroom is that Feb. 1 is Kagame’s birthday, but I have no evidence for that. It could be that the war started on Feb. 1 in 1990. The point is nobody knows. Big Paul (from now on my informal name for the president) decided Feb. 1, and that was it.

Big Paul’s office invited me to the festivities yesterday. It was at 8 a.m., and the president’s media guy said it would be short, only two-and-a-half hours. At least they were honest this time. I was only going to take pictures, because no one outside of Rwanda cares and the paper I’m helping to run in Rwanda is a monthly. We don’t come out until March, so we just needed a picture with a caption and that’s it.

Well, getting the photo would be harder than I thought. I showed up a few minutes early because this is Rwanda and I know to expect all sorts of problems even when I’m on the list. So I started talking to the protocol officer, who had no idea what I was talking about. He then called his boss, the man in charge of the media, who had no idea what I was talking about. The first protocol guy then took me up to the metal detectors to let me in. I wasn’t on that list and no one knew what I was talking about. We then got the president’s chief of protocol involved. She had no idea what I was talking about either.

Then I noticed Rwanda’s one newspaper photographer (I wish I was making that up) at a separate entrance. “Is there a second list?” I asked and walked to where Photographer George was. Sure enough, I was on that list. Rather than just let us in we had to go back to the metal detectors where we started. Doesn’t anyone here talk to anyone else? Ever? No. What’s wrong with you, white boy?

Then I found out that mobile phones were not allowed for people near Big Paul (there’s this paranoia that someone is going to pack their phone with C4 explosives, receive a call and blow everyone up. No one who wants to get at Big Paul is that smart), and since I had no place to put the phone, I went home. The soldiers of course didn’t have a basket to hold people’s phones in, and of course there was no announcement beforehand. I should’ve just stayed in bed like I wanted to.

And then I started to realized what makes me crazy here in Kigali. I never thought I’d say this, but I need a little bit of order around me to function. Newsrooms are inherently chaotic, people coming in and out, making a lot of noise, cursing like sailors. But there’s an order to it, some procedures.

What makes me crazy is trying to impose order on the insanity around me. The reason the newsroom at Focus makes me happy is that, aside from doing good work and creating something new, I make the rules for the reporters. I’m imposing order on the chaos. There are procedures. They’re democratic and I’m not dictatorial. But deadlines are respected. Reporters are learning how to copy edit, things like that. It’s my island of sanity.

You might want to sit down before reading this, but I’m the detail man here. I even spent the morning showing Vincent the designer how to organize his files. We’re in worse shape than any of you thought.

Speaking of that, we’re still waiting for the first edition to arrive from Kampala. Apparently there were some problems with the printer. Ugh. Some of you have requested that I send copies. Hopefully there won’t be enough to send to you; they’ll all be sold. But I’ll have some for myself to show off next time I’m home.