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August 31, 2007
Petits Plaisirs
“This is the best kind of voyeurism; hearing joy from your neighbors.” - Chuck Sigars
(August 12th) Nyamirambo is the Muslim neighborhood of Kigali. There are two mosques, lit up with white and green fluorescents so they look somewhat like a UFO at sunset. There is a valley on either side of the main strip, and numerous tailors shops. There are “sports stores” with knockoff Adidas bags, where no one seems overly inclined to sell things, and instead they gather passersby for the latest soccer match. In the alleyways people burn piles of rubbish at night, and kids stare transfixed in the glow of the fires. They create jungle gyms out of the stacked crates, and the fruit vendors shoo them away with palm fronts and the occasional tossed rotten wrinkly passion fruit. The samosa vendors walk around with their greasy cargo in plastic clear boxes on their heads, and people chew gristly “brochettes” or goat kabobs.
I realize that I have ignored Rwanda’s vivacity in this blog. Rwanda is in some ways lacking in the same liveliness (or chaos) found in many other African countries. But compared with, say, Newark, or anywhere else in the grey concrete slab of the USA, it is an incredibly colorful and lively place. You get the impression that everyone is living with one foot in the grave, but I think that this might be more impression than reality. When I run around Kacyiru I end up with a hoard of little troublemakers following me, their jelly sandals flapping noisily against the hard-packed earth. I get Patience, our elderly neighbor, who grabs me as I run by, muttering things in Kinyarwanda and trying to roll up my running shorts. There are fourteen-year-old kids in the neighborhood learning to ride their big brother’s motorcycle. There are they younger children who roll up their blue school uniforms and create a gymnasium by piling the sand intended for road construction in a heap and making a bench-horse with concrete blocks. They hold their own mini-Olympics for backflips, sending sprays of sand into the air with every landing. The have perfect form and perfect glee, with their wrists bent in that typical gymnastics splay.
There is Rwinkwavu, where Partners in Health has created something out of nothing. The before and after pictures scattered throughout the halls show the old colonial hospital and the new wards, the old sickly patients and their new selves. There are nutritional support gardens, and a big foundation for a new building. Paul Farmer is proudest of the goldfish pond… when we arrived, there were roughly 20 people crowded around the zen-like pond poking at the fish and floating plants. Dr Farmer believes that public spaces for poor people deserve the same aesthetic as those for rich.
There is Akagera, the game park, which is Rwanda’s attempt at tackling a bit of the safari market. Eastern Rwanda is flatter and more savannah-like, with hills and grass and flattened shrub-like trees. The views are expansive and grand. The landscape seems so stereotypically African that it is almost cliché, and yet you can’t help but be awed.
It sounds trite, but of course the people are Rwanda’s most precious asset. My host’s brother regaled us with stories of his childhood troublemaking and strict catholic school headmistress, complete with mimicked gestures and sound effects. There is Isobelle, the Grande Dame / secretary of the national network of people living with AIDS who gave me story upon story of women’s successes in treatment, and who regales me with the tale of how she found her support group as though it was how she met her husband. There are the eminently reasonable WE-ACT trauma counselors, who not only deal with their own past but the pasts of thousands of others with an admirable grace, humor, and openness. These are women who have had nothing but the worst in life, and still are dead-set on saving the world. They are curious and polite and humorous. They are tri-lingual. They are stylish and sassy. Nowhere is Rwanda’s resilience more evident.
Posted by Caitlin Lee Cohen at August 31, 2007 04:06 PM
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