Sssssshhhhhhh.....he's sleeping

There is a fifteen pound tortoise asleep in my room. Can’t say I’ve ever had this problem before. In Congo, I never had much in the way of animal problems because there was not much in the way of animals. I hated to be the one to break it to my nephew that I didn’t see many animals in Congo – unless they were being carried back from a hunt cut in two, and even then I wondered how they managed to kill it since they’re so few large animals left (needless to say, I kept this last nugget of information to myself). This is not to say that Burundi is crawling with wildlife. It just happens that the hotel I’m staying in has a tortoise that walks around, always seemingly with a resolute sense of purpose. This is the second time he’s waltzed across my porch and into my room. Earlier today he was lounging in my doorway, perhaps trying to escape some French kids who picked him up moments earlier. Unfortunately for him they spotted him, retrieved him, dropped him, then lost interest. He wandered off into the hotel grounds. As I sat on my computer in my little living area an hour later, he walked by, circled a chair, then went into my bedroom. He’s been sleeping in a corner ever since. I was actually a little concerned that he was dead, since he’s been there for a few hours. Maybe the drop from the French kids took him out, I theorized. So I snuck up behind him, kneeled to the ground, and listened for signs of life. In the silence, his sleeping tortoise breaths sounds like an old man.

He stayed there until I was ready for bed. At which point I went to the hotel bar and had a staff member help me escort him outside. When I work up the next morning, he was sleeping on my porch. I guess he likes me.

One more week....

It's amazing the difference between going to a foreign country when you know you will be staying for a year and when you know it's just a temporary sejour. For instance, Burundi is six weeks. Five of them are behind me. On the one hand, I can marvel at the nicer sides of Burundi (friendly people, good roads, charming restaurants, the war is pretty much over, etc) while also letting small things go (intermittant hot water, the "do i have malaria or is it just a headache" game, working long hours.) On the other hand, I completely avoid anything that might invest me socially or otherwise in Burundi. After all, I've had one foot out the door since I arrived. I've been dancing once and been to one party, but I can count the times I've "gone out" on one hand. Heck, I can make a peace sign with those times. I'm ready to head back to a life that might have some social interactions beyond work.

I saw a very good friend from Kindu this weekend, and it made me both nostalgic for my Congo days and stressed at the reminder of them. Life under the microscope was not a healthy thing for me, and, at the risk of sounding like I don't like Congo, it is a country that can really suck you dry. My friend had an incident where a crowd of one hundred guys wielding machetes showed up at her house screaming that they were going to kill her (someone her organization employed killed himself, and his passenger, when he ran his motorcycle into an on-coming car). They blamed her. They were ready for any excuse to raise hell, steal some motorbikes, and loot. I make a lot of excuses for the Congo - it's complex. It's fifty years of being run into the ground. It's colonization. Etc. But I can find no reason to ever justify the fact that these guys were pretty much ready to kill her. It made me want to launch a friggin intervention and convince her to leave.

As for me, I'll be changing countries once again, this time to England. I had decided I wanted to be an American, live in America, get back to my American roots, etc, but fate had something else in the cards and I moving to London in June. Thank goodness a cool job came up because after working at a temp agency I had pretty much decided I would rather be doing emergency work in Congo, Sudan or Somalia than sending faxes and binding human resource manuals for $12/hour. You think I'm kidding, but I'm quite serious. I was in the final round of interviews to do intense emergency work in various areas of the world, and I might just have taken it. But instead I got something great in London. Fish and chips sounds loads better than beans and rice. Plus, the dating scene in London might be a tad better than rural African hotspots. Just a hypothesis.

Tragedies

Watching the gruesome news of the Virginia Tech shootings when I got back from the field last week and returned to Burundi’s capital of Bujumbura, I cried. But it is not something I brought up to anyone here. Why? The number of people who have died in Burundi since 1993 is 5,000 times the number who perished at VT. While this in no way lessens the tragedy of the shootings, it made me uncomfortable with broaching the subject.

In America and many other parts of the world, we assume that we will be safe. We are shocked when violence tears things apart. This is also why terrorism is so effective against us – it shatters our sense of security. I know the lovely and interesting Burundians I’ve been working with would have been sympathetic if I brought up the Virginia Tech tragedy, but I shy away from any subject that touches on the deep tragedies that they themselves have faced. If we as Americans gave as much news coverage to parents in Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Somalia, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, showed pictures of the brothers and sisters who perished, the children who died, the grandparents...maybe there is too much tragedy in the world to show it all with the same intensity. It’s natural to be hit hardest by tragedies close to home – the perplexing grief of something senseless and random. But while not as random, the violence that has occurred or is occurring in each of these countries is just as senseless, and parents mourn with the same depth of grief, if not with the same shock.

But, as with much of my time in Congo, the thing that strikes me most here in Burundi is that I can barely imagine a war. Yes, I see soldiers. Yes, I they have guns. But people carry on with their lives, children smile at my camera, and old women shake my hand. And I leave it at that, because the truth is that I don't want to imagine the suffering. I'm selfish like that.






I know, it’s almost as hard as “Where’s Waldo?” But if you stare long enough you might be able to pick me out of the group.

Diary from the field

April 10 – Today we traveled through Kirundo Province. Burundi is seriously beautiful. I often wonder if people who live in these rural areas, most of whom will not have opportunities to see different places, think they live in a beautiful place. To which one might ask me if people who live in secure counries, who do not know what it’s like to have a civil war tear apart your life, think about how they live in a peaceful place. After a working in two different “collines” (this is an administrative demarcation, French for “hills,” that encompasses around 1,000 households), we spent the night in a medium-sized town.

April 11 – This morning I resisted the urge to snooze my cellphone’s alarm. The main roads are lovely pavement, but trekking on the side roads is the usual bouncy ride that I got used to while living in Congo. Our Landcruiser did its best impression of a mechanical bull. Still, even these roads were a piece of cake in comparison to the winding trails and sketchy bridges in Katanga Province (Congo). After conducting interviews in a colline near the Rwandan border, we stopped at an NGO’s office who works in the area. This happens to be the NGO I worked with in Congo and Niger, so it felt very familiar. Turns out one of the employees in that office, though she’s on vacation, is also an acquaintance from grad school. Small, small world. We eventually found a decent hotel, and by decent we mean minimum standards of clean rooms and sheets. I lucked out that the running water was working and took a shower. The shock the cold water caused me to gasp. Never been a big fan of cold showers. The water stopped running halfway through, and I dragged the bucket of water from the corner to finish the shower the old-fashioned way. My colleagues in the meantime had located a restaurant where we could eat and work. They had already placed the order for our meal. Our hotel said the electricity was only intermittent, so they had sought out a place with a generator. When we got there it was past six in the evening, and the light was quickly fading. We asked them to start the generator to plug in or laptops. My colleague, speaking in Kirundi, is obviously not happy with the response. I see two men slink towards the gate and leave. Turns out they left to get fuel for the generator. Yes, this was the first of many bad signs. The second was that the generator turned out to be broken. The third was when the cook showed up at 8pm to start cooking our meal. Having used flashlights and our laptop batteries until this point (which were now out of juice), I had the driver drop me off at the hotel. The rest of the team stuck it out for the food, which came at 10pm. I ate a Go Lean crunch bar that I had brought from the states and collapsed into bed. My phone rang a half-hour later. My mom and I had a broken conversation distorted by the bad reception, bad phone card, or a little of both.

April 12 – More field travel and interviews. I listen to my ipod as my colleagues have animated discussions in Kirundi. My general tiredness is probably not helped by my strategy of deliberate dehydration (no drinking means no peeing, no peeing means not having to find a place to pee in a remote village where children stick to me like glue). Will chug some water tonight.

April 13 – Woke up to the pouring rain. It is the rainy season in Burundi, afterall. As we eat breakfast in our hotel (a bit expensive at $10/night, my colleagues think – should be $8) fog creeps into the room through the open door. It reminds me of a Halloween Haunted House. After more interviews, we head back to Bujumbura. We go over the interview information at the office. I get back to my hotel in the evening. Pizza and gin and tonics follow (two things I never, ever tire of).

Photos from Burundi

Congo, I love ya, but I'm happy to be on this side of Lake Tanganika for now. Happy and with bad wind-blown hair.


Rollin, rollin, rollin....many hills. Great for scenery, not-so-great for farming. But that doesnt stop people.

This is Bujumbra - small town as far as capitals go, situated between hills and lake Tanganika.

It's a Wild World

In Burundi, I’ve been given CD-ROM program on how to deal with insecure situations – something that, surprisingly, I never once did while working in Congo. I suppose that detail somehow fell through the cracks. I actually enjoyed testing my common sense and base knowledge of radio communication, though the program itself was pretty cheesy. Like an American after-school special on drugs.

I’m given situations like the following:

The carjackers drive you 30 minutes off the main road. Diego managed to grab his backpack. Now you and Diego on your own in an unknown location. What do you do next?

The scenario sounds pretty serious, until a box appears with a cartoon of two men, in a jungle setting that looks like a children’s book. I half expected Dora the Explorer to run by with the carjackers. Simple! We ask our talking map where to go.

However, we have a liter of water, two chocolate energy bars, a Swiss Army knife in the backpack. Our next task is to figure out where North is using a stick.

Crap – as though I know how to use the shadow of a stick to find North. What, did I stumble into the Girlscout’s version of humanitarian assistance? (once we manage to get back to safety we can plan critical assistance while calculating the global volume of income from Thin Mints this year).

All I can say is that Diego is darn lucky to have me, because I end up saving us. My choice to not follow the path, shown in a photograph, was only based on the instinct that the security program was trying to trick me. Then it congratulates me for noticing a pair of sticks making an “X” at the beginning of the trail, indicating the presence of a mine. Um…..right….that’s precisely why I didn’t go down it.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the course, which reminded me that security is basically common sense, and that even cartoons with vehicles exploding when they hit a mines make sure to have ethnically diverse characters.

Ironically, my security risks have been of another kind. My shower head, as I learned quite quickly, drops out of its holder when the water is turned off, and the first time this happened I narrowly missed getting whacked in the head. Also, some men came to install internet at the hotel and ended up working on the tile roof above my porch. As I sat underneath it. A small chunk of clay tile fell to the concrete floor and smashed. I gingerly picked up my laptop and went inside.

Yesterday we drove outside of Bujumbura, accompanied by armed guards. Diego was nowhere in sight.

Bujumbura

After 38 hours of flying and visiting airports in the USA, Europe, and Africa, I arrived in Burundi on Tuesday. Locating Burundi on a map is not easy. Even the least geographically challenged will find themselves squinting at the maze of borders and lakes. There are lakes in Africa that could swallow Burundi whole. Yet this tiny country, much like it twin to the north, Rwanda, manages to have a magnitude of problems disproportionate to its size.

War, for starters. Since 1993 300,000 people have died because of the conflict that’s been haunting this country off and on since the 1960s. It’s usually painted as an ethnic conflict, one marked by fear, mistrust, repression, killings and reprisals, but of course the reasons move well beyond the simplicity of “ancient tribal hatreds.” The majority Hutu have been dominated by successive Tutsi governments since independence, governments always afraid of losing their power to the majority Hutu population. In 1972 a failed coup attempt by Hutus crystallized the atmosphere of mutual mistrust. 200,000 Burundians – many of them education Hutus – were massacred. Since then there have been a few more coups and attempted ones, with opposition to the increasingly consolidated Tutsi government power becoming outright violent in 1993. Atrocities have been committed on all sides, with no actions escaping retalitations. Fast-forward to the present, after more than a decade of attempts by the international community to mediate peace between rebels and the government, and you’ll find a country that is putting conflict behind it only to face a mire of other problems inherently tied with its violent past – extreme poverty.

Still, better to be poor and at peace than poor and at war. Because in this neck of the woods, war is against civilians. I don’t think it should even be called “war,” which calls to mind armies facing off. It’s groups exercising their frustration, their greed, and their disregard for human life and dignity by turning against innocent people. Stealing from them, oppressing them, raping them, and killing them.

Burundi is currently the poorest country is the world. If you look at average income, or lack thereof, this is it. Of course, it’s hard to trust statistics. As far as I’m concerned any country within the poorest ten, if not twenty or thirty, are pretty much interchangeable in terms of poverty. A man in rural Chad isn’t jumping for joy that his country beat Burundi in terms of absolute poverty. He’s very very poor, a Burundian’s very very poor, and the likelihood of either of them accessing basic healthcare or paying their child’s school fees is minimal.

And yet these thoughts are in the way back of my mind as I sit in Bujumbura. War, hopelessness, the mess that is Africa - I never feel this. Alright, except for the mess part. But I mean that in an endearing way. Most of the time. Or at least some of the time.

I was very ambivalent about coming back to Central Africa, indeed within spitting distance of Congo, my former home-away-from-home. Maybe I was too stressed to think about it – I’d just flown to London on a day’s notice to interview for a job there, and within five days of returning booked a flight and left for Burundi. Such hurried logistics do not exactly lend themselves to introspection. Driving through Bujumbura from the airport, even my jetlag could not dim the friendly familiarity of the bustling streets and certainly not the beauty of the rolling hillsides framing the capital. Africa, I missed you.