whaddya make of this...?

here is something amusing that happened to me last week.

i have this habit of flossing my teeth. i sometimes floss two or three times a day. my teeth are very clean; i do it a bit obsessively since i had a tooth pulled last year. in rwanda, flossing is not really part of the oral hygiene landscape. people use toothpicks. they are on every table in every restaurant i’ve ever been to — road side cafe or 5 star international — toothpicks abound.

at my house, where i do my flossing, there is only one garbage can. so i have developed this bad habit of flossing in front of the tv, or flossing after coffee on the terrace, or flossing while i check my emails. (i know, its disgusting, but i live alone at the moment!). i twirl the used floss into a long braid and then tie a knot in the middle. then i either leave it where i was sitting or i remember to take it to the sole garbage can in the house, which is ever-so-conviently located outside near the garage. let’s just say that i leave it laying around more than i walk it to the garbage can.

the other day, i am at the hotel ibis, sitting on the terrace, having a coke and waiting for one of my translators to show up. as i wait, one of the staff at the hotel come up to me and says, ’susan-ah, i hear you like to clean your teeth alot’. i am looking at this guy, jean-paul, in total confusion. ‘pardon?’ i say. he says, ‘yah, i heard from [the woman who works at my home] that you like to clean your teeth with thread’.

ok, this is interesting i think. first, i am the topic of conversation between rwandan’s who may have never flossed. maybe they are wondering what exactly is it that i do, and why. but jean-paul interrupts my thinking, as he says, ‘yes, in rwanda, prostitutes also use thread. they have very dirty mouths.’

hmm. does he think i’m a prostitute?

accessible elites...

i am amazed at the level of accessibility that senior rwandan officials provide. i am phoning senators, parliamentarians, ministers and other high-level officials on their direct line. it is very easy to track down the cell phone numbers of these people. drop them a phone call, make an appointment, and they receive me.

and when we meet, they avail their time generously. we talk for up to two hours. where a meeting or some other official duty arises at our appointed time, the individual him/herself calls to re-schedule our appointment.

i wonder what it means, that meeting these government individuals is so easy. it is because i’ve been in-country before, and that i have some currency here? nah. is it because my research question is of interest to the rwandan government? also unlikely. they don’t even know my question until i present it to them in our face-to-face meeting. it is because the Rwandan government is open to research about life in post-genocide rwanda? maybe. there are many, i would guess over one hundred foreign whites here doing research at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels, on topics ranging from sustainable agriculture, to deforestation, to resilience among survivors, to ICT and development…

i have no sense of the dominating, controlling elite that i’ve read about in various western journals (see for example, Eltringham, 2003; Reyntjens, 2004). instead, i’m encountering an open, patient elite that respond with well-thought out answers to my equally well-planned questions. (i spent my evening writing and re-writing questions for different members of government, trying to anticipate what might come up so i have something intelligent to say, to ask). what wiggles in my mind is whether the open-door policy is itself part-and-parcel of the policy of national unity…. the western academic literature suggests a manipulative elite. i don’t have this sense; what i see is a compassionate elite that is committed to the reconstruction and reconciliation of their rwanda.

does make me go, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, nonetheless….

and rwanda likes to think of itself as a state with impermable borders…

a poem on domestic-international borders, by polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, written in 1976, but taken from her 1995 collection, VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND: SELECTED POEMS. translated from the polish-language by Stanislaw Barañczak and Clare Cavanagh

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!

Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

gimme a break

the sexism stared about as soon as i got up. i went down, at 645am, to use the hotel internet. at about 730, half-way through my backlog of email, a french diplomat asked me to leave as he need the sole terminal to do his “business”. i replied that i would be finished in about 15 or 20 minutes. he then slamed down his briefcase on the small desk where i was sitting and told me that his embassy “business” was more important than chatting with my girlfriends. i just looked at him like the idiot he was and kept working. he hummed and hawwed in the background, pacing back and forth, wearing a tread in the carpet no doubt, muttering loudly about his “official” work, his important “business” for the remainder of my time on line. if his business was so important, why hasnt his offce assigned him a laptop with all the bells and whistles of connectivity? codger!

then, at about 8am, i present myself to the front desk of the hotel to send an international fax. the front desk manager takes the two-page fax and makes an attempt to post it to the memory of the fax machine. after one attempt, he declared my fax number incomplete. at about the same time, a herd of business men arrive to check out, pick up messages and get the local newspapers. my fax is dropped like a hot potatoe as the front desk team (of 3 men) falls all over themselves to assist these new arrivals. my fax languishes for the next 20 minutes, is eventally returned to me in a huff.

and so on and so on and so on….

is it just me or are there layers of insecurity?

everywhere i go, i meet people in rwanda who think that the country is very secure. there are no more night time raids in the hills. the economy is doing well. “i know longer fear to go home”. rwandans from all walks of life are joining in the chorus of security.

i was reminded earlier this evening of the complexities of the meaning of the word ’security’. in butare, where i live, there are rolling power blackouts. this is caused by a number of factors, the two bigs ones being lingering drought and regional politics. so i’ve rented a flat with a generator so i can continue my western existence, what i call my bubble. i retreat to my bubble every evening, having spent the day in the hills interviewing rwandans about their life before and after the 1994 genocide. the bubble broke when the generator ran out of fuel.

in broken kinyarwanda, some swahili and a bit of english, i asked my night guard to take a taxi-moto to the petrol station to grab 5 litres of lisansi (kinyarwanda - petrol). here is my first eye-opener. i have a guard, who i pay and take care of. his daughter is ill. i know about his difficulties, his problems. i know nothing of his joys or hopes.

i wouldn’t have a night guard in canada. i suppose his presence is a bit of a make-work project in that he is unarmed, and there is really nothing anyone could do if someone decided to break into the house. with curfews, and armed military patrols, there are not too many people walking around anyway. if i was to suffer a ’security breach’ (sorry, lingo from my former life with the United Nations!), it would likely be military men anyway. no one else can walk around with out raising an eyebrow.

second, my guard has a counterpart. the gardener. the gardener position is also a make-work project. the woman from whom i rent the house requires as part of the lease agreement that i keep emmanuel on staff. ‘ok, i say’. now emmanuel lives about 100kms from butare, in gikongoro. this means that he spends the whole week at home with me in butare. ok, well, i spend half of the week in kigali. emmanuel goes early on saturday morning and returns early monday, having spent the weekend with his wife and kids. so i have 2 men at home most of the time. if emmanuel was more economically secure, perhaps he could work closer to home….

“Expatriates have bankrolled Internet cafes in Somalia and helped build one of the most reliable and inexpensive phone networks in Africa…”

The Washington Post
With Web, a lifeline home
Technology advances help immigrants track Somali crisis, aid families
By Sudarsan Raghavan

Updated: 12:30 p.m. ET June 6, 2006
Dayib Mohamud Sheikh lives on a calm, tree-lined street in Silver Spring, and his aging mother is thousands of miles away in a turbulent war zone in their native Somalia. Yet for the past three weeks, he has lived through her nightmare morning, day and night.

One day, he learned his mother’s house was hit by a missile. She was fine. Another day, the fighting was nearing her neighborhood in the capital, Mogadishu. He was not so fine. Yesterday, Islamic militias captured Mogadishu.

He scoured Web site after Web site, driven by one question: Is my mother safe?

Then he picked up the phone. He would soon find out.

For nearly three weeks, Mogadishu has been the scene of some of the worst clashes since U.S. soldiers withdrew from Somalia in 1994 after a failed intervention.

Closer than ever
But unlike then, the chaos in the East African homeland is closer than ever for thousands of Somalian immigrants in the Washington region and across the nation. Technology is propelling the conflict into their living rooms and offices, providing a painful ringside view of the crisis as well as ways to help relatives in danger.

It’s the latest manifestation of how immigrants in the region, from Ethiopians to Salvadorans, from Liberians to Iranians, are increasingly connected in real time to violence and political upheavals unfolding in their home countries.

“Everything that happens in Somalia is now instantaneous,” said Dahir Amalo, 43, a mortgage banker.

Today, several dozen Internet sites follow every twist and turn of the conflict. They post digital photos of the chaos, blogs and round-the-clock news. It’s easy to listen to online radio and video broadcasts from the BBC and Voice of America.

Expatriates have bankrolled Internet cafes in Somalia and helped build one of the most reliable and inexpensive phone networks in Africa, where cellphone and online use is rapidly growing. It’s cheaper for Somalis in Mogadishu to phone the United States than the other way around, said immigrants here. And they use text messaging, e-mail and instant messaging to further cut costs.

Sheikh knows. He has become a virtual sentry, monitoring his mother’s safety with every click of his mouse.

“If it gets worse, I’m planning to get my mother out,” Sheikh, 47, an account manager for a private tourism operator, vowed last week.

Like many Somali Americans, he came to the United States in the 1970s seeking higher education. He watched the central government collapse in 1991 after the overthrow of the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, ushering in lawlessness. The recent clashes, some analysts have said, pitted U.S.-backed warlords against Islamic militias.

The Washington region has about 6,000 Somalis, according to community leaders, including refugees who have fled the violence in recent years — the fifth-largest African community in the region. In the 1980s and 1990s, they paid $10 a minute to phone relatives back home. News was often delivered months later through word of mouth.

“People used to send letters to tell us what’s happening. It was like the Pony Express,” recalled Mohamud Haji, 49, who runs a technology company. “Nowadays, they use e-mails, faxes, text messages, even Skype,” software that enables free phone calls over the Internet.

But the ease and speed of communicating with loved ones can be distressing. Ahmed Afra, 63, recalled the phone call last week from his sister in Mogadishu.

“We’re listening to the news. Is it true or not?” Afra asked her about the situation that day.

“Yes,” she replied.

“We’re praying to God that everything will be okay,” he told her with tears sliding down his face.

His sister told him that she was fine. The fighting, she said, was unfolding in another section of Mogadishu. But he has been logging on to Web sites, getting his daily dose of the mayhem. And he wondered whether she was playing down her plight for his sake.

“You cry over the cellphone. What else can you do?” he said.

Ahmed Eyow, 51, remembers that in pre-Internet days, his imagination would run unfiltered during any upsurge in violence.

Today, he surfs Somalian Web sites such as hiiraan.com. He knows the clashes are confined to some parts of Mogadishu and finds that reassuring.

On Friday, Haji and more than a dozen Somali American men met, as they usually do, at a Caribou coffee shop in Silver Spring.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to their homeland, what the latest news was on Web sites and which blocks of Mogadishu warlords controlled.

Haji spoke about his hopelessness.

“We feel like: When is it going to end?” he said. “It’s a sense of despair that we can’t do anything. You feel helpless. You want to do something. The conflict brings this to us more vividly — in real time.”

Amalo spoke about his cousin, Abdul, who had traveled from the Washington region to Somalia to visit his relatives. Then the war erupted, and he found himself on a different mission. He had to evacuate his mother, sister and 10 nephews and nieces.

Before he left, he deposited about $10,000 with a Somalian money transfer service in Alexandria, part of an informal, ancient global banking system called hawala .

Each time Abdul needed money, he e-mailed the hawala broker, and the broker e-mailed him a password. Then, he went to one of the broker’s partners in Somalia to get the cash, Amalo said.

Abdul rented housing in a safer part of the country, bought airline tickets and evacuated his relatives, Amalo said.

Yesterday, Sheikh was also thinking of getting this mother out.

He has tried to make her leave Somalia, but she has refused.

Now he was on the phone with her. He had four minutes left on his $5 phone card. He allowed a reporter to listen to the conversation as he translated.

Sheikh: “How are you?”

Mother: “I’m fine.”

Sheikh: “What’s happening there?”

Mother: “The ulama [Islamic religious leaders] now control Mogadishu. I’m not hearing any bullets now. Everything is quiet.”

Sheikh: “What time is it?”

Mother: “It’s 8 o’clock at night.”

Sheikh: “How do you feel about the ulama ?

Mother: “Whoever brings the peace, we support them.”

Then the connection went dead.

Sheikh knew there would be more information and more calculations in coming days, but he felt at peace, like his mother.

“I’m very happy to hear that she’s okay,” he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

a crime to be poor...

i just came across, while walking to catch my bus to Kigali, a scene that is common in the streets of rwanda. grinding poverty is the norm for at least 80% of the population. many are flushed out of the hills in an effort to meet their basic human needs. The street poor are people of all shapes and sizes – young, old; able-bodied, not; men, women, boys, girls. what ties them together is biting poverty.

so it is common to have someone in extreme need approach and ask “cent francs manger” (one hundred francs to eat). 100 francs is about .35¢ Canadian and would buy less than a handful of rice; or a few tablespoons of cooking oil. rice sells for 550/francs rwandais (frw) for a ½ kilo, while a litre of cooking oil goes for between 6 and 800frw.

as i walked towards the bus stop, i was followed by the usual coterie of street poor. i don’t want to call them beggars, as many others – both rwandan and mzungu – do. the word ‘beggar’ seems to me to be an imposition of liberal (western?) concept onto an ordinary rwandan. a beggar is someone who won’t work, and liberal thought suggests that since s/he won’t work, s/he must be lazy and hence, labelled a beggar. in rwanda, to be a ‘beggar’ is a luxury – the individuals that i see on the streets are there for lack of any other opportunity to survive. not all rwandans have land that they are able to cultivate; these people work as labourers on the land of others for a few hundred frw. a day. for those who might be fortunate enough to hold title deed, their land is not always arable, or their holding is in dispute because of outstanding, sometimes long-standing, grievances against the plot. the street poor i see in butare are the poorest of the poor because of their limited options and even more limited means of surviving and coping. this is particularly true amongst survivors of the genocide, particularly those who have lost their family structure. the family is the core unit of support, and care in Rwanda (in fact, the government of rwanda considers the family the base administrative unit!). without a family tie, help of any type – financial, physical or emotional, is not immediately forthcoming.

one of these street poor, a young teenage girl, was ‘begging’ for money and/or bits of food at the window of the bus that carries some 25 passengers to kigali. these buses run every 30 minutes, and there is always a lot of commotion at the stop. the presence of the street poor – there are many, on average 12 or 15 people crowd the bus at any one time – is a source of insecurity for the passengers. in response, the bus company has hired guards, code name ‘guide’ – to keep hawkers as well as the street poor well away from the open windows of the idling bus before its departure. the idling buses are cordoned and the blue-coated ‘guides’ monitor the contact between paid passenger and street poor.

the teenager, a girl of no more than 15, had reached for a packet of biscuits that a seated passenger had proffered through the window. between the moment of offering, and her reach over the cordon, the ‘guide’ decided that a theft had taken place. she was grabbed from behind by two men, at the base of her neck, and flung down towards the ground. the biscuits were recovered, and handed back to the passenger who offered them in the first place. he refused. i then saw the ‘guide’ — whose cries initiated this string of events — put the packet in his pocket. meanwhile, the girl is prone on the dusty shoulder of the road, while a crowed gathers to await her fate. much ululating from the teenager. tears run down her dusty face. tremors of fear, fear of what will happen next. the crowd is silent as are the clientele of the hotel restaurant adjacent to the bus stop. no one moves, no one says anything. finally, after a minute or two, the ‘guide’ releases his grip on the girl, and she is lead to a room behind the bus stop. what happened behind closed doors, i don’t know.
i got up to see if i could assist the girl, painfully aware of my status as a white woman. intervention in such a scene is none of my business. i was stopped, bobby stick across my hips, by one of the security handlers at my restaurant. he instructed me to sit down and not to worry. i wasn’t worried until he suggested that i not worry…. i also realised that i was totally powerless in this moment. what could i do, how could i help without causing more of ruckus. i couldn’t, i didn’t.

just as revealing about the divisions and divides of rwandan society was the ambulating presence of a white aid worker, pushing his baby daughter in a pram, across the same space that had just been a space of fear and intimidation.

on traffic...

having spent more than a week on foot in rwanda’s capital, kigali, i remain amazed that there are not more pedestrian accidents. the roads are teeming, and I mean teeming, with people. most people don’t own a car, and they come into the central business district by taxi bus. jam packed with commuters coming in from the surrounding environs, people pop out of any one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of buses that ply Kigali’s commuter routes like the fizz that erupts from a can of coke.

like many african cities, kigali is not very foot-traffic friendly, and the leap from inside to outside the taxi bus is a sight to behold. women with babies strapped to their backs navigate the uneven transition from passenger to pedestrian with great dexterity. young men leap from the bus with athletic ease. business men and women, smartly dressed for a day at the office, add some decorum in gingerly exiting the taxi to join the stream of people walking along kigali’s dusty streets as they attempt to navigate a space to occupy in amongst the competing traffic.

once the foot hits the broken pavement, a bevy of activity meets the newly anointed pedestrian. men push wooden wheel-barrels full of bags of cement or cooking charcoal, women balance jerry cans of water or 15 kilo bags of rice on their heads, young men hawk their wares - khaki pants, chewing gum and packets of tissues, men’s shoes and neckties, or cell phone credits - while business commuters weave in and out of the foot and vehicle traffic that crowds kigali’s main routes. students, arms full of books stroll to school, hand-in-hand, in large groups. the yellow-jerseyed parking attendants that the city of kigali employs call after offending drivers to pay the hourly parking fee. most streets don’t have sidewalks - those are reserved for the main roads. so cars and people agree to disagree on the boundaries of what constitute roadway and what could be considered a sidewalk. a great cloud of red dust, kicked up by the competing activity, casts a pale shadow on the bee-hive that is kigali city centre.

from my perspective, walking is a defensive art. there is nothing resembling a shoulder that could be deemed sidewalk. it is simply one open space where the road becomes parking and parking becomes store front. pedestrians of all shapes and sizes vie for discernible space among the taxi-buses, the taxi-motos, the white toyota taxi-cars, known locally as ‘specials’ as the fare is too high for everyday use, and the SUVs and pick-up trucks of government projects, and internationals.

walking in busy places, where there are no discernible agreements between car and pedestrian, is a great source of stress for me. everyone else bobs and weaves, shuffles or strides their way to their final destination. i am focused on the 3 foot space in front of me, lest i walk into a car, trip on a pothole or land a foot in one of the many open manholes. the rwandans seem to enjoy my hesitancy. “mzungu (white person), you can move” is often uttered, and some particularly gracious individuals grab my elbow to walk me across the wide boulevards that cause me so much consternation. “don’t be afraid, it’s just kigali” is another oft-made observation. seems my fear is palpable….

the traffic along avenue de la justice is perhaps reflective of rwandan society itself. on the surface, it appears to be your average street scene, found in any city, anywhere. people are bustling with the day’s activities. any fear of pedestrian accidents is likely my eyes seeing an african scene through a western lens. if others fear for their safety, it is not revealed by the skill and precision with which they navigate their journey. how and where to navigate an appropriate space from which to walk to work or school, sell their wares, or wait for their next fare. this, i think, is not unlike the broader scheme of things in rwandan society.