Gosh, I can’t believe that it has
been over a month since my last blog posting. I’ve spent much of that month
running through the motions of my Rwandan life, and indulging in the feeling of
having way too much to do. My three main projects are very much underway. I
finally, officially, received funding for my animal husbandry project. The
project will be working with about 25 community health workers to address
malnutrition. There are several existing programs that work with community
health workers to teach nutritional cooking to mothers in the community, and
via the cooking courses, providing nutritional food to malnourished children
once a week. One component of this project will serve to provide protein (meat
from rabbits or chickens, or eggs) to these weekly cooking classes. The project
is also designed to serve as an income generating activity for the
participants. As I say here in Rwanda, tuzareba, we’ll see.
I am also head over heels plunged
into planning Nyamagabe District’s camp GLOW and camp BE. Much of this past
month has been spent leaving my village and going to either Butare or Nyamagabe
town to work on camp stuff. I had to print over 400 applications, then travel
with another PCV to distribute them to all the secondary schools in town. Here,
we were greeted with the smiling faces of campers from last year, which was
amazing. We are inviting approximately ten boys, and ten girls who attended
camp last year to return and be junior facilitators this year. Our camp will be
the first that uses this many junior facilitators, so again, tuzareba. But, I’m
really excited, as the camps are designed to teach about life skills, but also
include a great deal about inspiring youth, as well as promoting leadership.
So a couple of weeks ago, we went to six
different schools and distributed the applications, and next week, we have to
go back and pick them all up… then read them all. We will narrow down the pool,
and then do interviews amongst the applicants, and finally give them
invitations to camp, which will take place the last week of November, and the
first week in December. My dad will arrive the last day of the boys camp in
December, so I may have to skip out a little early to make it to the airport in
Kigali on time. Finally, I’ve finished, with the help of an amazing Rwandan PC
employee located in Kigali, my GBV awareness training in Kinyarwanda. I’m in
talks with the director of social affairs at the sector level government office
about how best to disseminate this information in the community. So, although I
haven’t been too vocal this last month, I’ve been wonderfully busy, and so it
goes.
This last week,
however, I did get out of the office, and had an amazing opportunity to visit a
refugee camp that has been built about 40 minutes from my village. The citizens
of the camp are from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the west of
Rwanda. What started out as estimates of around 7,000 people, has quickly risen
to numbers upwards of 14,000 living in around 4,000 houses, on two hillsides,
sandwiching the main road. The site is surprising and entrancing from the tiny
squeeze buses passing along the road. Every time I drive by, to go anywhere, I
stare at the almost absurd number of tiny, white plastic sheeting wrapped houses
dotting the hillsides as we drive by. What was once terraced hillsides, covered
in farmland, is now barren, brown, muddy, covered with makeshift dwellings.
Months ago, before my mom’s visit in
May, I began seeing dark semi-trucks marked with big bold black letters reading
UN across the sides, pass by my health center en masse either in the direction
of DRC, or in the direction of the refugee camp. Fleets of white land cruisers
marked with organizations like Oxfam, UNHCR, and others have increased
immensely in my district. Sitting down at the Golden Monkey Hotel, in
Nyamagabe, rarely goes without glimpsing other foreigners now, pulling up in
the same land cruiser fleets. Passing through the area with the refugee camp,
is now traveling through masses of people, wandering along the roadside,
selling bread or cans of cooking oil with USAID stamped on the side of them,
watching the cars pass, children playing. Even the market has changed so
dramatically in the last few months, from a barely recognizable clearing along
the road to wooden structures, and boutiques built to sell wares. It’s a
shocking transformation.
I decided that the camp was a place that
I really wanted to visit, to see how it actually was relative to the images of
refugee camps that inundate American Media. This also seemed like one of the
best opportunities I would have to do so, potentially in my entire life. Even
though it’s location is 40 minutes from my village, it is located next door to
my district hospital. Walking from the bus stop I ran into at least five
different people I knew, worked with, or had become friends with in my time in
Rwanda. Although it is 40 minutes away, I still feel that it is a part of what
I consider my community, at least my extended community.
Regularly there are at least two police
guards standing watch at the entrance of the camp, and I’d heard rumor that
foreigners couldn’t just show up and visit, which I have to say I agree with.
Can you imagine your life, being uprooted from your community, your home, your
country, living in houses with nothing but plastic sheeting to protect you from
the elements, and also being a tourist attraction? It actually kind of angers
me, and yes I recognize the hypocritical nature of that statement, as I was
going to visit the camp much like a tourist, and I do have mixed emotions about
the visit, and what I represented in going. I can’t say that I myself am above
my judgment of others.
In my time here, through various events,
and the fact that this country feels smaller than Weston, Oregon and its
population of 600 people at times, I have met much of the district’s
leadership. Through umuganda (the monthly day of service), my relationship with
my sector executive, and lots and lots of weddings, I had met the chief police
commissioner, the mayor of the district, the chief of the local military
branch, and many others. So, I started in on my phone tree to seek out
permission to visit the camp. Everything looked surprisingly well after my
first phone call to the police commissioner. Which was answered with a
cancellation the following week, and thus a scramble to get permission in just
a few days.
My second call was to
the Mayor of Nyamagabe district, who, thanks to his mother being my co-worker,
took my call, even though he was on paternity leave after his wife gave birth
to a baby girl the week before. I attended his wedding about a year ago. He
directed me to the vice-mayor, who then directed me to the refugee camp
director, who referred me back to the mayor. From here, he informed me that he
would get in touch with the Minister of Disaster and Refugee Affairs here in
Rwanda. This was followed by a text saying I needed to e-mail a copy of my
passport to the assistant to the minister to receive permission. Fortunately,
being on the main road has offered me the benefit of almost regular
electricity, and therefore, my health center also has a copier, which has a
scanning function. Granted none of my co-workers really know how to use the
Canon machine, and I give weekly tutorials, but it has been quite a perk, and
come into handy regularly.
So, I went about scanning my passport
and sending it in. I received a letter from the assistant to the minister,
signed by the minister and stamped with the official seal of the department,
granting me permission to visit the camp. After printing the letter, again on
the amazing copier here at my health center, I discovered that it gave the date
of Friday the 14th, and not the 21st, for me to enter the
camp. So I had to e-mail the assistant back and graciously request a new one.
She then typed a new letter, had the minister sign it again, and re-emailed it
to me. I’ve noticed in my cross culture experience sometimes it can be difficult
to actually convey how truly grateful you are, in either language. But I am so
immensely appreciative of her help, and I couldn’t help thinking about how our
e-mail transactions would have occurred stateside rather than here. Rather than
her gracious apology for the typo, I envision this transaction requiring lots
of forms, and maybe a dash of bureaucracy if I had been in the US. But needless
to say, her assistance was amazing.
Friday arrived. Leaving my bag with a
German girl I had met a week before, who is working at the hospital, I ventured
down the road, feeling daunted, apprehensive and intimidated. I met with the
camp director, who after our many phone calls was already referring to me as
his friend, and he organized for a guide to come and assist me in a tour. Much
to my relief, the citizens at the camp knew Kinyarwanda. So, as I waited, a mob
surrounded me curious at the foreigner, but the crowd grew immensely once they
discovered I could speak Kinyarwanda. I had some of the most respectful
conversations with people in Rwanda that I have ever had. I told them once that
I didn’t like to be called muzungu, and they listened seemingly thoughtfully to
my reasoning and nodded in agreement, correcting anyone who said it thereafter.
We talked about where we were from
respectively, they taught me a song in Kinyarwanda and then they all laughed as
I performed “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” for them. I learned from the camp
director about their plans for handling education, health care, and other
challenges in the camp, in an already established community prior to the camp
being built there. Finally my guide arrived and she took me up the larger of
the two hills first. I was quickly overtaken by adorable children screaming
gleefully and running after me grasping for my hands to guide me through the
camp. Over their shouts and repetitive greetings in English, French and
Kinyarwanda, I asked my guide questions about the camp, the number of people,
the number of houses, water conditions, sanitation conditions, processes for
development, improvements, food distributions.
We walked through rows and rows of the
white plastic houses. I envisioned the houses in the rain, water and mud
running down the hillsides, families of around five living in a maybe 8 ft. by
10 ft house, using communal kitchens, communal bathrooms, and communal showers.
I thought about attempting to understand what that could possibly be like, but
understanding that I really can’t possibly begin to reach comprehension. The
people looked happy, they looked content, and as if they had found ways to
exist, to create a new world. I was impressed at how well run the camp
appeared. There was no one running around in crisis looking for their
metaphorical cut off head as they were the metaphorical chicken.
On the second hill,
there were canvas hunting style tents with families living in them awaiting the
“to-be built” plastic houses. There was a medical unit, where patients could be
referred to the local health center, then to the local hospital if necessary.
The food distribution tent sits on this second hill, right along the main road,
emptily awaiting it’s once a month distribution of staples like rice, beans,
potatoes, flour, and oil, amongst other things. Children played soccer
endlessly on the field at the base of the hill, and mothers in colorful fabric
sat above watching them. The camp was not what I expected.
Much of my expectations were based on
the images of extreme poverty, malnourished children barely there yet with
bloated bellies, emaciated people, people wearing barely rags, and other such
images. The kinds of pictures on those commercials showing babies with flies
buzzing around them, where a heart-wrenching song is playing and appealing to
your sympathy in the background. I expected feeling physically ill because of
the visit, feeling depressed, hopeless, impossible. Instead I met some amazing
people and saw a refugee camp that appeared outwardly well run. This of course
is not to say that problems do not exist en masse in this place, or refugee
camps in general.
There were so many scenarios where I had
to wonder if a crisis were not to occur at any moment. The market has seen
prices increase over 200% since the arrival of the refugees. That’s more than I
could afford even. The children (and most of the people are women and children)
haven’t gone back to school yet, and the plan seemed to be rotating local
children and refugee children in the local school. Communal bathrooms, hygiene,
water issues, clean drinking water, health, especially now that we are
reentering the rainy season, and it’s a very wet rainy season in Nyamagabe
district. There is nowhere for the people to farm or grow food. One tent had
three chickens pecking around the ground where the children were sitting and
playing. Another refugee camp in Rwanda recently suffered a cholera outbreak. So
many things could go wrong so quickly, if they aren’t already.
No one knows how long
these 14,000 people will be living in this refugee camp. No one has any idea
how long unrest and war will continue in the DRC. No one knows how long this
place could sustain the population increase, hospital staffing issues, lack of
education, lack of natural resources, lack of money or outside funding. The
visit was so wonderfully enlightening, and one that may never be repeated in my
life. In the back of my mind, I see the smiling faces of the people surrounding
me before I entered the camp, children chasing me through the rows of houses,
tumbling over each other trying to hold my hand. Each time I ride by the camp
on a bus, I still stare mesmerized at the hillside, watching it, more slowly
now, continue to grow.
