Home Home

Sometimes when I'm sitting here idly, watching the people mill around me and waiting for cleaning morning to wrap up so I can go about my day, shop at my stores and eat at my cafes and ride on my busses home, while I'm waiting not unhappily, while I'm comfortable and feel relaxed and recognize familiar faces, while I'm feeling most at home here, because this is where I live now, not just a place I've travelled to, but where my stuff is, and where I live in the normal, unexhausted pace that normal people experience when they are close to their base -

these are the times when I realize most starkly that I'm far, far, astoundingly far, far away from Home.

I get frustrated here, I can't believe the inefficiency and the feigned-or-not stupidity and the effort it takes to live life, and I curse this country and glare at these people and yearn, not for Home, but for elsewhere, other, not this. And I did that at Home, too, because I'm fully coming round to the idea that Laura was right, comforts really are relative, so five minutes of waiting at the post office on the corner of Larkin and whatever felt just as maddening as waiting two hours at the post office in Kacyiru. But it's when I'm happy, relaxed, at my best here, when I'm feeling at home, that I realize that this is good for a visit, for a year, for an experience, for some insight, to shake things up in my smug mind, for a challenge, for a break, for a spell, for a bit. For a bit.

At the foundation of my current relaxed happy state lies the knowledge that in the future, no need to hurry, there will be a time when I can feel like this and simultaneously feel at Home. Where I can sit on the balcony of an ornate old theater hall with unnecessary beautiful decaying detail all around, with a glass of beer in front of me that I'm drinking because I like the taste, and that I can afford without thought, with a shoulder against mine and a hand on my back, with music streaming in that I love instantly, with that life-defining ahhhh that only seems to come when I'm at Home.

Pining for the old brunette.

What a feeling!

To encounter, to feel giddy, to be infatuated, to be crazy, to be ripped from, to slink back to, to get comfortable, to love, to overtax, to fear, to love, to love, to fear, to love, to lose, to pine for, to wallow in, to despise, to feel foolish over, to dull, to worry, to re-encounter, to wince afresh, to dull, to dull, to reassess, to feel differently, to be surprised, to reassess, to laugh with, to see with new eyes, to feel proud of, to root for, to appreciate, and finally, to love platonically and without complication, without jealousy or need for anything in return, but simply to love, to feel happier for knowing, to feel profoundly appreciative, to feel so clearly and welcome so wholly their impact on you, to feel like a lucky beautiful bastard surrounded by the same.

run along now

Just finished with my first ever run with my students. It was amazing.

The less good: Right at the end of the run, within a hundred yards of the school gate, we're sort of running "through town". Everyone in town naturally stops and stares at the sight of a hundred high school girls and their one muzungu teacher stampeding through the street. As I run by the side of the road, one twenty-something-year-old guy reaches out and grabs my arm and shakes it, hard. It nearly throws me off my balance. I shake him off and keep running, but I quickly start to see red as my arm stings more and more. After a few more paces, I turn around and walk quickly back to him. The students can see that I'm pissed. I get right up to him and tell him in French that he's never to touch me again, and then I point to my arm and tell him no and bad in Kinyarwanda. As I turn to walk away, he snickers to his friend a bit, so I turn around and stare the smile off his face. As I go to walk back towards the school, all the girls start cheering. I sprint the last fifty yards with the cheers of the girls to back me up.

The very good: These girls are amazing! They took off out of the school gates running with gusto, and kept a totally respectable pace up the giant half-mile hill right and the beginning of the run. They get tired easily, but the slightest encouragement makes them pick up the pace again. I was running my best to try to show them how it's done, but at least six of them kept up with me stride for stride the whole way. They're totally encouraging to each other; there's no one making fun of anyone else, and I am yet again surprised that body image doesn't (outwardly, at least) seem to factor into their actions at all. The thicker ones run just as hard as the thinner ones. Towards the back of the pack, where the most tired runners are, they clap and sing rhythmic songs to keep each other going. Once we were about a mile out of school, we stopped and waited for everyone else to catch up. I led them in stretches, counting down each stretch in a different language, which they find hugely entertaining. High fives and laughs were everywhere. When we were done stretching, we ran back the way we had come, again with enthusiasm and total mutual encouragement among the girls.

I don't want to sound like a cheeseball, and the fact is that these kids drive me crazy for a good 80% of the time. But that other 20% is golden indeed. Their total acceptance and love of each other, their willingness to see the good in others and in their own situations, their excitement over challenges and small privileges, their strength and hard work and intelligence and effort, make these girls a joy to be around. They're certainly teaching me more than I'm teaching them, and today I'm grateful for it.

Here's to Tuesday runs with the students! Hoping to make this a year-long tradition and a good start to the running week.

Wednesday

I'm in the staff room during our morning break from classes. The teachers get served tea every day during this break, and it was pretty good today, not too sweet and piping hot. Even as I write that, I can't quite believe I'm describing this tea as "good", because if I'm being honest, it actually falls under the general heading of "bilge". The whole room is in uproarious laughter right now, including me, as we're talking (in a lunatic mix of English, French and Kinyarwanda) about poor Peter teaching sex ed to his O-Level biology class. One year ago at this time, I had recently returned from France, was busy at work planning our lab's move to a new building, and was vaguely thinking about going to Africa at the end of the year. I am surprised to find myself now, chuckling over the menstrual cycle with Rwandan men.

With the free time I have in the evenings here, I've been catching up on all that delicious purposeless information seeking that I'd have loved to have done in San Francisco if there were more hours in the day. Here's what's been keeping me from going postal:

PODCASTS

Fresh Air from NPR - I never listened to this in the US, but now I love, love, LOVE to hate Terry Gross's smugness. Plus, sometimes she talks to interesting guests, although usually their smuggery is outclassed only by TG herself.
The Archers - I've revived my love affair with that gloriously mundane English village of my dreams. David Archer reigns supreme. Lillian can die.
This American Life - After being given a whole data CD full of episodes as an (excellent) gift, I've been listening to these would-be-sappy-if-they-weren't-so-damned-good hour-long awe-fests every week.
The BBC History Magazine Podcast and BBC's From Our Own Correspondent - Both really interesting romps through mainly useless brain fodder from olden times and the world today, respectively. I'm totally out of my depth with the first one, but I like to pretend, and sometimes I catch a brief idea of what they're talking about.
A History of the World in 100 Objects - Haven't started listening to this yet because I'm waiting for 100 consecutive days to do so, but I'm weirdly excited about it. I think I'm also going to give my English class an assignment to write the history of their lives in five objects. Thanks, BBC!

BOOKS

One Fifth - Complete and utter drivel, like the worst book I've ever read, and also the most amazingly satisfying when I arrived in a country where all of my norms and comforts were decidedly absent and I just wanted to bathe in a trashy novel and forget that I wasn't in the United States. One Fifth is pure awful, but it saw me through some dark times, and I'm grateful to it.
Table By the Window and Table Number Seven - Two halves of Terrance Rattigan's Separate Tables collection, and both awesome. His plays are all about the dramatic happening within the mundane, and for some reason his stuff really sits well with me.
Baking Cakes in Kigali - As I think I said before somewhere (this blog?), this was a little heavy on the folksy African wisdom for my taste, but it was nice to read, if only because you have to have been to Rwanda to understand what she's talking about half of the time.
Jurassic Park - UNFORGETTABLE AND AMAZING. Why hadn't I read this before?! Why did I throw Michael Crichton under the bus so? I don't care if it's not great literature, I don't care if it's infuriatingly unrealistic, this shit was GREAT. I think I might have skipped a class or two towards the end so that I could read more, and I don't even feel bad about it.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Oh Tess! This started out a tad slow, but became a total page-turner towards the end. As in, it took me about two weeks to read the first sixty pages, and three hours to read the last hundred and fifty. Hardy is my mum's favorite, and I've been meaning to tuck into some of his books for years, but it wasn't until I saw them on display at Nakumatt for just 2.500Frw that went for it. And now, thanks to John, I've got The Mayor of Castorbridge on its way!
The Road Taken - I've only read the back cover and introduction of this Michael Buerk autobiography, but based on those alone, I have high hopes.

And now, one more class before lunch. Wednesdays are the new Thursday. I love them.

a useless post

So here we are at Bourbon, and I'm swimming in comfort and wondering at this life that has become so pleasant, that has been so pleasant all along.

Friends from New York, DC, San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Madrid, London pass in, say hello, share a story or two, commiserate, laugh a bit, have a coffee, make a plan, pass out. We're weirdos in Rwanda together and that's the foundation that all of our very varied relationships are based on. Billy Bragg, Blind Pilot, and the Avett Brothers are playing and my book of Jack London's Great Short Stories sits open on the table; I've just finished with Batard and now I'm right on the brink of digging into The Call of the Wild. Batard was excellent, the kind of story that makes you gasp at the end and feel a little scared and a little lucky to have read it.

This weekend is a big reunion of my group in Kigali, so about a week ago the emails started circulating about what media everyone has to lend and needs to return and wants to borrow. I'm bringing back Baking Cakes in Kigali, a nice easy read and cool story idea, but featuring a bit too much folksy African wisdom for me (offensive?), and the plays of Oscar Wilde, hilarious, fullstop. At the request of my friends, I've brought to lend out the entire British Office, Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, and all my This American Life podcasts on CD. Finally, I am pretty keyed up about all the loot I'm borrowing: the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Jane has ALL SEVEN SEASONS with her on DVD, so...!), Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (the book!), Breakfast at Tiffany's (the movie!), and Lost in Translation, which I've been craving since I got here. It would be so easy to get any of these things at home, whenever I wanted, but here they feel like gleaming golden treasures and buoys in a potential sea of ennui.

In walks a guy I met at a party last night; he's from Germany but it turns out that he spent the last few months of 2009 researching at Berkeley, hanging out on the weekends in Dolores Park, a block above my apartment. And then we both flew thousands of miles to Rwanda and then finally we said hello. If you meet a fellow foreign aid worker/volunteer here in Kigali, it's not necessarily to get their email or phone number or even their name if you want to stay in touch or be friends; all you have to do is hang around at Bourbon for five minutes and they'll show up. We're all the usual suspects here; you could write a novel if you wanted about a bunch of people sitting out on this balcony and Bourbon and how varied their lives are and they're all really connected somehow and ain't life strange?!

Seriously, quick tale: On Thursday, I read an article from The New Times to my S5 students about a team of heart surgeons from Spokane, WA who had come to Kigali to perform sixteen open heart surgeries due to the lack of qualified doctors here. The next day, sitting here in Bourbon, two guys at the next table strike up a conversation with me and my friends, and I ask where they're from, and they say Spokane, WA. I ask them if they might happen to be heart surgeons, and they say yeah, they are. I tell them that I talked about them with my students for about half an hour the day before, and they're tickled pink. Coincidence? Rwanda.

When you run make sure you run to something and not away from cause lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere.

During a rare bout of gchat access, I found this old status, and felt like it should be blogortalized rather than lost to the sands of the internet (although I realize that now, with Google Buzz aka every thought you so much as brush up against is now broadcast to everyone you've ever emailed including your ex-boyfriend's mom, nothing is ever lost!):

Benny: i dont care where my progeny end up as long as they dont know where i am

Yessss.

oh hello little blog i didn't see you there

An interesting conversation with P and A today: Why does there seem to be absolutely zero rebellion or counter culture among this country's youth? Because they're focused, we concluded, on the goals they've been handed, on saving the country. Once they've worked hard their whole lives and saved the country, achieved their goals, perhaps their children will look at the saved country they live in and conclude that technology and upped GDP doesn't automatically equate to happiness, and they'll say fuck it. Perhaps, kind of like...us. Haha. Had we any choice in the matter? Have they? We like to think we do. They like to think they don't.

You're welcome, entire culture of the country I've lived in for precisely seven weeks. I will be speaking for you now.

I really should just stick to liking music, I'm alright at that:

What's been turning me all inside out, reminding me of my old home and making me comfortable in my new home, nightly: The Avett Brothers. Oh, oh, oh, would that I were in California: tour dates in Indio, Oakland, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Quincy.

I keep telling myself that it'll be fine
You can't make everybody happy all of the time...

The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
Cause nothing happens here that doesn't happen there
When you run make sure you run
To something and not away from
Cause lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you down.

Well you send my life awhirling
Darling when you're twirling upon the floor
Well who cares about tomorrow?
What more is tomorrow than another day?

New house, new roommates, new music for them to ask me to turn down in the middle of the night.