I'm going home.
Flying away makes me examine my experiences. I reflect and reflect until I worry the mirrors inside me will shatter from over-thought.
To the countless greens of Rwanda, the dusty infinities of Tanzania, the blissful bananas of Uganda, the recently-peaceful politics of Kenya, the picture-perfect beaches of Zanzibar and the friends and strangers who unify and diversify the land with all with your culture, beauty and warmth: kwa heri.
Warning: this entry is graphic, but it's not illustrated and it's not happy. I suggest you skip it if you don't like morocity. Morose-ness. Whatever.
I've promised myself I'd keep pristine memories many times: my first kiss, my first visit to a refugee camp, my first near-death experience, and just last week, my closest view of a death.
But even this latest one is blurring already, just like all my other memories.
It was on an express bus from Kenya to Uganda, and I can't remember which country we were in. I was in the front row. The bus slowed as we approached a village, and we saw crowds up ahead. I remember colours: women wearing colourful vitenge and buildings wearing colourful cell-phone advertisements. I can't remember which colours or which cell-phone companies.
A small crowd was looking at a red motorcycle lying on the ground. (I think it was red.) Then, one bus-length later, the main crowd formed a silent and stationary half-circle around a body sprawled on the road, fresh blood around its head.
I winced involuntarily. The body was a full bus-length away from its vehicle, and its arms weren't at the angles they should have been.
And here's the part I want to remember: the two passengers across the aisle laughing at my reaction.
But I won't remember it properly. I never do.
This summer I visited Rwanda's genocide memorial again. I discovered I'd forgotten something I'd sworn not to.
The memorial is a hall of videos, pictures, and texts. Its layout and style are similar to Shakespeare's Globe in London, except for the bits in the core of the circular floor plan: skulls, bones, and t-shirts.
The t-shirts stand out: they're empty. At some point in the past each t-shirt represented a person; now, each t-shirt is a hole in the fabric of reality where that person ought to be.
Three years ago, one t-shirt burned a permanent place in my memory. It's centred in the display as you enter the room: a big, white t-shirt with a picture of Parliament and, in bold red, "Ottawa". What was that second-hand t-shirt's life like? When did it leave Canada? Why was it forced to experience such trauma? What did it see? In some sense it's easier for me to relate to a Canadian t-shirt than to a Rwandan genocide victim.
This summer I returned to the memorial. I watched the videos and read the narratives more critically than last time (because of my three years of reading about the topic), but I was terrified that the Ottawa t-shirt would get past my cynicism. A Canadian companion ahead of me entered the room of t-shirts; she backtracked and told me in a subdued voice: "come see this."
I knew it was the white t-shirt. I braced myself; and when I saw it, the shock wasn't what I expected.
The t-shirt wasn't white.
It didn't even have a picture of parliament on it.
Sure, it said "Ottawa". But my memory, which was so vivid, was wrong.
There are moments in life that, once experienced, I want to preserve intact. Some inspire smiles and laughs out of nowhere; others, pangs of regret; and some, like the Ottawa t-shirt ... well, I'm not quite sure. That's why I never wanted to forget.
But I did.
(As for my first kiss: I don't remember what colour the couch was.)
Two years ago on this blog, I made a victim out of a friend.
Quoting myself:
One week later, the employers hired a replacement. They would never see their old house girl again.
...
She is beyond rescue. No well-meaning person can do anything about her situation. In the darkest parts of our hearts, for all our pride of our notions of feminism and gender equality and statistics, we know this. And in the darkest part of your heart, you already know all the stories and statistics and words I can muster.
Pendo, this is your eulogy: more respect than most women ever receive in Africa.
Actually, they saw her just last week. And so did I. A few weeks after I wrote my story about her being "abducted" by family, Pendo returned to Dar es Salaam and started sewing dresses for a living. Currently she's unemployed and job-hunting, but her smile is wider than ever.
How did I write a story so far from the truth? I've since learned enough about journalism to explain.
First, I didn't use any primary sources. I didn't talk with either Pendo or her brother: I just used hearsay and prejudice.
Second, I tried to predict the future. I'm no expert at divination, women's issues or even Tanzania: my predictions are worthless.
Third, I used derogatory terms. I wrote words like "beyond rescue" and "eulogy" and I injected venom in "Africa".
I wrote as if Pendo would never read my website. I behaved like a superior, somebody wiser than she about her own life story. In taking away Pendo's individuality, I was grossly unfair.
I apologize to those who read my "I Hate Men" story and felt they learned something from it.
But I didn't have enough time or Swahili skills to tell Pendo about the original story or this correction, either. So Pendo, I apologize ... twice.
Julius, Carleton University's Rwandan superhero, invited me to visit his family in Uganda.
Crossing from Rwanda into Uganda, the road becomes unpaved and the border officials and bus ticket vendors happily try and scam you.
The pineapples become tastier, too.
Bananas spring up everywhere. Even Rwandans agree the matoke (mashed banana, Uganda's staple food) carries more flavour on this side of the border.
On Julius's property, right near the Rwandan border, there are beautiful cows.
Villagers set up nets to trap fishes in the rainy season. Now that the season is over, the water level has dropped and the nets aren't even submerged.
Cows still provide ample nutritious beverage and a small income.
Julius, the city slicker, hadn't visited his family in a year; they couldn't get enough of him.
The day came to an end...
...and a new one began.
After a 45-minute walk and 15-minute motorcycle ride, we arrived at the nearest trading hub. We waited for a bus instead of mounting this popular banana transport.
We spent a night in the Ugandan city of Mbarara.
On our bus back to Kigali (which, in Ugandan fashion, cost more than the going rate and took about twice the time and effort we were promised), a wandering minstrel sang us tunes.
I'd forgotten how different Uganda is from Rwanda. Food is cheaper and more plentiful; rules are more lax; and timing is more liberal. I wish I had the time to spend a few months there before my return to Canada in August.
If you know the president is coming, there are two ways to get his picture:
I'm a very nascent photo-journalist, so I can't do either very well. But I worked on the latter at today's gorilla-naming ceremony.
(Or, yes, you can just walk up to Don Cheadle and ask for his picture. Some Japanese guests and all my housemates did that. But those pictures just aren't as interesting to me.)
The key to getting a picture few others will get is to go somewhere few others will go. Therein lies a problem, of course: permission. Your best means of accessing a place you may not have permission to access is confidence. I had an identity card of some sort and an air of self-importance, and that got me far.
After that? The usual photography stuff, such as shooting from different angles, fiddling with camera settings and watching your subject's background.
I feel I got a good mix. What do you think?
The obligatory crowd shot. There was no way to capture it all, so I recklessly cropped it.
President Paul Kagame's signature wave. I hadn't expected to see this one, except that ....
... Kagame, aware of the August election, played to the audience and took an unplanned detour that led to the shot. There were more smiling faces, but by cropping I managed to focus on the best one and tell a joke, though at an imperfect angle.
This band announced Kagame's entrance. I could have taken a picture from the front, but security would have pushed me back and I didn't want to annoy them too early on. (These are the choices we make as journalists: annoy people now, or annoy them later when it may be worth more?)
Today was a gorilla-naming ceremony for the 14 newest endangered creatures in Rwanda. The real gorillas don't come to the ceremony, but fake ones did. The key here is to shoot people close together: the viewer should be able to clearly understand what everybody is doing. Except if he's in a gorilla suit. Oh, okay, and I'll explain: the ranger is just standing there, like the gorillas.
The ceremony had a bunch of world environmental leaders (it was World Environment Day, organized by the United Nations Environment Programme) announce the names of all the gorillas.
Of course, like any proper ceremony, it also had music. Lesson from television here: if you're going to use two similar-looking pictures in a row, make sure people in the second picture aren't facing in the same direction as people from the first.
These dancers were expertly synchronized. And I failed here in shooting their backs: I had fifty shots of dancers but most were too spaced-out to bring the neat line I craved and emphasize their perfect timing.
I ducked out of the spot I used for the last three shots (yes, it was the same spot--bad Adam!) to circle back to where I predicted Don Cheadle, who announced the name of the final gorilla, would arrive. I was right, and we were only about five people with cameras and three with video cameras. I could snap for a while and pick the shot that excludes everybody else.
Think about the perspective for a second: this is a downward shot. You can argue that's artistic; truth is, I was one row back in the media scrum and I was holding the camera over my head. My secret weapon was my SLR's swivel screen and its "live view" mode that makes it act like a point-and-shoot.
The final trick to a photo story is selection. I took about 500 pictures today but set my limit at 10. The ones I gave here seek to tell a story or convey an emotion. You may think I did a lousy job at this, but there was very little news value to the event. To me, the story was, "Adam running around shooting whatever he can see."
If you were hoping for "Adam with Kagame" or "Adam with Cheadle" pictures, I may post them. Somebody else took those shots.
Bitenga is about as remote a village as you can find in Rwanda, and I needed to be in Kigali as quickly as possible.
Five hours in minibuses and two hours of uphill walking had gotten me here, but as a journalist I had failed. The village next door had been displaced into Bitenga to make way for trees and chimpanzees, but I couldn't report on it: as I walked towards the villagers' new homes, I was firmly redirected to an official's bedroom, where the dozing authority called his faraway boss and told me I couldn't interview anybody without permission.
Off the record, the village is a journalistic treasure. There are winners and losers, but nobody dares put a name next to a complaint for fear of making life worse. Several people told me, "come back with permission and I'll tell you all about it."
These new homes shelter untold stories. It's a pity I couldn't tell them.
I didn't have time to get permission. I had dinner plans in Kigali. It was 1:30 p.m., and I had meant to leave at noon. The race was on.
I had walked the last 15 kilometres, but I didn't have time to return that way. The villagers, who swarmed me but withheld interviews, called up a motorcycle taxi from Gakeri, the nearest village with minibus service. I chatted and snapped some photographs while I waited.
The motorcycle came and I hopped on, and with an imaginary "hi-ho silver!" I was zipped downhill. The driver told me he knew all the issues here, too, and he speaks four languages so can help with translation if I ever want to come back.
Race or not, I had to dismount to snap a shot.
I told the driver of my haste and with a friendly "no problem," he promised I'd catch a minibus soon. But when we got to Gakeri and I dismounted, he asked around and discovered a minibus had only just left.
It was 2:00 p.m. and it would be a while before another minibus came.
He told me to get back on, and I, bemused with nothing to lose, did.
"Sit closer," he warned.
The motorcycle transformed into a rocket and we bounced down the dirt road as quickly as a small avalanche, beeping but never slowing for amazed passers-by. Ten minutes later, we caught up with the minibus and, with a wave of the driver's hands and honks of his horn, stopped it.
There was still room! I climbed in and willed the road to be less bumpy. The obstinate road would hear none of it, and we plodded downhill for hours.
A girl behind me asked me if I could help her enter Canada.
Soon, at another village, an old man and a teenager joined the rest of us passengers. Then the all-too-familiar conversation started, in Kinyarwanda:
"It's a white person!"
"What's he doing here?"
"I think he doesn't understand Kinyarwanda."
(I don't, for the most part, but I gave a knowing smile anyway.)
"He does know Kinyarwanda!"
"Do you know Kinyarwanda?"
"I'm learning Kinyarwanda," I answered. Switching languages, I continued: "but I know Swahili."
"He understands Swahili!"
The old man fell asleep, and the teenager quite confidently borrowed his radio. It was as long as the kid's forearm and expertly wrapped in white tarpaulin recycled from a bag of charcoal, slitted along the side for access to the dials and fastened in the front by a big, white button reading, "BASIC CONTACT."
He switched it on and fiddled with dials, and a Tanzanian song enlivened the minibus.
I'm looking for a beautiful woman...
"Hey, I know this song! It's from Tanzania," I said.
The bus laughed and agreed. "Yes, it's in Swahili."
The kid discovered the antenna and extended it. Static was triumphing over music until the kid stuck the antenna in his mouth and the singer's voice became clear again.
I went to Morocco (in Dar es Salaam), there weren't any...
"I've been to Morocco. This guy certainly wasn't looking very hard," I said.
That got some laughs.
We continued, for hours, plodding our way down the green hills adorned with green tea leaves, green sugarcane, green banana trees, and green weeds. Rocks wore green moss and motorcycle taxi drivers and passengers wore green helmets. The road seemed exhausted from contrast and tried its best to look green, too.
We finally reached Gisenyi, the Rwandan town bordering Democratic Republic of the Congo. And at 4:10 p.m., I jumped out of the minibus and ran to the Belvedere bus ticket counter.
I waited in an illogical and immobile line for ten minutes, only to find that all buses until the 6 p.m. one were booked.
I sprinted to the Virunga Express offices. Their office was more organized, but their buses weren't any more empty; and as I dejectedly purchased my 6:00 p.m. bus ticket, the 4:30 bus I so coveted left for Kigali.
But I said I'd be there for dinner! I began an apologetic text message, then a thought struck me. I'm white, right? I can break the rules!
I hopped on the 5:00 p.m. bus and stood at the front. I located somebody who spoke Swahili and unveiled my plan:
"You are on a 5:00 p.m. bus. I have a 6:00 p.m. ticket to Kigali. I will pay 2,000 Francs (about $4 USD) to anybody willing to swap tickets."
The message was translated and re-broadcast, and the silly white guy at the front of the bus grinned and waved a bus ticket and 2,000-Franc note like an idiot. And at the last minute, somebody agreed.
On the bus home, my editor called to ask how the story went. I told him it was a failure and he gave me a new assignment: to prepare to cover the case of Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer who was arrested in Kigali on Friday for genocide denial. I spent the entire three-hour trip on my phone, texting, emailing and web-surfing to find contacts and learn what I could, until I ran out of airtime.
I disembarked at the hectic Nyabugogo bus stop, escaped attention, bought more phone credit, found a motorcycle taxi and threw my phone at him. He took directions from my hosts and finally, after 8:00 p.m., I arrived.
The meal was great.
I visited Gihembe refugee camp yesterday, about 50 kilometres north of Kigali. And I took photographs.
The back-story: in Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 100 kilometres west, tens of thousands of Congolese face the same tensions that contributed to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In 1996 violence erupted on that side of the border, and Rwanda hosts over 50,000 refugees from that conflict who fear they will die if they return home. The Gihembe camp houses about 20,000 of those refugees.
(Politics drive the story, but this post is supposed to be about beauty and the very word "politics" seems to terrify millions in Rwanda; so let's ignore all that for today and focus on my fledgling photography skills.)
The refugee camp is perched at a peak that collects a rainy hug as toll from every passing cloud. The weather can swing from glorious to gloomy and back in an hour.
May 25 is a holiday of sorts in Congolese refugee camps in Rwanda, so thousands (yes, thousands) of children swarmed to my camera.
I shot this one blind, camera at my hip. The kid wasn't posing: he was trying to see the back of the lens.
On this holiday, the camp emptied to attend its annual ceremony.
It began, as many Rwandan ceremonies do, with a march so that television stations could gather footage. The signs bore various slogans such as "never forget;" the purple banner at the front signifies genocide remembrance in Rwanda.
To many children, the violence is forgotten or never experienced; younger residents have never seen their motherland.
Refugees have spent most or all of their lives in very cramped quarters. Many fear the dense population and lack of jobs is causing an AIDS catastrophe behind the camp's orderly veneer. On the bright side, the hospital is very nearby and medication is free for the few residents who have the nerve to face stigma, get tested, and ask for treatment. According to Jean des Dieux, responsible for treating the camp's AIDS patients, about 250 residents are known to be living with HIV. Of these, 76 people are under treatment and 109 are being monitored and should get medicine once symptoms appear.
Elders can only wonder whether they will ever see their homes again.
But on May 25, these worries are secondary. The entire camp stood for hours in silence, passing tissue papers to each other listening to tearful testimonies and sorrowful songs.
After the ceremony, the World Food Programme trailers appeared. Refugees rely upon the United Nations for food.
Things have been this way for about 14 years. To many residents, this is home.
Everywhere I turned I found a story nobody has published. I wrote about a topic I've adored since my first conversations with twenty-something-year-olds in East Africa three years ago. Here's my story about older high-school students struggling to attend school.
A five-foot-tall transvestite, dressed in drag, walks up to me at the Posta Mpya
public transit hub late at night in Dar es Salaam, happily yammering words I cannot understand. I smile and shrug, and eventually he moves on to his next comic victim, never missing a beat in his monologue.
Ni mchizi yangu,
a passer-by jokes with me: a Swahili pun, in this context straddling the line between, this is my buddy
and, this is a crazy person.
Out of the spotlight, I am free to look around: I notice that a crowd is laughing at my accoster.
This is yet another little moment from my life in Tanzania which recently rushed back to me when I least expected it. My reminiscing usually begins with smells, sights, or phrases; but this particular memory of Tanzania came from a crazy person in New York:
I was walking to the movies with a friend. We arrived at the pedestrian decision point between hurrying north to beat the light or waiting a second for the light to turn so we could head east. A man loomed towards us, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and loudly asked: Y'avalight?
Sure,
enunciated my friend, producing a lighter and igniting it near the accoster's mouth.
The man ripped the device away and flicked it viciously, focusing his entire existence on the transferral of fire to his cigarette. Once finished, he gave it back roughly, muttering, vowel-free, tks.
The traffic lights decided our next move: east. This man trudged in the same direction, at our exact pace: worried, we accelerated. As the man finally faded from our world, we detected that he had veered into the middle of the intersection. The last thing we heard him shout was, Apbtkd!
That was scary,
we agreed, after gaining half a block of insulation.
There was something different about this man: something which set him apart. What was it?
This enthusiastic smoker was hardly the first person in New York to set off my ingrained normalcy radar. Walking home from work one day, I spotted a black cat perched on the head of a man who was strolling down the street. One week earlier, some coworkers and I ate lunch in downtown New York while a man outside the diner patiently teed six empty beer cans into a line on the street, pulled out a driver, lined himself up, and deliberately, one at a time, whacked each can into traffic.
I felt I gained some insight last weekend, as I discovered some people who seemed to blur a line between me and crazy: the coffee lady and the junkies.
The coffee lady came first. While trekking across a Brooklyn Bridge laden near collapse with tourists, I was perplexed by the common phenomenon of otherwise sensible people stepping in the extremely clearly delineated bicycle lane; even more comical were the reckless bikers who would yell, ring bells, shout warnings, and swerve, but who would adamantly refuse to decelerate to avoid their witless obstacles. As I approached the Brooklyn side of the bridge and the tourists (curiously averse to stepping past the centre of the bridge into a land unexplored by the gawking masses) receded, I spotted an approaching woman, eyes scanning the inches in front of her feet, mouth muttering incomprehensible phrases, with a coffee on her head. Two thoughts sprung to mind: first, that the wind was bound to blow this poor woman's coffee away; and second, that here at last I had found somebody who respected the bicycle lane.
The junkies appeared on my return to Manhattan, at the direct centre of the Manhattan Bridge footpath. Three of them were lolling over one another, backs against the side of the bridge, eyes dead. After months honing my ability to avoid subway screwballs and street psychos, I knew the footpath would bring me within a foot of these social deviants and I braced myself for the worst; but as I walked past them they gave me a completely normal New York greeting: eyes staring straight ahead, no words spoken, no sign of acknowledgement. And while they were doubtless well past the point of making a rational decision on the matter, I was nonetheless set aback by this one stab at normalcy.
I suppose the interesting feature common to the coffee lady and the junkies was their similarity to myself. Just like me, the coffee lady walked in the proper lane; just like me, the junkies observed social etiquette. Instead of being a different species, they became ordinary individuals with one bizarre twist: the coffee lady is normal except for the cup of coffee on her head (which, I assume, she replaces after every errant gust of wind); the junkies are normal except for the abnormal chemicals they recently absorbed.
Perhaps the smoker just needed a cigarette really badly, and perhaps we caught him at an unfortunate time as he tripped and thus stumbled into the middle of the intersection accidentally.
And come to think of it, why do I refrain from wearing a cat on my head, driving empty cans into traffic, and dressing in drag at a bus stop in Tanzania? These may not be normal activities, but when I give the matter a bit of thought, they sure seem like fun.
Part of me feels inclined to wait for the first snowfall, strip to my boxers, and run down Broadway shouting, I like pizza!
at the top of my lungs. Call me crazy, but I somewhat doubt I would be the first to do it, and I suspect several so-called normal people would agree with me.
In the grocery store today, I found passion fruits! They were shrink-wrapped, but still they reminded me of East Africa. Naturally, I bought one.
At the checkout, the clerk hefts it up and down, searches it for a nonexistent label, and then stares at me blankly. I say it is a passion fruit. He stares at me, then the fruit, then me again. He says, lime? I say, passion fruit! and I point to his fruit price list. The fruit is not on the list. He runs over to his supervisor, who looks at it and tells him, with a better-than-thou, knowledgeable facial expression, that this is one of those exotic fruits. He asks how much it costs. Still trying to sound knowledgeable, she asks what I called it. I say, passion fruit! She runs over to the fruit and vegetable section to find the price. My clerk mutters about me and my bizarre fruits.
Expensive fruit
It cost me $1.99. Which is around 6632% more than I have ever paid for a passion fruit before. And it was sour. But it was worth it.