Katrin handed me at least fifteen forms to fill out: waivers to ride in agency vehicles, registration for my computer, forms for taking pens and staples from the limited supply closet. I signed confidentiality agreements about the refugee cases I would interview and report, and was given a five-minute security briefing by the Rwandan security advisor: don’t talk to strangers, don’t eat anything weird, and don’t walk around alone at night. Any questions?
Noticing the way my African colleagues were dressed, I regretted having packed so many “field outfits.” I had figured I would need comfortable and disposable clothing, but now looked down abashedly at my sensible brown linen dress, as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide after days of travel. The Rwandan women were amazingly put together and stylish. They dressed traditionally, in long skirts and fitted shirts decorated with loud greens and oranges, shocking purples and yellows—colors that white women could never pull off. Our skin was just too pale. I learned later that the secret ingredient to their outfits was wax—it was put in the cloth in order to repel dirt and prevent wrinkles.
My first week in the office, I’d walk around introducing myself to people at the canteen, in the bathroom, along the hallways. Perhaps it was because I was painfully naive, annoyingly exuberant, green to the point of repulsion that everyone but Kassim pretty much ignored me.
“Hi! I’m Jessica,” I practically screamed at a woman standing at the printer one day. She looked a few years older than me, her hair overgrown and tied in a loose ponytail. She wore faded khaki pants that hit her mid-calf and a loose, colorful shirt that looked like she had bought it in India or Nepal.
“Hi,” she replied, “I’m Susan. Ugh,” she said, looking at the pages coming out of the printer. “There’s no toner left. I told Henry to get some a week ago.”
I shrugged. “What are you working on here?”
“Women’s health.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long. Two years.”
“So how do you like it? How has it been?”
She seemed annoyed that I was even speaking, let alone expecting her to respond. “I don’t know. I mean, lately bad days have turned into bad weeks, which have turned into bad months. The time just kind of goes, you know? I’m just so ready to get out of here,” she sighed, ripping up the pages coming from the printer and throwing them in the trash.
I had thought all these people would be so happy to be here. I certainly was. I wanted to hear how they ended up in Rwanda, what they knew about the place, and how they got into this career. Where were they before? Where were they going after? “I’m here for the next couple of months. I’m sitting down the hall with Katrin. If you want to have lunch or anything some time, just let me know.”
“OK,” she said, smiling weakly.
When the sun went down I sprayed myself with DEET because I heard that this was the time when mosquitoes were the worst. “Have you ever gotten malaria?” I asked Katrin one evening as she was getting ready to go home.
“Yeah, twice.” She said it as if she were talking about getting a cold.
“Was it bad?”
“Yeah, it feels like death. Well, the first time did. The second time wasn’t so bad.”
“Are you taking anything? I’m on Malarone.”
“No. I don’t take anything. After you’re here for so long, you just stop. That stuff will destroy your liver.” She turned around to watch me rubbing the repellent onto my skin. “Sorry, can you spray that stuff outside? It’s getting really stuffy in here.”
That week, I plunged into the blue binders lining our office wall. Refugees arriving at the camps were given refugee status on a prima facie basis, meaning due to the urgency of the situation, it wasn’t possible to determine refugee status for each individual and therefore they were accepted as a group. But for those who came to the capital, where they either had friends or relatives or thought that they could find work, their status as a refugee had to be proven through a Refugee Status Determination interview. Each applicant’s file came in a red folder with a passport-sized photo stapled to the front. Inside were photocopies of whatever documentation he or she had and a draft of their interview transcript. Kassim was right—many of the English translations were indecipherable—but I sat with the files until I could make whole sentences out of the notes.
Determining refugee status was not a fast process at all. Staff in the Kigali office interviewed the applicants, wrote up their cases, and put them into the red folders. When they were edited and approved in Kigali, the folders were sent to Nairobi where they then had to be approved for a second time. The Nairobi office was the regional hub, processing thousands of asylum seekers from all over East Africa. Rwanda wasn’t its only concern, and things moved slowly. For resettlement cases, once that hurdle was cleared, there were more. The red folder was sent to Geneva, where someone at the global headquarters would have the final say. The whole process could take more than a year.
It was hard to believe that humans could endure the trials written in these pages: if they themselves hadn’t been mutilated, or subjected to rape or torture, they had witnessed it done to their relatives. I couldn’t imagine which would be worse. As I read, I kept flipping back to the small photos stapled to the front of the red folders, trying to match the events to their stoic faces. I didn’t know then, but I would be meeting these people in the coming weeks, and I would be hearing their stories—their voices—myself.
Work was going well, but on a measly internship stipend, I couldn’t afford to continue staying at the hotel. I asked staff if they knew of any available rooms. Some gave me leads, but nothing concrete. The addresses went like this: the red house after the large tree on the left downtown. Turn right after the stone wall stops and you see the peanut vendors on your right. Major landmarks included the big blue water container next to the water pump or the abandoned truck near the cemetery. I called a taxi driver who was referred to me by someone at the office. For $20 he agreed to drive me around town to all of the addresses I had gathered.
The first house I visited was a good mile and a half off the main road. There was no running water, but the woman who owned it told me I could use her bucket and walk five minutes to the river each morning. I thought I could probably do a bit better. I got back into the car to go to the next address: after the petrol station near the soccer stadium. But that place didn’t have a finished floor and the door didn’t shut all the way, so there would be no way to lock it at night.
After a few more failed attempts, the taxi driver could tell I was upset and took a detour to show me his sister’s house. We pulled in and he pointed me to a half-constructed room. As I walked over a pile of chipped concrete, I noticed that the roof wasn’t finished. It was a nice room, just no roof over it. I pointed up. “No, no, don’t worry,” he said. “Nothing gets in!”
That night, I returned to my hotel room and from inside my mosquito net I listened to the shouts, laughter, and life on the street. It felt cozy under there, like the sheet-fortress my brothers and I built over our bunk beds as kids. But my brothers weren’t with me now and I wondered if this was the plight of all aid workers on their first missions. Was this some rite of passage, the refugee agency’s version of an initiation? Because I felt like a displaced person. And sleeping alone did not help my loneliness.
Ever since Michael proposed earlier that year, we had been living together in his studio apartment in the East Village. For a time, we were happy and in love. But once I started graduate school, I found myself surrounded by peers from Senegal and Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and the Czech Republic. Even the Americans, having spent years in Mauritania and China, Ukraine and Somalia, were worldlier than anyone I had ever met. I tried to talk up my recent work trips outside the United States, but in reality I had spent more time in Cancun and Jamaica over spring break than anywhere else. The more engaged I was with this new cohort, the less I wanted to settle down. I didn’t so much change my mind as recognize it: I hadn’t k
nown how much I wanted to do, how much I wanted to see.
But the snowball had already started picking up speed and I was too scared to stop it. We went shopping for linens, registered for plates and silverware, designed our invitations. All the while, my panic intensified. I couldn’t even get excited about my new Carolyn Kennedy–esque dress.
A FRIEND FROM COLLEGE HAD gotten engaged a few weeks before me. One night we met at a bar to talk about wedding planning. I practiced facial exercises beforehand—the open-mouthed smile, the brow raised in delight—to help me look as though I had risen to her level of excitement. I tried to mimic it in the mirror, but really I just looked like a jackass.
When I arrived, my friend was already at the bar drinking. “I got you something!” she exclaimed, as I approached our table.
I hadn’t gotten her anything. “You’re so thoughtful. You really didn’t have to!”
“Oh, no, it’s really nothing—just some fun stuff for us to go through.” She reached into her bag. “Here!”
She pulled out a copy of Modern Bride, heavier than my tenth-grade world history textbook. She opened to a dog-eared page.
“Michelle’s dress was just like this! Except the lace was lower down, you know? Like around her hips …” she said, swiveling her hands around her waist.
“Uh-huh,” I said nodding. We turned the thick, glossy page.
“We just saw these dishes at Bloomingdale’s. What do you think? Are they nice enough for dinnerware? Or more like porch summer barbecue?”
“I’m probably the wrong person to ask about this,” I said. “But yeah, I think they’re probably nice enough for dinnerware.” I was trying, really I was, to get up for this. But she could tell.
“You know what you should do, Jess?” she said, closing the magazine and earnestly taking a sip of her white wine.
Get a handgun?
“You should go on theknot.com.”
“What is that?”
“It’s this really fun website. They give you all of these cool ideas—off-the-cuff stuff, things you wouldn’t think of. Like sprinkling glitter on the tables instead of candles.”
“OK, what is it, the N-O-T dot com as in, ‘I do … not!’ ” My sarcasm went unnoticed.
“No—it’s knot. As in, tying the knot.”
The next day, I sat down at my computer and went right onto theknot.com. What harm could it do? At least I was doing something. I typed my name in the first box, my fiancé’s in the next, our wedding date, my budget, and—poof—it was done. I was registered!
What I didn’t realize was that theknot.com sends daily e-mails checking up on you. The next morning when I opened my inbox, screaming from the monitor was my first e-mail from theknot.com. Subject line: Jessica! Just 207 days until your wedding!
I felt like I was choking. I could see a rope coming out from the screen making a tight noose.com around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I felt dizzy and lightheaded, but not in the way that I had when Michael proposed six months ago. This was in the bad way. This was in the way that I thought I was going to puke.
I had to call this off. No matter how many hours I spent awake listening to Michael sleeping next to me, trying to convince myself otherwise, every day that brought us closer to the wedding, the more nauseous I felt. A voice inside me compelled me to continue living on my own, to immerse myself in this career, and in the lifestyle it required. My twenty-five-year-old self felt sure it wasn’t possible to do that and be married at the same time. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that my personal life would take a backseat to this career.
I never regretted breaking off the engagement. But as I lay under that mosquito net in Kigali, where I didn’t speak the language and where I couldn’t find my way back to the airport if my life depended on it, I wondered whether it was, in fact, the right decision. Being alone at times like these really sucked.
But finally, through friends of friends who had worked in Kigali before, I found Gloria, a Rwandan woman who lived downtown. She ran a local women’s organization for widows of the genocide, and told me to meet her at its offices one evening after work. When I arrived, she walked proudly up to me and shook my hand. “So you are Jessica?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Well, let’s go.” She was not a chitchat kind of person, and getting to know Gloria over the coming months would take time and patience. She wore a perfectly tailored bright yellow dress, the color popping off her dark skin, and carried a small black patent leather purse. She was a round woman and her steps were slow, as if she were waddling. Gloria had a driver, a boy in his teens who was already sitting in the driver’s seat of her beat-up white car. She opened the passenger door and pushed the front seat forward so I could get in the back. “Skinny ladies in the back,” she said. I slithered inside. The car made an audible sigh when she sat down in front. My seat back did not stay upright, so I sat supporting myself by holding onto the back of hers.
“This is Juma,” she said, pointing to the driver. He looked at me in the rearview mirror and smiled. “He doesn’t speak English.” Juma pulled onto the main road, crowded with people walking home from work.
“Have you been to Remera yet?” I didn’t know what Remera was. A restaurant? A store?
“I don’t think so, no.”
“That is where we live, Remera.” It was a neighborhood. We drove down the bumpy road, the back of my seat jumping with each pothole. Dust from outside seeped into the sides of the car and puffed up around us. After a fifteen-minute drive through rush-hour traffic, Juma pulled onto a side street that was a short distance from the office. He slowed down at a gate and beeped. A young man, Gloria’s guard, opened it, and Juma pulled into the driveway. “Come on,” she said, holding the front seat forward for me to get out of the car.
I entered her small, simply decorated house. The living room held a long black pleather couch which faced a large entertainment console that looked as if it came from a 1987 Sears catalogue. Its cabinets held an old radio and a small television. At the far end of the room was a dining room table with plastic coverings still on the chairs. On the small table next to the couch, a bouquet of fake flowers sat on top of a doily. Things were tidy, and everything seemed to have been placed deliberately. One bulb hung from the ceiling and moths swarmed around it.
We walked to the back of the house, passing a small, dark kitchen area and two other bedrooms. Gloria opened the door to what would be my room. The furniture was simple: a dresser, a plastic table, and a small bed draped with a bright pink cover.
“One of the women at the widow center made this. It’s part of our livelihood’s work,” she said proudly, tucking in one of the corners. She reached up to open the small window close to the low ceiling. “There is a screen so you won’t have problems with the bugs.”
Gloria offered me tea. I accepted and as she walked back from the tiny kitchen, holding a mug, she said, “You will eat with us, you will be part of the family.” I moved in that night.
Gloria was not married, but she had two daughters who lived in Nairobi, where they went to private school. She shared this house with her sister Betty and Betty’s family—a son my age and two little grandchildren. Gloria was a prominent woman in the community and, by all local standards, was rich, with a car, a driver, a maid, and a guard.
Later that night Betty returned home and Gloria introduced us. Betty smiled kindly as she put out her hand to shake mine. She did not speak a word of English but it didn’t matter. I was immediately at ease. Sitting in Gloria and Betty’s living room, sipping bland tea, and listening to them speak Kinyarwanda—this was the first time since coming to Rwanda a week ago that I felt at home.
THAT FIRST NIGHT BETTY AND I sat in silence in the living room with our mugs of tea. Every so often we looked up at each other and smiled. On the wall were two photographs, one of a man and another of a woman, both of whom appeared to be in their early thirties. I pointed to them and gestured
with a shrug of the shoulder. “Who are they?”
She looked up slowly and first motioned to herself and then pointed to the ground. Gloria walked in and translated matter-of-factly. “Those are Betty’s children. They were killed in the genocide.”
I looked back at Betty. Her face was down, her eyes gazing into her mug.
Betty’s house was now filled with walking, talking reminders of her children’s deaths—her two grandchildren, whom she was raising. From the living room we could hear them bouncing around the bedroom, giggling and screeching. I took out photos of my family from my backpack to show Betty. I pointed to my brothers as she took the small album from me and brought it closer to her face so she could see.
Betty pointed to me in the picture with a somewhat confused but animated smile. This is you? She looked down and then again at me, and shouted something to Gloria in French.
“She says you are very pretty,” Gloria yelled back to me from the other room.
“Oh, merci.” I blushed. Sure, I look pretty in that photo, at my brother’s graduation, with makeup and blown-out hair. I looked down at my dusty garb and ran my hand across my sweaty face. Of course she doesn’t recognize me.
She pointed to my mother and father, looked at me, and smiled again. At first, I wanted to shout back to Gloria—“How do you say ‘My mother died’ in French?”—but I didn’t. I just pointed to my mother’s photo and then pointed to the ground, exactly as Betty had done. And she just knew—that strange expediency of not speaking the same language.
I came into work the next morning relieved. “I found a place to live!”
“That’s great!” Katrin said, I think more grateful that I wouldn’t be pestering her for leads anymore.
“Yeah, it’s close by here, with a lovely family.”
Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid Page 4
