Tanzanian Vacation

Zanzibar, Tanzania. It's the closest beach vacation a Rwandan PCV can get, made infinitely better by the fact that they're a PCV. This is where a few friends and I chose to spend our first leave days since we arrived in Rwanda 10 months ago and I had to say, transportation complications completely aside, it was perhaps my most appreciated vacation yet.

Tanzania and Rwanda share a border, as well as a membership in the East African Union, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Just across Rusomo Falls, the landscape transforms from lush, green Rwanda hills to Tanzanian savannah. The excess of houses and children that makes Rwanda Africa's most densely populated country fades away and you can look out the bus window without seeing a single sign up human life. That is, until you hit a bus stop where Arabs, Indians, Rastafarians, and Masai warriors mingle freely without a second glance towards the abazungu because, frankly, difference isn't nearly so uncommon here as it is in Rwanda.Street food, illegal in Rwanda, is everywhere. You can even buy a potato omelet and have it bagged with a toothpick to eat it on the road.  And you might as well get a couple because it's going to be a long ride.

The bus ride from Kigali to Dar es Salaam is 36 hours. 36 hours of watching your feet, but mostly your stomach, swell to twice the usual size while you do nothing but sit and eat as you cross an entire country.  By the time we reached the ferry office to cross over to Zanzibar, we were sick of traveling and more than willing to pay the ridiculous $170 round trip fee to just get to the hotel waiting for us on the other side. It's a good thing we did too. Just behind us was a ferry full of people who couldn't afford the $170 on a ship unauthorized to go as far as Zanzibar and well over capacity. Somewhere halfway across the Zanzibar Channel, the people on our ferry started panicking. At first, I thought someone had fallen overboard. I turned to see a tiny, white speck in the distance and the man standing next to me mimed something breaking in two. We would soon find out that that speck was a capsized ferry and that our boat would go to rescue them only after they had taken us safely ashore. By the time all of the passengers had been rushed off the boat, military personnel had been able to board, and the ferry was able to fight the current that makes going back to the mainland take approximately twice as long, almost 200 people had drowned, unable to make it until a rescue was attempted. The Minister of Transportation resigned a week later and most of the Tanzanians we talked to on our trip seemed to believe it had something to do with lax monitoring of the ships going out from Dar es Salaam. Either way, it didn't prevent the unnecessary deaths of those too poor to pay for a nicer ferry or to go to swim lessons like so many middle-class children in the developed world. What can you do?

We arrived at Baby Bush Lodge on Kiwengwa beach with a nasty reminder of how lucky we were to be there literally ringing in our ears as we took a phone call from the Peace Corps Country Director of Tanzania called to make sure we were all accounted for. We spent a few days on the beach, not exactly sunbathing, but just enjoying and making friends with a few locals. Just down the beach, we found Obama Bar. The owner, Peter, was a Masai who had studied tourism in Italy (which coincidentally bought up most of the beach property in Zanzibar while it was still cheap) and loved Americans. We got the local price for Happy Hour and met a crew of Masai who all of whom had learned several romantic words and sayings in Italian and how to say “I love you," "yes," and "no" in English, which had apparently been enough for them up until that point.  During the day, we met merchants who, for the most part tried to charge us infinitely too much and Dida, who invited us into her home to cook for us during Ramadan (all the restaurants not connected to a hotel were closed during the day) and introduced us to her baby girl, Leila, over delicious coconut curry.

Just south of the beach was the true highlight of the trip, the Stonetown night market. The best way too describe the happiness this experience brought me is to recall a night nine months ago when I sat under the mosquito net of my bed, lifted just a few inches off the floor of my host family's home, waiting for yet another meal of rice and beans that wouldn't be ready until 10:30 pm and decided to watch Ratatouille. Five minutes into the movie, Benny starts describing seeing flavors in color and I started to cry over food. Zanzibar was just like the movie, but with all of the food right there at my fingertips. There was cane juice, pressed in a machine and mixed with ginger and lemon. There were battered potatoes in a tomato-based soup with lemon and chilli sauce. There were delicious chapattis; there was tea full of spices; there was ice-cream and brownies and milkshakes! There was the Zanzibar Pizza. The Zanzibar Pizza, by the way, is God's gift to Rwandan PCVs who make the 36 hour journey to Zanzibar. Wonton dough filled with all of the delicious savory toppings of a regular pizza and then fried to perfection, you would think that the Zanzibar Pizza could not possibly be any more amazing....until they make it with nutella.

Fully satisfied with our trip, it was time to make our way home. We spent the night in Dar es Salaam, which we discovered had a Subway in a strip mall. Foot long sandwich and milkshake successfully polished off, I headed to the grocery store and stocked up on snacks. On the island, eating in public is forbidden during Ramadan just the same as it is year round in Rwanda. However, in the rest of Tanzania, it was still perfectly acceptable and I was not going to lose any precious munching time. In fact, I polished off half of my snacks before we even boarded the bus the following morning and proceeded to buy more as soon as possible. Destination: Moshi, the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

In Moshi, we stayed at Twiga Home, a sweet little hotel just outside of town with a free shuttle service and honestly the best customer service out of anywhere I have been since I left America. They helped to arrange a tour of some nearby rice fields, which just might have been one of the most beautiful places on Earth and a little venture to some waterfalls at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. But I'm not going to lie to you, the highlight was still the food. Twiga Home made delicious grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches that we well stocked up on, but they also introduced us to a coffee shop in town full of American food we don't get to have too often and, you guessed it, really good coffee.

As our glorious days of eating came to a close, we realized one, rather unfortunate, thing. Moshi had no bus to Rwanda. We had to go to Arusha to catch a bus, where we spent the night in the Seven Eleven Hotel literally right in front of the bus park. From here, we spent half a day traveling on bumpy roads and at high speeds to Kahama, about four hours from the Rwandan border. Our bus tickets said we were going straight to Kigali so we assumed that we would make some kind of connection here. We had not assumed that we would be making it the next day because buses refused to risk heading towards the border as evening was approaching. It was three in the afternoon when we found this out. One more night in Tanzania spent sharing what was supposed to be a room for two people between five girls at a cheap truckers' hotel later, we were on our way home.

The delay just so happened to work in my favor! I was able to spend the weekend in Kigali to take care of some last minute errands and to go to Guma Guma Superstar, a huge concert featuring Jason Derulo, who I saw play live for 5,000 Rwandan franks or $8. It's good to be back!

The Right to Vote

Independence Day. On this day in America, we reflect on our history, pride ourselves on our democracy, have a barbeque, drink cheap American beer, and set off some explosions in the sky. Rwanda also celebrates on this day, just without the fireworks. However, in the same way we celebrate our liberation from England, Rwanda also celebrates its liberation from colonial rule (50 years on July 1^st), followed by Liberation Day, the end of the Rwandan genocide, which marked its 18^th year, today on the 4^th as America celebrated its own 236^th year of freedom.

In 50 years of freedom, Rwanda has taken great strides. It has created its own democracy, created national parks, put itself on the map for eco-tourism, joined the East African Union, transitioned from a Francophone to an Anglophone educational system, and dramatically increased the number of students enrolled in primary schools across the country. But 50 years is still just a short time in the life of a country. The class-system first introduced by colonial rule has yet to dissipate entirely and has the habit of making small appearances at the least expected of moments. For a class assignment on traditional storytelling, one of my students chose to write the story of the genocide of 1994. He made no effort to soften his words, writing:

Long time ago, Rwanda was a good country, but when the white people came in Rwanda they begun to destroy the Rwandan culture. Before white men, Rwandan had the culture of granting cows, eating together, visiting... All these culture were ruined by the white men.

At a recent Kwita Izina, a naming ceremony for all of the baby gorillas born in Volcanoes National Park in the past year, foreign dignitaries were invited to join in the celebration. They were given special invitations and sat in a separate, shaded area of the field with seating, a view of the stage, and free refreshments. They were allowed access to separate, better maintained latrines, a fact we discovered when an African American volunteer tried to go to the bathroom. Part of the price of catering to tourists is not being able to cater to your own citizens. I wonder how my student would have felt standing, packed side-by-side with other Rwandans in the sun behind the barrier to the visitors' section at the Kwita Izina watching white foreigners sit eating chocolate-covered pastries and sip coffee while snapping picture after picture on their high-end digital cameras and occasionally relieving themselves in latrines painted in the colors of the Rwandan flag, their right to do so hardly coming in to question as status here can be assigned with more ease than it can be earned.

Things are changing with the next generation and there is nowhere that change is more obvious than among my students. Before we were even able to start printing, my Media Club had managed to stir up quite a bit of trouble. Unbeknownst to me, my newsies started drafting articles and reading them out loud in front of the morning general assembly. One of my students did a bit of investigative reporting and shared a story on the unwashed potatoes in the school refectory. When he was confronted by the school's cooking staff, he didn't ask for help, but stood up for himself by walking into the kitchen and informing the staff of the role and importance of journalism:

If you think you can do a bad thing, like give us those potatoes that are not washed and we will keep quiet, you are wrong. If something is bad, the media is going to say something about that.

Later, the same student ran into more serious trouble. He was called before his class by his mathematics teacher who proceeded to call him a dog (the deepest of insults in Rwandan culture) and tell him to stop writing because he was only doing it to try to make himself look smart. When he asked the teacher to take back his insults, he was suspended for three days for talking back. Both my Headmaster and Prefecture seemed fully aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, but the fact of the matter is that a teacher is an authority not be crossed by a student here, no matter what the circumstance. My student was forced to go and beg for imbabazi (forgiveness) before he would be allowed to write again. He had to accept the authority of his teacher even when he knew it was wrong.

The term for this is ndiyobwana. It means, I accept, Mr. My teacher tell me this word is Swahili, but it applies just about everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa so just about every language in Sub-Saharan Africa uses it. It means that you accept someone because you have no choice, that it doesn't matter if they are wrong or right, but only that they are above you. I am told that, even now, authority plays a large part in local politics. It is unheard of to state your opinion because it is something people still fear they can be beaten for. When I casually mentioned that I would vote, again, for Barack Obama in the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election while chatting with my students at a football match, they all gasped, looked over their shoulders, and shushed me. The fact that the crowd of Kinyarwanda speakers around us were hardly likely to have understood what I said, let alone cared, did little to comfort them. I had to explain that it is not common practice for Americans to beat each other over their choice of candidate.

Student candidates gave speeches in front of the general assembly and each student was able to cast their vote in the refectory afterwords. Students and teachers worked together to tally the votes, making it clear that there was no corruption taking place. Since students in S6 were not allowed to run for office this election, I set my S6 journalists into motion documenting the event. They used my camera to take pictures, sat in on the count, recorded candidate speeches, and even conducted interviews.

This is a new concept here, students and teachers working together. My students informed me that last year's election took place behind the closed door to the teacher's lounge and that the students that were selected hadn't even wanted to run in the first place. This is something I've determined to change, starting with the newspaper. I insisted on having my students prepare a meeting with the Headmaster to propose their ideas instead of bringing them to him myself. I think they were somewhat blown out of the water when he agreed to fund everything we asked for, including a digital camera without even batting an eyelash. They had never had the chance to ask for what they wanted so directly before. With this and many other changes on the horizon, this year I am proud not only to be an American, but also to be (however honorarily) a Rwandan.

Mind over Matter

My students and I are discussing ideas for short stories. Considering the fact that the majority of them are in their late teens, love is first on the list. I write “Romance” on the board, draw a heart next to it, and am instantly bombarded with questions.

Teacher, what is the meaning of that symbol?

It is a heart. You don't draw hearts like this in Rwanda?

Not. A heart is for pumping blood. That is what we study in biology.

Rwandans believe that love is in the mind, not in the heart, a point I tangentially contested for a good 10 minutes of class as I asked my students if they had ever been in love and whether or not they could feel it in their heart. Only a few of them said yes, but I feel like they might have done so to humor me. The rest were quite clear. Love is something you think about with your head, not feel with your blood-pumping organ. That is something else entirely.

This isn't the only physical or biological function that Rwandans and Americans seem to disagree about. Yawning is another. Every time I open my mouth to yawn, I am told to eat something. It doesn't matter if it is 6:00 in the morning or 10:00 at night or even if I have just eaten. If I am yawning, I am hungry. I assume that this is because food does, in fact, give you energy so it is possible that one can be tired from lack of food, but I'm constantly bemused by the fact that an involuntary bodily function can be perceived so differently in our two cultures. What is even more bizarre is that I have started to associate yawning with hunger myself, which has caused a sharp increase in the amount of snacking on amandazi (Rwandan fried bread) that occurs when I have to stay up grading papers.

Other times, my Rwandan friends are intrigued by some of the the simplest behaviors. Saying “Ow!” has no meaning, despite being my own ingrained response to pain. “Ah!” works perfectly well, but isn't something I react with naturally. I've also found that none of my cures for the hiccups work on my students, making me wonder if my students just like having the attention they get for having the hiccups or if they actually only work if you believe in them.

I gotta wonder, is culture the main determinant in how we understand the way we physically feel? If we say that love is in the mind, do we feel it in our heads instead of in our hearts? Is yawning really from hunger and Western culture has just been fooling itself all of these years? Or is it the other way around? If I grew up in a society that believed sneezing was a sign of the stomach flu, would it make me feel nauseous? At our core, we're all human and we all experience the same basic feelings, but it seems the power of the mind is strong enough to change the way we comprehend them.

Kigali International Peace Marathon

“You can become tired from walking, but not from running. When you walk, you think only about how tired you are, but when you are running, it is for pleasure so it is impossible to become tired.”

A couple of months ago, I was telling one of my friends how tired I was from running that morning when he imparted this brilliant piece of wisdom. In the past few months, I have learned the incredible truth of this statement. If you love what you are doing, you almost never become tired, whether it's running or anything else you choose to do with your life.

The Kigali International Peace Marathon was founded in 2005 to commemorate the genocide of 1994 and to draw people from around the world to Rwanda. This year, it also marked the first anniversary of the first real race I had ever run in unless you count a Free Tibet 5-K in my freshman year of college that I ended up having to walk partway because I was so out of shape.

Not having any real distance running experience, I googled a training regimen to work with. Running turned out to be a brilliant way to work my way into my community without ever really even having to carry on a conversation. People were so amused to see me huffing and puffing up a hill that they didn't care that I was rarely about to exchange more than a few short greetings and soon began to call me “the girl who likes sports,” which, if not my name, is still a step up from muzungu and they did eventually get it right. That's not to say that training was easy. Each time I pushed myself to run a little farther was a new time that I had to re-introduce myself and deal with being called muzungu all over again. It was also pretty hard to figure out how far I was actually running without an accurate map or the assistance of google (my village doesn't actually show up on google maps). I ended up asking people in my village approximately how far different landmarks were and running to them and thought I was running about 20-K every few days when one of my priests told me he thought it was more like 12-K and I ran my brains out the next day. I think in retrospect that I was probably right. I didn't always stick to my schedule, but I worked pretty hard at it, and by the night before race day, I felt fully prepared and completely entitled to a full pizza all to myself at one of Kigali's finer Italian restaurants.

The race began at 7:00 in the morning at Kigali's Amahoro Stadium and it was full of abazungu. In one morning, I saw more white people in that stadium than I think I have seen in the past eight months, all wearing under armor, running shorts, sweat bands, and iPods. Most of these people were connected to an NGO in some way or another. World Vision, an international Christian development organization was there in force, wearing bright orange team t-shirts and helping to organize the event. I was decently relieved to see that the race was also popular with local Rwandans as well as internationals. Before the race started, we spotted a group enthusiastically circled around doing a team warm up and stretch that seemed to be making use of every part of the body the facilitator could possibly think of. I'm not sure what some of their exercises were meant to accomplish, but they were having fun. Not too far from them, tiny, sinewy runners from Kenya were doing sprints.....as a warmup. The last group was comprised of kids. Some were there just to watch, but quite a few were in it to race. A few second year Peace Corps Volunteers had pulled together a grant to bring students from their school to Kigali as part of a health and nutrition project and to run the relay, in which each runner runs approximately 6 miles of the race. They wore matching t-shirts with their names creatively painted on the back and were just as happy to cheer on PCVs from the sidelines as they were to cheer for each other. Ideally, I would like to be running the full next year, but seeing those kids at race day has inspired quite a few other volunteers to get their students together to do the same thing next year.

We had been told to expect the race to start late, so when it was ready to go at 7:30, only half and hour after is was supposed to, a friend and I were scrambling to get to the starting line after searching the stadium for an unlocked bathroom with toilet paper (there were none, by the way). Once the runners took off, a good deal of the diversity separated itself out and turned into a race between Kenyans and a race between everyone else. It turns out that the sprints I thought the Kenyan team had been running prior to the race weren't sprints at all. That was the pace they intended to run the full marathon. Thankfully, the racing organization was prepared for this. They had hired motorcycles to lead the pack and honk to get other runners off of the load as they lapped them. I'm pretty certain that the first Kenyan to finish the full marathon did so a couple of minutes before I finished running the half and the second runner-up overtook me literally thirty seconds from the finish line.

My own race went well by my own standards. I finished in 2:13.04 and ran the entire way and, for my first half, that's good enough for me. The people that came to watch made the race a lot of fun. The race organizers gave out bottled water, bananas, and some pretty nasty looking sponges to cool off with at specific checkpoints and they were filled with kids there to snatch peoples' bottles when they dropped them. They got a pretty big kick out of the muzungus that could speak to them in Kinyarwanda. Besides the kids, there were a bunch of World Vision volunteers there to cheer people on, which was particularly helpful up one of the larger hills, a group of senior citizens handing out cups of water by the stadium (a good idea since a lot of the water checkpoints were running out), a dread-locked and spandex leotard wearing American there to cheer on his girlfriend, and a few early-bird PCVs who stood by the sidelines and took pictures for the runners.

After I finished my race, I hung around the stadium, waiting for friends to come in and eating the free bananas and biscuits they were giving out at the finish line on the ground. Just before the last runners came in, it started to downpour and they decided to give out the awards. They had a film crew there to project the event onto the large screen in the stadium, but they unfortunately had not placed their cameras too well so they ended up showing the backside of a woman from Sweden for well over 5 minutes as she gave her address to the crowd. So, it wasn't the best of closing ceremonies, but we still managed to have fun taking pictures on top of the podium with a bunch of kids and waiting for the stragglers that got stuck in the rain.

For the first time in Rwanda, I really felt like I deserved to treat myself so I ended the day with a buffet lunch complete with macaroni and cheese, pita chips with guacamole, a delightful fresh salad bar, french toast, bread rolls, fruit tarts, and drinks by the poolside at the Mille Collines, the ultimate in PCV and post-race bliss.

Disparity

“Abazungu (white people)! Agacupa (water bottle)! Abazungu (white people)! Agacupa (water bottle)!” were the cries that filled the air on the road leading to Bisoke, a 12,000 foot volcano in Volcano National Park. Bisoke is home to Crater Lake, a pool of water floating in the clouds, half a day's climb from where we were walking. It is also home to several gorilla groups, one of which we were fortunate enough to see despite not having paid the price for an actual gorilla trek, a far pricier experience that makes for an excellent source of revenue for the government of Rwanda. It is hard to understand that, somehow, on the road between the park's beautiful tourist lodge from which all of the guided tours are based, and the border to the actual park, there can be such abject poverty.

Of course, this is not due to a lack of effort on the behalf of the park to make conservation benefit the local community. Over complimentary coffee and tea in the morning, we were entertained by traditional dancers. Gorilla trekkers, armed with thousand dollar cameras, foot-long lenses, and tripods, snapped pictures the same way they would later capture the gorillas. Rwandans love to share their culture (not to mention, they were being paid to do so), but those snapshots will hardly begin to be able to cover it. In the weeks that they are here, dance may be the only thing those tourists really intentionally learn about Rwandan culture, but it's only a small part of the whole thing, and, after eight months here, I know that even I am just beginning to scratch the surface. I wonder if the photographers will go home with these images and think that they have somehow managed to gain an understanding of Rwanda.

However, some will get more of a taste than others. Disgruntled, the German tourist who climbed Bisoke with our group, parked his fancy rental car a few miles from the park parking lot for fear that the bumpy road would damage the suspension. He cursed at having to pay someone to watch his car so the tires wouldn't be stolen and grumbled about being ripped off and behind schedule for the rest of the day, not even attempting to keep it under his breath. He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand what it feels like to have something dangled in front of you, knowing that it is something you will never have. His car is an object of wealth that the people surrounding the park must be forced to look at every day knowing that they will never possess anything like it. I wonder if he saw it: the difference between himself, a well-groomed, well-fed tourist, in good enough health to climb a 12,000 ft volcano just for leisure, and a tiny Rwandan child, covered in dirt, pant-less, with a distended belly and fluffy, red clown hair from malnutrition. It is disparity like this that is the reason it is considered rude to eat in front of others in this country. It isn't like in the states where you can safely assume that anyone that observes you snacking at the bus stop has the opportunity to go and buy themselves something at the closest convenience store if they so choose.

Maybe we weren't eating in front of them, but we might as well have been. The children ran alongside us, asking for money and water bottles with the justifiable expectation that we should be able to give them these things. My friends and I tried to mitigate this by greeting them and explaining ourselves in Kinyarwanda, but there is only so much you can do to diminish the expectations that have been upheld for generations. In my own community, I am the sole person responsible for building or not building the expectation of free handouts. However, I find this particularly challenging on the days when missionaries visit my church only to hand out candy and biscuits before they disappear again. On these days, I find myself faced with new demands and I am forced to explain, yet again, that I am a person and not a bank and that candy is bad for your teeth anyways. These are not fun days for me.

I must constantly remind myself of the reason for days like these. Rwandans didn't wake up one day and decide to start making ridiculous monetary demands of foreigners for no reason. Those expectations were put in place long before I arrived here...and they will likely be in place for long after I leave. In some parts of the country, like in Kibuye, where I recently attended a training, tourists are so common that they are virtually ignored, making for a blissful past week. Now, back at site, I am faced, yet again, with the challenges of being the one muzungu in my community. While it is comforting to be home where everybody knows my name, the reality is that they wouldn't know my name if they didn't associate it with my status as a foreigner. There is no reason that every child in town comes running to the road screaming when I come home on a moto, no reason except for the fact that I am white. In the next couple of years, I have the opportunity to try to undo some of the stereotypes associated with my nationality. I only wish those stereotypes hadn't been so firmly put in place by so many generations before me.

The Rainy Season

The rainy season. We have so much to do in the rainy season. The kickoff to Memorial Week is our reminder: a funereal procession following a man with a distorted microphone, driven in the back of a blue pickup truck with a broken windshield, who stutters so rapidly in Kinyarwanda over the sound of a generator that I am sure that I am not the only person who cannot understand him and that, perhaps, he doesn't mind this. His speech is punctuated by statements of Never Forget, Never Forget, our reminder that, this week and this week alone, we will be given no choice.

However, the Resurrection of Christ will have to take precedence. We are in Church. We are in Church all evening until well after the rain and well past the time that most people are normally in their homes after dark. We are in Church in the morning too, being constantly reminded by our priest to liken Christ to our loved ones. To look to rebirth and renewal, rather than to the horrors of our past. This is a time of year we need the prayer and Easter is more enjoyable than Memorial anyways.

We have a whole week of state-mandated mourning to perform, most of which, thankfully, is cut short by the rain. If not, it is cut short some other way. This is no time to talk about the past. This is the time to talk about gratitude. A district official makes this clear as she stares, bewildered, at an elderly man, drunk off too much urwarwa who comes to the microphone and begins to tell us the details of his past. Not today, she says, gingerly snatching the microphone from his quivering fingers. Not this moment. This moment we will discuss why we are thankful. That will be all for now and all that we will hear for all of the days.

Each meeting is so much like the next. On one day, guest speakers touch briefly on the crimes against the bodies of women, another on the crimes against the minds of our children. Crimes of ideology are the worst kind of crimes we really care to discuss. On most days, we end early, on account of the rain. Rain that we are grateful for after long hours spent on wooden benches, trying to drown out the sound of the speakers without any success until the sound of the rain, the same rain that unfortunately failed to end the crimes against this country we are now forced to discuss in the rain every year.

18 years of discussion. 18 years of well-contained mourning, if you can call it that, meant to make sure we never forget, but also that we never have to remember. Nothing is more frightening than having to remember. For 18 years, the 3,000 bodies in the Red Zone have lain, unburied, where they died and 18 years the mourners have been there, asking for their burial. And, after 18 years, we are still forgetting them. The world is forgetting. Like it forgets and forgets and always forgets even though the word in front of forgets, we are told, was always supposed to be never.

A day after remembering, my community is resurrected from the dead. We are in Church again and it is time for Baptism. Crying babies are subjected to cold water, dripping down their faces in a rush to cleanse them of the sins of their ancestors before it is too late and beaming parents smile into camera lenses in an attempt to make this a moment never forgotten. The ceremony is tight, contained, which each ritual step memorized collectively by the whole. At the last final clanking of the bells we proclaim Dushimiye Imana (Thanks to be God) and it's raining again with nothing to do, but let loose and dance in it.

A Sliver of Rwandan Insight on Kony 2012

When I first heard about Kony 2012, it had already been viral in the states for a couple of days. I didn't get a chance to watch it until about a week after a friend posted a link to it on my wall, or until controversial screenings of it were quickly called off after a riot in Lira, Northern Uganda.

My personal opinion on the video was that it was well-intentioned, but paternalistic by focusing so much on the efforts of American do-gooders and so little on the opinions and desires of actual Ugandans. The video also dumb the issue down pretty significantly, thus failing to emphasize the fact that Joseph Kony is currently in the DRC (although, if you watch closely, he does mention it) and that ending violence in the DRC is a much more complicated and monumental task than the mere capture of one man....but that's an entirely different topic and different 100 blogs in and of itself.

However strong my own opinion on this video was (and is), I decided that a more valuable voice to add to the conversation was the voice of my students. While they are not Ugandan, my students are mostly of an age in which they have witnessed violent conflict within their own lifetimes. They also live in such close proximity to the Congo where Kony is said to be hiding that many of them are Congolese or have family that live in the Congo so I figured their opinion was more relevant than my own.

I was also happy to see that the organization I first volunteered for in Africa, The Real Uganda, had posted Ugandan reactions to the video, giving a voice to the people that the film claims to be helping. They were outraged. Following my expectations, Ugandan bloggers said that the video was lacking vital information, demeaned the power of Ugandans to act for themselves, and failed to address real Ugandan needs for post-conflict development. I expected my students to have similar views.

They did not give me the answer I anticipated. Despite the fact that I had prefaced the video by saying that it had sparked massive controversy in Uganda and that it was OK for them to criticize the film, they had a fairly positive opinion of it. They were happy to see Americans paying attention to an African issue and agreed with the sentiment that Kony should be made famous. Angie, who at first needed help with some of the facts, was of the opinion that "People are people. Where they are should not stop others from giving help to them." In what seemed to mostly be an attempt to satisfy my urge to criticize the movie, Patrick mentioned that perhaps the people in Uganda who do not like the video are politicians who don't like the fact that the movie makes them look like they are powerless to catch Kony on their own. I mentioned that the movie glossed over a lot of important details about the conflict in the DRC, but their response was that maybe now that people were paying attention to Kony, they would do their own research and come up with better solutions. I didn't have the heart to tell them how little people actually use their access to information technology.

I was initially convinced that I had failed to explain the situation of Uganda and that that was the reason my students weren't more critical of the film. However, after a little reflection, I think their response can be attributed to Rwanda's own, very different, history. In 1994, the United States did precisely the opposite of what it is doing now in Uganda. Instead of intervening in what was clearly a genocide, American policy makers refused to acknowledge the tragedy occurring in Rwanda for what it was. Now, in the aftermath, my students frequently point to the US to say that it should be doing more to intervene on crises taking place in Africa. While discussing how the lack of US aid to the Somalian famine was due to America's own weakened economy last week, Faustin said, “I think that, if I have a house with three chambers, and one of those chambers is destroyed, I might want to rebuild that third chamber. But, if you have a house and all of your chambers are destroyed, it is better that I use that money to build a chamber for you because you have nothing and I still have a house." Politics aside, he said, it was always the responsibility of those who have even the smallest ability to help those who are suffering.

Granted, Kony 2012 isn't about Rwanda, but it is about stopping a man guilty of significant crimes against humanity and that's something I trust my students to have a fairly good understanding of. Take their opinions with a grain of salt, knowing they come from a different place than the Ugandan rioters who were so vehemently against the film, but also that their opinion comes as a result of Americans doing nothing. My own opinions on America's responsibilities as a wannabe global superpower are constantly on shaky ground and my conversation with my students has done nothing to solidify them.