“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.
