Still in Rwanda...

I thought you might be interested to know that I am the first white person who has ever lived. Everywhere I go, kids chase me, yelling “mzungu!” (white person) and getting as close as they dare before screaming in fear and running away. Even adults aren’t above stopping dead in their tracks and staring at me, or unapologetically touching my skin as they sit next to me on the bus. One day, one of my co-workers Julienne was walking with Jen and me and because she wasn’t used to all the attention, got a bit frustrated. When a group of kids started screaming “mzungu!” she stopped and yelled right back at them, “They’re not mzungus! They are human beings just like you and me!” Nice. Now that’s a phrase I wish I knew in Kinyarwanda.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the front stoop of SEVOTA’s office in Ghinga, just hanging out and watching people pass by when a large group of prisoners in matching pink jumpsuits came walking along picking up trash on the side of the road. This certainly isn’t an uncommon sight in Rwanda, whose prisons have been packed since the genocide. In fact, a year after the genocide in the town where I live, the prison held four prisoners per square yard! In order to deal with the overflow of the accused, the government instituted a traditional legal system called gacaca, where essentially anyone who participated in rape, beatings, or killing, but not in planning for the genocide, could admit their crimes to the community, ask forgiveness, and then perform community service, like this road cleaning, for a few months while living at home. It’s not exactly justice, but what would justice be in a small country with hundreds of thousands of killers and hundreds of thousands of victims?

Anyway, I was feeling a little unnerved as the prisoner-workers all stopped to gawk at the mzungu, when my friend André came up to talk to me. I was just grateful to have something else to do besides stare back at all these admitted killers and we had a good conversation. He told me about his time at university, I explained the rental market in DC, and he tried to convince me to marry his youngest son. Normal.

He left to go finish his yard work and my boss Mama Muhire came out to sit with me. She spotted André across the street and said nonchalantly, “You know, he just finished his community service last month.” My stomach dropped at the reminder that not every killer is wearing a pink jumpsuit. “What did André do to require community service?” She waved her hand dismissively, “He participated in the genocide. I don’t remember exactly.” She then stood and in her loud Mama Muhire voice yelled across the street for André to come over and greet her. He smiled and ran over. Then in the daily miracle that is Rwanda, this man who committed acts of genocide embraced this woman whose husband was killed in the genocide.

I realized then that I see people here in neat little categories: widow, rapist, orphan, killer, mzungu… Well, as Julienne would say, they are human beings just like you and me. And God knows all of our pasts could use some explaining. I’m just not sure how to see people outside the context of their personal histories. I don’t know how yet, but I want to learn to look at people and ask, “Who does this person want to be NOW?”


P.S. The weirdest place I've seen the USAID logo was in an overpriced expat grocery store on cans of vegetables they were selling. Food donations for sale to Americans?