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.