March 29, 2010; 14.48 CST
Today was a rather long and frustrating day. I felt like I was often losing my patience and being irritable with and/or without reason. Not sure what day I’m on – but I think it’s more likely to be just fatigue and heat (it was incredibly hot today) plus a bit of cabin-fever style stress due to being with the same people 24/7 for over a week. I miss my alone time – and I still miss John. I wonder how many times I will say that in the course of this journal. I am used to speaking to him every night; perhaps this is my version of speaking to him every night now that I cannot do so ...
Anyway. Woke up this morning to an ant crisis. And I do mean crisis. Now, I don’t like ants. I really don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t like them at all. They creep me out. And last night, when we got back to Bel Air, I didn’t think twice about the honey and marakuja nectar in the paper bags from the market. I’m not used to thinking about insects getting into houses.
Yeah, revise that. Woke up and got up to get dressed and saw ants all over the floor. I’m immediately disgusted and creeped out, and then I realize they’re on my stuff – specifically the paper bags with the honey and the marakuja nectar. I instantly feel like a total idiot for not having thought of this before, and then I’m thinking about how the heck I’m going to fix this in twenty minutes and still have time to get dressed and ready for the day, since it’s 7.10. Oh dear.
So I pull the marakuja nectar out of the big paper bag and clean off the top, which was sticky. I put it in the plastic bag which had my mosquito netting in it. I gingerly pull the pot of honey out of its little bag and wipe it off too, and put it in the same plastic bag. I take the two boxes of tea out of their little bags (which the ants are crawling on too) and roll them in some of the fabric. They have no honey on them so I thought it should be okay. I throw away the big paper bag, which has two marakujas and two parts of a baguette in it (sob, what a waste, but they would have been no good after all the ants). I get dressed and take the honey with me to breakfast, leaving the marakuja nectar in my backpack, which I closed.
Ate a good amount of the honey at breakfast, slathering it on my bread (so good after just butter) and putting it in my tea (I miss the creamer: they keep giving us milk now, but that’s okay ... the milk is better for me). Come back to the room, wrap the honey and the nectar in the plastic bag again, seal them both in my backpack and pack my bag (the hotel staff was going to change our sheets this morning, so I just put everything away). I wrap my backpack in my mosquito net to deter any more ants, and leave it on my suitcase. On the way to the construction site, it occurred to me that I could have sprayed the netting with Off – it’s not meant for ants, but maybe it would help mask the smell of the honey.
Work this morning was more efficient than it was at the end of last week, mostly because of Danika’s genius with kids: she stopped working, more or less, and distracted them all with games (the Hokey Pokey, a simplified version of Simon Says, plus bracelets, necklaces and bouncy balls) and trying to learn Kinyarwanda. I have a few pictures plus a video of this: it was rather touching, not to mention it was an absolute lifesaver. The kids, helpful as they want to be, are very difficult to communicate with and after a certain point just start getting on your nerves. More proof for me to not work with kids. The ones who didn’t go to play with Danika were easier to communicate and more willing to cooperate, so that was much nicer – we could actually tell them to wait, or not to hammer (oh, and we had the genius idea of only having one hammer per group, so there were no extra hammers and so they couldn’t get them! It worked for a while, but then they found the rest), or where to hammer. One of them, Steven, spoke fairly good English (if pretty rudimentary), and he was really helpful. It’s great to see them wanting to help to help themselves.
I think we are at eighty-ish sets of shelves now, since there was a power outage in the late morning and there was no wood for a while (nor was there much in the afternoon, which made for a semi-unproductive afternoon – all the wood started getting cut just as we were supposed to close up for dinner). But I want to write down the experience of delivering one of the sets of shelves to one of the widows. This was a couple days ago, I think Friday. Roxanne, Myriam and I hopped into Rodrigue’s van to help deliver shelves. The little kids were faster than we were and delivered the first two sets, but Rodrigue told them to let us do the third one. We brought it down into the widow’s house, and started talking with her and her friend (who taught the widow’s daughter, killed in the genocide, in school). The friend could speak French, so she translated for us. It was very touching and somewhat difficult – the widow said that she had a granddaughter in school of whom we reminded her, and she said that Roxanne smiled like her late daughter (which made Roxanne rather teary later). She blessed us and thanked us and we got pictures with her; I was glad that I could remember the first two words of “God bless you” in Kinyarwanda, and that her friend understood what I was trying to say and provided me with the last word – it’s Imana aguhe umugisha, I think, or close to that anyway. The message got through. It was an amazing experience. The house was little; painted teal on the inside in the front room – a couple chairs, a small TV, a bedroom and a kitchen – but that was all I could see. Rudimentary and very clean, but definitely a home. A picture of her late daughter on the wall. And still she smiled.
This afternoon we were supposed to work more, which only kind of worked as planned – the remaining people who had not gone to the Kimironko market went, leaving two of the three groups missing people, so they (our group and another group) joined up to work together. Yeah. That didn’t work so well, since each group has its own production-line style of building the shelves, and it’s rather difficult to integrate ... even more so when you have a new set of kids to work with. The ones at the site we went to were incommunicado, speaking neither French nor English to speak of, and the mother apparently invited some of the group in to eat but they didn’t understand what she was saying (and tried to tell her so, but apparently that didn’t get through) and so she was potentially offended, and the kids were trying to walk off with things ... the whole atmosphere was sort of tense and awkward, more so than the morning. Ah well. Also we had to bring all the shelves from those two sites to the Centre at four, which was another whole step. I’m very grateful for the way our site works now, and how efficient we are.
I read for about two hours this afternoon, which was nice – I’ve read sixty percent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man now, and I’m really getting into it. Joyce has a funny way of making you think you’re in Ireland, creating a strange sense of displacement every time I look up from the book, because I am not in Ireland but neither am I at home, and so it takes a moment to re-realize that I am in Rwanda.
I have been so tired these past few days that food almost makes me feel sick – I keep coming back to the room after meals and feeling kind of out of it, a little queasy, rather weak. I want to just sleep; it is so hot here during the day, and the food is heavy most of the time and carb-loaded, so I keep becoming more and more fatigued. It is nice to have the honey in the morning (along with fruit) and the marakuja nectar to mix with my water (along with some stevia) to make for some sugar during the day.
Oh, more ant crisis in the afternoon. The marakuja nectar had leaked onto a few pieces of clothing, so I had washed them quickly last night and hung them to dry on my window. When I came back that afternoon, I saw a trail of ants going up the wall to my window, and just about freaked out. That was pretty nasty and not cool at all – and I had thought I had gotten all the nectar! I pulled the window out and saw that there was like a whole colony of ants on one spot on my capris ... evidently I had not gotten all the nectar off. Ugh. With Roxanne’s help I managed to toss the three articles of clothing into a garbage bag, and then I brought them to the outdoor sink and washed them as thoroughly as I could, then hung them on the hedges to dry. (Two of them – my shorts and my capris – are still there, drying: the t-shirt, being very thin, dried quickly. No sign of ants. Win.) I came back in and sprayed the wall with Off, trying to get rid of everything. Oh, and I sprayed the mosquito netting and even my backpack to mask the smell of the honey. The inn staff had cleaned the room a bit, including the sheets and the floor, so the ants were pretty much gone. I still feel like they’re all over the place, though, and keep jumping whenever something touches me gently, like my hair or my headphone cord. Ach.
After supper the Visionaries came along for a debate evening, which I thought was going to be difficult to hear/understand/focus on because I was so tired and not in the mood for a debate, but it was actually pretty good. We started again on Romeo Dallaire, which we had discussed a bit during one of our discussion periods last week, the question being what do Rwandans think of Romeo Dallaire? The Canadians think he’s a hero, the Belgians think he’s a traitor: where do Rwandans stand? The answers varied, from answers seemingly closed-minded (he is not a hero because he failed, regardless of whether he could have done more) to forward-thinking (he is a hero because he is spreading the word of the genocide and has been since 1994) to two-sided (he is not a hero because he did not succeed, but we cannot condemn him because it was not his fault). A lot seemed to depend on one’s personal or cultural definition of hero: I explained the Canadian point of view of a hero being someone who gives their all in spite of personal danger and does their absolute best to save lives; the traditional Rwandan point of view was given as someone who fights valiantly and (generally) wins in battle. The viewpoints were evidently, therefore, very different to start with. The conversation was, in general, a good one.
One of the things I have noticed during conversations like these is that often the Rwandans will make the same point at least three times, almost starting over their idea again at the end two or three times. It can get kind of frustrating for those of us who prefer conversations and discussion points to be precise and concise (oh dear, the IB is controlling my brain): you make your point and you support it, and you don’t repeat yourself. I am one of these people, so some of the people who spoke several times (often pretty much the same thing as they had said before) got on my nerves a bit.
After the debate, though, Andrée said something which I had (I admit to my own shame) not thought of: these people need to talk these things through. Apparently one of the guys who talked the most (and was the most polarized of the speakers) had seen the rest of his four-member family die. Hm. Perspective much, us Canadians? This whole trip has been an exercise in seeing other people through the right eyeglasses: we have to keep in mind what they have gone through, while not letting that be the only light in which we see them: we must see them also through the lens of future development and the new push for humanity. The genocide is not where it ended and is not where it ends now – life goes on and they must somehow move on as well. Debates like this are part of that.
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