Kigali picture

There's been a request for more pictures, and right now the internet connection is pretty fast, so:


This is a pretty standard view in Kigali. This particular spot was at the Gisozi genocide memorial, which we visited on Monday. Almost everywhere in the city looks like this.

Well, that's all I have time for, but hopefully more will come later, maybe next week, as I'm not going to have much internet access for the rest of the week.

Retraction

So I got a lot of emails about the last blog entry, and I was so confused, because the last post that I wrote was about the genocide site. The post about beerfest was my friend Kim's, which was accidentally posted to my blog when she borrowed my computer. My weekend was nowhere near that eventful - sorry for those who were expcting "the full story"!

Murambi Genocide Memorial (warning: could be gruesome)

Yesterday we went to Murambi genocide memorial in Butare district near Burundi. On April 21st, 1994, 50,000 Tutsis who had been hiding in a school for two weeks were killed over the course of 48 hours. The memorial is really unique because some of the survivors came back to the site after the genocide and dug bodies out of one of the mass graves, identified them and laid them out in the classrooms, using lime to preserve them.

We walked through 24 classrooms, each one filled with distorted white figures that were somewhere between bodies and skeletons, and a terrible stench of decay that lingered in my nose for the rest of the day. I had expected that this memorial would bring the reality of the genocide home for me, like it would stop seeming like this distant, horrible thing that scholars have been analyzing for the past fifteen years, and start seeming like, well, a “real genocide,” whatever that is. I wanted to take some time to step out of the analysis of the genocide and appreciate the tragedy of what really happened. But it turned out that the bodies were so surreal and unhuman-looking that it’s still impossible for me to wrap my head around the violence that happened there. Some of the people still had bits of hair or clothes, and often you could make out some sort of facial expression – usually screaming. Some of the most poignant bodies were the ones where you could start to form a story of what happened, like the mother who was trying to shield her screaming baby. But for the most part, they just looked molten and ghastly.

I was more struck by the room that was filled just with skulls lined up, and a big pile of bones. Somehow the scale seemed greater, or maybe more manageable. I don’t know.

The school itself is in the most beautiful place. We were on top of a mountain, surrounded by other mountains, where inhabitants could hear the screaming fifteen years ago. The world was so still up there, silent except for some children on another mountain. When we got to the site, it was sunny and beautiful out, but soon the clouds moved in, and the breeze that felt like rain just made the site all the more calm. There was a tree there that looked almost like a bonsai tree the way the branches were completely flat and reaching out like a carpet of moss, poised on a little trunk. After I went through the memorial I sat under the tree, and there were all these birds that were flying around me, swooping in and out around my face. The world always seems more beautiful after witnessing the macabre and terrible.

I had so much difficulty wrapping my head around what I was seeing there, and I wanted to really understand it and feel all of the sadness and frustration of what happened there, instead of just filing the experience away to try to process slowly, later. I felt like I wasn’t really there, or like I just wasn’t making some crucial connection. I guess because these bodies which hardly even looked like bodies anymore were just faceless representations of people whose stories I can never know. Why is it so hard to feel empathy for people we don’t know? The only way I could really feel like I was relating to what had happened at this site, in the genocide as a whole, was by trying to imagine what it would be like to wait in this cramped classroom, weak and exhausted after two weeks of undernourishment and dehydration, terrified, and then to watch people, maybe people I knew, come and kill the people I loved and know that I was going to be killed and not be able to do anything about it. I had to place the people that I know and care about, the people who bring me joy, into that imagined/real scenario, in order to feel like I was even beginning to understand it.

But then I was really troubled by how challenging I found it to relate to these people, the people whose bodies were right in front of me, the people that actually died. Of course it’s harder to empathize with people you don’t know, but isn’t that part of the tragedy, that you don’t know them and no one else will ever know them? How could it be so easy to retreat into my own concerns and needs so soon after seeing this atrocity? I started to wonder if maybe I’m too selfish to really do humanitarian work or “make a difference.”

And then I started to think about why I was having a hard time empathizing, and I’m not trying to pass on the blame in any way or anything like that, but I do think that part of the problem is that I have spent so much time reading horrible stories and trying to look at conflict so analytically. Not to say that we shouldn’t be analyzing the causes and effects of conflict, because we absolutely should. But after reading so many explanations for how the genocide happened, all the different factors and all the different actors that are “to blame” – it has made the unthinkable thinkable, and I have to wonder if that’s always a good thing. So as I was thinking about the depersonalizing effect of scholarship and academia, I had the “why am I doing this/what is the point of academia?” revelation that I have been expecting this entire trip.

Only a couple of days ago, I was thinking about how strange it was that I hadn’t really had that revelation yet, especially given that it was only a year ago that I felt so frustrated by the Ivory Tower and so much like we should just be focusing our incredible privilege on actually helping people instead of just criticizing other people’s attempts at helping. I was half expecting to come out of this trip not wanting to go back to school and wanting to just stay here and work for an NGO or do something that would feel concrete. So I had been pleasantly surprised to find myself still looking forward to classes and scholarly articles and all that, until now. Not that I’m about to drop out of school, just that I need to think really hard and honestly about why I want to research refugees (and whatever else I do later in life) and what the effect of that research/work could be. Am I interested in refugees just because it’s interesting, or can I actually help them?

Recently I’ve been taking for granted that doing academic research naturally helps the subjects of that research because it raises awareness of their problems and directs attention towards them that otherwise wouldn’t be there. But now I’m questioning that assumption a little more. Especially because I know that NGOs and even more so big organizations like UNHCR are so resistant to change – as one of our guest lecturers in “Aid, Politics and Violence in Africa” said, they do self-analysis, come up with this report and recommendations for how they can do better, and then never look at it again – I have to wonder whether it makes sense to just read/publish reports on the failures of NGOs. Right now, I definitely think I want to do some sort of “concrete” work after graduation.

So that was my (very self-centered) conclusion/series of thoughts following my observation of how self-centered I am. At least I’m consistent.

Family in Kigali

Family in Kigali!

My homestay family in Kigali is so wonderful!! I have a “mom,” a “dad,” a 17-year-old brother who has been showing me around but had to go back to school today, a 16-year-old brother who is in Butare studying to become a priest, a 3-year-old brother who is actually insane, a 20-year-old sister who was adopted, a “grandmother” who doesn’t speak any English or French, and a few other people who are sort of in and out – uncles and aunts and household “help.” The father and the 17-yr-old and one of the uncles all speak various degrees of English, but most of the time we all speak in French because that’s the language we can all understand the most of. They have electricity and indoor plumbing, though they don’t get enough running water, so they have big basins of water in the bathroom and outside (it’s still sooooo much better than the pit latrine!!)

The first night I got there, we were hanging out in their sitting room talking about Rwanda, the US, why I decided to come here, etc. I had a cold, which was really draining for me… I was struggling to keep my eyes open. All of a sudden, all of the women came out of the kitchen with this big birthday cake that said “Happy Birthday Danielle B. 20 yrs” with 20 candles around the edge, singing happy birthday in three different languages! It was the sweetest thing ever!

On Saturday evening, the 17-yr-old asked me to show him how to use my computer. I quickly figured out that he was really just interested in watching music videos, and was very disappointed that I didn’t have any on my computer. He settled on listening to my (very limited) collection of R&B/rap songs, which prompted Beni, the crazy three-year-old, to start dancing around like crazy, jumping on the bed, throwing pillows and making gangster faces. It was actually one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. A picture is worth a hundred words, so hopefully this completely candid photo will capture some of the ridiculousness:



So not only was Beni running around like a chipmunk on hallucinogenics, but shortly after exhausting my R&B collection, my “brother” found the Michael Jackson songs. Before I knew it, my skinny-ass 17-year-old homestay brother named, of all things, Chaste, starts doing a Michael Jackson impression to Billie Jean. It was actually pretty good… definitely had the crotch-grabbing and hip jerking motions down. Awkward.

Beni is the funniest thing ever. He likes to jump around on the couches, stand on chairs and reach across the dinner table, spit out chewed up pieces of meat, play with my hair, pull my arm hair, run away from me, climb all over people, refuse to eat, etc etc. I don’t know how the family members put up with it – he would drive me crazy if he was my real brother, but since it’s all new to me, I think it’s hilarious. I know I’m such a bad influence and that my laughing at him just encourages him, but I can’t help it. He’s started running around yelling, “My seestah. Nevah fohget you.” So cute!

So that’s basically the family. They haven’t told me the story about what happened to them in the genocide, though I know they’ve been living in that house since 1990. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to ask or not. I know that they love Kagame, their president. When they heard that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, they were like, “Oh, Kagame’s probably going to get it next.” Overall, it’s great so far, and their invitation to stay with them during the research period is pretty appealing. Actually, speaking of research, I’m supposed to be meeting with someone from UNHCR soon, so I should go!

Nakivale refugee camp

Getting back to the refugee camp visit that I mentioned in my last post: On Monday we went to the Nakivale (NAH-chee-VAH-lee) refugee settlement camp, and it was such a better experience than when we went to Orom. Part of that was because they reacted to us differently, part because we were more prepared for the whole experience and actually knew what was going to happen. We had a briefing beforehand and talked about what kind of questions we wanted to ask and stuff, which helped so much.

We were visiting the camp to see the Rwandan (primarily Hutu) refugees who had fled after the genocide and are afraid of reprisals from Tutsis and potentially unfair trials, because there’s such a big bias against Hutus in Rwanda now. (Of course, it’s likely that many of them have a legitimate reason to fear a fair trial as well.) The camp also had refugees from Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and a couple of other countries. Each nationality has its own zone within the camp. We ended up splitting into two different groups, with half going to see the Rwandans, and half going to see the Congolese. I was in the group that saw the Congolese, which I’m really glad about because the conflict in the Congo is definitely something I’m interested in and relatively informed about and this program doesn’t really deal with it all that much, and because we ended up talking a lot more about issues in the refugee camp and among the refugees than the other group, which mostly heard about how the refugees wanted their names cleared in Rwanda.

Again, we were asked a lot how we could tangibly help the people we were talking too, and a large portion of the time we spent talking to them ended up being about how we were there to learn and that we would be helping less directly. The people here were a lot more confrontational than the people in Orom – it was like the difference between frustration and desperation. One of the refugees compared our visit to watching a drowning man and asking him, “How are you sinking? Tell me about how you’re sinking” instead of pulling him out of the water. There were two really great moments: one when the program director from Gulu said that his people had been suffering a lot too and he felt their condition and if they shut themselves off from people coming to ask them what is happening, they would ultimately lose. At this point one of the leaders among the refugees asked a bit snarkily, “Well have you ever been a refugee?” To which the director was able to say, “Yes, actually, and my mother and brother and family and people have been in the IDP camps.” The other came after the sinking metaphor, when one of the girls in our group spoke very passionately about how we can’t save everyone, and how can we choose to save one person when hundreds of others are also drowning? This seemed to really hit home with them, and afterwards we weren’t really asked that question.

It’s frustrating that we have to spend so much time dealing with that issue, and it’s something that I’m concerned about with doing research, but at the same time, I completely understand how frustrating it must be to tell these comparatively rich and powerful people about your problems and then hear them say that you won’t really see a tangible improvement.

Before we reached the camp, this guy who was in charge of the camp came and spoke to us about the refugees. [Side note: right now it’s about 6am in the hotel in Kigali and these birds are singing outside our window (for once not roosters!) and I just heard this one bird call that was so strange and beautiful.] We asked him about whether there were tensions in the camps and whether all of the different groups received the same aid. He said that everything was peaceful in the camp because everyone identified as a refugee and there is a sense that everyone was in the same condition and that everyone got the same aid. All of which turned out to be total BS. One of the first things the Congolese said was that they are terrified because of killings within the camps. Because so many different people of different ethnic groups and political loyalties have fled Congo and are all mixed up in “New Congo,” as they call it, people are living with the very enemies they fled. Since June, three of the Congolese refugees have been killed in their homes, and they basically have no idea who is responsible. Plus, they mentioned that some have threatened to start massacring people in the camp once they know they are going to be repatriated.

That’s one of the “cool” (i.e. interesting to study) things about refugee camps – that you have such a mix of people of different nationalities who are there for completely different reasons so the camp becomes this meeting point for all sorts of different conflicts in the region. I think it would be so cool to look at how ideas are exchanged in refugee camps and how the different conflicts interact with each other.

The other major issue they talked about was the special treatment given to the Somali refugees in the camp. They felt that UNHCR (the UN body responsible for refugees) only ever brought enough aid to help the Somalis and focused their resources far too much on the Somalis, increasing tensions in the refugee camps. The U.S. has also been accepting a ton of Somali refugees, and almost no Congolese refugees, in large part because of the War on Terror agenda. This policy was something the refugees kept asking us about and wanting us to help them with.

One of the other really startling things they talked about was water. Of course, I had expected that they would tell us about lack of water or lack of clean water. What was surprising, and if true, disgusting, was the accusation they leveled against one of the NGOs supposedly supplying them with water. They accused this NGO of reporting (to headquarters, to UNHCR, to donors, etc) that it has been supplying the camps with clean water, but when they showed us a jug of the water they were supposed to be drinking and bathing with, it was literally green with little things crawling in it. Gross. I think that’s maybe one of the places where the whole refugee camp structure breaks down. You have this pseudo-state formation with UNHCR and the NGOs acting sort of like a government (imposing order, providing services, etc) but it gets to be such a problem when the “government” is not accountable to the people, but rather to its own headquarters or to its donors, who can’t see conditions in the camps.

By the way: new phone number is +250-078-537-0788 hopefully it will work better than the Ugandan number.

Really fast:

Quick update, since I don't know when the next time I'll be on internet will be. I'm in Kigale, the capital of Rwanda, and it is so different from Kampala or Gulu! The city is so modern and beautiful. The whole area is incredibly hilly, so getting anywhere requires walking up and down really steep hills, and you can look out from these beautiful viewpoints all over and see the city just sprawl out seemingly forever.

We've done a lot of travelling the past few days, so I'm looking forward to settling into the next homestay family tomorrow. The refugee camp was fascinating and I definitely want to write about my experiences there, and more about Kigale, but unfortunately I don't have time right now.

Hope everything is going well back home, I'll update more substantially soon!

Birthday Weekend

Happy Birthday to me! Thanks SO MUCH to everyone for the many birthday wishes!!!!! My birthday was kind of weird because we spent the entire day on a bus from Kampala to Mbarara – oh, and because I’m in UGANDA. Details. Saturday was the birthday of another guy in the group, so I feel like birthday celebrations have lasted since Friday night, when we went to a casino in Kampala. I didn’t really do so well at the casino, but it was super fun and at least I didn’t lose a whole lot of money… Mostly it was just fun to get out and do something! Staying at the homestay got to feel a little claustrophobic because I’m used to being so independent, and I couldn’t ever be out past about 7pm, and then the first couple of days in Kampala we mostly stayed at the hotel.

I was really happy about going back to Kampala. The first time we were there, we barely got to explore, but this time I did get to walk around a fair bit. It really reaffirmed for me how much of a city person I was. Everyone in the group keeps saying how much they adored Gulu and how they wish they could just stay there, but I was so glad to get back to Kampala. I’m sure some of that was just regaining independence, but I was also really jealous of the other SIT group in Uganda, which mostly stays in Kampala for the whole time. I think it would be so great to actually know Kampala, and it’s looking a lot more likely that I’ll go back there in November for my research.

Anyways, on Saturday I met with a guy from the Refugee Law Project about my research, and it was simultaneously disappointing and really exciting. Disappointing because I had been hoping that I could work under the Refugee Law Project and they’d take care of all of my logistics and stuff, and he pretty much said that that was not going to happen. Exciting because he thought my research idea (of how NGOs interact with refugees) would be a good topic and he suggested exactly the methods that I had been planning on using, and talked about literally every single thing that I want to look at/write about/hope to find.

After that I walked about an hour across the city to go grocery shopping. OH! I should say one other really great thing about Kampala: plenty of Western food!! On Friday I had a BURGER!!!! Back to grocery shopping: wandered around trying to find stuff because the layout was so confusing, but eventually got everything I needed to make a chocolate cake with mocha frosting! One of the rooms in the hotel randomly had a kitchen, so I baked a cake. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the oven was in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit… oops. Still came out great – yay! Went out to pizza dinner, and then came back to the hotel for cake celebration!

The program directors had given the group money to get cake for the other guy and I, so there was a cake for him Saturday night, and this morning we had pastry stuff for me for this morning because we couldn’t really take a cake on the bus. Everyone was super nice saying happy birthday and singing to me and stuff, which was great. Otherwise it was a pretty low-key day. We left Kampala around 10am (after much difficulty loading the bus and van because the Rwanda director had bought some shelves and a giant chair in Kampala, which didn’t really fit with all of our stuff…) and stayed on the bus almost nonstop until 5pm. Talk about square-butt.

The drive was so beautiful, though. I’ve always heard that this part of Africa is supposed to be stunningly beautiful, like the jungles of Congo and the mountains of Kenya and all that, but honestly I was a little underwhelmed by the parts of Northern Uganda that I saw. It definitely grew on me as we stayed there, and it was so cool that it looked exactly like so many of the pictures I’d seen of Africa, but it wasn’t until today that I really saw the sort of beauty I was expecting. A short way out of Kampala, the sparse shrubs became dense, tall trees and brilliant flowering plants. It was so lush and green! And suddenly there were hills, instead of just flat land. Later on we were just driving through these hills and valleys and it looked like parts of the US, only emptier.

We stopped at the equator! There’s a little landmark, and we all got our pictures taken like the supreme tourists we are ;)

The road to Mbarara was considerably better than the one to Gulu in that it was actually paved – sometimes even freshly paved. However, there were a number of “diversions” as they call them, or places where we would have to drive way off the road because they were doing some sort of road work or something. And sometimes there’d even be an extra lane off the paved part of the road, which we drove on when the potholes were too intense.

One other thing about Kampala was this horrible lecture we had on the policy of amnesty, or the pardon that’s been extended to all rebels to try to lure them out of the bush. This lawyer came who works for the Ugandan Amnesty Commission, along with two (female) assistant lawyers and a former abductee. The lecture started with the lawyer telling the woman who had fought with the rebels for several years to tell us her story, though he warned us repeatedly that her English wasn’t very good and that he would have to interpret for us. We realized how incredibly patronizing and insulting he was being when she started speaking in quite clear English that we could all understand – though he kept interrupting her to restate what she said. About a minute into her story, when she was telling us about how the rebels had killed a boy who refused to give them all of his money and the wares he was selling, she was clearly struggling. She was crying, and having a lot of difficulty continuing to tell her story, but the lawyer kept impatiently prompting her to continue. It was SO DISGUSTING to see how much he looked down on her and it felt like he was displaying her retraumatization (he kept saying, “oh don’t worry, she’s just traumatized. See, this is what trauma is.”) Finally, one of the program directors told him to let her stop.

The rest of the lecture was interesting, though definitely our opinion of him was very much affected by what we had just seen (one of the girls asked what his ethics were as a lawyer, and then when he couldn’t answer the question she asked more specifically about the treatment of victims and it was like she was speaking Greek). Regardless, it was really interesting because we certainly disagreed with some of the things he was saying, even though most of us do feel that amnesty has been a good policy (both because so many of the perpetrators were forced to commit the atrocities and are themselves victims, and because it’s been so effective at drawing fighters out of the bush). For instance, we were questioning how a society that is so willing to accept mass murderers could stigmatize the children born in the bush, and suggesting that maybe this double-standard suggests that the forgiveness of the former rebels wasn’t as complete as everyone claims it is (an opinion that a lot of returnees voiced). What was particularly interesting was that he seemed to personally agree with us, and kept saying stuff like “yes, it’s not perfect, and as a Western-educated lawyer I believe more in justice.” There was a sense that he just felt this desperation, like “what else can we do?”

Anyways, tomorrow we’re visiting Nakivale refugee settlement camp, which I’m both super excited for and dreading slightly. Mostly excited, because I might be able to set up something for my research there, or at least get some other information and ideas, but I’m worried it’s going to be a bit like the visit to the Orom youth center… Guess we’ll see!