The clock is ticking. I have three weeks left in this country that has become my home for the past five and a half months. Apart from the denial and severely mixed feelings this induces, I’ve also entered that inevitable place where I suffer from thoughts of not having done enough. Much of this I think stems from, you guessed it, impermanence…and the fact that I was initially only supposed to be here for three months. I hesitated to get involved in things I now wish I had—volunteering, visiting rural communities, networking with NGOs to see what type of work they are doing. For many who have done development work or lived overseas, three months is quite literally a blink of an eye. You wake up one morning and realize it’s time to go, and how little you have truly accomplished. And of course, like anywhere and anything, as foreign as a place may appear at first, we naturally find our niche and our groove and things become routine. Work consumes you. Friends stand in for family. And the weeks pass into months and you realize you have spent half a year in a country that has slowly crept into that space in your heart that you call home. It feels kind of like a premature break up. We just need more time to get to know one another! It’s hard not to let my mind go to that place (you know, the completely unproductive, unhealthy, regretful place?) I haven’t seen enough of the country. I should have volunteered. I should have sucked it up and paid the $600 to see the mountain gorillas. I should have asked my Country Director for more work. I should have networked. I should have made a concerted effort to visit more organizations and see what work they do in this complex and beautiful country. I should have read more history and educated myself more.
So, this is roughly where my head is at the current moment. Not entirely awesome but not so bad either. It’s all part of the continuous process that reminds us how human we are. This weekend, I was feeling a bit left in the lurch. My sidekick Karen was out of the country; Luke and his fiancée Sarah had a romantic getaway at the lake; my ever-complicated, part-time squeeze was in Kenya for the week. Ho hum. What to do? My natural tendency was to sleep, which I did for fourteen delicious hours on Friday night. Saturday, I woke up and decided to go to Musanze, the small town two hours north that sits at the foothills of Volcanoes National Park, the home of the infamous mountain gorillas. The bus ride up was spectacular, yet also a harsh reminder of the reality of Rwanda’s food insecurity and population crisis. Rwanda is roughly the size of Maryland, has over 10 million, with a fertility rate of over 6 children per woman. This may not sound like much when thinking about the population of most American cities, but picture the island of Manhattan with everyone living on it requiring land not only to feed their families, but to make some sort of income. The land issues in Rwanda are multi-faceted and incredibly complex, a development issue I will choose not to elaborate on in this entry. But nonetheless, the drive up was filled with terraced mountains, patches of crops, grazing goats, and women, men and children tilling the soil. It’s green as far as the eye can see.
I arrived in Musanze around 11, took a quick moto ride to the next village over, Kinigi, which rests at the entrance of the park. I had no idea what I was actually planning to do up there, I just wanted to see the volcanoes, hike around a bit, and create some mental space in which to reflect over my final weeks in Kigali. Within moments, the sky opened up in a bucketing downpour. Well, I guess I’ll eat lunch. I sat, reading my book, watching CNN, in a lovely little guesthouse and ate quite possibly the most delicious fish brochettes I’ve had since I arrived in East Africa. Yum. So, I start to wander. I have no idea where the park entrance is, whether I will need to pay an entrance fee, how long the hikes are, and if I’ll be able to make it back in time for my 4:30 bus. After approximately three minutes, a very chatty and inquisitive teen named Chris approaches me. He speaks exceptional English. His friends Elize and Jack arrive. We start cruising around, wandering through farms and talking about soccer, snapping pix here and there with the volcanoes in the backdrop. It is a cool, beautiful day. Other friends surface. The soccer championships are coming up. It’s a huge deal. They are pumped. They will call me on Tuesday to give me the results of their match. I spend two hours with this motley crew of Rwandan teens. We talk chemistry, geography, reggae, soccer. I am quizzed on high school course-related facts (Do you know anything about the periodic table of elements…or Mt. Everest?) I answer compulsory questions about myself and America. (Do you have goats in your town? Are you married? Do Americans grow corn?) They are a blast. As we near another small village, the sky reopens and we run to the market, where they shuttle me onto a bus to take me back to Musanze and finally, Kigali. I am a bit saddened that my day is cut short due to the weather, but I’m really happy I came. It’s nice to be reminded how breathtaking Rwanda is, as the months here can slowly head one down a “taking-this-beauty-for-granted” type path.
I get on an earlier bus, and saddle up between two Rwandan women. The ride is winding…and the woman next to me is in the unfortunate, aisle flip up, small enough for an 8 year old child seat and is holding her head in her hands. Hmm. Ending the day with a woman vomiting on the bus in the rain doesn’t particularly suit me. I quickly offer to change seats with her. It’s at this time that I befriend an 80 year old man named Andre who is sitting behind me. It wasn’t until we started talking that I realized how few elderly people I have come across in Rwanda. He shares with me that he had 11 children, 7 of whom were killed in the genocide, along with his first wife. He has outlived the majority of his family. Despite this, he was a sassy, inquisitive, adorable personality who was basically obsessed with me within five minutes. He posed for pictures with his pipe and his sailor hat. He repeatedly informed me how beautiful I was. He had half the bus engaged in our conversation. He giggled uncontrollably at his posed photos. It was the perfect ending to the day. It’s these random encounters that remind me how lucky I am to be where I am, how engaging people can be, how such small events can teach us so much and connect us as humans. It was lovely, truly. So, I’m back in Kigali, gearing up for a crazy week at work, applying for jobs, drinking locally grown coffee, and trying to appreciate what remains for me in these remaining three weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment