Entries in Life

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” — Reinhold Niebuhr

I went and saw “As we forgive those” tonight. It is an amazing account of the process of reconcilliation that some people in Rwanda are going through. The documentary focused on two different genocideres and the reconciliation that they sought with the surviving members of their families they attacked and murdered.

Two women whose families had been killed struggled to forgive the men who had killed their families. The process of reconcilliation in “As we forgive those” covered what happened after the Gacaca courts.during reconcilliation workships run in cooperation with the Prison Fellowship in Rwanda.

One of the projects the former genocideres participate in is building homes for victims of their crimes. This is especially poignant since they often destroyed those homes during the genocide.

(I have to admit that I only saw the last part of the movie. The listing of screenings gave a contact email and said it was being shown by Church of the Apostles in Fayetteville, NC. I sent an email, got a response, found the date posted on the site was wrong, and got a showtime. But no location. So I naturally assumed it was at the Church of the Apostles. No one linked to their website. If I had gone to the website — or even known it existed — I would have realized it was showing 20 minutes
away from the church. Anyway… if you post information, make sure it is all connected.)

Besides the excellent message of reconciliation instead of retribution, the Church of the Apostles seemed to be using the film as a sort of evangelism. The minister.stood up after the film and said, essentially, “See what Christians are doing? You might have a bad
impression of the church, but We ain't all bad!” I thought it was a bit too pathetic.

Still, I think this is a great film for any church to show or sponsor. And it's great for people outside the church, too. The message is universal.

Forgiveness isn't human. It is divine. (from the trailer)

It was only because I read about the award that I even found out about the documentary "As We Forgive Those".

The documentary covers two widows facing their families' killer's and asks "Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church ... fit into the process of reconciliation today?"

The last bit seems the most poignant to me. I'm not sure this sort of national reconciliation would work at all if it was merely a civic duty.

I'm hoping to see this next week.

You know what? I like the way Rwandans do bureaucracy -- completely open to the world. We walked right into the Ministry of Health and found the person we needed to see. No bothersome identification checks. No screening. Just plain trust.

Contrast this with our visit to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. A squat building built to be impervious to almost any attack. Two ID checks. Two metal scanners. No laptops. Bah!

Well, some journalism interns from Canada are in Rwanda and, when one decided he needed a contact at the Ministry of Infrastructure, he was a little surprised:

Jean Pierre, our program assistant here in Rwanda, suggested we just go to the Ministry offices and ask around. I was skeptical; surely security wouldn’t even let us through the door without a contact or an appointment.

But much to my surprise we walked right in the front door and after asking around I found a man who has worked in road safety for over a decade: the perfect expert.

So, I didn't get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla's Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants.

In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn.

There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions' manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses.

As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you're interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I've got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com.

Why there and not del.icio.us?

Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And this use (link and comment) it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog suggested.

So, I didn't get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla's Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants.

In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn.

There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions' manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses.

As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you're interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I've got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com.

Why there and not del.icio.us?

Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog.

As many Rwandans say, forgiving is an effort that one makes in order to make life livable, especially since victims and the ex-prisoners have to live together as neighbors again. (— from Reconciliation still a major challenge

Rwanda has too many guilty people for “classic justice” — it just “didn’t meet expectations”.

Classic justice is having trouble dealing with the hundreds of thousands of genociders that will show up in court. The guilty and the victims are everywhere.

So Rwanda has implemented public confession, after a fashion, in the form of its Gacaca courts. Confess, and your sentence will be reduced.

Still, as the quote above hints, it isn't always easy. Victims and perpetrators have to live next door and they can be a danger to each other.

Describing the experiences of living in the same communities, some survivors said that despite having forgiven and reconciled, they found it hard to look each other in the eye.

Tonight, after confession, my priest told me "Confession is easy, relationships are hard". I immediately thought of this article. Confession, giving voice to your sin, seems so easy, but we have to do it so often. Screw up, confess. Screw up, confess. Repeat ad infinitum, it seems.

Because confession is so easy and does not, in and of itself, mean change, it is nothing compared with going back and reconciling with the one you wronged.

When I've hurt my wife, she isn't satisfied that I've gone to confession. She wants real change.

When the man who killed your family confesses to his crime and has his sentence reduced or forgiven completely, you aren't going to be satisfied when he moves in beside you. You want real change. (And probably, if we're honest, some "classic", retributive justice.)

Confession is easy. Reconciliation is hard.

Any mention of Rwanda seems to evoke the Genocide there fourteen years ago. Since then, we've had at least a couple more (Darfur, Kosovo), but before Rwanda, there was Cambodia. Dith Pran, the Journalist from The Killing Fields said on his deathbed: One time is too many.

Genocide pops up in the strangest places. Reading this travel account of a couple of Jewish backpackers in Germany is telling. It starts out easy enough.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson.

But ends with this haunting image:

Near the exit was a beautiful bronze sculpture that read, "Never again." Beyond the sculpture sat fifteen orange tents. There were fifty Rwandan refugees sitting in the dirt and cooking lunch. There was a cardboard sign in front of them with the words: "You said never again."

Is Dith Pran's dream impossible? Will we always have genocide?

I don't know. I'm pessimistic enough to think that people will always suffer from irrational hatred.

I suspect that the institutional intolerance that Rwanda is currently using is not the right way to get fix the problem in the long term. Now-a-days, Rwanda sacks officials for believing the wrong thing. It may work for now, but as long as people continue to believe the "genocide ideology", it won't matter if they lose their jobs, the beliefs persist and people will continue to elect people who think the wrong thing.

Here we are, sixty years after the end of WWII, and Germany still hasn't managed to cleanse itself of racists.

I suspect it takes something more subtle. And it takes more time.

There is one comment on that last link, though, that gives a note of caution: “He who says he knows the way, does not know the way.” -- Lao-Tze

Since going to Rwanda, I've been more interested in keeping tabs on what is going on in the country.  I set up a Google Alert and have been getting some interesting things.  I've been letting these build up, so it is time to clear out my browser.

• Bikes to Rwanda and Wells for Life were two charities working in Rwanda that I found.  While I like the Bikes charity, the video in this blog post is filled with familiar yellow water containers that I saw rural Rwandans lugging along the road.
• This journalist goes to see some gorillas in Rwanda and mentions the Mountain Gorilla's Nest hotel that we stayed in to see the golden monkeys.  He describes it as "an unsympathetic mishmash of a place", but I prefer their rates to the £347 (US$687) a night in the posher hotel he used. Did I mention Rwanda isn't cheap?
  
•  Can the Congo Save Itself? talks about the fighting along the Congo-Rwanda border. I met a couple at the Serena who traveled around Africa quite a bit. They were the first to say what others have confirmed many times since: Rwanda is a one of the safest, quietest places in Africa. "A good place to start" was how they put it, with vivid examples from other countries to reinforce the idea.  Even though it is fairly safe, the guards we had on our trip to see the monkeys hinted at the dangers along the borders.
• What is Unspoken in Rwanda talks about the beauty of Rwanda and the constant awareness that some of these people are former genociders. Kesse Buchanan recognizes the friendliness of the country, but, in the end, can't reconcile it with what she knows about its past. This isn't the chaotic Africa I am used to! ... I just can't comprehend how everyone can be so friendly but capable of genocide. The genocide is everywhere and nowhere. How do people go on?
  
• Then genocide in Rwanda 14 years ago are something Kenyans and Zimbabweans are thinking about.  Evidently along the lines of "Do we have to get that bloody to get democracy?":
  

  At one point, a stunned delegate from Rwanda was even asked whether the genocide in Rwanda had been worth it as it had paved the way for a more democratic and open society that was based on progressive, egalitarian laws.
  
  He responded by saying that the price Rwanda had paid for its peace and democracy was too high, not just in terms of the cost of reconstruction, but because it was written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of his country’s men, women and children.
  

• A Catholic Priest was convicted of participating in the 1994 genocide.. His participation was particularly gruesome -- he had his church, which was filled with 1500 parishioners -- bulldozed.  Of course, there are many people who don't like the institution of the Roman Catholic church and they jumped on this case as further fuel for their hatred.  This is the sort of person who will tell us that Mother Teresa is evil and the pope is a Nazi.  Many of these people misunderstand the purpose of the church, but, there are those who understand it perfectly well and are just opposed to it. Arguing with willful ignorance is just as futile as attempting to persuade those who understand but disagree they they are wrong, so I won't attempt either here.
  

I think I'm done writing about this trip, but I wanted to point you to some rough videos I took with my camera.  They'll give you some idea of the dancing we saw.

• Semi-professional Dancers at Gorilla's Nest (~10m)
• More (~15s)
• Women dancing with Baskets on their heads (~15s)
• Children from the Volcano Lake (~1m)

Sorry for the quality and lack of editing.  But you get the idea.

After spending 30 hours on planes and in airports, I arrived in Philadelphia Sunday evening.  With so much time spent in economy class in full planes, I could have kissed the ground.  Today, I slept off 3 hours of jet lag.

Overall, I'm extremely happy that I went.  Actually going to Rwanda gave me a lot more insight into how what I'm doing might be used.  I understand the limits of what I'm working with better.

Airports are funny places.  In the airport in Brussels, I ran into a woman who works with the blood transfusion center and had been attending a retreat with some fellow Capacity Project workers. She had just learned about the software that I was helping to customize and install.

One thing we talked about was American's perceptions of African countries.  Say "Rwanda" to almost any American and they'll think "Genocide" and "Hotel Rwanda".  The country, though, has accomplished much in the way of economic and political stability compared with its neighbors.

On of the reasons for this is, as one business consultant evidently told the government, because the country is blessed.  It is blessed with a lack of diamonds, oil, and other natural resources (though the land itself seems verdant and fertile). As a result, it doesn't have the continuous conflict that plagues many other African nations.

Fifteen years ago, Rwanda was in the middle of a civil war that ended up in genocide.  Now, Rwanda is prosecuting Genocideers and chasing foreign investment while growing its domestic industries, including ICT.

In the meantime, after being a model country for years, Kenya is beginning to backslide.  This means its neighbors (including Rwanda) see an increase in oil prices.

Which brings us back to the point of the perceptions we have about African countries.  Often times, they're 10 years out of date, at least.  One friend, when I mentioned I was going to Rwanda, said "I'd go to Kenya [where he had been before], but not Rwanda".  He said this during the height of the Kenyan riots.  He wasn't watching the news coming from Kenya.  (Neither was I.)

The riots have affected where the Brussels ➔ Kigali ➔ Nairobi flight refuels.  It used to refuel in Nairobi, but with the riots, it now refuels in Kigali and still tries to minimize the amount of time it sits on the ground in Nairobi.  (The health care professional I met in the Brussels airport told me that during the hight of the riots, the plane would land just long enough to unload and load passengers.  We were there longer. than that.)

(I plan on writing a summary of my thoughts on Rwanda, but felt like this deserved a special note.)

As I mentioned before, Paul Wolfowitz was staying at the same hotel as I was at in Rwanda.  Evidently, I'm a good friend of his.  Good enough, that he thinks I'll pay his bills for him.

The hotel serves a decent little breakfast and which they include in the cost of the room.  Every morning at breakfast, they'll give you a bill, and you sign your name with your room number.  If you have guests, you're expected to pay for them.

On the 4th, he was checking out (he left on the same plane as dcm) and had two or three guests at breakfast. For some reason, he put my room number on his bill and signed it. Did he forget his own room number? Or is he just the sort to try and skip out on his bills. Perhaps we'll never know.

(The signature is not clearly and distinctly "Wolfowitz" but, then, few people's signatures are clear and distinct. The first part is obviously "P. Wolfo..." and the end looks like a "z", Which leaves us to fill in the "wit".)

It has started to rain!  It is nothing like the easy storms that we usually get in Pennsylvania.  This rain is much more like the windy torrents that I remember from New Orleans when we were there.  Thick rain, coming down in sheets.

Sitting here in Rwanda, I'm taken back to a New Orleans storm in May 1995, later know
 just as "the May Flood" when dvfmama  and I made an attempt to run through the
 torrential downpour.  I lost a shoe when it was swept away in the flood and had to borrow some clothes from a priest in the Catholic Student Center.

Rwanda makes me feel nostalgic in so many ways.

I've put up some more pictures of monkeys, dcm, and guns.  What a combo!

The hotel I'm staying at is amazing.  Kigali does not have an abundance of good hotels and, unless you go out of your way to find a deal, you'll end up staying at the Serena.

The Serena itself is nice enough.  You could hunker down here for days and never see the poverty just across the street.  This is, in fact, what I've been doing the past couple of days as I work on customizing the software we're delivering.  This is why I haven't written much.

But as nice as the hotel is, that is not what makes it amazing.

Instead, the regular stream of interesting characters that congregate in the lobby of the hotel make it so amazing.  As I watch the people and listen to the conversations, I feel like I can get a good sense of where this tiny little country is headed economically.

The first weekend we were here, we shared the hotel with Tony Blair and saw President Kagame making his way through the lobby..  There were the various UNICEF conferences, aid workers, and similar activities throughout the week, but when we got back from our weekend trip, we started to seeing Paul Wolfowitz skulking about the lobby.  Evidently, he has been working on economic development in Sub-Saharan African.

At the same time there were several Pentecostal leaders (President Kagame seems to be courting the Pentecostals while shunning the Catholics) here talking to Americans and natives about economic development projects.  I heard conversations that ranged from farming and using the proceeds to fund Rwandan School Lunch programs to Beauty School programs for a small number of students.  The groups shared the patio with Wolfowitz, and while I suspect the programs they were discussing had something to do with is visit, I didn't really see any hard proof of that.

Beyond the observing, here at the hotel, on the street, and in the offices of the Capacity Project and the Ministry of Health, I have been reading the local English language paper, the New Times.  One front-page article that caught my eye was on the amount of money that the country spends on consultancies.

Rwanda is the beneficiary of a lot of aid from Western countries.  But, not all of it is well-spent and, as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man hints, a lot of that economic aid seems to be directed at the donor country's private companies rather than the direct recipient.  Just this week, the New Times printed an article about the $80 million dollars that is being spent every year on consultancies (registration may be required for that link).  These are, for example, software developers performing maintenance tasks on software that was "given" to Rwanda.

I'm still struggling to figure out exactly how I feel about working with an organization spending aid money — my fiscally conservative libertarian tendencies are uncomfortable with it — but, as I said before, I'm extremely pleased to be to work on software that the country will be able to own and maintain itself.

This weekend, I spent doing stuff in Parc National Des Volcans.

The 90km trip took about two and a half hours.  (I should add that a good part of that driving was on mountain roads and half the time I felt lik e our driver was pulling insane stunts.)  We drove through the mountains, passing a lot of terraced fields.  Even rural areas arefull of people and at least half of them are walking along the road. Or riding a bike.  Or, in a few cases, taking the bus.  Hopefully everyone doesn't try to buy a car.  The smoke from burning fires is already bad enough — adding a lot more automobile exhast would only make it that much worse.

The road we used was a narrow strip of pavement from Kigali to the mountains for people who want to see the gorillas as well as commercial trucking.  Most roads that diverged from ours quickly turned into dirt.  People filled every village we passed through.

Every other woman that we passed had a child strapped to her back. The country is set to double its population by 2020.  It doesn't seem like that is a hard target to reach.

After eating a buffet at the resort (which seems populated, at the moment, by a large group of touring families from France), a local dance troupe came in do a traditional Rwandan dance.  It was great fun when I turned the camera on the drummer and watch her face light up with 10,000 watts of smile.  All of them exuded energy and joy.

After that, we hopped back in our mini-bus to take a ride to volcanic crater lakes.  After a frightening ride up the side of the mountain, sometimes chased by children who ran beside the car on the dropoff, we arrived at the summit and began to take in the view.

The twin lakes are beautiful.  But we didn't remain alone for long. Children in a village at the edge of the lake spotted us (“Muzengu! White Man!”)  and rushed the peak we were on.  They surrounded us and asked for our email addresses.  Talk about surreal!  Two of the boys gave us yahoo.fr adresses and spoke a passable English.

We'll see if I get an email reply.

We trundled back to the lodge and tucked in for an early departure the next day.  I fell asleep around 9:00pm and, then woke up again around 2:30AM.

It has been a while since I had a chance to see the night sky free of light pollution, so I got dressed and went outside.  I didn't recognise any of the sky.  I'm no astronomer, but I can pick out a couple of constellations.  There were even some bright clusters that I know I would have recognized had I seen them before.

A bright moon ruined some of the fun.  But waking up and listening to the stillness was awesome.  Something to do again.  I went back to bed till 6AM.

In the morning, we were off at 6:30.  We met up with our guide to the golden monkeys and a few minutes later we were driving off the pavement and then walking through people's fields and villages to get to the bamboo forest where they lived.  (We had an armed escort — the park is on the border of Rwanda.)

We spent an hour amongst the monkeys as the ran around us.  For the most part, they seemed oblivious to us.  They didn's sit still for us to photograph them, but they didn't run away.  It is their mating season, so they were chasing each other around quite a bit.

(Evidently this particular species of Golden Monkey only exists around those volcanos and they are an endangered species.)

After a muddy hike back, I collapsed in my hotel room.  I can hardy wait to go back, but, for now, I'll read a book.

(dcm has an update with pics, too)

Today, Vanessa took us on a tour of some local markets.  The first was quite a shock.

As our taxi, filled with three obviously non-Rwandan (i.e. white) people, pulled up, it was surrounded by young men shouting at us.  I had no clue what they were asking us.  The most I could make out was "Remember Me?"  I thought surely he must be talking to the cab driver.  None of us would remember any one of these guys.

We wandered around a bit (I managed to get a poor picture of the airport from a distance) and finally wandered into the main part of the market.  The place had everything.  One line of stalls was freshly butchered meat.  Fresh (as in today, probably), but not refrigerated.  There was a slight smell.

Across from them were several stalls that contained toiletries. Around the corner were several stalls filled with people willing to sew you anything you wanted, provided they had a pattern or you showed them a picture.

Since I'll do almost anything dcm tells me (he is the reason I own winkyfrown.com), I asked them to make me a pillbox hat.  They didn't know what I meant, though.  (Should I go back now that I have directions?)

Across from them was a woman selling already made clothing.  I'm pretty sure this was the clothing that the Salvation Army (and other Charities in the U.S.) can't sell and, by way of brokers, finds its way to markets here in Africa. (We saw a couple of trucks carrying several bales of this sort of clothing on the way to the market.)  If you're wondering why African countries no longer have a textile industry, it is because you give your old clothes to the Salvation Army or GoodWill and it ends up here at, among other places, the market I went to.

Then we wandered inside the covered area.  They had a few stalls with tourist trinkets, but since this is market wasn't focused on the tourist trade, there were only a few.  Stalls across from them were selling shoes.

And then we came to the stalls with flour.  And more with beans and fruit.

It was crazy and and a great way to learn how to say "No" and say it forcefully.  I bought a few things in the tourist area as well as some "Super Pilipili" sauce and pili pili oil.

Buying the tourist trinkets was the beginning of understanding the madness that surrounded the car when we first arrived.  The stall lady asked me if should could put the items in the bag that the young man following us like a puppy dog provided.  I acquiesced.  I had just bought us a minor fight.

A few minutes later when the other man -- the one leading dcm around -- helped me find and purchase the pili pili, the two began to exchange words.  I could see no good was going to come of it, so I grabbed the oil and stuffed it into the bag my other stuff was in.  Thankfully, they both let it drop.

Once everyone was tipped and paid, our two guys made sure that we would remember them.  They gave us their names and numbers (one wore an yellow shirt with the number 12).  I guess repeat customers mean good business.  This was the answer to the mystery surrounding the "remember me?" schtick at the beginning.

Next we went to a craft market.  I purchased a couple more items and, this time, I actually did some bartering.  First time in my life I tried to dicker with someone.  I discovered they expected it, I started to walk away and they lowered the price.  Amazing!  I'm sure they still made a handsome profit on the carved giraffes (probably imported from Kenya) and I was no where near the place where they would have stopped.  But I felt a little better about those purchases.

Finally we went to what looked like a western-style grocery store.  I didn't barter at the market so I ended up paying 150 RFR (Rwandan Francs, about a quarter) more than the grocery.  I'm sure I could have bartered them down if I had thought to try.  I ended up buying some ground Rwandan coffee.  I may have to go back to the market if I want whole beans.

That ended our crazy afternoon.  Tonight, we've been trying to get a ride out to see the country-side this weekend.  I just found out they got the ride.  I should be offline all weekend as I go check out the wildlife.

Oh no! I've been here too long, I don't have anything to write about!

I think this is mostly because I spent yesterday at the hotel doing the sorts of things I normally do: development, sys admin, etc.  I didn't get a chance to actually start customizing the system like I originally intended.  Instead, I realized I needed to set up monitoring and interim backups for the server I set up at the Ministry of Health.  From the looks of things I might not get to started on the customizations for a couple of days.  Ugh...

dcm, however, actually left Kigali and went out to a health center in a village. I was hoping to join him, but there wasn't enough room.

Well, I'm off to the U.S. Embassy.  More when I return.

In many ways, this trip feels like a big CV padder -- you know, finding the most impressive way of describing something possible.  When all you did was help desk support, you throw around words like "training" and "communication" as if that makes picking up the phone and walking someone through a few steps it takes to make a headline bold more important.

International Travel, working with the Head of IT for a countries Department of Health... It all feels pretty surreal to me.  The surrealism is accentuated by the way I've thought about the world as a big globe floating in space, and my self a minute little speck on one side of it.  Well, the speck has moved!

Today I actually start customizing iHRIS Manage for the ministry. Hopefully it is as straight-forward as I think it is going to be.

Because Banana Beer is the Lutefisk of Rwanda, Vanessa insisted that dcm and I try some.  So last night's dinner was actually somewhat Rwandan, as compared with the other food we've been eating. (Photo by dcm.)

The restaurant (La Republica) had a great view of the night time city.  The menu was a bit sparse, but did include goat dishes.  And Banana Beer.

dcm took a couple of sips of the muddy stuff and, after declaring it "tastes like mead", he refused to touch any more.  That left Vanessa and I, operating under the twin principles of "Waste not, Want not" and "Eat what is put in front of you" respectively, to finish it off.

I ended up swigging the last of it down and regretted having any before I was finished.  The syrupy stuff didn't make me retch, but the way it sat on my stomach was unpleasant, to say the least.

The other food, (goat soup and plantain) was really good, and considering the buffet of native-ish food we visited for lunch, I'd give the countries fare a B overall so far.  Not too outstanding but, with the right seasoning, quite edible.

Just don't give me any more banana beer.