Apr 12 2007
Part II
The Journey
I’ve never flown overseas before, so I wasn’t sure how it was going to be riding for 3 consecutive 8 hour flights in 36 hours. I never had a window seat the entire time and most of the time I was seated at a minimum 10 rows away from EVERYONE else, but that’s life.
We slept in the airport in Kenya. They had some… umm… sleeping chambers for rent for $15 an hour or some such. At least it was a little shuteye before we touched down in Rwanda.
The first 48 hours were a blur. The first thing that struck me as I got off the plane was that I didn’t feel like I was in a foreign land. There were cars, people, fences, animals, the sun in the sky, dirt on the ground. Granted, everyone around me was black, and most did not speak English barely at all, but for some reason this didn’t bother me.
The place we were staying was kind of like a dorm. It had bunk beds in a brick and mortar building, very sturdily made. It had offices attached and was adjacent to the massive church the Kigali Christian Life Assembly is building. Meeting our hosts, Jeff and Jody Komant was a treat. They are lovely people. Jeff was kind of serious most of the time, but when he got away from “work” he turned out to be a real character. Jody was just amusing all the time.
I tend to be pretty reticent around people I don’t know, so I felt kind of like a 5th wheel at many points as other team members connected quickly to people. I never really reacted to the racial difference that Rwandans clearly noted - we were labelled wherever we went as “Muzungu”, a Swahili word approximating to “rich white people”. As such, we were expected to have simply loads of cash and to give it to anyone who asked. We were instructed specifically NOT to do this, as it makes things worse as people become habituated to free stuff. We were there to help people improve themselves, not buy them a better life.
On our first major excursion, one of our Land Rovers broke down in the middle of nowhere. In Canada, that would have meant we would be 100 miles from the nearest human. In Rwanda, it meant we were within spitting distance of about 15 houses and family homes. When I say that though, I should be clear - 4 walls made of adobe, something that may have been a door, a hole in a wall that some call a “window”, a tin roof covering 15 square feet and 8 family members is what I mean by a family home. We managed to get going after 20 or so minutes and a crowd of about 50 people formed around us to see what the “Muzungus” were up to.
The team managed to jerry rig something in the engine after about 20 minutes and our first intensive experience with Rwanadan people. A crowd of children formed around the ladies, they all wanted to see us up close. Some young men stood across the road, interested, but trying to look cool (teenage boys are the same the world over). The parents and other adults mostly stayed at the top of a rise by the road. Jason and Paul climbed up to try to converse with them, with mixed success in Jason’s French. We continued on to the museum.
There was so much that happened out there, I am having trouble putting it all into chronological order. Some of us went to visit a local school. Others went to the local lumber yard. With forestry being in my background, I was intrigued. The wood, being hardwood and rarely straight, was unlike much of what we see here. The tools they used to rip it were basically industrial-strength tablesaws, but the workers were what struck me. Dozens of them, all working closely together, barefoot in sawdust and unsanded wood piles. There were no forklifts to carry wood. There were no neat stacks. Everything pulled, pushed, dragged and carried by hand, on the shoulders of slight, wiry youths. Pieces of lumber weighing 100lbs or more, dropped onto a callused shoulder padded only by a rolled up shirt, and carried to our truck to be loaded. Piles of sawdust up to 3 feet high surrounding the tablesaws, and women - some with babies on their backs, climbing over and under flying wood, heads inches from worn belts and blunt sawblades, packing sacks full of sawdust for who knows what purpose. It really is impossible to imagine until you have seen it.
Continued in Part 3.
