Women in Uganda

My homestay mother is 22, I found out a few nights ago. She got married at 16. She has two children under 6, and a third is on the way. My neighbor got married at 15, and yesterday a woman came over to visit with her one-month old baby — she was 14.

Oh, and my dad is 40.

But don't get me wrong, my dad is great. And maybe, because they HAVE to mature so early here, out of necessity, it's not as outlandish for a young woman to feel ready to be married. I don't know though...

It is illegal in Uganda to marry a minor, but that is not enforced (like most laws in this country), especially in the villages, where parents marry off their daughters so they can get the bride price.

My mom said she is lucky; she is so happy with her husband, and many women who marry so young are not happy in their marriages. If the man decides to end the marriage (divorce isn’t really necessary, the man just gets to make that call), the woman gets nothing. Women can legally own property, but this is just another useless law with few real-life ramifications. And many of these women are uneducated, so good luck trying to provide for yourself if your marriage goes kaput!

If she’s lucky, she can go back to her parents until some other man comes along and wants to marry her. But if she has children, or if she gets to keep the children, her parents usually won’t accept her back; she has to “find her own way,” as one man told me.

Many parents won’t accept their daughter back regardless, because they’d have to “refund” part of the bride price. Don’t worry guys, you can return your purchase if you aren’t fully satisfied, but because it’s “used,” you can’t get all of your money back.

But my mom said she would be fine if her marriage ended — her husband paid for her to attend school for sewing and design, and she’d just open up a shop, selling dresses and making wedding cakes, another lucrative skill she has acquired, she told me as I learned how to pound sim-sim (sesame seeds, I think?) into a flour like powder, then grind it with a rock into paste.

A while back, we went to the Acholi Cultural Center to learn about “nonformal education” and watch some traditional dances. The directors of the center told us about their mission and the pillars on which they based their programs, one of which was women empowerment, while another was “eradicating bad culture,” an interesting choice of words, I thought. They told us about Acholi traditions: the chief, who is the firstborn son of the chief before him (but don’t worry, the women can be in charge of the cows), the inheritance of property (again, women traditionally can’t own property), and the way they prevent incest. If a man sleeps with a woman of the same clan, he must jump off the roof of a hut, naked, in front of the whole village, then pee on the woman with whom he committed the crime. Then they bring out a female dog — apparently bestiality cures incest.

I’m guessing this is the “bad culture” the center tries to end. But they never said that; they just said it’s shameful for the man and he would never do it again. And when we asked them about what they were doing to promote gender equality, they didn’t exactly give us the answer we had hoped.

They told us they promoted nonformal, traditional education in the family settings, which consists of pairing the boys with their fathers to learn hunting and planting, and the girls with their mothers to learn the duties expected of a good Acholi wife.

The girls learn to carry jerry cans of water for miles, for cooking, drinking, and bathing for everyone in the family; carry firewood the same; they learn to pound and grind millet for millet bread, groundnuts for groundnut paste, sim-sim for whatever dish I had yesterday, stir the impossibly difficult pot of posho (made from maize flour, I think?); plant and cultivate and harvest alongside their future husbands; cook after they, the women and the men, come home from the day’s work on the farm; sweep the house with a tied bundle of hay, and mop it, bent over, with just a wet cloth; wash the whole family’s clothes if there isn’t enough money to hire a housegirl – never a houseboy – to do it for them; care for the children; and produce more children.

These cultural practices “teach a moral way of life,” the director said; they teach women to be “well-behaved.” If a woman doesn’t know to sit by the door chasing chickens away while a man eats, or if she doesn’t kneel when she offers water to a man visiting her home, well, no one will want to marry her. Women have to be respectful.

In the camps, during the war, the husbands’ duties decreased; they had no land to farm, so men just sat and drank, for the most part. They felt they had no power, no authority, so alcoholism and domestic abuse skyrocketed.

On the other hand, women’s responsibilities doubled. While the men did nothing, most women took up petty trading, taking whatever they could find or whatever they could make, and trading it with other women doing the same thing. Along with their old roles of mother, cook, cleaner, pack mule, etc., the women were the breadwinners, and they had to pay for children’s school fees as well as taxes, and, because the World Food Program provided the food, the alcohol for their husbands.

Many men in Uganda have multiple wives. If a man is monogamous, one lecturer told us, people would say "he has been defeated by his woman." The more wives, the more power. Same goes for children — one man my age said his father had 15 wives (unusual even for Ugandans), and 48 children. He didn’t even know the names of some of his siblings. And his mother was a rare one; she left his father and set out, much like my mother says she would, setting up a shop and finding her own way.

The men at the center said that rape was never a problem before. Women didn’t complain; men would just pick them up off the street and take them home, “whether they liked it or not.” Slapping was an expression of love.

But during the war, rape became an issue because rebels (and government soldiers) were kidnapping and/or raping young girls and women. The international community brought attention to it, so some changes started slowly happening. Now rape is illegal, and now female genital mutilation in Eastern Uganda is "discouraged" by culture and by law.

Since the war ended, the director of the cultural center told us, things have been improving. It takes time, and we are just "culture romanticizing," because A) America has complete gender equality and B) gender equality is something only Westerners push for/want, right? Wrong.

And then he said that women are "cheap" now because they complain. Or at least the educated ones do.

To Grandmother's House We Go!

The other night, my mom, Belita and I went to my grandmother's house for a short visit.

Of course, walking down the uneven dirt road, I fell. Typical. And I didn't catch myself because I was holding Belita, so I scraped up my knees and one ankle, and I had to walk the rest of the way with blood running down my leg. Mom kept saying, "Ooh, I am unhappy. You hurt yourself; I am unhappy," as we walked, and my grandmother looked completely shocked when she saw me. She went to get a bucket of water and some soap for me to clean my scrapes, and by the time she came back, her whole grass hut village had gathered to watch the hurt mzungu.

So, I finished cleaning myself off and wrapping a little cloth around my knee to keep the flies away, and we went into my grandma's hut. The thin old woman offered me and my mom the couch, while she sat on a mat on the floor. She had prepared a FEAST for us (we had already eaten a "snack," the size of a normal dinner, before we left the house.. at about 3, after I had already had lunch). As usual, we were expected to finish everything.

My grandma decided on an Acholi name for me at some point during the meal, one different from the Acholi name my mother had already given me. I don't remember what it was, but it meant "what can I do?"... If only she knew how fitting that was. But my mom eventually convinced her the earlier name, Aber, was better. Grandma told me about the meaning of her young daughter's name, which was something about coming close to death. I asked why, and she replied that when she was pregnant with the child, she had been shot by LRA rebels. She and the baby almost died.

My mom later told me that woman wasn't actually her mother, just someone who took her in when her real mother died. I didn't ask how her birthmom died. But this adoptive mom, she said, lost her father and two brothers in the war. I'm slowly realizing, just like in Rwanda, death has touched everyone here.

Family

I absolutely ADORE my family.

My mom is young and energetic; she has a high singsong voice that she uses as often as possible. She’s very fashionable, even with the five-month-old bump just now showing on her belly. She is a tailor, and she’s given me a little fashion show of her clothes – the first dress she ever made is an amazing 80’s prom dress with a black velvet top complete with poofy sleeves, and a long white ballerina-material skirt. She made me try it on (it fit!) and wanted to give it to me, but I legitimately don’t have room in my suitcase.

I have a one-and-a-half year old sister named Belita, and she is the cutest thing in the world! She loves to see herself… she could sit for hours looking at pictures of herself on her dad’s laptop, saying “Ooh! Lita!” every time her face appears on the screen.

Recently she’s been sick, and I was terrified she had malaria. People here say that families plan on losing about three children before they reach their fifth birthday, to malaria or diarrhea or something. My baby sister has already had malaria once, and she’s not yet two. Thank God it’s only the flu.

My dad is a program director at the biggest radio station in town: Mega FM. He’s a doting father, and much more quiet than his wife. I don’t know him very well because every weekend he goes to school in Kampala; he’s working on a degree in Conflict Management.

I live in a little house in a compound surrounded by grass huts and pigs and goats and chickens and ducks running everywhere. Two (or three?) other families live in my compound, and all of them have kids under 6 – I love it! It’s just one big group of women and children all the time… I have no idea where all the other husbands are.

The electricity is never working, and my toilet in a hole in the tiled floor in the bathroom, right next to where I take a bucket shower in the morning. But to be honest, I’d much rather use that latrine than a public toilet in a gas station in the US! And I am seriously considering taking bucket showers in the States. We waste SO MUCH WATER with our fancy “massage” showerheads and all.

My mom always tries to convince me to be the one to kill the chicken whenever we have one for dinner (I told her the only meat I eat is chicken… I can’t bear to eat a goat or duck or cow… or one of the fly-swarmed fish I see in the market), but I refuse point-blank. From all I’ve learned about the American meat industry from all the vegetarians in our group, I’m also going to seriously reconsider how I eat meat when I get back.

Nakivale Refugee Camp: Part 2

Half of the group went to see Rwandese refugees like Oliver, but after my lovely conversation with him, I decided I had heard enough of their side. So I went with the other half of the group to the Congolese refugees (this sounds too much like a zoo visit) because I wanted to learn about the conflict in the DRC.

I don’t know much about the conflict in the Congo, other than that Rwandese militias are there; some LRA militias are there, and there seems to be utter chaos that the government cannot control. In the past 20 years, millions have been killed, and nobody really knows by whom because there are so many rebel forces, and there doesn’t really seem to be an end in sight from what I can tell. The largest UN peacekeeping force in the world is stationed in the DRC, but their mandate is set to expire early this summer. I have no doubt that mandate will be extended, even though the Congolese government apparently wants them to leave in order to prove they have control over the country.

We walked into a concrete shed/room and filed into wooden benches. Congolese men and women filed into benches on either side of us until the room was packed; probably 25 people were standing in the back. Our director introduced us as students, “ambassadors” for their stories, and future leaders of America. Then the refugees started asking us questions.

First, why so many Somali refugees get to come to the States, and Congolese don’t. We had come once before, and nothing had changed; what were we doing here again?

Our director William answered the second question for us: we didn’t come to help; we came to learn. We came to hear their stories and spread them in America, and maybe in the future, we could change their situation. But there would be no short-term satisfaction.

William was very clear and calm in his explanation, but he seemed angry. I didn’t really understand that – their question seemed perfectly justified to me. This group of white kids, with our nice clothes and notebooks and pens, comes in and listens to their problems, writes down some details about their personal lives, and leaves. No help, no recognition, really, of what they told this group of strangers ever comes… the strangers go back and live their lives, as usual, and so do the refugees. So why did we come, if we weren’t going to do anything?

Then they told us their story.

"This is a people war, not a guns war. If it was a guns war, we would go home," a refugee who translated for us said. Many of them said they have been in these camps most of their lives.

They told us about the water – “The health people told us safe, pure water is clear, but ours has color.” They get food from World Food Program, but they have trouble cooking the maize and beans they get because they don’t have firewood. Cutting the trees is forbidden; it’s a conservation area, so the women (always the women!) have to walk miles to go get logs for the fire. Many get raped on the way. And the amount of food isn’t even enough – the school requires a certain amount of maize for school fees. So their children aren’t in school.

One man stood up; he had a degree in Public Health, but he couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t even get books; he felt like he was losing all his knowledge and would never get it back. A Burundian nurse stood up – same problem. She was born in this camp, had lived here her whole life. She didn’t even know where “home” was. And she had gone to the nearby clinic to ask for an interview for a nursing job recently, but they told her to come back in two weeks. She came back so excited! When she returned after two weeks, though, they told her they had changed their minds… they needed nurses, but not refugee nurses.

Another woman stood up. She said life was hard for women, especially those who weren’t married. When there is some sort of manual labor a woman cannot do, she has to ask a man. But they usually won’t help without compensation. So the women have to have sex with these men, even if they might get pregnant, even if they know the man has HIV, even if that ruins most chances of their getting married in the future.

After she spoke, almost everyone in room started whistling and yelling louder than before. We couldn’t decide: were they whistling in support of this woman, or were they making fun of her suffering?

After we thanked them for their time and honesty and filed out of the benches and the stuffy room, we walked back towards the van. I stopped to say hello to a cute little boy in a Tigger shirt and a doe-eyed girl with braids. I was looking at them, smiling, when a man walked up: “When you go back, you will forget these.”

…I never even knew their names. How can I remember them, distinguish theirs from the faces of so many children I've seen?

We rode back to town in the van and spent the night celebrating Charity’s birthday at a bar.

Nakivale Refugee Camp: Part 1

Cows got thinner and thinner the closer we got to Nakivale. More kids have runny noses; fewer houses are made of concrete. They are made of mud and sticks and have tarps for roofs, weighed down with more sticks to prevent them from blowing away or collapsing during the rainy season.

I sat next to a man named Oliver on the way to the camp. He is a lawyer, a Rwandese refugee, a Hutu living in the camp with thousands of other Hutus, who claim they are innocent of the genocide crimes many are accused of committing.

Oliver told me his side of the story, which began with the “real” facts: 50,000 Tutsis, at most, were killed in the 100 days of genocide (80,000 by most counts, 1 million according to Rwandans). No more could have been killed; there were so few! So many had fled Rwanda long before 1994… although there were no massacres before the 1994 genocide; apparently the Tutsis had other reasons to flee their country.

See, genocide wasn’t planned; even the radio programs just “incited hatred,” but never promoted killings. Hutus are simply naturally “brutal,” and they loved their president (who, he claimed, was killed by the RPF), so they, actually only a few, according to Oliver, picked up their machetes and started killing when their president was assassinated.

Hutus are also naturally merciful, so many tried to hide or save the Tutsis, as Oliver did (of course!) during those three months. But Tutsis are ruthless. When the revenge killings began, no Tutsi tried to save a Hutu. So the real tragedy is the 1.5 million Hutus that were killed after the genocide (the figure from most sources is 25-40 thousand, most killed when the RPF was still trying to stop the killing).

The people sitting in the camps – most are innocent. And they want the guilty ones to be punished, of course. But the gacaca courts in Rwanda punish the innocent and free the guilty (makes total sense for Rwandans to free those who killed their families and friends..)! If there is no evidence other than one witness’ testimony, a man must be acquitted; if there are no survivors from a killing, a man must be acquitted. SO the innocent people in the camps cannot go back to Rwanda.

Reconciliation is not actually happening in Rwanda. People simply say it is because the government, under the new divisionism/genocide ideology law, will put them in prison if they say anything different. Tutsis are teaching their children to hate Hutus, pointing them out on the playground, and taking them to memorials (memorials! God forbid!), while Hutus in the camp are doing the “right” thing: not teaching their children anything about ethnicity or the genocide.

Oh, and the bones in Murambi are not Tutsi bones. They’re Hutu bones that Tutsis dug up from graves to make the genocide seem worse than it really was. (I suppose the scars on survivors’ faces, the missing limbs are made up too?)

They appreciate what Kagame has done for Kigali’s economic development. But still, the only barrier to reconciliation, the only problem for Rwanda, is Kagame. Because they have proven that the democratic process is impossible in Rwanda (Evidence: Kagame, a Tutsi, won), they must “prove him wrong militarily.” The armies in the DRC and Burundi etc. have more weapons than you can imagine, and they will act very soon, Oliver said with a chuckle. The grenades in Kigali were too militarily weak to be the rebels’ work. They were the government’s ploy to scare people into letting the government squash anything resembling opposition in these months before the elections.

The scariest part about this conversation was not the BLATENT rejection of everything I’ve learned in the past month; it was that some of his story might actually be true. What if the grenades were the government’s doing? Everything about the genocide itself was false, but I don’t have a clue as to what is true about the current regime… for all I know, Oliver’s story that Kagame had police beat his parents when they were searching for him could be true! For all I know, Ingabire’s associate (Ingabire is the opposition candidate, her associate was accused of genocide recently) was in Sweden in 1994, like Oliver said, and the government is using anything it can to reduce her influence.

NO IDEA what to believe about that, but I do know that those bones in Murambi, those survivors I saw, were real. It was beyond disrespectful to say that they weren’t… beyond disrespectful to say that there were no killings in 1959, the year my Tutsi family fled to Uganda and stayed for 35 years.

It’s interesting that Tutsis were in the same spot in 1990. Refugees with nothing to do, no country to call home until they mobilized the RPF and invaded Rwanda that year. Now these refugees say they will do the very same thing…

Kibuye

SO behind! And now procrastinating writing a ten page paper on media and the Rwandan government... interesting topic actually. Kagame's government recently made "divisionism" and "genocide ideology" illegal, and the definitions of those terms are so broad that the government can manipulate it to mean just about anything. But theoretically, the laws make some sense in context. I can't figure out what to believe... the government is definitely VERY restrictive of the media, but I don't know, it seems like the international community sometimes forgets that genocide happened here only 15 years ago. Maybe restrictions on free speech are still a little bit necessary, if even just to assuage the fears of survivors who think it might happen again at any moment... but definitely not to the extent of suspending the BBC Kinyarwanda radio program for "denying genocide" and an independent newspaper for an article exposing a government official in a sex scandal. And disappearing journalists... that scares me.

Here goes. A semi-update on my recent life.

We spent a few days this past week in a little paradise in western Rwanda: the town of Kibuye on Lake Kivu.

The drive there was less than idyllic, curving this way and that, falling all over everyone in the crowded taxi, but beautiful nonetheless. Especially when we neared Kibuye — the water is an impossible teal, and the greenery just overflows around it. Even the hotels, white or cream with terra cotta color roofs, couldn't ruin the scenery; they almost looked fitting.

We joked that our program directors were going to spoil us and get a five-star hotel for our mini-vacation, but we expected our usual hostel situation. However, we continued driving, up to this little place atop a penninsula... a pleasant surprise compared to our usual accommodations! We were right on the water, two people per room, and we had HOT SHOWERS! It was amazing.

The water was perfect for swimming, and the color was no less incredible up close. We took off after lunch, swimming to an island in the distance... I didn't quite make it, but a couple people did. We read and journaled on the "beach," really just steps down to the chalky white volcanic rock that forms the lake. The whole scene looked pulled from a coloring book! We took a little motor boat to a "Bat Island" nearby the next day, supposedly the habitat for around 5 million bats.

A lovely boat ride and short walk later, at least a million of them were swarming over our heads. They were everywhere, flying in circles, mirroring this weird ring around the sun. It was completely surreal! And kind of scared some people, or grossed out those who were pooped on, so we backtracked and took a swim before heading back to the hotel.

That was basically how our days went, sitting and reading in the sun or swimming in the clear blue water, surrounded by volcanic islands and mountains in the distance. Amazing!! The phrase of the week was, "Guys, we get college credit for this," until Apollon told us his story.

Apollon is our Assistant Program Director, and a survivor of the genocide. He had just graduated high school at the time. He and his family hid in a university in Kigali that was protected by the UN; they thought they were safe. But the UN had to evacuate the campus for their own safety, and they left the people hiding there to fend for themselves. Apollo lost his entire family that early April, but he somehow escaped; he hid in the bush for weeks, and he witnessed the rape and carnage of the genocide firsthand.

We came back from Kibuye Thursday, and we visited a TIG camp the next day. Apollon translated a convicted genocidaire's words for us; the man, who had killed five people, said he was "at peace," and happy at the prospect of returning home in a few years. Apollon translated this. Apollon, who saw men like these kill people with his own eyes, Apollon, who survived while hiding from people like this, whose whole family was killed by someone like this! I don't know how he did it. I asked him how he felt about the whole situation, and he said he was happy this man was at peace with himself, though he didn't necessarily think it was true. He said healing is impossible after genocide... it's just not fair that Apollon can't heal, but this person can say he's at peace. And these TIG workers can carry machetes and hoes, doing work for the community, which is great and all, but still.

Apollo said, if he were president, he'd outlaw machetes. I think I would too. And I'd hate dogs. Every time I see one here, or hear one howl at night, I think of the bones I saw at one of the church memorials... the bodies were left unburied for weeks; when Apollon came to help design the memorial, they were still untouched, but for those that had been eaten by dogs.

Friday night was the homestay party, on a lighter note! We collaborated with our brothers and sisters to make a "cultural presentation" for our parents and our partner school's students. The Americans did a traditional Rwandan dance; the Rwandans danced to Cotton-Eye Joe (sp?), and then we sang, together, a Kinyarwanda song composed by our very own Lewie... who my sister described as a "Rwandan with white skin." God, I love our group.

Tomorrow we leave for a refugee camp is Uganda... I am not ready. I love my family; I love this country! Maybe it's just how beautiful the country is, but everyone is just so happy. We're kind of cleansed, in a way, from all the American hustle and bustle. It'll be awful when I get back to the States... I'm going to be at least an hour late to everything.

Gisenyi

Chiara and Kara cut their hair Friday – beginning of a very interesting weekend.

That night, a bunch of us planned to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner and out to a club afterwards, so we went home early to tell our families where we were headed for the night. Well, my dad wasn’t home, so all of us kids were locked out of the house until he got back with the key. It was so much fun though! We sang a bunch of American songs; they attempted to teach me the Kinyarwanda/Swahili songs that came on the radio, and I taught them some ballet… my brothers got rhythm! They were showing off their hiphop skills, which was especially adorable with my youngest brother, who is too shy to speak to me much. But we finally got in the house, and I finally got to the restaurant at 8:30 – half an hour after we all were supposed to meet in town.

No one else got to the restaurant until 10. They got lost in the taxi or something, going the wrong way, who knows. But the food was great! We didn’t end up going to the club afterwards, though, because we finished dinner at midnight and wouldn’t get home until 1 am anyway. And walking down a dark dirt road at 1 am is scary enough; we didn’t want to make it any worse for ourselves.

The last Saturday of every month is umuganda all over Rwanda. Basically, at least one person from each family shows up at a certain spot in the neighborhood to do community service all morning, and then they gather for a meeting to discuss the community’s problems and possible solutions. My neighborhood was bushwhacking, making another dirt road.

I didn’t really know how to use the tool my brother Robert handed me (something between a hoe and a machete), so a random man lent me his hoe for 20 minutes, and I dug out some weedy bushes/grass. That was about the extent of my umuganda. I didn’t feel too bad about my worthlessness because several women were too well-dressed to do any of this work and were simply socializing. Umuganda, in general, seemed like a useful time for a bunch of locals to get together and talk – and be productive at the same time. It’s remarkable how quickly the road materialized down the hill… seemingly going nowhere, just further into a field.

So I started up a conversation with some man about my age, and he told me that the whole neighborhood used to be a forest. “In ten years, there used to be rabbits. You can find no rabbits now,” he said (in ten years = ten years ago). He said he and his friends used to hunt birds with slingshots in the area. It’s strange to look at this devastatingly beautiful country and know, if I have any hope for a prosperous future of the people here, much of that natural beauty will be gone, replaced by shopping malls or gas stations.

After my exciting stint at umuganda, I met some people in town and hopped on a bus to Gisenyi, a resort town on Lake Kivu. Some girls in our group had left the night before, so we hung out with them Saturday night, slept 4 to one queen bed, and went to the beach in the morning.

The beach is beautiful. God, everything here is so gorgeous! The lake is perfectly blue and backed by silhouetted blue mountains on one side, green hills to the other. To our right, stately houses stuck out into the lake – Goma!! The DRC! Weird, how close we were; we probably could have swum over the border.

The other girls had warned us – they had about 35 men and boys surrounding them at the beach, when they were doing nothing but sitting in their bathing suits. Granted, bikinis aren’t all that common, nor are white girls on the public beach, but STILL. It was RIDICULOUS. In less than half an hour, we had 20 people, mostly kids, circling the four of us. We weren’t even doing anything! We weren’t even speaking, hardly! Normally, I would attribute it to a simple cultural difference and be totally fine, but there was one guy shooing people away for a while, so I know this was inappropriate anywhere. And then, when I was asleep right beside my backpack (I don’t know how I slept with all those people staring at us and talking), someone reached in, grabbed my camera AND my glasses and ran off. My friends were reading, and they didn’t even notice what had happened; some kid had to gesture to us that someone had run off with my stuff. So, camera and glasses gone, people literally encircling us who absolutely refused to leave, plus the fact that I had gotten up like five times during the night, not feeling well... I was not happy.

So we left the beach all in a huff and went to lunch at the Serena Hotel down the road. I felt like I was walking into another world. There were UN cars sprinkling the parking lot, a huge fountain in front of the entrance, white everywhere… white people everywhere, too. And the brunch looked absolutely divine. I think I forgot how amazing hotels can be – it was so nice to use their bathroom and sit on their porch, looking out on their private beach! We couldn’t afford the amazing-looking brunch, so we got the cheapest pasta on the menu and just enjoyed pretending to be hotel guests. Even weirder than the switch from our beach experience to this hotel was that this place was more along the lines of my normal vacation – am I always so removed from the real lives of people around me? I can’t believe that 500 yards made such a difference… naked kids who couldn’t be more curious about these strange foreigners to the occasional (very rich) African not even giving us a second glance.

As guilty as a felt, falling into this fake world of sky blue pools and “traditionally dressed” Rwandan busboys, I felt so comfortable there. And the pasta tasted like home. But then we had to walk back through town, brush off the kids following us and asking for money, and catch the public bus home, and strangely enough, for the first time, I saw another white person using the public transportation.

There is SO MUCH I wish I could put on here – our trip to Nyungwe National Park, our trip to the Millenium Village, stuff that is far more important than Gisenyi – and maybe soon I’ll have enough time to update.