Reflection #1

Sometime in early September, 2006…

Friends, Family, aFrica-Files,

I’d meant to wait a month before writing my first mass-e-mail, but I’ve got quite a bit to say, and have a few minutes to put my thoughts to paper, or to liquid-crystal display, as it were. I’m sitting at the table of my living room/dining room/sitting room, eating by candle light, as the electricity has been cut off (I had electricity last night, so naturally I wouldn’t have it two days in a row). Where to start? Let me try with my itinerary and go from there:

I spent the first five days in Abidjan Ivory Coast, where I was mostly stuck in the office, reading books, working, and watching the first two episodes of Smallville. Most people go to Africa to experience the culture, I bring four seasons of a WB teen drama series. But it’s about Superman, so we’ll forgive the cultural insensitivity. Anyway, Abidjan was fine, and the most exciting thing was an ATM, countless shell stations, and dinner on the lagoon with a guy I met last time I was in Ivory Coast and who used to be our studio coordinator, watching fisherman fish in canoes made of tree logs. It was midnight… perfect time to get the fish, and they whispered softly, as they pushed off the shore into the calm midnight waters. Now, before you think I’m in the middle of nowhere, the background of these peasant fisherman at midnight on a calm lagoon is the most advanced city I’ve seen in Africa, with sky scrapers, neon lights, highways, cab drivers just across the water, not to mention a full-screen dvd screening of Beyonce live in London. Here’s a restaurant with a thatched roof, on the edge of a calm lagoon, showing Beyonce Knowles’ luscious legs on a life-size screen. Not that I’m complaining, but did somebody say cultural dichotomy?

Then I mosied over to Burundi, with stopovers in Ghana and Nairobi. Only eventful happening was befriending three South Africans who work for a security consulting company and tried to convince me they were lingerie salesman. For my part, I tried to convince them I wasn’t CIA. So I arrived in Burundi, and promptly stayed at our Ivory Coast Country Director’s house. She’s Burundian and was there on holidays (vacation for you amurrrrricans). So I dropped my shit off, changed, and headed to the office to meet the team. I spent the next four days looking for a place to live, meeting Spes’ 11 brothers and sisters and brothers and sisters in law and nieces and nephews, all of whom wanted me to live in Spes house. Good deal: white guy = muzungu = $$. A common formula, as you will come to see. In any event, I began working on helping the Burundian staff prepare a couple of project proposals to the Open Society Institute and the Canadian government, as well as helped organize their financial systems (for those of you who don’t know what I actually DO and think I work for the CIA, hopefully this will shed some light). If you still persist in your thinking, know that you (and the South Africans) are not alone. Long story short, I picked up where I left off in Washington, with a similar job, only now the communication is in French (though most of the writing is still in the Queen’s Anglais), the malaria threat is higher, and everywhere you go people yell “Muzungu, muzungu”, pretty much the equivalent of “Fucking Cracker!” Which reminds me of this kid I used to wash dishes with at the retirement home named Joey, the kid’s name, not the retirement home. Every day, I’d come into work, and he’d yell, “Hey, Graham Cracker, get it, Cracker!” Yeah, I got it.

Anyway, back to Burundi. But honestly, moved from West Africa to East Africa (thematically), and the reality of my job is that I could really do it from anywhere, even on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean, assuming I had a V-Sat hookup and constant internet access. I just happen to be plugged in at an NGO headquarters/radio production studio in Bujumbura Burundi, where I spent the next five days not finding a house, drinking beer, working, and not really feeling culture shock.

Five days after arriving, I jetted over to Eastern Congo for a 24-hour orientation/meet-and-greet to meet my boss, who was arriving in Bukavu from Kinahasa (the capital – we have offices in both). She had been delayed because of a security situation in Kinshasa following the elections. (Don’t worry mom, it’s 1000 miles away, literally). So I spent the night in Eastern Congo, then met the staff the next day, before turning around and driving the 3 hours back to Bujumbura, crossing the border between DRC and Rwanda, then driving an hour through Rwanda, before crossing back into Burundi for the hour+ drive back to the Capital, passing kids on bicycles transporting hay and sticks, and rice, and anything else they could strap to their bicycles, shepherds hearding large groups of long-horned cattle, right across the road (which presents a problem when your 4x4 is driving at 60 mph. But we slowed down to miss the cattle, barely avoiding (unfortunately) a small group of children screaming Cracker (get it, Graham Cracker?!). But I returned to the Capital, where I spent four more lovely days, including a party at my country directors house with the whole 35 person staff, complete with kebobs, patio furniture, cell phone conversation, and a bathtub filled with ice water and beer.

Let me get to the point, as this is boring.

I’m sitting here by candlelight, looking over the bill the kid gave me for the 8 bucks I gave him this morning to buy food from the market to make lunch and dinner. It turns out that he’s been hired (by Spes) to cook, clean, do laundry, and guard the house during the day. Also turns out he lives in what I thought was a tool shed behind the house, a brick, open awning-covered structure, picture slave quarters on a plantation, and you’re actually right on. Nonetheless, this offends every inch of my morals and judgements on human equality. When I got home from my 9 day trip to Kigali, Rwanda and Bukavu, Congo (DRC) last night, I had other things to worry about. You’ll see.

So I took a 6 hours chartered bus with our media coordinator in Congo and three journalists that work for us in Burundi (hosting round table discussion programs, news programs, and other live and pre-recorded radio programs). We drove through some of the most beautiful mountain landcapes I’ve ever seen, with small villages and groupings of huts and mud-brick houses butting up against the roadway every few kilometers (a kilometer is one fifth of a high school cross-country race for those of you math wizzes doing the conversion at home). Anyway, I was crammed in the back seat next to a farmer from Rwanda (who couldn’t read and write, so I filled out his exit card to cross the border – he looked like he was 15, but he was born in 1980 – no date, just the year… that has really stuck with me, particularly given all the importance we put on birthdays – I for one celebrate mine for two weeks – those of you who love me will remember a certain wine party where we all had a bit too much to drink) and a group of three Burundian women (who also couldn’t fill out their Rwandan exit card, through lack of caring more than lack of schooling). At the border crossing, I ran into Spes’ brother, who again asked me if I was taking the house, though by that time I had already decided no to. We chatted away, before getting back on the bus for the last two hours of the mountain trip back to Burundi.

On arriving, I walked to the office, attempted a phone conversation with my parents using Skype, in which I think they heard about 58% of the consonants and 3 of the five vowels. I then grabbed a cab and headed back to Spes’ house (my house for the month of September), after being dropped off, I realized that, as I hadn’t been there in nine days, no one actually knew I would be coming, so to my unpleasant surprise, I found a pad lock on the gate: the day watchman, cleaner, cook, shed-hut dweller, Kirundi-teacher had left for the day. So here I am at 5:30 pm on a Sunday facing a ten foot stone wall with shards of class and metal spikes on the top to prevent intruders (and inhabitants) from scaling the fence. I would have jumped it, but I had a 2000 laptop over my shoulder. So I launched my backback over the wall, called Spes’s sister, who said the night watchman would be there in 30 minutes, and promptly stared at the dirt. 30 minutes, middle of some random Burundian neighborhood without anywhere to go. So I walked around the corner to a small market run by an Indian family. You have to imagine the irony of speaking English at a the equivalent of a convenience store in Burundi. So that killed five minutes, and here I am in front of the gate, contemplating my existence and pain threshold (have YOU ever scaled a ten foot wall covered in metal and glass shards? – that’s what I fucking thought). By this time a small group of four children had gathered and began giggling at me from about 20 meters away (again, a meter is 1/5000 of a cross country race or roughly the height of an annoying, ethnically insensitive Burundian child). So after they began laughing and yelling Muzungu, muzungu, a group of neighbors at the other end of the “street” – sandway, I might call it – took up the relay baton, only their discussions included horrific attempts at English. So I start laughing because the whole damn thing was quite funny, and let’s face it, getting locked out of your own compound is pretty quintessentially Muzungu. Then I look across from me, and there’s a girl staring at me. She invites me in to sit until the damn kid gets back. THANK GOD!.

Which really leads me to the main point here. Here I am a total stranger being openly mocked for being white (well, ok, REALLY white), and this wonderful person invites me into the most personal space in Burundi, the home. So I sit down with her and her sister, and it turns out they’re both at the local university and management school. After they ask me if I want a beer and force feed me a banana, So I begin to try to engage them in conversation: the cute one is the younger sister (who doesn’t have a fiancée – good news, sorry mom) and she’s studying English. The older one is studying management. However, instead of practicing her English, the two of them decide to quiz me on my Kirundi. Yeah, uh, don’t know about most of you, but I sort of slept through Introductory Kirundi in college, it was one of those 8am classes that met every day – hell for a full-time hybernator like myself. But I digress. So we get to chatting, mother owns a flower shop in the center of town, father died during the massacres of 1994, you know typical chit-chat. And they invite me to a mass they’re having in honor of their father, a mass they have every year on the anniversary of his death 9/13. Now let me paint the picture, as my English skills are clearly awful. I go from outsider stuck on some random street in some random capital on some random continent with some random job to sitting down in a beautiful living room with two of the kindest individuals I’ve ever met, who are teaching me Kirundi, serving me bananas, offering me beer, asking me about my job, and inviting me to a special mass in honor of their father, who died in a crisis I was (and a lot of others were) too busy listening to the soundtrack of Woodstock ’94 to give a shit about. I’m sharing their food, discussing the importation of artificial flowers from Tanzania, and agreeing to come to the mass, as well as the reception afterwards chez-elles / at their house.

Well, Spes’ sister finally arrives with her daughter, and I apologize profusely, invite them in, serve them warm fanta and a warm coke, and we sit out on the stoop, facing the inside of the wall, much better and begin to discuss the current situation in the country. Without going into too much detail, it’s safe, but it’s sad. The government is consolidating it’s majority and electoral victory last year, and beginning to clamp down on freedom of expression. My organization’s been here for eleven years, using radio to prevent the exact kind of eventuality that killed 800,000 Rwandans and my neighbor’s father in 1994. And after ten years and an election, there’s still so much to be done.

Flash to Rwanda for a second, where I spent the last five days. My second night there, we finish up a planning workshop for a regional youth radio program that we’re launching, which will be live and simulcast in Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo on four radio stations via internet streaming and FM rediffusion. (picture African infrastructure, now reread that last sentence). It’s an amazing project and is aimed at addressing how youth in the region view and deal with conflict. The ultimate aim is to help prevent mass-violence and promote peaceful conflict transformation. Picture Woodstock (’69) meets proactive initiative. Any event, I head up to my hotel room and one of the participants (a local DJ and radio producer) asks me if I’m coming. Where, I ask. Mille Collines, she says. Before I have time to hide the incredulity on my face, I find myself at a happy hour, listening to another participant named Cassanova singing Bob Marley on stage, while I drink a half-price beer. Yep, you guessed it: Happy Hour at Hotel Rwanda. Not even kidding.

So they used radio to promote hatred and ethnic genocide; we use it to promote the exact opposite.

You want to know what I do. Nothing as exciting as that last statement; however, I work to make sure that the amazing people that do this work have the salary and funding to keep going. That’s why I’ve been working my ass off since I moved to DC two years ago. I’m not going to make this a sappy e-mail, but I’m 25 and sitting in complete darkness, typing on a laptop, while some 19 year old kid is sleeping in a shed made of mud bricks in the back yard, making a dollar a day to wash my clothing, make me lunch and dinner, and help water the lawn, and a family across the street is mourning for their father, who was killed 12 years ago because either his ancestors came from a certain part of the continent or because Belgium decided the most effective way to control a country would be to use ethnicity as a tool for manipulation and control.

So it turns out, the kid doesn’t eat if I don’t eat. And I was gone for nine days. Think about that for a second. Not really clear, as I don’t speak Kirundi and the kid doesn’t speak French, but he didn’t eat for about 2 or 3days while I was gone. Yeah, I know, jesus. Spes’ sister finally found out, and made sure he knew that he could eat at her place when I’m traveling. Fucking ridiculous. Now I’m responsible for some kid’s nutrition, who lives in a servants quarters in my backyard

I don’t even know where I am.

-Graham

Skype

I was talking to my uncle on Skype tonight, and we were discussing the problems with the static you hear...

When I hear static,
I can hear all the miles, all the other people talking... the signal going through the equator bouncing off luxembourg plunging through 4,000 miles of ocean bandwidth through the naval yards of phillidelphia past Lititz, PA and Amish Country, crossing the bridges of pittsburgh, plunging into the Ohio river valley and then all the way across to california; or maybe it's going the other way across Asia, or maybe half is going one way and half is going the other way. Or maybe it's a third, a third, and the other third is bouncing off a satellite orbiting over San Francisco. And maybe every one of these signals is crystal clear, but they deflect one another as they all arrive in your living room phone receiver,

that's why you can only hear every third word