Questions...and Answers?
O430 am Kigali, I wake up in the middle of a nightmare involving being evacuated from war-torn Rwanda. Damned Mefloquinine!
0530 am I can no longer sleep due to the f%#$ing bird outside my window. I seem to have the loudest bird species in the history of nature decamped in my garden. I don't know what it is, I've had alarm clocks that were less effective than that bird. I wish I could shoot it!
2100 I arrive home and the water pressure still isn't back on, this means after 4 days we are still running off the reservoir tank out in the back garden and its rapidly emptying. Its been almost a week since my last proper shower and I'm getting desperate. I ask the houseboy to lend my his clothes washing bucket, which I half fill with water from the outside tap, the only one in the house giving water faster than trickle rate. I then take the largest cooking pan I can find and fill that with water in order to "cook" my shower. Altogether I have about 10 litres of hand hot water, its not much but hopefully its enough, I won't even attempt to wash my hair. By the time I've done all that and got the basin upstairs to the bathroom I am exhausted.
Water in a large open container must be the nastiest thing to try to carry anywhere, much less up a stairs with uneven steps - but boy did it feel good to be clean! I even managed to have some water left for washing my face and hands the following morning.
Our water problems are no doubt aggravated by the fact that there are four people in our house instead of the usual two. French Frank is still around, although he is leaving Rwanda soon, Patrick the houseboy had his water needs, as did I, but finally there was the sad case of Frances, our "refugee". Frances is a VSO volunteer from Uganda working with AIDS awareness in one of the other ministries and lives on the same group of houses as me and Frank. He was away for three weeks on paternity leave, his wife had given birth to their first babies (twins). He got back to Kigali recently to find that his houseboy had run off with everything in his house, all his stuff and every single piece of furniture, even the bed!
We've had a mattress put in the ironing room for him until Frank leaves, when he may well become a permanent fixture in the house. I wouldn't mind this at all as I've never relished the prospect of living alone, plus Frances can teach me how to play my drums - we've already had a couple of jamming sessions :)
Just after my first week at work I heard tell of a bomb in Madrid. ETA disclaimed responsibility and quickly Al Qaida were blamed. Spain had been a strong supporter of US I was told. If the Americans had decided that anyone who wasn't with them was against them, then it seemed so had Al Qaida. I imagined most governments in the West were going to go all paranoid and I was somehow happy to be "safe" in central Africa. Had we merely traded the old Communist/Capitalist divide for a new world order where you were either with the US or with Al Qaida? In which case, good luck to all of us trying to remain neutral ! I wondered if the USA had learned anything from the history of warfare in the 20th century which showed over and over again that superior cash reserves and firepower was little guarantee of success against a motivated and dedicated guerilla force who are not afraid to die for their beliefs. If violence is the last resort of the powerless, how powerless do you need to feel to kill? How powerless do you need to feel to kill yourself? Or in the very least be prepared for almost certain death?
And again I am left posing these questions in the context of Rwanda. Years ago I visited Germany and I remember having a conversation with someone who asked me what I was looking for there. The question was surprising to me, he reckoned most people who went to Germany were looking for some sort of explanation as to what happened their during world war two. i was just visiting friends and taking the opportunity to see some of the country. It seems many people have been coming to Rwanda for answers, I just came here to work but find myself posing questions nonetheless. It always seemed quite amazing that the likes of Paul Kagame who had grown up somewhere else and who had perhaps a decent standard of living, relatively speaking, would give up their way of life and endanger themselves of the sake of a country they had never known.
There is somehow a fundamentally different dynamic between the residual emotions when you decide to leave a place and those when you are forced to leave a place. Perhaps this would explain why the homesickness I felt in coming here was for Switzerland and not Ireland. This still didn't explain why your children might be emotionally attached to a place you were forced to leave.
I know a woman who teaches English in a secondary school in Kigali and she asked her students to write an essay entitled "My magic moment", the many were about escaping the militias during the genocide but many more were about the time when the teenagers family finally moved back to Rwanda. This was usually described in terms of returning to a kind of promised land. I was familiar with the ways immigrants describe their homeland but I had not expected such romanticism from their children or grandchildren. I found a partial explanation recently while talking to a man who had grown up in Burundi and subsequently joined the RFP. He told me that as a young child he'd thought he was Burundian but as he got older and the school system discriminated against him for being Rwandan he learned otherwise. With such systematic alienation there was really no way he could feel attached to his native Burundi when the time came for him, as it comes for us all, to search for an identity.
And my thoughts returned to the many marginalised immigrant communities in Europe and how many within them identity with the homeland of their parent and grandparents rather then their own country .And my thoughts continued to Ireland, my homeland that I had seen very little of in the last five years. The Ireland I grew up in was culturally homogenous, being Protestant or perhaps having a parent from England was about as exotic as you got in my home town, although I do remember a family from India or Pakistan moving into our parish when I was a teenager. I remember the one or two African guys who attended my local university, I remember the staff in the Chinese restaurants in town, who were definitly Chinese but whom you never seemed to see outside their restaurants.
The Ireland I left in 1999 was a fast paced monied economy riding on the back of the dot com boom and in desperate need of computer literate labour. The Ireland i returned to in 2001 was a markedly different place with entire communities of Eastern European skilled and semi skilled workers, bar staff and construction workers speaking Cantonese and Mandarin and African asylum seekers handing you towels for tips in the bathrooms of Dublin's fancier bars. It seemed that the eastern Europeans were treated somewhat as Gastarbiten, the Chinese it was hoped were only here to learn English and service the temporary overflow of catering jobs. And the asylum seekers? Well everyone knew they were just blugers using a loophole in the system and the inefficiency in the Irish processing of refugees to hang around and get everything free from the state. Ireland had a long history of peoples coming to invade the country and ending up indistinguishable from the local population with in three generations. But that was back in the middle ages, before the English arrived. How Irish would the children and grandchildren of these new immigrants feel? When living abroad in more multicultural societies the Irish communities were not known for their tolerance and all I could see for the future was Ireland making the same mistakes as Britain and France had done from the 1950s onwards.
Notes
Mefloquinine, widely sold under the brand name Larium, is a powerful anti-malarial which is known to be psychoactive and cause potentially serious side effects. One of the milder possible side effects is vivid and/or disturbing dreams.
Return to story
0530 am I can no longer sleep due to the f%#$ing bird outside my window. I seem to have the loudest bird species in the history of nature decamped in my garden. I don't know what it is, I've had alarm clocks that were less effective than that bird. I wish I could shoot it!
2100 I arrive home and the water pressure still isn't back on, this means after 4 days we are still running off the reservoir tank out in the back garden and its rapidly emptying. Its been almost a week since my last proper shower and I'm getting desperate. I ask the houseboy to lend my his clothes washing bucket, which I half fill with water from the outside tap, the only one in the house giving water faster than trickle rate. I then take the largest cooking pan I can find and fill that with water in order to "cook" my shower. Altogether I have about 10 litres of hand hot water, its not much but hopefully its enough, I won't even attempt to wash my hair. By the time I've done all that and got the basin upstairs to the bathroom I am exhausted.
Water in a large open container must be the nastiest thing to try to carry anywhere, much less up a stairs with uneven steps - but boy did it feel good to be clean! I even managed to have some water left for washing my face and hands the following morning.
Our water problems are no doubt aggravated by the fact that there are four people in our house instead of the usual two. French Frank is still around, although he is leaving Rwanda soon, Patrick the houseboy had his water needs, as did I, but finally there was the sad case of Frances, our "refugee". Frances is a VSO volunteer from Uganda working with AIDS awareness in one of the other ministries and lives on the same group of houses as me and Frank. He was away for three weeks on paternity leave, his wife had given birth to their first babies (twins). He got back to Kigali recently to find that his houseboy had run off with everything in his house, all his stuff and every single piece of furniture, even the bed!
We've had a mattress put in the ironing room for him until Frank leaves, when he may well become a permanent fixture in the house. I wouldn't mind this at all as I've never relished the prospect of living alone, plus Frances can teach me how to play my drums - we've already had a couple of jamming sessions :)
Just after my first week at work I heard tell of a bomb in Madrid. ETA disclaimed responsibility and quickly Al Qaida were blamed. Spain had been a strong supporter of US I was told. If the Americans had decided that anyone who wasn't with them was against them, then it seemed so had Al Qaida. I imagined most governments in the West were going to go all paranoid and I was somehow happy to be "safe" in central Africa. Had we merely traded the old Communist/Capitalist divide for a new world order where you were either with the US or with Al Qaida? In which case, good luck to all of us trying to remain neutral ! I wondered if the USA had learned anything from the history of warfare in the 20th century which showed over and over again that superior cash reserves and firepower was little guarantee of success against a motivated and dedicated guerilla force who are not afraid to die for their beliefs. If violence is the last resort of the powerless, how powerless do you need to feel to kill? How powerless do you need to feel to kill yourself? Or in the very least be prepared for almost certain death?
And again I am left posing these questions in the context of Rwanda. Years ago I visited Germany and I remember having a conversation with someone who asked me what I was looking for there. The question was surprising to me, he reckoned most people who went to Germany were looking for some sort of explanation as to what happened their during world war two. i was just visiting friends and taking the opportunity to see some of the country. It seems many people have been coming to Rwanda for answers, I just came here to work but find myself posing questions nonetheless. It always seemed quite amazing that the likes of Paul Kagame who had grown up somewhere else and who had perhaps a decent standard of living, relatively speaking, would give up their way of life and endanger themselves of the sake of a country they had never known.
There is somehow a fundamentally different dynamic between the residual emotions when you decide to leave a place and those when you are forced to leave a place. Perhaps this would explain why the homesickness I felt in coming here was for Switzerland and not Ireland. This still didn't explain why your children might be emotionally attached to a place you were forced to leave.
I know a woman who teaches English in a secondary school in Kigali and she asked her students to write an essay entitled "My magic moment", the many were about escaping the militias during the genocide but many more were about the time when the teenagers family finally moved back to Rwanda. This was usually described in terms of returning to a kind of promised land. I was familiar with the ways immigrants describe their homeland but I had not expected such romanticism from their children or grandchildren. I found a partial explanation recently while talking to a man who had grown up in Burundi and subsequently joined the RFP. He told me that as a young child he'd thought he was Burundian but as he got older and the school system discriminated against him for being Rwandan he learned otherwise. With such systematic alienation there was really no way he could feel attached to his native Burundi when the time came for him, as it comes for us all, to search for an identity.
And my thoughts returned to the many marginalised immigrant communities in Europe and how many within them identity with the homeland of their parent and grandparents rather then their own country .And my thoughts continued to Ireland, my homeland that I had seen very little of in the last five years. The Ireland I grew up in was culturally homogenous, being Protestant or perhaps having a parent from England was about as exotic as you got in my home town, although I do remember a family from India or Pakistan moving into our parish when I was a teenager. I remember the one or two African guys who attended my local university, I remember the staff in the Chinese restaurants in town, who were definitly Chinese but whom you never seemed to see outside their restaurants.
The Ireland I left in 1999 was a fast paced monied economy riding on the back of the dot com boom and in desperate need of computer literate labour. The Ireland i returned to in 2001 was a markedly different place with entire communities of Eastern European skilled and semi skilled workers, bar staff and construction workers speaking Cantonese and Mandarin and African asylum seekers handing you towels for tips in the bathrooms of Dublin's fancier bars. It seemed that the eastern Europeans were treated somewhat as Gastarbiten, the Chinese it was hoped were only here to learn English and service the temporary overflow of catering jobs. And the asylum seekers? Well everyone knew they were just blugers using a loophole in the system and the inefficiency in the Irish processing of refugees to hang around and get everything free from the state. Ireland had a long history of peoples coming to invade the country and ending up indistinguishable from the local population with in three generations. But that was back in the middle ages, before the English arrived. How Irish would the children and grandchildren of these new immigrants feel? When living abroad in more multicultural societies the Irish communities were not known for their tolerance and all I could see for the future was Ireland making the same mistakes as Britain and France had done from the 1950s onwards.
Notes
Mefloquinine, widely sold under the brand name Larium, is a powerful anti-malarial which is known to be psychoactive and cause potentially serious side effects. One of the milder possible side effects is vivid and/or disturbing dreams.
Return to story
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