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.