Kigali - Morning

My memory of the first visit to Kigali is a blur. Maybe it was the heat. Or the non-stop action. Or the sudden drop in altitude. Whatever it was, only the most jarring moments remain to my mind with any clarity.

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I woke at 5:30 on Friday morning in Musanze. My buzzing cell phone alarm crashed into my dream – What? Why? Oya. I made some toast and coffee, and plopped myself in front of my laptop. After catching up on rugby news , sports, and current events for a while, I started to pack.

With Ro, our fearless leader and CEO of WWHPS-CCHPs, in the country there were a number of meetings to hold in Kigali. The plan was to go and meet all day Friday, stay overnight, and finish meetings and shopping on Saturday.

I didn’t pack much. Along with my laptop and a notebook, I threw a button down, clean boxers and socks, and a toothbrush into my bag.

By 7:30 we were all packed up and loaded into Gertie. The morning was cool and dark as we left Musanze but our excitement prevented any of us from trying to sleep on the way.

The trip began uneventfully. Like most rides in the Land Cruiser, the back section was dominated by Kinyarwanda speakers, so I zoned out to “Live at Folsom Prison”, which periodically skipped as we bumped down the pot-holed road to Kigali.

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The day began to warm as we climbed along the ridge of the hills that precede the drop into Kigali. “Bob Marley, Greatest Reggae Hits Vol. 2” now played. Old Gertie, the team’s Land Cruiser, began to shake violently, not quite to the music. Thinking we had a flat, Zack pulled off onto the shoulder. The tire was fine.

We rumbled away again and Gertie shook harder. “It only shakes when we’re going uphill,” said Zack, “This is the last part right here.”

The road rose gradually but determinedly, up and up the great hill. We had climbed along the east side of the mountains for most of the trip, but now we crossed the ridge-back to the west side.

We reached a small town and stopped in front of a school. This time we all piled out.

The sun beamed down brightly on the white Land Cruiser, and I thought about what it might be like to get trapped at the top of the great hill. The thought did not animate a fear of danger so much as a fear of time wasted. Sitting on top of the hill, baking while our appointments in Kigali went unmet.

Ro thought the spark plugs might be dirty. Gabby popped the hood. Ro, Zack, Elie, Rene, Gabby and I crowded around the engine. Though I know nothing about cars, there’s something deep within most men that drags us to the exposed engine of any car. I can nod, grunt, and shake my head with the best of them. The actual mechanics and engineers of the group – Elie, Rene, and Gabby – conferred, but concluded there was nothing they could do.

We piled back in and Gertie started up again, shaking but moving on.

…

Rwanda is remarkably densely populated. It holds 10 million people packed into an area smaller than Massachusetts. Moreover, the biggest and arguably only city, Kigali, has only 800,000 inhabitants. The rest of the country is covered in small farms. As we descended into Kigali, the demarcation of city and countryside never came. The city limits overlap with the countryside such that billboards and corner stores seem to rise up out of the fields of banana and maize.

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Kigali is at once bustling, chaotic but also small. It holds so much activity is pressed into a tiny space. Wherever you are, you feel trapped on the side of a hill, slowed by the incline, the heat, and the crush of just under a million people. Most people live in homes ranging from modern condos to mud-brick constructions, though like any city Kigali has its fair share of the homeless and beggars. But in Kigali more of the beggars than I’ve ever seen have missing or deformed limbs. The limbs are clearly not deformed, but damaged – a beaten wrist or an ankle forced back upon itself. The wound is healed, but not healthy. The beggar is always functional enough – smiling sometimes even. But often they move with great strain. The injury is not genetic, but for those carrying the wound the original form will not be recovered.

…

We stopped first at the Millenium Village Project offices, where Zack and I got out. Affiliated with Columbia, it also houses staff members from Columbia’s Access Project. We work closely with Access in Musanze. We met with Teddy about our proposed filing system for Shingiro.

Currently, the health centers do not maintain comprehensive patient histories. This leads to misdiagnoses and other problems stemming from a lack of communication. For example, patients are sometimes treated the same way for the same disease multiple times. At one community meeting in Mugali, a woman explained that her son was not treated for intestinal parasites because the pharmacy was out of the drugs prescribed for him. When she returned after the drug had been restocked, the health center did not have a way to verify the boy needed the drug, so he had to be retested. A filing system would cut down on such wastes of patient time and health center resources.

Teddy gave us a number of helpful suggestions and we had a good time with the reclining pleather desk chairs and the air-conditioning. I snapped off a picture of a map on the wall, finally wrapping my head around Musanze District geography:

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Zack and I hoofed it up a hill to meet the rest of team at Bourbon Café. We climbed up the hill and into the office tower, probably 6 stories tall. Bourbon Café sits in the office tower’s indoor atrium. This courtyard mall serves as a kind of Muzungu haven in Kigali. There is one grocery store and a few small shops. Bourbon sits in the back-left corner of the atrium.

Jean D'arc and Consolate at Bourbon Cafe.

The walk up the hill in 85 degree heat left both Zack and I sweaty messes. Zack suggested I order the “Moca-Mania-Cowa-Chino”. When the waitress brought it out, I was confronted with a chocolate-coffee smoothie topped with whipped cream. It was the most impressive artifact of American cultural transfer I’ve yet seen Rwanda. It’s the kind of very American drink my brother always orders at Starbucks or Dunkies – over the top, with so much sugar that if you put your straw on the bottom of the glass you end up chewing on grains of sugar crystals. At 3,500 francs (~$7), it did not disappoint.

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Zack, Jean D’arc, and Ro had a lunch meeting with Josh Ruksin, a Columbia professor and the head of Access.

While they went off to their lunch, Elie, Gabby, Rene, Amber, Consolate, and I went to ours. On the way to Africa Bite (pronounced ‘bee-tay’), Elie pointed to a collection of short buildings at the point between the hill we were going down and the hill we were about to climb up, “There is Cadillac, the nightclub.”

“What is it like? They dance there?” I asked naïvely.

“Oh yes. Hehe, the last time I was there was in 1988. A lot of dancing.”

Zack, Rene, and I had talked about the possibility that we would go to a nightclub while in Kigali. Cadillac was on the list that Rene provided, along with Planet, B-Club, Black and White. Rene had gone through them:

“Cadillac is popular, a lot people. Planet is good also – those are the two more popular clubs. B-Club is VIP. You have to dress to impress. It’s expensive, if you go in jeans you don’t go in. So it’s less popular. And there is Black and White. It’s OK, it used to be more popular a few years ago.”

Africa Bite turned out to be a pleasant little restaurant. We piled our plates with a buffet of African dishes: curried lamb; igasafria, a hot pot of bananas, potatoes and tomatoes; ugali, maize or cassava flour mixed with hot water into little balls; sweet potatoes; mashed bananas; rice and beans; and a naan-like bread. There were also two sauces, a tangy yogurt sauce and pili-pili. Pili-pili is a mashed chili paste, hotter than almost anything else I’ve been able to eat, including my beloved Sriracha.

We ate in the restaurant’s garden, enjoying the breeze.

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After lunch, we passed Cadillac once more on the way to shopping. Across the street, I noticed a strange billboard – a man beckoned to two young women, one of whom drew away while her friend pushed her toward the man.

“What does that say?” I asked Rene and Consolate.

“It says to not have a sugar daddy,” offered Rene.

“A sugar daddy?” I asked, “It’s an advertisement against prostitution?”
“Sort of, basically,” said Consolate.

“No, not prostitution,” said Rene, “young people here are very poor, so sometimes the young women will go around with much older guys and let them buy them things.”

I thought on it: “Same as it ever was.”

…

We drove to what seemed to be the commercial center of Kigali. The streets are narrow and feel more so because they are packed with people – moving, hawking, being. Everywhere there are children and beggars, teenagers selling blue jeans, belts, and high-heeled shoes. Internationals stood out in the mostly-Rwandan crowd: stocky Germans wearing wire-framed glasses, short sleeved button down shirts, and crew cuts; spiky haired Chinese dressed in baggy jean shorts and t-shirts with cut off sleeves, and of course, the gawking, pointing, squinting American tourists.

Given my lack of local savvy, inability to speak Kinyarwanda, and skin color that screams ‘SUCKER’, I was more a liability than a help in the effort to purchase supplies. Determined to look more Jason Bourne than Clark Griswold, I threw on my ‘informed-American’ swagger and followed Rene into an electronics store. Every inch of the store was covered in electronics for sale. The aisles were filled with merchandise, small washing machines jammed alongside coffee makers and vacuum cleaners. Along the back wall was a long counter and above it light switches and bulbs.

A Chinese customer stood in front of the counter. He was negotiating with the clerk in Kinyarwanda. Say what you will about their efforts to establish an economic sphere of influence in Africa, at least the Chinese really dig in. Along with a scattering of Indians, the Chinese are the only non-Africans that I’ve encountered that speak Kinyarwanda. The power adapter/strip combo Rene was looking at was no good – “they say it will be 12,000 but we got these for 8,000 a few weeks ago, let’s try another place.”

The next store we entered was not an electronics store. It had a main aisle running through the middle of the store, with perpendicular rows of shelves that nearly reached the ceiling. Each row was maybe 3-4 feet across. The store was not well lit. Rene ask the attendant where they kept the power strips. He led us to the end of the main aisle, and down the left half of the second to last row. The power strips were at the end of the shelf. Rene decided that this power strip was not right either as another group of shoppers entered the row.

There is no word for “please” or “excuse me” in Kinyarwanda. I’ve always thought of pleasantries as a bit disingenuous, but in their absence I’ve come to realize how essential they are to American culture. It is jarring when an English-speaking Rwandan forgets to culturally translate his or her thoughts. I’ve been on the receiving end of comments like “You will do the analysis for me,” instead of “you are so good at the analysis, and I don’t know how to do it, would you mind doing it for me?” Or “Give me the internet card,” instead of “can I use the internet card when you are finished using it?”

The convention also applies to crowds. Rwandans literally push each other and place hands on each other to get where they want to go. As I led Rene and the attendant out of the row, I was confronted with a cultural translation problem. The people that had moved into the row took up the whole of the 4 feet across. In the US, people move out of each other’s ways in such situations, almost unconsciously and rarely with acknowledgement. Here there was no indication that the Rwandans noticed me or planned to get out of my way. Unable to bring myself to dragging the other shoppers out of my way, I sort of shimmied around the group. I squeezed myself against the shelf and used my back and butt to carve space for the rest of me to birth my way out of the row.

In the light of day outside the shop I gulped the fresh air. “One more place to try,” said Rene. We crossed the street. This time, I tried waiting outside, hoping not to earn us the Muzungu price. Rene came out, shaking his head, “She wants 10,000 – that still seems high.”

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To be continued…