Sad stories

I guess I’m just in a sad mood today. Maybe it’s the small children withdrawal—they don’t take volunteers on Thursdays, so here I am, sitting at home on the balcony looking out over our front yard and driveway (and one of our helpers sweeping the driveway with the brush part of a broom—not that there are handled brooms here anyway, that’s just the easiest way to describe it. This city is crazy clean. And this black bird with a fro and a bright orange tail :) )and the city beyond that since we’re essentially at the top of a hill. It’s a pretty grey day, yet it still manages to be bright as all get out—yay for the equator! Anyway, there are a couple of stories that I realized I’d left out that I occasionally remember, so here you go…

So, when we were at the refugee settlement, we sat in the car for a while when we first got there. There was a mom and her two babies (anyone under 5 here is a baby) sitting in this pavilion-ish thing across the drive way. The kids came over to stare at us per usual, and so I got out of the car and sat down to see them. They were really dirty, especially their clothes.  We gave them a couple of biscuits (cookies) and bananas that we had on hand, and Issa, our teacher, was able to speak to them in Swahili, I think it was. We weren’t quite sure where their family was from, but then they told Issa that they wanted to go in our van. He asked them where they wanted to go, as a joke. They looked back at him and said, “back to Congo.” These poor kids probably had never been to Congo, and even if they had (if their family had come there recently), they likely didn’t remember it because they were so young. It sounded like they were parroting something they had heard their parents or siblings say. Life at a refugee settlement can’t be easy, but to prefer Congo over the settlement? That’s saying something.

There’s this girl at Abakarikuta who’s probably in her late teens or early twenties, it’s hard to say. She might have Down’s syndrome or something like that. She comes and hangs around the toddlers a lot, and one day while I was pushing some of the kids on the merry go round, she came into the playground, picked up a chopped piece of wood, put it on her hip like a baby, wrapped her sweater around herself and the wood, bent over and shifted the wood to her back, and tied off her sweater in front—tying her wood baby to her back like I guess she’s seen mothers do. Like the baby she’ll likely not ever have.

Speaking of moms and babies, there’s this mom and her baby who sit by the steps that I go up every day to get from Abakarikuta to town. Every time I pass, the mother always asks for money. I can’t tell a professional beggar from someone who is legitimately poor, but if I had to guess, I’d say they’re the latter. We’ve been taught not to give to people like this, but it’s so hard to see them sit there every day.

And speaking of begging, there are a fair amount of beggars in town. There are the kids that swarm you occasionally when you leave UTC (the mall), there’s the 3 year old girl that grabs your hand and walks with you while telling you she’s hungry, and then there are the adults who are apparently disabled. I say apparently because I’m not entirely sure if they’re legitimate or not. Is her back really that disfigured, or is she just leaning over like that to make it seem that way? Are his legs really that deformed, or is he just contorting them to look like that?  It’s interesting. Part of my research for my internship paper will definitely be about what sort of services are available for the poor and disabled in Kigali and in Rwanda, because I honestly have no idea what alternatives disabled people have to begging.

Another thing that’s tricky is asking people how their families are. According to my Kinyarwanda book, that’s just a polite thing to do, but with people here, it inevitably brings up genocide. I asked our guide at TIG how his family was (out of a lack of anything else to say), and he told me he was single, which I took to mean he wasn’t married. I clarified by saying mama, papa, abavandimwe (siblings), and he said no, we are only two—me and my brother. Everyone else died in the genocide. What can you say to that, really? Sorry doesn’t even begin to cut it, but it’s worth a shot.

There’s also this really tragic story about what happened to a lady and her baby during the genocide that comes back to haunt me every once in a while, but that’s a little more graphic than I ought to say here.

But hey, here’s a more humorous story for you—I’ve been told that I’m beautiful, that I’m hot, that I’m nice to look at, etc. more here than I ever have been (except by Marvin, le duh. I love you :) ), and I’ve also gotten more numbers than I know what to do with (again, love you!). Maybe I could wallpaper my room with them…

Rwanda is quite an experience.