“Family? Oh, who do they work for?”
“Well, she runs a local NGO for widows of the genocide, and she lives with her sister, grandchildren and nephew.”
“Wait,” she said, turning away from her computer screen to look at me. “You’re living with a Rwandan family? Are you serious?”
“Yes. What?”
“You have a lock, right? I mean, you haven’t left anything valuable there, have you?”
“I don’t know. No. But, I mean they’re really kind. I’m not worried.”
“Well, I’ve heard some bad stories. Do you want me to hold some of your valuables at my house?” I was supposed to trust a woman who had practically ignored me for an entire week over a family who had graciously welcomed me into their home?
“No, but thanks. I think it will be OK.”
I could expect this reaction from Katrin because I noticed she kept a cool distance from nationals. She wore rubber gloves when she went to the refugee camps to greet community leaders and children. “Who knows what they are carrying,” she would say. “I have an infant son and can’t bring home any viruses or anything.”
AT HOME, BETTY’S GRANDCHILDREN—a boy and girl, ages five and ten—followed me everywhere, anticipating my every move. I swear they would have sat on the floor and watched me pee if Gloria hadn’t been there to scold them when they followed me into the bathroom. Betty’s grandson knew five English words. They were by 50 Cent: “Go, shorty. It’s your birthday.” When the electricity worked, they sat watching one channel, which aired the local news and Big Brother Africa. I tried to communicate with them in their language, Kinyarwanda. When I’d open my mouth to say “Murakoze chane” (thank you very much), they’d smile, puckering their lips and averting their eyes. But within seconds, unable to contain their giggles, they would burst into hysterics. Was it my pronunciation? My voice? My accent?
Before bed, they came out of the room they shared with Gloria and Betty carrying combs and gestured for me to sit down so that they could brush my hair. They each took a side and every so often stopped to quietly stroke my head to feel the wispy texture. They touched my white arms with intrigue, losing themselves in their curiosity. When they looked up to see me smiling at them, they would turn away, clutching their embarrassed smiles with both hands. I was the first white person they had ever gotten this close to.
Betty was a nurse and more soft-spoken than Gloria. She was older and her eyes revealed years of grief. She walked slowly but authoritatively. Her hair was tied tightly in cornrows on her head, and she had a large space between her teeth, which only made her occasional smile even more endearing. She paced the house humming, which sometimes turned to singing, like she was lost in her own head, not noticing or caring that others could hear her. Gloria’s nephew Lawrence also lived in this house. He was close to my age, spoke English, and worked at a bank downtown. Every morning he’d sit at the breakfast table before any of us were dressed wearing the same white button-down shirt, green pants, and a checkered blue tie that stopped mid-belly. He called it “dressing smart.” Lawrence asked me a lot about America. He wanted to know what music we listened to and which movies we watched, what my friends did and what we ate. He looked at the pictures of my family and asked what they did, what our house looked like on the inside. He wanted to know whether I had ever seen snow and what it felt like, how many channels my TV had, whether I had met Michael Jordan or Madonna. I thought back to the questions my college friends at home asked before I left—Was I scared I would encounter lions? Did I have to pack my own water there? How was I going to charge my laptop without any outlets?—and Lawrence’s curiosity didn’t seem so absurd.
But I quickly got a sense of why my colleagues shrank with horror from the rigors of living with locals. The interior of Gloria’s house seemed to be made of unfinished surfaces, crumbling walls, and floors that never got clean no matter how diligently they were scrubbed. The bathroom always had a soggy feel and a tangy odor. There was a toilet, but flushing it meant pouring in a large bucket of water at a rapid enough speed that it all gurgled down in one swallow. I’d usually find someone else’s turds floating at the top. My bed smelled like earth and if I sat down on it when the light was shining through the window, a mushroom-puff of dust arose from inside.
I walked home from work every day. It was about fifteen minutes from the office to Gloria’s by foot, and the road I took to get there was lined with half-constructed houses. That’s how people built their homes: when they had enough money to start, they’d put down a foundation. Then they waited until they had enough money to build the first wall. And then the second, and so on. Although there were banks in town, people didn’t usually make enough to save money the way I’d known people to save in America. All over, homes were in various stages of construction, grass and weeds growing inside the open rooms. I wondered how long it took some of these people to finish, and how old they would be when they finally moved in.
Children followed me during my walk home. All that was needed was for one to spot me and scream “Muzungu!” and kids of all ages would come streaming out of their homes to walk with me. “How are you?” I asked. Some only knew one answer to this question: “I am fine!” You could tell whether children attended the morning or afternoon session of school because regardless of what time it was some would always shout “Good morning!,” while others inevitably greeted me with “Good afternoon!”
Initially, I was flattered. They wanted to be near me and get to know me. I had scores of new friends! I also noticed that in addition to their salutation they repeated the same phrase, “Mpa amafranga.” I imagined it meant something like, “Isn’t this a beautiful Rwandan day?” But when I discovered that it meant “Give me money,” I was deflated and a little heartbroken. These children saw me as a walking ATM, not a friend. Newly cynical, I learned how to say “Nt amafranga nfite yokuguha”—I have no money to give you. Within a few days, I was walking home alone.
Loneliness followed me into the nights. Gloria was often out to dinner, networking and fundraising for her organization, and Lawrence usually worked late, so I was left with Betty who, although lovely, could only communicate silently, through smiles and nods. It was dark by 6 p.m. and without a car, without friends, I had nowhere to go but bed, where I would read and listen to the same twelve CDs again and again. The monotony of those nights was unbearable. The hours passed slowly, like honey dripping off the back of a spoon.
At the office I would overhear Katrin on the phone making plans for the night—“Yeah, I’ll see you there. Tell Mark to come! I haven’t seen him for ages!” She’d walk out with Susan, reminding me to lock up before I left. I felt right back in seventh grade, when Elise Levine sat me at the unpopular table at her Bat Mitzvah.
I’d usually eat lunch by myself at a local restaurant down the street from the office. After a few days the Rwandan waitress, a gorgeous, slender, tall young woman who dressed in clothes much more stylish than mine, took pity on my palpable loneliness. She already knew what I was going to order—a Diet Coke and a plate of rice and stew—and would have it prepared for me when I arrived.
I was so desperate to speak with people that one afternoon, in a fit of bravery—as if loneliness had suddenly been converted into courage—I approached an expat woman who looked about my age sitting at the table across from me.
“Hi, I’m Jessica.”
“I’m Nisha,” she said, looking up from the papers she was reading.
“Sorry to disturb you, I just moved here and …”
“It’s hard at first,” she said, smiling.
I laughed. “Yeah.”
It turned out Nisha was as friendly as she looked. She smelled of sweet perfume that I got a whiff of every time there was a slight gust of wind. Her dark hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. She had been here six months working for an NGO, she told me, and lived in a house downtown with her husband.
“Hey, I’m having a dinner party tomorrow night. Why don’t you come over and I
’ll introduce you to a bunch of people?”
I almost got out of my chair and hugged her.
“Sure! But, I don’t have a car. I don’t even have a phone!”
“Well, don’t worry, I can pick you up here after work—I pass right by here on my way home—if you don’t mind coming before the other guests get there. We can cook together!”
I would have scrubbed her floors if she asked me.
“Thank you so much! What time should I be here?”
“How about six?”
“Perfect. See you then!”
I almost skipped back to the office, thinking about what I’d wear to my first dinner party, what I should bring, whom I would meet.
The next evening, Nisha pulled up to the restaurant right on time and I piled into her beat-up Jeep. We arrived at her house, which sat at the bottom of a steep drive, and I tried not to gasp as she showed me around. The place was palatial, her sunken living room with its high ceilings felt larger than Gloria’s entire house. Every room was a museum to the places she’d traveled: African masks of different shapes hung on the wall, waist-high wooden giraffes stood in the corner, colorful tapestries were used as tablecloths, African designs dotted the salad tongs. It was an impressive display, and you got the sense she wanted to impress. I’ve been to all these places, the artifacts said.
We entered the large kitchen and she opened the refrigerator. “Oh good, she managed the pasta!” Nisha said. “Last time you should have seen the mess she made of it!” Nisha was referring to her cook. And when she said that we’d be cooking, she meant making a salad, and this was because she didn’t trust her cook to wash the vegetables in bottled water. All of the other items for the dinner party—the large pasta dish, grilled chicken, vegetable stew—were already prepared. The table was set and all we had to do was light the candles with the matches placed neatly next to them.
Nisha offered me a beer and we went out to her porch. “Tim will be home any time now,” she said. Her husband Tim was still looking for work in Rwanda. Nisha had gotten a good job here and he had followed her out, hoping to find work when he arrived. “Next posting is his turn,” she explained. “Once my contract is up here, I’ll follow him wherever he gets work. But I like it here. I hope we can stay for a while. At least another year.”
Eventually the guests arrived—ten people in total, all of them aid workers from various agencies. At some point I went to the bathroom and as I was coming out heard someone calling my name. “Jessica?”
It was Katrin. “I didn’t know you were coming here! I just came straight from the office! I would have given you a lift if I knew you were coming!”
By now, I had shared an office with this woman for three weeks. Nisha had been warm and inviting, a quality that I would certainly find in others, but most people, once they learned I’d only be there a few months, were distant. Looking back, I couldn’t really blame Katrin; keeping some degree of distance from the short-termers was how we dealt with the transience of this existence. Eventually I, too, would begin to regard people the same way—anything to protect myself from the constant emotional jolts of this life. Maintaining personal stability became important in ways I’d never imagined, and in ways I wasn’t at all prepared for.
AS THE WEEKS WENT ON and I got to know more expats, I realized how odd my living situation actually was. Most expats lived like Nisha, in spacious houses situated behind high walls, some with barbed wire at the top, others with broken glass bottles crammed into the cement. They had guards who opened the gates when they returned home, and generators that ensured they always had electricity. The houses that I visited had porches and backyards, air conditioners and DVD players, stereo equipment that rivaled my dad’s surround sound system at home. At dinner parties like these we drank alcohol from Italy and ate cheese from France. The expats sat around, complaining that their guard was caught sleeping again, that their driver was on the verge of getting fired after being late again, that so and so came into work drunk again.
“I just can’t wait to get to Jinga this weekend,” one would say, inhaling a cigarette deeply.
“Where’s Jinga?” I asked.
“You’ve never been to Jinga? Oh, it’s fabulous. You have to get there before you leave. It’s the start of the Nile not far from Kampala. We go rafting there.” She turned to her friend, “Edward, you cannot fall out of the boat this time!” Her tone was so detached, as if we were living in some parallel universe, no part of which resembled the Africa that I had imagined from home. Eventually, with my personal life under control, I was able to settle into work. Rwanda seemed to have closed the chapter on the genocide. The identification cards introduced by the Belgian colonialists that differentiated between Hutus and Tutsis—like the yellow stars that classified Jews during the Holocaust—were abolished. People no longer referred to themselves as Hutu or Tutsi, but as Rwandans.
Still, it was impossible to meet someone who hadn’t been touched by the genocide in some way. Taxi drivers spoke candidly about family members who were slaughtered. Opening their desk drawers, my colleagues removed pictures of siblings who had been murdered. Waiters told stories about living in the crowded Tanzanian embassy, or hidden beneath a canopy of banana leaves, during the hundred days of hell.
Somehow people went on with their lives. They got dressed in the morning and went to work. They sent their children to school, if they could afford the fees. Some worked Rwanda’s soil to feed their families. Their resilience and ability to put the past behind them with such stoic resolve almost seemed unnatural. I didn’t think anyone I knew at home could be so brave, so dignified after seeing what humans are capable of.
For the aid community, though, the Rwandan genocide had been eclipsed by new conflicts. Afghanistan was the disaster of the day and donors redirected funds there. For aid workers, the allure of Rwanda was long gone—there were newer, more exciting places to work. Although thousands of cases still needed to be processed, both within and outside of Rwanda, the office was operating with the amount of funding and staff that would suggest that the refugee crisis had nearly been solved. And so while people continued to flock to the office seeking help, while camps were still over-populated, and while resettlement cases remained unresolved, the agency was being forced to scale back—closing field offices, letting employees go, stopping certain programs altogether—because donor attention and money had shifted elsewhere.
From my window, I watched dozens of people, many of them from Congo, Uganda, or Burundi, waiting outside the office, in order to find out if they were eligible for benefits as a refugee, or follow up on a resettlement request, or make an appointment for a refugee status determination interview. Women sat on the ground breast-feeding. Men, their shoes freshly shined in preparation for their interviews, milled around, reading in silence or chatting with friends. People were patient and calm. Occasionally they stood up to stretch, but mostly they just sat for hours on rocks around the office compound, in the hot sunlight in hopes of getting some kind of help. Whatever that help might be, they believed, it sure was better than where they came from. Looking at the stacks of file folders on my desk and then over at the ones spilling out of the cabinets all along the hallway, I knew that these were only a few of the many who waited. And I knew that they’d be waiting for a long time.
After I had spent a few weeks rewriting refugee status determination interviews, Kassim decided that I was ready to conduct interviews on my own. Uganda had been colonized by the British, so English was the spoken language, and it was to their cases that Kassim assigned me. These were just initial interviews to get basic information—where they came from, what happened to them, when they left and how they got to Kigali. Later in the process someone else would ask more pressing questions to determine if their stories were true, if it really was too dangerous for them to stay in Uganda, and if they could, in fact, seek legal refuge in Rwanda.
My first few interviews, I shadowed Katrin. “You have to ask them for details. Y
ou have to ask them to describe who they campaigned for and when,” she instructed me. “What they did and where. What happened to them to make them flee. It may sound harsh, but do you know how many people come in here trying to claim refugee status who don’t actually qualify?”
One day, we interviewed a man in his early forties who came with his five-year-old daughter. He wore a wrinkled suit, she a blue frilly dress, and white ribbons in her hair. We walked into the interview room, and his chair screeched loudly as he pushed it back to stand up and greet us. We both shook his hand, and then Katrin motioned to him. “Please, sit.”
I colored with the man’s daughter at one end of the long wooden table while Katrin interviewed him at the other. This man’s wife had been jailed for campaigning for the opposition party in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. After she was released, she and her family fled to Rwanda, where she was granted resettlement to the United States. She went. Her husband and daughter were still waiting to get their resettlement statuses confirmed. If they returned to Uganda, her husband feared that he, too, would be thrown in jail.
“How exactly did you come here?” Katrin asked.
He looked up at the ceiling and raised his eyebrows, recalling the route.
“Did you go through any other countries on your way?”
“For how long was your wife in prison?” Katrin inquired, while nodding and scribbling his answers.
And then in a higher pitch, “Where was her prison exactly?”
“Do you remember the names of her prison guards?”
This gentleman, a former teacher, answered slowly and deliberately, sometimes pulling on his tie as he spoke. When Katrin finished the interrogation, he quietly asked a question of his own. He looked at his daughter, who was sitting in my lap, and then back to Katrin: “When can I tell her she can see her mother again?”
“We will do what we can as fast as we can,” Katrin said.
He nodded and waited, in a moment of deep thought. Then the man stood up, walked toward where I was sitting with his daughter, scooped her up, and held out the picture she had drawn.
Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid Page 5
