The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Tufts University or the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.

Sunday, June 6

I arrived at the Permalodge (www.permalodge.org) today. It is smaller than I expected and I am still getting used to it. The stars however are fabulous. I do not have internet access so this is being posted for me by my Dad, after I emailed my posts to myself - clever huh! I don't know when I'll post next. In the meantime here are some saved posts from Rwanda.

Into the Village/Shabbat:

It has been a while since I last posted and we have done a lot (we get up at 6 and go to bed at 12-1).

Friday, May 27: Today we walked into the local village, where Agahozo is located (Rabona). The weekly market was running and it was a bit chaotic. Lots of people everywhere, stalls, stores, and shoppers. People also looked at us as if we are aliens and to a certain extent to them, we are. (The only comparative thing I can thing of for the globalized US is a Native American tribe walking down the street.) The prices are astonishing, I only wanted pineapple and it was 300 franks or 50 cents for a whole one. (Pineapple is common (and deliciously amazing) and Agahozo's farm even has some.) Along the road to Rabona there were lots of children who ran out of their houses to say hello to us. They could all have a short very standard dialogue, "hello, how are you?" "good, how are you?" "fine, thanks." Absolutely every child said "fine, thanks," it was strange. We were not allowed to take our cameras as they would have caused a riot, so no pictures from today.

When I got back to Agahozo I intended to nap, but I got asked the "how is Judaism a religion?" question by my friends Will and Toka. For the first time since confirmation class, I had to think of my own reasoning and definition of Judaism. (I believe that Judaism is a religion and a culture where the religious aspects are not required for being part of the culture. The culture is based on a shared set of values including social justice and equality, education, love, and good food and while those were possibly, originally adopted from a belief in God, the belief in god is no longer a prerequisite for the cultural beliefs.) My Jewish friend Matt disagrees with me, arguing that the belief in God is somewhat required to have the same cultural ethos as other Jews, but agreeing that the culture is pretty much as important as the religion (I believe the culture itself perpetuates those values). However the most important cross-religious discovery made was that it is not ok to question the existence of God in most Christian faiths and that Judaism is one of few religions where a belief in something is not the only core belief uniting the religion. I had no idea that was the case with most religions. The discussion then wrapped up because I had to shower (cold) before helping to lead the Shabbat service that I helped plan.

During the first prayer, I realized that the service was going to go very poorly. The Shabbat committee (four of us) had met three times to plan the service and started with a traditional Jewish service as the basis (for an interfaith trip :/ ). We all picked some good English readings to make it more accessible, but we did each prayer or reading in isolation with no explanation. While it would have an all right pluralist Jewish service, I felt it made a very poor interfaith service. Afterward I was in a weird place, as I didn't make the service as much as priority as I was expected to and I actually left Tufts before our final meeting (when we made the final decisions) so while I didn't feel ownership of it, I really couldn't criticize it either (although I did). On a positive note, we did give a good sermonesque thing about paying attention to the otherwise-overlooked things in life on Shabbat, which involved me giving a rousing telling of the lesser know miracle of the burning bush story, Moses paying enough attention to actually notice the crazy bush). Later that night we ended up having a bit of discussion about the service ( the trip coordinators loved it, but got some negative feedback) and how the trip was not an interfaith trip, but a Jewish trip with interfaith people (as the first interfaith Hillel trip ever we are still learning, but I wish it had been more clearly established for all parties involved). At the end of the night we also had an oneg with the Agahozo long-term volunteers, who stay for a full year at the village (through the JDC) doing whatever is needed (school admin to supplies coordinator). They all seem very interesting and maybe I will do that one day, although I don't feel a strong enough connection to village to want to do it quite yet.

Much love,
Howie

Rabona/Rice Patties

On Saturday I got up early to go weed the soccer field with students. We had not planned on working, but it is a national day of community service so we are going to work with the students (community service?). While I walked all the way back to the other side of the village because I forgot my hoe, because I wasn’t listening, because I got very little sleep, I did more talking than working. For most of the time I talked with students Patrick and Fabrice about a bunch of things including American politics and history for most of the time (the specifics are escaping me). We then had a break and lunch and then went on a hike to the rice patties in the valley of Agahozo’s hill. The hike was very long and we went back through Rabona (with cameras, see picture), however, the destination was excellent. We got to walk through the rice patties and a select few rolled in hay bales with the local kids. We then got back relaxed, had dinner and I stayed around for a bit of Saturday movie time, which featured a surprisingly compelling, This Is It (the Michael Jackson movie). Watching the movie felt very strange, as I completely lost all sense of being in Africa. I’m discovering that Agahozo is a bit of a western bubble. I then went to sleep later then I would have liked, ho hum.

Sunday:

Sunday was our “see the rest of Rwanda” day. We left early and drove to Kigali to pick up the long term volunteers. We then went to the national museum in Butare, had a nice touristy lunch, and went to the Murambi Genocide Memorial.

From Kigali to Burare, I had a great discussion about education and Israel (separately) with Ido, an Israeli long-term volunteer. He originally introduced himself as a sheliach, which means he lived in America to teach about and represent Israel. This led me to assume he was very unabashedly pro-Israel (right wing). However, I was completely wrong and he is totally against settlements and really wants peace. He also wants to be a high school principal in order to work with kids and we discussed that as well. On a side note, I also stood for most of the 3 hour bus ride because there were not enough seats and it also gave me a good excuse to be literally in the face of the long term volunteers (social justicey college grads), to whom I really wanted to ask questions, as I see a possible future in doing similar work.

We then stopped at the National Museum, which shows the history of Rwandan culture, but it is mostly useless, as Rwandan culture has not really changed all that much in its recorded history. The only interesting thing was a replica of a tradition Rwandan hut/house, which you could enter. After a painfully long wait for people to buy gifts at the gift shop, we went to the center of Butare for lunch at a Americanesque restaurant, where I had a lot of pasta with garlic and oil, as it was my first taste of real garlic since January (the dining hall is not so enthusiastic about garlic). And just to illustrate how touristy the restaurant was, the radio played “Fireflies” a song by a Minnesotan guy performing as "Owl City" and had both an Obama ’08 and a Calgary Flames sticker on the door (None of the students even know what hockey is).

We then went to the Murambi genocide memorial, which is a bit infamous to say the least. Murambi was a school, where the town leader sent the village’s Tutsis so they “would be safe” and then proceeded to let Hutu militias in to kill everyone. While this is an unfortunately common story, the uncommon thing was that the mass grave where the bodies were thrown was airtight, preserving the bodies. Someone then decided that the bodies should be preserved with lye and displayed in the 24 rooms of the school as an affront to any genocide deniers. I knew this was coming (there was internal Hillel debate about whether to go or not) and I was both nervous and curious to how I would react. I almost threw up in the van thinking about it. However, when I finally saw the bodies, they were so much less real than I had pictured and I had a hard time connecting the bodies with an actual genocide rather than decorations at Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The bodies were just white and chalky looking, with the skin stretched over their bones, so it looked just like a skeleton. I’m not sure if it was the bodies’ appearance or my faith in humanity that won’t let me associate this with the genocide. The smell was the worst part of it, a scent I will never be able to connect with anything else. (We were warned, but my bug spray was ineffective). After leaving the memorial and driving through the oddly normal Rwandan neighborhood that sits 200 feet from the school, we went to the ASYV apartment in Kigali to decompress.

The thing that stuck with me most about the decompression was the eerie similarity between the apartment and how I pictured a Rwandan house involved in the genocide (aka I think the apartment looked just like a house in some movie about the genocide like Hotel Rwanda). We then arrived back at ASYV at 1am at which point I then fell backwards into one of their rainwater ditches lining every road (I have an elbow scrape and an almost infected wrist cut, which has been overintensely wrapped). A few minutes after my fall the sentence “see you at 6, get a good nights sleep” was uttered without sarcasm. (I am very upset at my lack of sleep and blame my ditch fall on it, (also, apparently someone ranted about getting more sleep and I was a focal point of the rant)).

Much joy in toyland,

Howie

Rwandan High Life

We started off the day working on the soccer seats, and then showered and drove in a packed bus (it was a row too small) to the villa of Samuel, the father of my friend’s adopted brother (he was a big RPF (Tutsi) supported and wanted his kids out of the country in 1994 and one of them landed in Connecticut). Apparently, he was a big RPF supporter because he had tons of money, as his villa was breathtaking and he served all 23 of us beer, Fanta, goat kebabs, and amazing fish caught from the lake that morning. It was amazing and we all got to relax. The only downside was that he didn’t speak English and I felt I really couldn’t thank him properly. The, again packed, bus ride back was one long awesome sing-along covering classics such as Sweet Caroline, Help!, the Backstreet Boys, Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the rest of the sing-along gamut. Once we got back to village we spread out into the students’ after school activities and I played a fun game of soccer with some first year girls (which my friend Gabe took a little seriously, scoring a hat trick). We then showered and met with Charles, the head of the village, who was really awesome and interesting and reminds me of my dad (he is Israeli and loves it, was a lawyer, and is now doing social justice work). We then had dinner and a horrible study session due to everyone's tiredness (everyone was talking past each other, I zoned out the whole time). Overall, It was basically an amazing day, in our daily “Roses and Thorns” my only thorn was not speaking French. (Also, I forgot my camera, sorry!)

Sincerely,

Howie

Education

My friends Will, Charlotte, and I got up early to visit Agahozo’s school, as the trip wasn't suppose to ever look at more than the basic school philosophy. We met with Alice, a volunteer in charge of education and she gave us some basic, but necessary information about the school and its various Rwandan quirks (like picking a broad major your sophomore year). We then had a study session about short service trips and whom they benefit. The general, and I think depressing, consensus was that they are really for the participants, not the community and the discussion was basically on how each of us can morally justify the trip (my recognition of the ineffectiveness of my physical labor, and my main motivators of seeing Rwanda and education research, did not lead me to have to morally justify my trip). I then worked shoveling a small hill into a truck with about 4 other people in a 5 by 20 piece of space between the truck and the hill (we all got dirty and hit with shovels). I then got to ride in the back of the pickup truck and went back to the school to sit in on an English class. The class was a disappointment to say the least; it was like all the bad things about a foreign language class rolled into one: teaching conjugation with verbs the students don’t know, teaching a tense no one ever uses, and a passive classroom dynamic with multiple side conversations. While I believe the village atmosphere is great and will produce great people, the school visit made me much less confident about the village’s effectiveness. After a crazy lunch, where I had no fork, we went with students to their weekly “tikkun olam” in Rabona. I was placed at the school and originally I thought I would be fixing the school building but was put in a classroom with 15 Rabona students and two Agahozo students functioning as teachers. However, it did not go so well. The Agahozo students were unprepared and were suppose to teach modifying adjectives, when the Rabona students really didn’t know one thing about adjectives. The Agahozo students played a few games with the kids and then unexpectedly told my friend Austin and me that it was our turn to teach. We did a pretty good job acting out various adjectives and teaching very miscellaneous things we thought of off the top of our heads, (sports and greetings) but we were mostly disappointed with the Agahozo students.

After the lesson, I found out that 3,000 kids go to the tiny school (wish I had my camera, but I was not supposed to bring it). As we were leaving I noticed a bunch of students in a classroom and it turned out to be two classes of 60 kids each, with a teacher sitting outside telling me not to disturb the peace. I was pretty appalled. I did not know this was the state of education in Africa, but I really hadn’t thought about it. Then after getting back to the village I noticed the house behind us had the radio going and kids outside, so I decided to make some new friends and that I did. I first did some bench presses with the boys and then taught them about John Lennon. I hung out with Clement and Fidele particularly and also visited Aimable was in bed with malaria. Aimable was very sweet and I delivered a note from him to my friend Meghan, whom, due to malaria, he had missed eating lunch with. I then went to family time, which was a bad decision (even thought we were supposed to go), as I drifted between consciousness and dreams the whole time. On the way home I fell in another ditch (this one was in the middle of the path), but I emerged unscathed. I then slept through another longterm volunteer answering questions and thorns and roses, until I could reach my, o so lovely, bed.

Nighty night,

Howie

Laundry and Goodbyes

Today, Wednesday, I got up at 2:45 in the morning because I brilliantly took my malaria medication right before bed, as I forgot to take it with lunch, which resulted in the equivalent of acid reflux. The crazy part was that when I woke up I knew exactly what had happened because I did it four years ago when I was briefly on the same antibiotic for acne (dioxiclycline). I ate a bunch of crackers and propped myself up sitting on a couch in our meeting room and slept until 8, when I was discovered by my searching roommates. I then began the day surprisingly refreshed and I worked moving rocks with other people, discussing the recent flotilla raid and Israel’s respect for human rights generally. We then had a “study session” about raising awareness and money for ASYV, but I missed it to meet with an Ethiopian Jew who gave me some tips about Ethiopia. Before meeting with him I did not know he was an Ethiopian Jew who had been airlifted, and I was sad I couldn’t ask him more about his life. We then had a break and I went around asking people for supplies (I got band-aids and crystal light packets). We then had lunch and I asked my friends from yesterday (family 8) if I could use their outdoor sink for laundry and they said “sure” and I met them at their house after lunch. At first they, particularly Aimable taught me how to do it, which was awesome, but then 5 of them brought out two more basins (I brought one) and proceeded to do basically all of it for me (they would only let me wring it out). I’m still not sure how I feel about it, as It was great to have help doing laundry and for it to go quicker, but it invoked some feelings of colonialism or the penumbras of colonialism (do something for the white person and they will give you money). However, they never asked for anything and we became closer until my departure. After doing laundry, I rushed to get to the ASYV-Tufts soccer game. It was lot of fun and I might have taken over the game a bit (some Tufts students were not up to par), but I and everyone had a ton of fun (even though we lost). I then went back to the clinic to have my new injury checked out (a scraped up hand, the game was played on rocky dirt). At the clinic I met Nir's wife, Cynthia, who is the village doctor. Cynthiatalked about different kinds of Ketubas (Jewish marriage contracts) with our ASYV leader and once again, I have come to the conclusion that Orthodox Jews scare me.

We had a formal goodbye ceremony at dinner and gave the village a pretty patchwork quilt thing that three of my friends made. Later, on the way back to the room, I managed to step on a rusty nail and puncture my teva, bringing my injury list up to four. I then packed until 2.

In the morning I visited Cynthia at the clinic again and went to breakfast for a disappointing goodbye to my ASYV friends (they weren’t very emotional or anything, maybe a cultural thing(?)). We then left to get to Kigali in time, stopping at a mall for lunch and some shopping. We made it to the airport with plenty of time, where we marveled at the extremely low alcohol prices at the duty free store, used the free wi-fi, and got to Addis smoothly. (I was also ceremoniously presented with the first aid kit.) In the Addis airport we had what I thought was an emotional goodbye. (I miss my Tufts Rwanda friends).

Concluding thoughts about the Rwanda/Agahozo portion of my trip:

Agahozo is great place and I really enjoyed being there (summer camp crossed with a Kibbutz), but I don’t feel a really strong connection to it and I really want the education to improve. It is its second year and, frankly, it is really impressive with that in mind and I’m sure it will improve. I was also disappointed that none of the students shared their genocide stories with me, as I still cannot connect the students with the genocide or even poverty. Overall a good, not great place.

Rwanda is an amazingly beautiful country, partially due to the nature and partially due to Kagame’s insistence on presentation. The people are incredibly nice (even past the smile and wave) and it was also incredibly accessible to me due to the switch from French to English in 2008. I would love to go back. However, I feel as if the genocide is a kind of skeleton in the closet, and not being able to talk about politics or the genocide has really heightened these feelings. I am afraid for what the future might bring for Rwanda. We shall see.

On the trip overall, I am very happy I went, especially that I got to know the other Tufts students as well as I did.

I've arrived/Kigali/First Day at Agahozo

This is my first post in Rwanda and I've already seen a lot.

Post flight (written two days ago):
The flight was long and I slept intermittently, but mostly wandered around talking to people, including Tufts people and an optometrist from West St. Paul on his way to give eye care to people in Cameroon (awesome). I'm finally starting to get excited (I know that should have started sooner). The best part so far was getting to see the sun rise over Chad.

Now:

So, we got into Kigali on Tuesday at 3. Then we went to the hostel, had dinner at an Italian restaurant and everyone conked out as soon as they hit their beds at about 8. Yesterday we woke up, had an amazing breakfast of all sorts of new fruit (Japanese plum/tomato, passion fruit, and green oranges) and went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum (THE Rwandan genocide museum). I found the museum thoroughly disappointing. First off, it was very small, only requiring 2.5 hours for me to read everything. Secondly, the museum only gave the very basic "Tutsi party line" account of the genocide. IT gave pretty much the very broad overview of the genocide, probably the equivalent of a one class high school history lesson. And, in that vain, it managed to leave out a lot of crucial things I would surely expect at THE Rwandan Genocide Museum. Things like the problem of having 100,000 convicted Rwandans in prison, that around 20% of those killed were moderate Hutus, or the war crimes of the genocide-ending Tutsi RPF , who happen to be in power( and have been since 1994). On that last note, the museum was very politically charged, exaggerating numbers and really portraying the genocide as a purely "Tutsi as victim" event. (my fellow PJS

While I disliked the muesum aspect, the memorial part made me quite emotional. I have enclosed a picture of it here. This is a concrete slab containing the remains of 100,000 people. ( I put a rock on it at a measly attempt to try and show respect for those lives lost. I think the aspect that made me emotional was not the event itself, but that there were so many people killed/buried there and it was impossible for me to give respect to all of them. By killing so many people the genocidaires managed to dehumanized all of the victims.)

Another interesting factoid is that in Rwanda history education ends after 1990. The genocide is not talked about almost at all in the country. (I think this is a great way to ensure it happens again, similar to Yugoslavia exploding after Tito died, as the current President of Rwanda is really holding the county together "while I don't want to, if President Kagame says to live peacefully with the Hutus, I will")


After the Museum we had lunch and drove to the Youth Village (ASYV). The drive was beautiful and seeing the village for the first time was as well. We had dinner with the students, had a meeting reflecting about our day, and went to bed early. Talking with the kids is sometimes difficult because of the language barrier (the language of instruction in Rwandan schools was switched from French to English in 2008). However, the kids and everyone in Rwanda are incredibly friendly and welcoming. The confident students come up to us and introduce themselves and a majority of the students tell us how glad they are that we are here. Even driving around Kigali most everyone would wave at us (we're white and, therefore, very strange) and if they didn't I could wave and I would always get a wave and a smile back (It was so fantastic).

Today we took a tour of the village, started work on the soccer field seating (I was carrying cement) (the seats need to be ready by the time the Rwandan national soccer team comes to play the school's team in a month), sorted the 250+ pairs of shoes we collectively brought, played volleyball and then basketball with the students, discussed the moral issue of who to serve, and went to family time with a group of 16 students (a family). The day was mostly good, I feel I am getting to know some students better and I had fun playing sports and going to family time. However, while sorting the shoes, a group of kids from Rabona stopped at the fence around the village and asked a few other Tufts students if they could have some shoes. But the answer was "no" due to the nature of the situation. This really broke the hearts of some Tufts students and resulting in the question of "how to decide who to serve." This question had reared it's head the previous night after viewing the poverty of Kigali and the cleanliness and wealth of the village. I still feel conflicted about this, I know that you can only do so much and help so many people with limited resources, but when you have a kid simply ask you for shoes, it is almost impossible for me to say no. My current thoughts are that the village is a great place, but that it goes a little to far. Anne Heyman's (the founder of ASYV) philosophy is that you need to educate some students "completely" and they will have a ripple effect on the county, becoming leaders of a future Rwanda. However, this "completely" includes really nice landscaping, multiple outside theater venues, village-wide wifi, and a recording studio. While I want everyone to have the very best, given Anne's mission of creating leaders and helping to solve Rwanda's orphan crisis (1.5 million of 10 million in the country) I think her limited resources might be put into better use by using the money for some of the things I view as frivolus to put them towards creating another youth village.

That is my journey and feelings for now. Tomorrow we will work on the soccer seats some more, go into the village of Rabona, and have shabbat. I would have put more pictures, but the upload feature has stopped working though the shaky ASYV wifi (sorry).

Hope all is well wherever you are,
Howie

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I'm tired and need to be up early, but I don't want to send people to an empty blog. Those are sad. So, more to come soon...hopefully.