home

JOan picks me up at the airport alone. As much as I was looking forward to seeing my boy, this is perfect. I am so so happy to see her. She is in "work mode"-- maybe even wearing her badge. We have lunch together at Duangrats and then I take her back to her office.

I pick up Nate from daycare. He is asleep, so his welcome is very restrained indeed. He wakes gradually and we go swimming.

I'm happy to be home. I tell Joan as much as I can and expect to tell her more over the next few days. I see Beth briefly on her way to go rafting. I talk to my mom on the phone. I am so tired that I fall asleep in Nate's bed while he is going to sleep. By the time I wake up and go through to my own bed, Joan is also asleep.

the trip back

I am so much wanting to get home. It feels like I've been away for a long time and I'm sensitive to the burden I've put on Joan, more so than earlier. I know the thing to do is not feel guilty about being away, but instead feel grateful and excited about the experience she allowed me to have.

LEaving Nairobi, Esther's sister was very kind in that she picked me up, took me to the westlands roundabout so I could give Celine a phone for Wambo, and then carried Celine, her husband, and her sister to the airport so they could say goodbye. We talked little on the way over, since I was both a little drowsy and a little anxious about the journey ahead of me. Still it felt good to have so many nice people around me.



I had a long layover in Addis and the airline gave me a room at the De Leopol Hotel-- whose staff provide the best customer service in the world. I had no money and wanted to know if I could walk to an ATM. The simple answer would be no, we're very sorry, but why not enjoy a movie in the lounge? Their solutin was to call the big hotels to find one with an ATM and then call a taxi and lend me the fare. Frewoyni and Asal, amesegenello!

So I finally got to see the Mango True Mirage production center. It's a simple place, a typical Kenyan office compound, one-story with many single rooms accessed from a central courtyard. What's remarkable is the diversity of their product line and their refusal to mass-produce the same items over and over. I especially like their bannana fibre and saisal baskets and found it interesting to see someone painting their wooden carvings.



My student meeting wasn't what I'd expected in that none of my students showed up. Paul-- who'd chosen a good place for us to meet-- found that he couldn't get off from work at Uchumi's (IT dept.) and instead sent his brother Charles with a formal typed letter of apology. Also there were Beth's brother Maina and her cousin John. Since I was expecting to see my students, I didn't recognize anyone at first, but it was great to see MAina and JOhn again and I was happy to meet Charles.

After some errands around Nairobi, I settled into my hotel in Parklands. I went back out to Westlands for email and felt safe if a little on edge. Maybe in some way I felt safer without Joan because I didn;t have to worry about anyone except myself, but I think there are a lot less streetboys in Nairobi and also more pedestrains.

Nairobi to Machakos

I go to Sunday morning services at the main Presbyterian church in Nairobi. (St. Adnrew's) There's a children's choir, but like in America, they are shy and quiet. All the music throughout the service is purely voices and the adult singers are very good.



I meet Lucy and her husband Kim for lunch and also meet their son Geoff and their niece Kandi. Geoff reminds me of Nate. He refuses to stay in his seat, but wanders around the restaurant, giving me an excuse to chase him and scoop him up and hold him.

I go to Machakos in the afternoon and hangout with Anne and her friend Andrew. I'd been to Kenyan bars and nyama choma joints before, but had never spent the whole afternoon in such a place. I'm not so much on those typical male interests of football on TV, beer, roast meat, lots of pictures of women on the walls but only one (Anne) in actual attendance. Still, I had a good time-- there are few things I enjoy doing more than something I don't normally do.

my students

Back in Nakuru, I very briefky see Mumbi and her mother. Brenda (Mama Yvonne) had showed me the photocopy shop where Mama Mumbi works. I really appreciate how much mama Mumbi respected my time. She said she'd take me in her car to their house so I can see Mumbi for 10 minutes and that's exactly what happened.



Dennis organized a good meeting with himself and some other students including Gladys and Jacinta. It's good to hear their comments that they had benefitted from my teaching but had been shy to say it when they were students. They gave Dennis the nickname "Brian" because he liked writing on the blackboard.

Dennis pays for me to go to Nairobi on the Mololine shuttle, a "matatu" without a tout that takes 10 passengers instead of the standard 14 or the 18 that was the rule zamani. Beofre the trip started, we pass the police station so that we can be checked for weapons.

My favorite part of the road between Nakuru and Nairobi is the place east of Flyover where we're above the Rift Valley and looking down into it. About a fourth of the way down, there's a "shelf", a very flat area maybe a mile long and half a mile wide. It's settled with houses and farms but I don't know how the people on the shelf can access either the road above them or the valley floor below them

Happy

Beth's family is very happy to see me and get my news of Beth. We meet at Purity & Maina's house in Langa Langa. I am surprised to experience again how small the house is and how closely surrounded by so many neighbors. Still it's comfortable and I enjoy seeing so many children. Everyone I meet (Purity, Winnie's husband, Mama Beth, Grace, Mary, Abu, Beth Kadogo, baba Beth-- and some children whose names I forget) are very well and they greet Beth very much.





I'm so happy that the Nyambura family (Wambo, Maureen, Paul, etc.) have moved to Elementaita. Though it's far from Nakuru (45 shillings or a 2 hour bike ride, which Paul does everyday to get to school) it's much more spacious and clean than the location of old their house in Ronda and has a view of the National Park. They have land on which they can farm and all seem very happy. Of course they wanted to sit with me in the house but after one cup of tea I asked to go outside for a walk. Wambui and her cousin showed me around a little, explaining the various crops they were growing. It was evening and the flamingoes were flying back from where they'd spent the day. I though of Brian Higgins and the other birders. The birds fly in a wide formation, the line stretching across the sky, it seemed, from one horizon to the other.

our old town

Nakuru has several new buildings including 2 or 3 tourist-class hotels that had seemed to be in perpetual "construction" when we lived here before, as well as Tidy's restaurant and a new office building. The many cyber cafes are all 1 or 2 shillings per minute. And there's more traffic including bodabodas and taptaps as well as cars. Despite all this urbanization, Wambo, with her slim jeans and big hair, really does stand out and I am rather shocked when I meet her by accident on Kenyatta Avenue and struggle even to know how I know this head-turning young woman who seems to know me. When I do recognize her, I'm very happy. Maureen is with her and I take him to lunch at the Ethiopian restaurnt. (It has been rebuilt since 2002 and is very busy.) In the later afternoon, I go to NCCK where I meet Daniel Kamau, Kireme, Korega, and Samuel Murithi, all of them happy to see me and hear news of Joan. Murithi shows me the invitation letter he received and explains the reason he couldn't get his passport (offical corruption) in time to go on the trip to America. He also says, when I tell him that next year Joan might come by herself, that it's better for people to travel together so they can really enjoy themselves. And I really hear him and feel lonely for Joan. Everywhere I go in Nakuru, it reminds me of her. In the evening, I pass by our old flats and see Kadogo, Junior, Faitma and their mother and then Princess Yvonne and her family.

leaving Rwanda

Rwanda is a beautiful country and very clean. I discovered at the curio shop that this is because the government, in what I'd consider a very characteristic move, has outlawed the use of plastic bags. It feels wrong to call them authoritarian as I admire the difference this makes on the first stage of my journey--from Kigali to the border.

At the border, it's necessary to go through one line on the Rwadan sie, then walk across a little bridge to Uganda where I go through another line. Finding myself at the end of the line, I ask someone to make sure the bus waits for me. Strangely, it is not me but she who is the last one to get on the bus. They noticed my abscence but I really have to make noise to prevent them from leaving without her. her name is Nadia and she is the only Rwandanese who I've met who I *know* was born in rwanda. And I know several who were born outside, in Uganda, Tanzania, or Burundi.

I leave Kamapala at dusk. At this hour, the women who sell vegetables on the slopes along the road place little candles among their wares and its wonderful that something so beautiful-- a flowing, flickering blanket of soft warm light on the hillside-- should be created by humans and by accident. There is still a little bit of light and activity when we reach Jinha, a town situated where the Nile flows out of Lake Victoria on its way to Sudan and Egypt.

goodbyes

We pass by LWF (lutheran world fund) on the way to Gacaca court meeting and I found the computer lab disassembled. As I told John, my voice a little rough, I was "of course disappointed, but I knew this was the risk when your bring something they didn't necessarily ask for." John apologized, insisting that he had asked for them. I appreciated his apology and this interest he expressed, but the issue is that the people who work at LWF on a daily basis weren't necessarily invovlved in the process. I admire John and how hard he works and with so many different groups. I hope that the people at LWF will find a way to use the computers and that I will find someone to work with in developing a web page, but if the interest isn't there then I can't force it. And i don't know that John can either.

"Gacaca" is a revioval of the traditional justice system, necessitated by the great number of cases in the formal legal system. The case we watched involved a man who was accused of killing his brother-in-law during the genocide. The victim's wife, i.e. the accused's sister was among the accusers.

We return to Kigali and shared a goodbye dinner at Cozy. There were many goodbyes-- Luther Place to the staff at Cozy, LP to Pastor John, myself to everyone. I feel some regret at separating myself from the others. Community is important. But I know that my choice-- to see friends in Kenya without spending an excessively excessive time away from home-- makes sense. I miss my people at home so much.

my hero

Seeing the churches where so many people had been killed was taxing for the whole group and I felt tnesions among us that made me nervous aboout our scheduled trip to visit "contact farmers" near Gitarama. What we saw there, however-- biogas units for cooking, kitchen gardens for reuse of kitchen refuse and dishwater for growing plants such as tomatoes and peppers, and an overall co-operative and planned approach to agriculture-- made us all feel better. Perhaps most heartening was our chance to see how this knowledge was being shared with active, working farmers. These students, currently mainly women, came to learn for a few weeks with the idea that by applying them on their own farms, they would have the opportunity to teach others in their communities.

We went back to Kibungo that night. The staff at "our" guest house (where I stayed with Eric and Sarah) were very welcoming and we all felt like we'd come home. They were disappointed that we'd already taken dinner, but I ate a couple of their very tasty onion fritters.

I miss Nate very much. I think he would enjoy being here, and I wouldn't regret the necessary changes to my schedule to have him here. I admire his curiousity and friendliness to everyone.

Am I living in your dream or are you living in my dream?

I hope that the low point of this trip will be the 10-12 hours spent at FESPAD. We waited 2-3 hours for the event to start and-- worse, much much worse-- had to wait four hours to leave because His Excellencey (the President) was in attendance. They couldn't let anyone out of the stadium until he was gone. If I were a better African, I would have paid more attention to the performance, which included music from Jean-Paul Samputu and others, traditional drumming and dancing, and various acrobatics (including rollerblading!) but unfortunately I always had one eye on the exit and on the guard surrounding it--w aiting for the all0clear signal.

We visit two "genocide churches" on Saturday, an activity in which I participate with some reluctance and in part to compensate for spending time away the rest of the group over the last few days. I don't like that Rwanda should be so closely associated with the genocide that occurred here, especially because, as I've said, it seems to confirm the appropriateness of the lower relative status of the Hutu majority. At the first church-- whose name I don't remember-- I spent only a couple minutes in the ruined sanctuary before going outside to play football with a group of of boys who I expect make a hobby out of "soft-begging" from tourists. I played hard and had a lot of fun and when they asked for money or pens, teased them in a way they seemed to appreciate. The name of this blog means "dream" in Kinyarwanda (though I think it should maybe be Ibiroto) and I was playing hard so as to reinforce my dream of Africa as a place of hard-played life. We played outside the gate of the church that presented the more common dream of Africa as a place of suffering and death.

At the second church, which was located on a school compound, far from a village or town and nearly deserted, I didn't have a way to avoid stepping into this other dream, one which despite limitiations does offer some of the pieces of reality that mine lacks. Imagine an aisle in an underground supermarket, an aisle even narrower than in a typical African supermarket, so that there really is only room for one person to walk down it at a time, and the light comes from a cellar window at the end of the aisle and on all the shelves on both sides from one ende to the other, from the level of your feet, to above your head, the only thing you see is rows of skulls.

Can't we all just get along?

My friend Flora who lives in D.C. has a brother Francis who lives here in Kigali and he took me around last night. We had a really good time at the Cadillac Disco. I was very popular, and Francis was very good about not letting me be too proud of myself, remind me a few times that: "They see your white skin and so they think you have money."

Food here is kind of hard and I've been eating meat here and there. I find it difficult separating the "making myself different" aspects of vegetarianism from the genuine ethical concerns. I'll watch Nate and see what he does.

I do have some concerns for the future of Rwanda. The events of '94 were centuries in the making. The power balance is very strange with one side having the advantage of numbers, the other those of education, external conncections and, for now, the assmed moral superiority that goes with victimhood.

African Church Party!

I've done three computer training sessions now, each very different. In Kibungo, I taught some of the basics of computers, networks, and the internet, teaching primarily in Swahili. Now I'm in Kigali where I'm talking to the LWF staff about creating a CMS-powered website for them with the understanding that they would maintain it.

African Church Party! We visited a large Anglican church near Kirihe where Pastor John talked to the youth about about his model for community building. After his seech and some words of thanks and encouragement from the various pastors in attendance, plus Luther Place singing "This Little Light of Mine" they turned on the keyboards and everyone in the church (200 people?) jumped up and ran to the front of the church and started dancing at a pace where I was glad they didn't go on for more than maybe 10 minutes. It was like the Kanisa barabara that I used to hear in Kenya but in which I never participated.

After my morning in Kibungo, I travelled by matatu to Kigali. This was a much easier process than I'm used to from Kenya. The vehicle had a posted schedule and left on time, even though there were a few seats empty.

Once I arrived in Kigali, I wandered around downtown looking for lunch and didn't find much. I called John who passed me to someone who told me how to get to LWF. I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't met Agnes (or, in fact, one of the other 1,000s of people here who be glad to help me.) She was going almost the same way, but went the last leg of her commute by motorcycle. I might have done the same if I hadn't seen the accident on the way up from Kibungo. I saw a group of people putting a woman on a stretcher, her body limp so hopefully unconscious and not dead into an ambulance; the motorcycle was lying in the grass in the median.

I'm appreciating Joan very much. It is unusual for me to operate as a solitary individual and I hope it is doing some good things for me that she will notice when I return. And I'm grateful to Beth for helping Joan while I'm away.

Maureen's operation

Maureen, of the Nyambura family (Akina Wambo, Paul etc.) is having an operation today at 2pm. It is a fybroid lump in her breast which doesn't sound serious thought I'm sure it's traumatic, both for her and her family. I am praying for them and find it hard that I shouldn't be at the hospital in Nairobi when I was just there a couple days ago.

In some ways, I feel still clsoer to Kenya than I did in Kampala. People speak Swahili here, and I'm enjoying that very much. I expect that most don't know it, but those who do-- probably former refugees-- are eager to speak it.

Sarah is doing a good job planning this trip and responding to changes in external factors. But she is stressing too much about the safari in Tanzania. The price is turning out to be a lot higher than expected and it's really dividing the group. I had never planned to participate so I'm in the enviable postion of being able to talk about someone else's problems and suggest solutions without having to experience it.