(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.

I have noticed, however, that I have been negligent in explaining what I am doing here, and what my internship involves. I work for WE-ACT, a group that does HIV-related care for women who are positive as a result of rape during the genocide. They also have a family program, income generation, peer education, and numerous other related programs. I have been working in the peer education department on modules on gender and HIV, gender-based violence, post-trauma and psychological problems, and community mobilization. I take materials from the existing Rwandais materials, the Hesperian foundation, other NGOs, and numerous other sources and compile them into one enormous and growing document. Then I edit for language simplicity and continuity, add photographs, and do lots of research into the Rwanda-specific components. This is usually information on available services, specific practices, coping strategies and social norms. I was hoping to get the chance to rigorously test the modules, but that is apparently not in the cards… they are currently about 130 pages long in total, and I have a lot to do this week!

When they have been finished and field-tested, the modules will be sent to the Centre National en Lutte le SIDA (the national center for the fight against AIDS). Hopefully they will be reviewed an approved for use as a national curriculum by anyone who wishes to use them. My boss and I have also been lining up partner organizations to use these modules. So far it looks as though the national network of people with HIV, the national nurse’s network, WE-ACT, the UNHCR subcontractors who work in the refugee camps, several of WE-ACT’s partner associations, possibly an association that does work with prostitutes, and possibly by two groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Action AID and HEAL Africa). In addition, I wrote a small report on gender-based violence in the North-Kivu district of Congo, as WE-ACT may be starting programs there.

I think the most interesting part of my work here has been learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, and its treatment. As one of the modules focuses on this, I have spent some time with WE-ACT’s trauma counselors as they interview women. This is obviously rather emotionally taxing. Trying to relay these stories in any but the most superficial way is practically impossible. I feel the need to retell these stories, at the same time as I recognize that they are personal and confidential and painful. Furthermore, suffering does not make for good literature. Nothing I had read before coming here prepared me for the reality of hearing these stories from people’s mouths, and I feel it is beyond my capacity as a writer to relay them in any meaningful way. As I was working on the section on ”compassion fatigue” (PTSD symptoms from hearing other people’s trauma stories) I began mentally checking off symptoms, and I decided to travel to Uganda and the DRC to get some space.

WE-ACT is starting a PTSD program with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s (like Prozac). I did some research into how to get these medications cheaply from Indian manufacturers or through the International Dispensary Authority. Delphine, the patient and friend mentioned in earlier blogs, is in need of Prozac. While I was in Uganda I purchased a years worth of these meds for her so that she might have a supply before WE-ACT starts the programs. The dearth of psychological medications and services for survivors in Rwanda is appalling, and the number of people who have used “cost effectiveness” as an excuse for why good psychological medications are not available is horrifying. The cost of generic Prozac is roughly $25 dollars per person per year, and the impact that this medication can have on the lifestyle and work potential for a PTSD sufferer is extraordinary. Getting medications for Delphine was perhaps one of the most rewarding parts of my experience here. It has affirmed in my mind that I really value the individual interaction in international work, and that I really do want to go to medical school one of these days.

Walking outside of the crypt at a nearby memorial, Nyamata, I treaded carefully through the small purple flowers strewn like a connect-the-dots image on the soil from a flowering tree above. Purple is the color of genocide remembrance. I looked at these constellations, compared with the constellations of shrapnel and shell holes in the tin roof of the ceiling of the church. They holes and the flowers seemed equal in number and in size. I couldn’t help but think that maybe they came in pairs, a flower for a life, a hole for its loss: maybe there is some accidental symbolism in Rwanda. The femurs in the crypt were stacked in the bookshelf-like spaces. Walking out I saw the stacks of firewood at the school next door, and their mottled bark resembled the mottled color of the unpreserved bones. I understood Delphine’s PTSD considerably better after seeing these memorials: the aesthetic reminders of terror are all too evident in the mundane.

There is a woman interred at Nyamata. She is not known by name. She is in a coffin to herself with a stick still in her vagina continuing to her abdomen and all the way to her chest. Her baby shares her coffin. She has an unusually small amount of company in her final resting place, compared with the usual 20-30 skeletons per coffin, expressly because of the gruesome mechanism of her death. And I think of that stick, still woven through her bones, and wish that her tombstone had a name. But names are worthless currency, and at a certain point it becomes both unreasonable and impossible to find a measure that can explain the vastness of loss of human life.

There are no answers in Rwanda. One could study the specifics endlessly, and find no ergot in the bread and no lead in the pipeworks. Even if these scientific answers did apply, they would be insufficient. Likewise, our explanations of the social and historical factors fall short of complete. One could look for explanations and find the only one available in the intelligent, structured, and capable Rwandan environment: depravity is only human, and otherwise good people are easy to frighten. The examples of genocide are numerous, and there is no equation that describes perfectly the precursors to them.

Leaving the memorials we ran into several prisoners being taken for a Gacaca trial. Gacaca is the local court system developed to deal with genocide perpetrators. The prisoners are dressed in pink jumpsuits, a change from the black jumpsuits they used to wear that were considered too macabre and frightening. They are treated casually, and they are only mildly guarded. Try as I might I could not connect one of these faces with the tombs and the bones. Despite seeing the relics, this place remains entirely unreal to me.

The slick vinyl seating on the buses adds to this amusement-park feel, as all four people seated abreast slide inexorably into one another as the buses hurtle around corners, none-too-aware of the white dividing line in the center of the road. The shoulders of the people on each end are pressed into the glass of their windows. Rwandan peasants, unaccustomed to the speed and the motion, look out of the car, down at their laps, and out again rapidly. Once one person starts vomiting, it is almost infectious… Pretty soon you have an entire roller-coaster scene, and not a plastic bag in sight because polyethylene bags were outlawed.

I came to Kibuye to visit my friend Lindsay’s former boss, Iris, the regional head of the UNHCR camp. I came also to visit the camp itself, having never seen a refugee resettlement situation. Iris had mentioned the fact that the peer education project in the camps could use some information specific to the refugee situation. As the modules I am working on address Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD) as well as other topics on HIV, we thought there might be room for collaboration.

The Kiziba camp is nestled onto one of the hilltops just under the highest mountain in the region, a 45-minute wash-board drive with some incredible views of the lake. When you round the corner to the road that continues to the camp, you can see the white tarpaulin cover from afar. The camp looks almost organic, like a fungal growth on a log. Even when you draw close it is hard to imagine that it is home to 18,000 people. You can see the schoolhouses first, long and rectangular, and the sprinkling of students dressed in strikingly sharp blue-colored uniforms wandering in and out for their morning break. Some of the students had wandered a little far on their recess; on the road to the camp we passed several youth dancing a little jig of freedom, the dance of “youth-cutting-class”. We pulled the car over to scold them in several languages for their lack of attendance.

I had in my mind the images of displaced populations in Rwanda as they are described by General Roméo Dallaire. I was imagining constant motion, deprivation, pup tents, and chaos. This camp is surprisingly methodical. The houses are as dense as I had imagined, made of sticks woven into walls and then covered with red mud for siding. When one UNHCR tarpaulin wears thin, another is added on top. Some houses looked like cakes, having been “iced over” so many times. There is perhaps 3 feet of space between houses, with a curved path sunk into the surrounding soil and little rivulets for water waste. But there are regular water pumps, little ambient trash, and a solid health center in the process of being expanded. As Iris pointed out, in some ways it the services here are better than the surrounding villages.

My initial lack of horror at viewing the camp was counteracted when I was told of its age. This camp had been around since 1996, a completely un-temporary timeframe. The residents of this camp came from Congo during the first of the Congolese wars, sparked by the migration of 2,000,000 Hutu refugees into the Congo after the genocide, and a Rwanda-supported-invasion-cum-civil-war to overthrow Mobutu. Congo became an unsafe region, and many Congolese Tutsis (a very nebulous and multinational category) “returned” to a land they had never known. The camp seems quaint and quiet at first, but no one invests the time and energy to construct well, because people’s homes are not their own, and no one knows when the camp will be closed. People have not put down roots, and it feels as though one could easily scrape the camp off the side of the hill, as if it were, in fact, a fungus on a log. The residents have had 11 years of World Food Program oil tins for windows, a tarpaulin for a roof, one room shared by many, no clothing, no public transport, no right to land, no right to collect firewood (that is brought in by a German partner to the UNHCR) and a thin mud wall in a cold and rainy climate. There is no income, little commerce (except for the trading of UN dried peas after 3-4 hours of walking each way), no higher education, and no resettlement as the Congo remains in perpetual flux. The UN does a good job keeping these people afloat, and yet they are exactly that: floating.

I will not expand on the Congo wars here. They are complex, and worthy of pages. I will recommend a newly-minted book on the subject: The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth, and Reality by Thomas Turner. My brief comment on the subject is that four million have died in the Congo since 1996, making the wars the most deadly since WWII. Yet the Congo wars are poorly understood, and considered non-important compared with clearer-cut conflicts. Congo is also ignored because the majority of deaths are not brutal slaughters, but are due to displacement, starvation and disease. The situation in the Congo has been called “a war against women” as rape is actively used as a weapon. The rates of fistula (tearing between body cavities, usually the anus, vagina, and urethra) and of HIV caused by these rapes are horrifying. I hope that the modules I am working on might be appropriate for this refugee population, but at the same time, I feel foolish hoping that health education might result in mental relief to victims of PTSD or earlier care of new rape survivors. There is a feeling of incompetence inherent in picking up some small pieces of a conflict rather than preventing it.

In light of the craziness of the great-lakes region, it is hard to see past the damages to the successes. But I take them where I can get them:

Wita, a refugee, is making a small living my crafting little poupées (dolls). She carefully braids their plastic hair and sews on red-painted toenails to the dolls as they are represented pounding grain or carrying firewood.

Close to 20 men, women, and children were waiting for Voluntary Counseling and Testing for HIV when I arrived. One family had come to be tested as a whole. We were all engrossed in a rather graphic video on STIs, and a couple of the francophone women translated the banter: “I want to get tested for that one, too! God knows I don’t want my penis looking like that!”

When the car comes to take the AIDS patients to Kibuye hospital for treatment, people no longer fear that it will contaminate them. They no longer really notice it. Half the AIDS patients participate in the support group.

Outside the clinic there is a garden, expressly for baby food. The nutrition center houses slings and scales, stoves, cups and dishes. It is heartening to see the nascent peas and peanuts in the hard soil.

The wall of the primary school house has “Work+ Discipline= Success” written on it in mud. It’s a simple equation, and despite massive evidence to the contrary, some part of me believes in its power.

Silas, the head of their AIDS program, explained to me that one of the biggest problems with respect to sexual behavior change is the simple fact that there is nothing to do. Kids grow up in tiny crowded rooms, seeing their relatives have sex and then as teenagers they get bored. The camps distribute 1200 condoms every month. Silas suspects that many of them turn into soccer balls: blown up, tied, and wrapped with twine. Maybe, if they give the teenagers something to do, the condoms vicariously serve their purpose.

Maybe the breakdown of our “ideal” can show us where the “ideal” is found in reality.

The Ntarama church, sight of the massacre of an estimated 5000 people. It has been left essentially as found: there are bibles, clothing, and bones between the pews. Photo courtesy of Kresa King Cutcher (camera_rwanda@yahoo.com), with permission.

He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by how life could veer.

Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a very high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them personally such pain…

I read the whole clipping again every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity… what is going on? And mail me the carbon.

- Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk.

The road by my house is undergoing construction. This morning, when digging the sewer, three men uncovered several bones from a human’s remains. There was little ceremony. They dusted them off with a rag, purchased a plastic hallmark-style gift bag covered in hearts, and placed the bones inside delicately, though they had been driven on top of for years. I didn’t see what they did with the bag, but I imagined them leaving the cheesy valentines present on the doorstep of some neighbor. I imagined little kids ringing the doorbell and running away, and the horror on the face of the recipient. Is there any good way to receive half a dead body? Can the kitchy hearts, an expensive gesture in such a poor country, cushion the blow?

I saw the film “Hotel Rwanda” when it first came out, in the safe confines of the Avon Theater in Providence. I am generally not wildly susceptible to heartstring-pulling. However, this particular movie destroyed me. I felt foolish walking up the frozen Providence streets, crying profusely in the hard grey context of “ViaVia 4” pizzeria and the construction on Olive Street. I spent an entire day imagining my death, and I somehow could imagine only the preceding events, not the event itself. There is little glamour in death, for all its mystique. Friends of mine were much more critical of the film than I… they felt that the movie toyed with emotion to give you a sense of relief when the main characters cross the line into the RPF territory, from a world of disorderly killing to one of “protective” killing. They said that the movie cultivated a false sense of security, and that it was an improbable survival story. I agree, Hotel Rwanda is both true and improbable. The Rwandan genocide is both true and impossible to believe. Even as an outsider, I want someone to explain to the Rwandaise how life can permit them so much pain. And, as Dillard says, please mail me the carbon.

I have been listening to stories. There is a clear and completely unavoidable problem with the stories we hear from Rwanda: they are only survivors’ stories. In telling the stories of those who survived it is almost as though we pass judgment on those who died. It is appropriate that we extol the determination, genius, and wherewithal of survivors, but can we do this without accidentally claiming that victims didn’t have these same characteristics? In horror films, it is always the weak at heart or the unresourceful who die in the first hour of the movie. When we hear that survival is possible, we cannot help but have this faint idea in the back of our minds: “I would have lived. I would have found my way out and survived.”

My idea of survival was that: a flood of relief, akin to watching Don Cheadle pass through the Hollywood re-created RPF front line.

There is not a single survivor of the Rwandan genocide. I do not believe that anyone who was alive and in Rwanda in 1994 is not deeply (and probably irreparably) traumatized. Everyone, perpetrator or survivor, has witnessed an inescapable and brutal killing, where no tricks or negotiations would have purchased life. Perpetrators have discovered how possible, even facile, it is to take a human life. Whether they were forced into it or elected to do it, whether they are regretful or not, this is an elementally disturbing discovery. Survivors have clearer traumas.

My friend Delphine had never seen a human corpse in her life until 1994. I asked her what it meant to be a survivor. She laughed, a dry, hacking laugh, more of a cough really. She said that surviving only meant having empty tables at weddings. If you imagine the closest people to you, and think of four out of five of them dead (probably killed in front of you) you begin to realize what an echoingly hollow word “survivor” is.

One day I was trying to break Delphine out of the stare that I have learned she does when she re-sees, as though watching a movie, all the bad things that have happened to her. I asked Delphine where she finds pleasure in life. She said that she loves Tracy Chapman, and I set up my computer to play her the tranquil and self-possessed tones of her first album. With small tears, Delphine said that even kindness, when contrasted with the opposite end of the human experience spectrum, makes her sad.

I asked her what brings her joy. She chuckled, a real laugh this time. Her five children love to dance, but are embarrassed to do it in front of her. Delphine’s greatest joy is spying through a crack in the doorway to watch her children bust a move to Jay-Z. But can these pleasures atone for the traumas? Can she somehow hope that joy will counteract the pain rather than remind her of it? Can I hope that Delphine will die an old lady, of a comparatively kind opportunistic infection, feeling as though her life had some ultimate justice, some ultimate balance between the pleasure and the pain?

The movie “Hotel Rwanda” ends with the following sentence: “The genocide ended in July 1994, when Tutsi rebels drove the Hutu army and the Interahamwe militia across the border into the Congo.” I wish that it were over. The Interahamwe continued to kill in Congo for years, reprisal killings and killings of witnesses still happen, and people continue to relive this history, throughout the survivors’ diaspora.

Can we believe the purple signs with hand-written white paint in Kinyarwanda, claiming “Never Again.”? Can we believe the slew of US presidents who have uttered this phrase, what Samantha Powers calls “The Worlds Most Unfulfilled Promise”? Can we hope that there is any truth to Bush’s capitalized scrawl in the margin of Powers’ 2001 article on the Rwandan genocide, “NOT ON MY WATCH”? We have developed a selective vision, which procrastinators around the world know as exclusive hindsight. Not that we haven't had time to do our homework... A new group has been living this hell for four brutally long years, in Darfur.

I live on the same street as the national network of people living with HIV (RRP+). Most of the work I will be conducting for the rest of the summer is in collaboration with this association. I am happy about the move because of this proximity, and also because it will allow me to move out of the gated neighborhood I was in before, to a place where people make samosas and beans, offer to braid my hair, and try to sell me pushup bras on the side of the street. The disadvantage of this neighborhood is the constant attention, the distance from the city, and the less-than-ideal bathroom/water situation (I stand in an orange bucket in my room and try not to splash while bathing). From my courtyard I can see the whole expansive hill of downtown rise out of the valley and the “Avenue de Poids Lourdes” (Heavy Weight Avenue).

I live with Vincent, an 18-year-old orphan whose mother died of AIDS, and Deborah, a newly-wed Rwandan who had lived in Uganda until 1998. Vincent is teaching himself English, and he loves cooking cabbage stew and teaching me how to describe the ingredients in Kinyarwanda. These are often the French word with an “ama” or “igi” tacked on the front of the word. Deborah is a gossip, and I love the relief she provides from my otherwise incredibly serious and emotionally-taxing job. She teaches me a lot about Rwandan sexual practices, particularly a practice called “Kunyaza”, which has the added benefit of helping me with the curriculum I am writing.

So far my internship has mostly involved computer work: cut-and-pasting photographs of seeping gynecological infections and cartoon representations of t-cells into the outline that I made of a peer education curriculum. The 5 modules loosely fit under the category of “Gender and AIDS”, though I am including information on community mobilizing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and general reproductive health. This week I am meeting with the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP) and the national center for fight against AIDS (CNLS) to assure that the curriculum with fit their needs and priorities. Eventually I will test these modules with the women at the RRP+ and hopefully do a community anti-stigma campaign with the women of the clinic I work with (WE-ACT).

I have also taken on another minor campaign: there are no SSRI’s available in Rwanda. (Prozac, for example, is an SSRI. As I mentioned in my prior post, there are no good PTSD medications in a country where practically everyone has suffered some trauma). Rwanda also has four psychiatrists, only one of whom was present during the genocide. I am hoping to work with WE-ACTs psychologist to obtain enough SSRI’s to treat 180 of WE-ACTs HIV+ genocide survivors, including my friend Delphine. We hope to pilot the program and convince the Rwandan government that the cost of the generic medications is worth the investment. I will write more on this soon.

Kigali is a city in 3-D, surpassing San Francisco’s hilliness, with incomprehensible organic residential layout, hidden by the pervasive ground cover and impressive trees. My strategy of learning a city by North/South/East/West is thwarted by this third dimension, and I have gotten lost daily. Thankfully, the intern house is a short walk from the President’s complex, in a neighborhood called Kiyovu des Riches. Downtown barely feels like a capital city, with its orderly and minimal traffic, median strips, and stunning view of the nearby hillsides.

The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, runs a tight ship. The streets are named and numbered, there are public trashcans, the public parks have manicured lawns, there are no street markets, and moto taxi drivers are required not only to wear helmets but to bring them for their passengers as well. When I arrived in Kigali my plastic bags were confiscated at the airport, because they have been make illegal to cut down on trash. Kagame has been accused of micromanagement, and yet this country was in need of considerable structure, even if structure is manifest in neurotic details. Rwanda has done an impressive job picking up pieces (though Rwanda’s involvement in the Congo, something I am just starting to learn about, is less than beautiful). Kagame himself is bean-pole thin and soft-spoken, though not to be trifled with; last year the French government indicted many members of his cabinet (mostly former members of the FPR, the Tutsi rebel faction) for their supposed involvement in shooting down the plane that killed then-president Juvenal Habyarimana (a Hutu Power leader) who’s death touched off the 1994 genocide. These indictments were widely viewed as preposterous, and Kagame gave French diplomats 48 hours to get out of the country. In Kigali, many people I have met insist on speaking only English because they are furious at the French for these indictments and for the role that the French played in the perpetuation of the genocide.

WE-ACT’s HIV/AIDS clinic is on the 3rd floor of a building encased in tinted glass, giving it a rosy 1960’s feel. The interior is dark and crowded, with an almost cathedral-like quiet. Patients are seen at regular intervals and the number never seems to grow or diminish. Rebecca, the daughter of a co-founder of the organization, tells me they have treated over 10,000 patients since it opened in 2004.

Simon Ntare, the director of the project, is Anglophone and quiet, fully white-haired with a lazy eye and a manner that puts one instantly at ease. He touches his chest lightly with his fist after shaking your hand as a gesture of respect, a heartbreakingly gentle motion that is reminiscent somehow of Nelson Mandela’s youthful dancing. I may be living with Simon and his family shortly, as I want to do a homestay rather than staying in the intern house. Simon also raises cattle, so he and I talked about pin-bone angles, fat content of milk, and cross-breeding for close to an hour. He pulled up a picture of the Ankole cow on google, and “tsked” the picture, saying the description is more wrong than correct. I noted that he was pointing to the various ethnic groups to whom the cattle supposedly historically belonged.

Ethnicity and genocide are not discussed here. But thoughts about them are pervasive. Even when googling cattle breeds, one receives a reminder of how conscious people still are of distinctions. My aim in coming here is not to try to make sense of the genocide, and yet one cannot help but be interested by the perpetual elephant-in-the-room. I feel almost illicit discussing it in this first blog entry, because I don’t believe that it is correct to associate an entire country and its people with tragedy. And yet, I don’t think the genocide should be ignored.

The only non-muzungu (non-white-person) that I have spoken to about the genocide is Delphine (name changed). She works for the project. She has beautiful small dreadlocks and dresses quite fashionably, in tight dark jeans and buttonup shirts. She fights with me over my laundry (I insist on doing it myself, and so she steals it from me when I am not paying attention) and jokes about defrosting fish in the toaster oven. But minor things become crises for Delphine… she is constantly worried that her co-worker is stealing, that she wont buy enough potatoes for dinner, that she wont iron all the bugs out of our underwear and shirts. This morning I asked her how she slept, and she said that she takes drugs to sleep (valium, I think) and that it makes her groggy in the morning. Her slightly yellow eyes filled up with tears, and I avoided the elephant-in-the-room by asking not about the tears but the jaundice.

She’s on AZT. She is HIV positive as a result of being gang-raped by soldiers during the genocide while much of her family was killed in front of her. She tells me that she is glad for the talk-therapy that WE-ACT has helped her get, and for her job. But now that she has started talking to someone, she cannot think about anything else and cannot talk to anyone Rwandan about her experience. And she cannot sleep.

I was left with my jaw on the floor, completely without words. “Désolée” (sorry) doesn’t begin to cover it. She broke the silence and grabbed a mug to pour me coffee, clumsy and drugged by her valium and her memories. I thanked her for the work she does, and curled up in my bed (which she had meticulously made) and contemplated her attention to detail. Catchwords like “AIDS”, “servitude”, and “injustice” bounced through my caffeinated head, and, as I do when I am overwhelmed, I fell asleep. Delphine, when overwhelmed, irons my socks. Kigalians, when overwhelmed, leave their houses on the first Saturday of each month and scrub the city's sidewalks and pick up all trash.