Life is Full

We tried to go to the museum and memorial here in Kigale before we left for rainforest camping but found it closed for diplomatic visits. President Bush is gradually realizing that his legacy will be one of diplomatic, military and economic failure and has taken, with a sudden and stinking desperation, to international relations as a hobby. His visits to East Africa carried an unctuous effort. Here in Kigale his visit to the genocide museum resulted in it being closed to tourists for two straight days. Returning on a bright and pleasantly breezy Tuesday, we found a faded floral wreath emblazoned with Bush’s name and an appropriately sober message of sympathy fourteen years too late. It was placed on a concrete foundation over the mass graves that were filled with the unidentified bodies that were rotting in Kigale’s streets back in 1994. These sit in a memorial garden that surrounds the genocide museum.
What is there to say about this place? About what has happened here and what it has meant to the people for whom this violence was not just a news story or a set of photographs in an air-conditioned and dimly lit museum?
There are facts. There is the fact that General Romeo Dallaire – officer in charge of the UN peace keeping mission in Rwanda – met with a government informant who offered proof that the Rwandan government was training youth groups to carry out a meticulously planned genocide. This plan was complete with government military support and annotated deathlists. There is the fact that this information was dismissed by the UN just weeks before President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by an unknown group. There is the fact that within hours of Habyarimana’s death roadblocks were set up in the streets of Kigale and the Interhamwe had begun the process of murdering, raping and torturing tens of thousands of people.
Too often in considering violence in Africa it is easy to understand and dismiss violence as a result of underlying ethnic tensions. We can chalk it up to the legacy of arbitrary borders created by an imposed government or the same supposed cultural differences that excuse a constant state of governmental corruption. There’s no need to understand what happened in any specific terms; it falls under a universal escape clause: it’s African and it’s ethnic. There’s nothing to understand. What I would have you take away from reading this is simple. What happened here was not unorganized. It was not a randomly expanded act of isolated savagery. The 800,000 fathers and mothers, sons and daughters murdered here were targeted over a period of months and years and the mechanism created and operated to extinguish their lives was coldly deliberate and intentional. What happened and what, therefore, could have been prevented was not spontaneous either in its planning or in its enactment.
Those are facts. They cannot carry the depth of meaning and emotion that I saw in the school group of high school age Rwandan youths with whom I went through the exhibits. Watching a video of interviews with survivors I was ashamed of my own feelings of sorrow and despair. I was embarrassed by how shallow any sense of loss I could summon must stand against their own. I watched as they wailed and sobbed, beat their hands against glass cases containing the clothes excavated off the bodies of those in the graves outside. 15…16? A year or two old when gangs of neighbors appeared at their doors with blunted machetes and bloody hands. I can’t grasp it. I can’t sit with it in the way that they do. In the face of that, what is there to do?
Nothing for now. Nothing for here. The healing that is taking place, the healing that may never end, is not a project for international concern. To make it so would be a disservice to those who perished and to any attempt for real and meaningful reconciliation. Whether this could have been prevented by the UN or the US or any other body is meaningless when it comes to truly shouldering the responsibility for what has happened.
I hesitated to write about our visit for this very reason. In the face of such astonishing loss – even absent our own government’s complicit silence when these things occurred – of what use are my pale descriptions? What could this piece transmit but its own inadequacy? Except that this personal sense of impotence in the face of such large forces is the same one that excuses our leaders from acknowledging tragedies like this one even as they continue to occur. When we stand aside and opt out of our own conscience because things seem overwhelming, that is when tragedy happens. When we cease to heed the courage of our convictions we leave the space for the kind of atrocities that were enacted here. Our penance for what happened here is refusing to give over to any sense of our own powerlessness. What we think, what we believe in the world matters. When we see something wrong, we must say something before it's too late.

The first few months I was here I couldn’t tell the Kenyans apart. The simplest way to say it was that they all looked the same to me. I didn’t realize it, but in my life at home I had grown accustomed to seeing one kind of face. If each race has a set of variables that tend to describe their proportions and colors, the shape of their chins or set of their eyes, then it would make sense that I am best equipped to detect subtle distinctions in the kind of face with which I am most familiar: my own. Over time I have improved and finding white faces the minority of what I have been surrounded by for the last ten months I now have the opposite problem. I am so unaccustomed to seeing white people that they all look the same to me. Waving to the girls at dinner just across from us on the patio, I get a mystified look and half hearted return wave.
But I am right. It is the Dutch girls from the bus office. At least, we think they are Dutch. They are from Holland and we can’t quite agree whether this makes them Dutch or Danish. Volunteers at a hospital in Mwanza they have been living here for two months and kick off tomorrow with a few weeks of travel before they head home. They had planned travel through Kenya but abandoned it in the wake of the election. This, combined with their exclamation of concern over our impending travel to Rwanda, makes them a casebook study in the danger that domestic disorder poses to a tourism industry. “Rwanda? Is that safe?” The genocide in Rwanda was 14 years ago next month and it is still discouraging visitors.
We found this place while we wandered about Mwanza today. The dining patio sits at the edge of the water, separated by a shallow wooden fence topped with small kerosene lanterns. I have been surprised at how calming the wide and quiet flatness of the lake is for me. It reminds me of home I suppose. The land around the lake seems new and ragged: hills climbing to an escarpment that surrounds the city center. The houses terrace up the hillsides creating the appearance of a Mediterranean village transplanted to central Africa. The water and coast are littered with boulders the size of houses, as though god had wandered along the shore scattering pebbles from his pockets. They poke out of the ground and water at intervals, like the ruins of some ancient settlement softened and rounded by centuries of wind and rain.
The Dutch (or Danish) girls are dining with an odd dozen ex-pats from work. Their co-workers resemble nothing so much as the cast of a primetime hospital drama. There’s a stunning, if vacant looking, blonde, a willowy and hippily dressed brunette. Standing slightly aloof is the older, rugged looking supervisor and the grim, tall, thin and dark counter-culture heartthrob. There’s a pop-band pretty boy in the white linen shirt, his tuft of tightly trimmed chin hair bronzed from the sun and a dumpy social misfit sitting with the pair of ambiguously ethnic minorities. The strongest aspect of their TV-drama resemblance is the exotic setting and honest joy that seems to pervade their dinner. Just watching them, I want to be a part of their group, their life. With little more than a cursory introduction, I find myself jealous of their lives. I imagine the houses, the lifestyle that their first world salaries command in this third world country. Their party stretches long into the night in my imagination, as they sip cocktails of fresh juice and imported vodka on the balcony of someone’s hillside home. Their conversation drifts in and out of English and Kiswahili, French and Dutch (or Danish) as they sit smoking clove cigarettes and waiting for the sun rise.
Watching them, wishing for the community and comfort they seem to possess in the midst of this strange and exotic land I start to see how I will remember the life I have left behind in Kenya. I’ve had dinners like this, sitting with my friends under the setting sun enveloped in a bond of common experience and mutual respect. Treasuring an isolation that makes the people and moments more precious than they would be anywhere else. Filled to overflowing with a true and honest desire to be here, now, and nowhere else with no one different. I have a quote written in one of my books to the effect that in travel we become all things: explorer and student, lover and academic, critic and creator and child. But I don’t know that we become residents. There’s a special sense of belonging in a place that’s not your own, of thriving in an adopted home. It’s not a role that we can “try on” as we might do with others. We visit places to try them out, to imagine our lives transplanted somewhere different, but there is a powerful difference between imagining a home and actually having one. It’s worth noting that, for a little while, I had one here.

The train station in Dar is cushioned from the street by a ring of families seated on their luggage, lounging in the grey light of the overcast day. The omnipresent and riotous mass of hawkers and street boys that surround the ferry to Zanzibar is absent here. The only things for sale in the street are the domestic supplies that three days on the train will require: five liter jugs of water and loafs of bread.
Rachel sits down with our bags and food on a bench just inside. While I am investigating the platforms a women sitting next to her asks for our two five-liter bottles. In broken English she indicates the child lying on the bench next to her. Rachel refuses just before the child’s actual mother returns to take her towards the train. As we rise to enter the platform we see at her feet already two five liter bottles, a mirror of what she asked us to give.
Third class is seating on a first-come first-serve basis. A stern, tightly packed crowd squeezes against the cars awaiting the conductor’s key. Across the platform sits an older train, one that has been gradually cannibalized over a decade of sitting in the yard. The glass is gone from the windows and the cushions from the seats. The light fixtures hang at the end of slack and worn wiring. Bare metal benches sit facing one another. The friction of a thousand sweating bodies has rubbed the paint from the metal leaving the dully glinting sheen of polished steel in the shape of legs and torsos. I imagine the struggle for these seats that has been repeated here over and over again – fighting for a comfort barely greater than the floor beneath it. And even after gaining a seat, three days of dust and bugs through open windows. Three days of unsleeping worry over luggage and theft. Rationed water and the sweet-sour stink of dirt and sweat.
In first class the compartment door has holes where the lock used to be that are plugged with wood scraps. The plastic light cover over the sole working fluorescent fixture is broken in a jagged streak. The pleather of the seats is ripped and faded from the sun. On each side of the door, facing the windows across the hallway, are one-way light panels with sliding covers propped open with scrap wood pieces. In the corner to the right of the window is a miraculously functional sink. I turn it on and wait for the pipe underneath to pool the water on the floor. Instead I hear it trickling down and out onto the tracks below. Above it, what might have been a medicine cabinet at one time is boarded over with the same wood that holds up the light panels and plugs the door. Down the hall, the toilet is a hole cut in the train carriage that drops right out onto the tracks. Squatting to release you can see the ground rushing by underneath. You watch as the contents of your bowels are splashed out across a half mile of track. We jury rig our mosquito net over the window and lay out our sleeping bags on the beds. We are shocked and delighted to find our rock-bottom expectations thoroughly contradicted even before a porter comes to the door with clean sheets and blankets. We are astonished to hear him ask us if we would like dinner delivered.
A half hour out of Dar Es Salaam the sound of car engines and paved roads on tires has disappeared. At our stops beside cornfields and tiny dirt crossings still more people run past us toward the third class cars and the only sound is the steam like hiss of the wheels as they slow to stop and gradually begin their roll again. The horn-blast signaling departure stands out like a beacon in the silence of the dusk. Sticking my head out the window as we enter a curve, I can see the train stretched our fore and aft, black heads leaning on arms as they watch the passing bush. The sounds of children and villages outside mingle with the voices of our neighbors and the people passing by in the hallway. We start and stop with an indeterminate and unfathomable regularity, as though god has asked us all to take a moment and dwell on this one spot. Consider this field and this sky. Absorb them honestly and fully.
There’s a dirty intimacy in this stifling space. Watching Rachel strip off her dusty, sweaty clothes to bathe with water from the tiny bowl of the sink, I imagine the scores of people sequestered in this space for two or three days of equatorial heat. Traveling with strangers or friends or family clinging to whatever ideas of personal space or hygiene are necessary to arrive at their destination. Rachel’s wet body under the dim bare bulb exudes a universality of human life startlingly distinct from the images of objectified female eroticism so often imbued in bathing. She stands half naked in this dirty and impersonal space as I will later and as people have since this train was new. Once upon a time the doors had locks and the floor was a solid mass of clean tile. The windows closed without bracing and the medicine cabinet was filled and emptied by each set of passengers who spent three days watching the landscape go coursing by. The clothes that lie piled on the bed and the walls that contain this bath are a changeable and ephemeral shell over a living, breathing thing. Rachel’s body enduring in the center of her manufactured skins; the endless procession of travelers removing the day’s dust continuing even as the floor has punctured, the locks failed and the windows cracked.
As night falls and the darkness outside carries only the mediated silence of a quiet summer rain. The light fades from the windows and the rhythmic beat of the train over the tracks fades from consciousness. Climbing into bed we turn out the light and find suddenly that the click-clack of the wheels over joined sections of track has diminished only within our own perception. In the dark, the motion and sound of the train become one thing cradling our senses and drawing us off to sleep.

Zanzibar has been an unforgiving experience when it comes to how I view myself. As my Kiswahili increasingly rusts in my brain and slows on my tongue it begins to feel as though I am losing a part of myself. It seems this trip is stripping me of the pride and strength I have cultivated from ten months of life here.
This place is packed with tourists, as it should be. The mechanisms are all in place to provide an experience that contrasts and comforts; one that challenges just enough to gratify, but not enough to draw any deep or profound questions. And though Rachel and I harp about authenticity - about real cultural experiences - what are we but culturally focused tourists? Elevating one variable of the experience above other equally imagined inputs to a fictionally ‘true’ whole. What’s ‘natural’ and what’s ‘normal’ is mostly a matter of picking a point in the progression and contrasting it with the present, the average or your preference. We search for essence and end up only shuttling between points of view.
The biggest blow to my sense of being special – of belonging in Africa– is how much I’ve enjoyed being here, camouflaged in a sea of white faces. How relieved I am to have my mistakes forgiven, to finally have the endless hawking and aggressive salesmanship actually apply to me. I can cease fighting the way I am viewed. I match, at last, the expectations daily foisted upon me.
Still, I can’t help feeling as though I have lost something, We share the streets with their overzealous tanning and corn-rowed auburn hair over pasty dry scalps. There’s the same ‘exotic’ African print cut into handbags and trousers, tank-tops and scarves. Cameras are slung over every arm and neck like guns. Every shop and duka echoes with the same argument and rotely memorized phrasebook exchanges. Rachel and I talk about them, snipe at their hair or dress as they come down the alley. We abuse them for reminding us of ourselves.
Most of my existence in Africa has been based around not being a tourist. I’ve struggled to validate my presence in tiny villages and back road bars through depth of commitment - by emphasizing the length of my stay. “I’m not a tourist. I live here.” Being special has become a burden. It started as a congratulation. As feeling better and more and different than those against whom I compared yourself. ‘Special’ ends as a violent and futile protest against a gathering sense of commonality. One that hollows you out and leaves an echo in the space you think you are supposed to fill. In truth, Rachel and I have been in a pissing contest since the day we stopped being volunteers and started being tourists - a word we shrink from using.
It dies hard because this whole thing started in a spirit of exceptionalism. We chose this trial; we elected this time to do something uncommon and unusual. Whether from a youthful temperament or some mix of deeply imbedded iconoclasm and historically posited guilt, we came to do and be something different. (Though it’s important to remember that we came to Africa to do it, a place where generations of white faces have arrived with similar sentiments of their own uniqueness.)
I feel sad to watch it slip away. Different or not, I felt different before. I had an honest pride in my choice to be here and my reasons for doing so. Now, the same thing I used to hold with a quiet confidence at the back of my hand has become an emblem I’m desperate to display. Instead of feeling special, I strive to prove that I am and it fills my interactions with calculated inferences and over-confident authority. My need to tell someone how it really is deepens in concert with a growing fear that I don’t really know. True or not, as I increasingly elevate the ‘authentic’ experience I can’t help but see how absurd my own lingering claim of uniqueness is becoming and, perhaps, how absurd it was to begin with.
The loss is less about my permanent self than about how I viewed myself here. And it’s not a loss. A year ago I would have seen it as so, but however I have grown tells me that it’s just a change; it’s a part of growing. I’m coming home not with a feeling that I’ve failed to authentically be here, but rather the knowledge that being anywhere has less to do with what you know or how long you’ve stayed as it does with feeling like you belong. As always, the only one who can truly validate your presence, your purpose, your intentions, is you.
The gradual relinquishing of my exceptional status is like a slow release of pressure as I come ascend from the depths, back towards the easy and familiar life I knew. To lose a part of something, it must begin with the kind of completeness that can never describe a life. I am not losing a part of myself, merely leaving it behind on the road to something new. I only hope that tomorrow finds me as optimistic and excited for the future as today.