17 May 2006

We got into a car accident on Friday night. It wasn’t serious. No one was hurt, and the car Rebecca was driving (a massive Toyota 4x4) was in relatively good shape afterwards. The front left bumper was out of place and the axle on the front left wheel was bent so the truck was hard to drive. There wasn’t much damage other than that.

The only reason I mention this relatively minor incident is as we prepare to leave Rwanda – originally we were scheduled to fly out on May 20, but that has been pushed back to May 25 – the accident was an illustration of everything good and bad about the country. Unfortunately for my perceptions of the country, it was more of the latter.

We had just finished off a very pleasant dinner with my friend Andreas and his girlfriend Evin. She’s Kurdish, and the name causes no end of difficulties. When I was talking to Andreas or floating in and out of paying attention, all of a sudden I’d hear, “So Evin, say something in Kurdish.” I’d run through the memory banks for a few seconds until I remembered that I didn’t speak Kurdish. Fortunately, Evin is smarter than me and answered quickly. I simply sat there with my usual look of utter bewilderment.

Now, back to the story at hand. We were driving Evin and Andreas home because they don’t have a car. Bec followed all of the traffic rules as we pulled up to their compound. She slowed down. She signaled that we were turning left. She looked behind her.

And then out of nowhere, a car tried to pass us on the left and wham! right into the wheel-well on the front driver’s side. The Rwandan driver left his car in the middle of the street where the accident happened. His little sports car – an approximately 10-year-old black Toyota Celica – sustained far more damage, but everyone in it was in fine form.

Bec pulled over to the side of the road to get out of the way. The other driver jumped out and started yelling that we were leaving the scene of the crash and that we had done something wrong. He was doing all this in French, and let me tell you, French is not an intimidating language.

“Why did you hit us? What were you doing? Didn’t you see me coming around your left?” he shouted.

“You hit us. I was making a left. I didn’t see you because you were going way too fast,” Rebecca responded calmly.

“Are you saying that I’m crazy? Are you saying that I can’t drive?”

We didn’t respond. He kept yelling.

It went on like this for about 20 minutes, with the Rwandan guy’s friend piping up in English on occasion with all kinds of nonsense. He said that our blinker wasn’t on. It was. He said they weren’t going to fast. They were. “You shouldn’t drink and drive,” he said to Rebecca, despite reeking of alcohol. “That’s right, you shouldn’t,” she responded.

Finally, they threatened to call the police, which we wanted them to do. But before the police came, they called some guy, apparently a friend. He kept saying that they wanted to come to an “amicable solution” which involved us paying for the damage on the idiot driver’s car. No deal.

All the while, I was keeping calm and watching Rebecca’s back. If you think I’m making this up, you can ask her. I was totally calm. Andreas and Evin did the same thing. Occasionally I’d tell the crazy screaming guy to calm down, told the English-speaking passenger to keep quiet because he was stupid (not in those words) and asked the weird guy who just showed up who he was. “You don’t need to know who I am,” he said. “Yes I do. Who are you?” And then he left.

I didn’t mention the other two passengers in the idiot mobile. Two young women piled out of the back seat. They were dressed for a club and appeared to be woozy. They kept calling their friends to say that they were in an accident with muzungus. They were dismissive, annoying and arrogant, much like the guys in the car.

This is where all the bad stuff about Rwanda comes in. First of all, they drive in an unbelievable position. When a person sits in the driver’s seat, the driver manages to fold himself (or herself, let’s be fair) in such a way that his head is literally up his butt. I guess that there is a periscope and they find a way to extend their feet down to the pedals. This is of course the perfect position for driving insanely fast up winding, curving, poorly lit streets.

Then there is the inability to acknowledge any personal fault. We hit them. How? I don’t know. But it was clearly Rebecca’s fault for slowing down, putting on her left-turn signal and making the left turn she had warned other drivers about.

Then there was the attitude among returnees to Rwanda that they are in charge – everyone else has to do what they say or get out of the way. The guards at Evin and Andreas’s compound – they live at the Swedish development agency compound – all told me that the Rwandan driver was at fault. He was going too fast and tried to pass us on the left. His car was in the wrong lane after the crash. But when the Rwandans saw the guards talk to me, they rushed over and started yelling in Kinyarwanda. These kids seemed like they came from a serious family, with serious fathers and serious mothers. We imagine that they were yelling at the guards something along the lines of, “Do you know who our parents are? Do you know what will happen if you say something against us.” Whatever they said, it worked. When the police came, the guards had nothing to say.

Security guards in Rwanda are usually under-educated demobilized soldiers and poor. There may be an ethnic component to all of that, but I’m not sure. There are Hutu and Tutsi security guards, even though technically there are no Hutus or Tutsis in Rwanda. Either way, the returnees run this country and in my view are turning everyone against them. They appear to know nothing about the country, and care even less that they don’t know anything.

Then there was the muzungu nonsense. As Rebecca said, “Does it matter the race of the person that they hit?”

Finally, there were the relations with the rest of the world. At one point, I turned to Andreas and Evin and said, “They’re going to blame the international community again.” At which point Rebecca made comparisons to the way they deal with the Genocide, which always involves talking about how the international community let them down, with Rwandans picking up machetes and killing each other a distant fourth in reasons for the deaths.

“At least we can leave this stupid country. These guys have to stay,” I said loud enough so everyone could hear me. Rebecca seconded that, much to my surprise.

Finally, the police showed up. This is where the good parts about Rwanda, the parts where we both think this country might go somewhere other than back to darkness, come in. The police officer that took the statements was professional, like the rest of the Rwandan police. Andreas pointed out that the Swedish police trained Rwanda’s. Who knew there was crime in Sweden?

Anyway, he simply took the statements from Rebecca and the driver. The driver tried to do his statement in Kinyarwanda. Rebecca asked him to do it in French so she could understand. “Yes, do it in French or English so everyone can understand,” the policeman said.

There was never a question of a bribe, as is the case with police in most African countries. There was no favoritism towards the Rwandan driver. The policeman moved the process along as fast as possible, doing all the necessary forensic checks with a tape measure and writing everything into his notebook.

If all of Rwanda functioned like its traffic police, then I’d be more comfortable about where this country is headed. But more of the country is like the two drivers. Shyaka Kanuma, the now executive editor/managing editor/advertising director/marketing director/lead reporter of Focus is actually far more representative of the country, and much like the kids with whom we had the run-in.

It’s kind of funny that one of the last entries I will write from Rwanda – I am so out of here mentally – is about driving, just where I began. It’s amazing how a country’s behavior on the roads can be emblematic of its behavior in everything else.

The most important thing is that we’re okay.