Finding your feet

Today I am 23. It is not a monumental age in our culture – I can't suddenly vote or buy intoxicants, and paying a reasonable price for a rental car is still years away. But this birthday seems significant to me. I have at last broken out of the incubating cocoon of undergraduate life. I am exploring a new country. I am working, and getting paid for it (a novel experience in my service career!). I am hunting for my first apartment. I am finding my feet.

Me and my housemates out for birthday dinner. 

Very appropriately I think, I have spent my birthday finalizing this transition to semi-adulthood. I attended a presentation about development in Colombo at my internship, had a meeting about a paper I am co-authoring, and met with my supervisor at the University of Colombo to discuss my teaching schedule. It is a day full of gifts. My teaching schedule, as it turns out, is very light. I am teaching one class 4 hours a week to students about to graduate from the faculty of sciences. I will get to teach the fun things: practicing speaking and presentations and writing for jobs. It is a good use of a native speaker, as many students will work for international companies or apply for graduate schools abroad.

An outdoor hallway at the Faculty of Science 

It also leaves me a tremendous amount of free time. I knew my schedule would be light, but leaving the office I felt I should pinch myself: only 4 hours teaching a week?! One of the great gifts of Fulbright Sri Lanka is that we get free reign of our time, and are encouraged to expand our engagement with Sri Lanka beyond our teaching. So I have begun an informal internship with a think tank called the Center for Poverty Analysis, or CEPA.

CEPA researches questions which fascinate me – has economic development in Sri Lanka benefited the poor, and if so how? What is the relationship between environmental degradation and poverty? How can post war reconciliation be combined with economic redevelopment? My first project is to co-author a paper on forced displacement of the urban poor. Once this project is done I'll write blogs and news articles summarizing their research. This work, too, is a gift. I am in Sri Lanka officially as a teacher, but I have always thought of myself as coming here to learn. This partnership will ensure that I do! For more information about CEPA, check out their website: cepa.lk/home.html

So grateful today for everything that I have. Learning – from how to find the best curry I've ever had in tiny grungy concrete storefronts, to the politics of economic development in Colombo. Friends – the amazing and fascinating people exploring this country on Fulbright with me. Beauty – the deep greens and vibrant sunsets of Sri Lanka. Freedom – these luxurious days as we learn Sinhala and settle in to Colombo.

It is a happy birthday indeed.  

The beautiful beach near Colombo. 

This is unedited - around sunset the sky is really that color. 

Welcome to Sri Lanka!

Bo Tree at Bellanwila Temple

Sri Lanka hits you like a tropical blanket – the air is a wash of water and car horns and bird song. It is both lush and green and dirty and concrete; bursting with color from the people and buildings and plants. I have stumbled into this chaotic paradise courtesy of Fulbright, for whom I will serve as an English teacher at the University of Colombo for 8 months. I have this next month to work through Sinhala lessons while I luxuriate in the delicious dizziness of culture shock – not quite knowing where I am or what to do at any moment. This stage is one of my favorite things about traveling – for a few weeks you are a child again. You are unsure of how to get from place to place, what to eat, how to speak. That feeling, and the slow satisfaction as you learn to cross the street without looking like a fool, order food, find the right bus. Now I am living with four other English teachers in a house so large we feel like pinballs bouncing through it – a house surrounded by brilliant green and awash in the calls of birds. One night I was kept awake by the scampering of monkeys on the roof, and the next day I encountered them in the garden – we were each as startled and curious as the other.

The monkey encounter.

In my first day or two I think this cow was more adept at crossing the street than I. 

Some context for my new home.

Sri Lanka is a country of transitions right now. I count myself incredibly fortunate to be here for a fraction of their history as they move forward. Sri Lanka is recently out of war. The Fulbright director described it as “post war but not post conflict” - the fighting is done but for the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority conflict is still fresh in memory and continued discrimination and misunderstanding. We stand at this moment on the brink of possibility – a new president miraculously swept out the tyrannical reign of the former president Rajapaksa whose ruthlessness ended the war, but at terrible cost of life and human dignity. All the Sri Lankans who have spoken to us hail President Sirisena as the beginning of a new chapter for their country, but there is much work to be done and many decades of pain to be healed. Conflict between the Hindu minority in the North and the Buddhist majority of the south reached a head in 1983 when government enflamed tension erupted into riots through Colombo, and death to any Tamil who the riots found. The Northern response to this was to create one of the most effective guerrilla resistance groups the world has seen, the infamous Tamil Tigers. The two sides traded atrocities until 2009, when the Sri Lankan government bombed the North to ashes. When they were done, there was no one left to fight. Peace comes slowly, and perhaps has its first real chance under the new government who has changed inflammatory rhetoric about the war and sought to minimize the disparity between resources in the North and South. Whether this will be enough, whether stated intentions will fully materialize, remains to be seen.

Sri Lanka is an island about the size of West Vriginia off the Southern tip of India. I am living in Colombo, while the war and most of the damage remaining from it occurred in the North around Jaffna. 

Sri Lanka is in the midst of economic transition as well. My past two homes – Cambodia and Rwanda were squarely in the “third world” while Sri Lanka seems well on its journey on the imaginary line towards “developed country” . I find myself in shock at simple things like bus tickets, cross walks, functioning (and obeyed!) traffic lights, western style grocery stores – things I rarely would have encountered in my past travels. We went to a fancy hotel for a final dinner after orientation – an ostentatious kind of place with butlers in uniform to open the door for you, sparkling marble floors, and chandeliers complete with bland modern art. I normally hate going to this kind of place because i someplace like Cambodia or Rwanda the patrons would have been solely white, but here the majority of the patrons sipping coffee or cocktails in overstuffed chairs were Sri Lankan. It will take me some time to learn that this is Sri Lanka too – not just the open air markets and clogged streets full of Tuktuks. It is a well educated country with a growing middle class, and an upper class with connections all over the world. Colonial heritage lingers in the excellent English of the upper class which seeps into every part of the country – even the menu at the little takeaway restaurant near our home advertises its curries and rotis in English. But here, more than a reminder of Colonialism, English serves as a bridge between the languages Tamil and Sinhala which have divided the country for so long. I hope my time here will be a tiny fraction of that bridge.

(If you are interested in learning more about the history of my new home I suggest reading “The Cage” by Gordon Weiss who gives a riveting account of the end of the civil war. But please keep in mind that Sri Lanka is more than its tragedies.)  

Photos of the incredible beauty and diversity of this country: Ballanwila Temple, the Red Mosque, and Pettah shopping street. 

So, Anna... why are you still in Africa?

"Hello, my name is Anna, I am a researcher with the University of Virginia. I am hoping to schedule an interview with you on the cessation of Rwandese refugees -" *click*

So, this blog is to answer the question of what exactly I am doing still in Africa, a question I wonder myself sometimes! But the answer lies with several thousand Rwandan refugees living in a refugee settlement in southern Uganda. As of June 30th these people will be required to 'voluntarily repatriate' to Rwanda. I learned about this on my last trip to Uganda, and decided that learning more about semi-legal forced relocation would be one of the best possible uses of my summer.

Why this fascinates me so much is quite complicated. First of all, you need to know a bit about the Rwandan government. While it is officially a free and fair democracy, the reality of it is that opposition to the current regime is heavily controlled, and ethnic discrimination continues but invisibly and silently. We hear rumors of political disappearances, jail sentences that people never return from. Disagreeing with the government is now called 'devisionism' or 'genocide ideology', pushable by a sizable jail sentence. So this is part of the reason there are still so many people fleeing Rwanda. Rwanda wants these people back for a number of reasons: one, for reputation (being the 'development miracle' and still having people run from you doesn't look too good) another for control (the current regime is actually made up of former refugees who organized and invaded Rwanda from Uganda). This is made even more complicated by the refugees who are former perpetrators of genocide, and claiming political prosecution to avoid justice. The layers of lies and complications go on and on.

Now this has all culminated in a cessation clause, a technicality in refugee law which allows a host country to revoke refugee status when they (the host country) determines the reasons for fleeing have ceased. The refugees can't legally stay, but they can't be legally forced to return, and Uganda has set up no system for appeals. Many of the people effected by cessation will have lived in Uganda for decades, some where born here. To say that sending them back to Rwanda is sending them 'home' is a misnomer of huge proportions.

So this is why I have spent the past week running around the crazy city of Kampala doing research, which primarily involves sitting on the side of the road making phone calls and trying to get people to let me interview them. I have talked to the UNHCR secretary so many times I feel like I should meet his wife and kids by now. I am a bit stuck in Kampala, waiting for permission to enter the settlement to go through, but Kampala is not a bad place to wait. I am staying at a hostel full of interesting people, mostly also doing research, and I spent the weekend at an Island in lake Victoria with a lovely American woman I met there.

So, research in Africa: always interesting, never what I expect, and always an adventure!

A New World!

 (Pictures are mostly by other people – my camera was stolen last month)

Hello my dears! Apologies for the long absence. My life has been full of too many transitions of late to document properly, but things are slowing down at last.

At the end of our program we went to the beautiful lake Kivu, hidden in rolling green mountains. It was a fabulous adventure of swimming in the clear water, and took a boat to a mysterious island full of cows and 5 million bats, which we climbed to the top of.

 High on the mountain-island 

Making new friends everywhere. 

The cloud of Bats we hiked through! 

Bats closer up

Now that my study abroad program is over I have moved to a new house for the summer, where I am staying with Kevin and Lizzie, two students from my program who are also staying through the summer. It has been a week of goodbyes at our house, as people have lingered in our house after the program and before their flights to America. We have had between 5 and 7 people in our tiny three-bedroom house, and we have big family breakfasts and dinners together every day. But by Friday everyone but the three of us will be gone, and it will be time to settle in to the summer for real!

Our house is  in the same complex as a brilliant artist’s studio called Ivuka! It is a jumble of bright colors and sculptures and paintings, which overflows into our bright orange house. There are dance practices outside our house every few days, and our concrete ‘yard’ overflows with the half-wild children who play in the streets by our house and come to play soccer with us and tie knots in my hair and snuggle.

In front of the painting in our living room

The art studio across from us 

Our house is the orange one!

The art studio 

I will spend my summer here in Kigali, and leave in late July for Europe and then home. I am doing research on forced repatriation of Rwandan refugees from neighboring Uganda. It’s a project I am very excited about, and I hope it will serve as a basis from my senior project. It will be a good summer! 

Playing with the babies -- Perfect and Bonett 

Measure of the Soul (a poem for Rwanda)

After a several-year dry spell I have at last had the itch to write poetry again! I mostly credit the amount of time I have on my hands here in Rwanda: I have a daily ritual of stretching out in my front yard and reading and writing poetry while the sun sets.My house seems made for beauty and creativity. I wrote this one a while ago, trying to capture some of the deep love and grief that I have for Rwanda. Thought I would share it, sense I have not posted in a while! 

Measure of the Soul

Dizzy in the darkness

secondhand horror.

I try your mask

a borrowed ache you

believe it.

This choir of death:

My love my blindness to

believe in you again.

I cannot forgive

life – white and dry and twisted.

And now I know

there is no limit

we do not break – even for mercy

built for pain and evil

a frankenstein creation.

And now I know

my skin is monstrous

and the shadows in my heart are bottomless.

And now I know

no God

but one that is broken.

And now I know

the bitterness of life

bitter: the beauty of it

the sweetness

bitter

the knowledge

the monster

bitter

that I cannot stop loving.

The Price of Memory

This week, commemoration week, genocide is constant. Strange twinkly songs spill from the radio, the only of word I understand is 'genocide', televisions flash image after image after image of the dead. Kigali turns to a city of the dead. The whole town shuts down during genocide memorials, by mandate, and so I when go out to buy a mango or an avocado I often wander past locked doors and darkened windows for miles.

Sunday I went to the main memorial: a long 'walk to remember' to the national stadium for an evening of songs and speeches and thousands of candles, flames spread from the memorial bonfire. In Rwandan culture when someon

e dies you keep a fire going for seven days and seven nights and stay by it, remembering the dead. This week fires burn all across the country, and we are all around them.

Candles at the stadium. You can see the lights better out of focus. 

Memory comes with a price. As we left the stadium on Sunday there was a scream in the dark: a howl of grief so brutal I cannot even comprehend the physical pain that must have been at the center of it. Three volunteers ran past us, carrying a writhing, screaming woman. She wailed and beat against them, lost in the torture of memory, while they repeated 'Ntakebazo' – it's ok – over and over again.

This is not uncommon during commemoration week. As we walked I heard screams again, and again, agony so physical it seemed to cut the dark and twisted my guts, made my skin prickle and shudder. Before Rwanda I thought there was a limit to pain. I believed because I cannot imagine grief beyond a certain point that the human spirit must not be able to take it, that we must simply break from the weight of it. Now I know better. We are made to endure, and this is our blessing and our curse. This is the price of memory. The dead never die. The screams in the night do not cease. Genocide in Rwanda is never entirely over. This week it goes on behind the eyes of every face I see.

I write this from another memorial. I am here with AVEGA, sitting quietly with my psychologist mentors to be there when and if the screams begin again. It is past midnight, raining and cold, and the faces around me are heavy with grief and exhaustion. I am on blood-stained ground: at the beginning of the genocide many Rwandans and foreigners fled to this school to escape from the Interhamwe. The UN came to the rescue: but only for the whites. They took the few foreigners out of the screaming begging crowd, and drove away. As the UN cars disappeared down the road the genocidaires moved in. Guilt seeps into my stomach -- I am nauseous with disgust. As a student turned researcher I feel out of place, a voyeuristic observer of pain too sharp for me to ever touch. In the cold air, orange from smoke and streetlights, I begin to imagine myself not an outsider peering into someone else's pain, but a mourner, keeping vigil for the dead.

Tonight we keep them close.  

Muzungus in Paradise

Life has changed a good deal in the past few days! I am now in the research portion of my study abroad, which means classes are over and for the next month I will do an independent research project on trauma. For this time we move out of our host families, and I am living in an amazing house with 5 of my friends.

Check out our Gazebo!

This is what I look at as I eat breakfast every day.

The house is lovely, has a fully equipped kitchen and we all have our own bedrooms. As a future development worker who expects to make very little money, this might well be the nicest house I ever live in. We even have a house boy, who is awesome and does our dishes and is confused by our insistence on cooking for ourselves. As a student I feel I don't deserve this, somehow, but it was the cheapest thing we could find with furnishing and enough bedrooms.

While I am doing my research, and for the next three months, I have an internship with AVEGA, an organization created for genocide widows to address trauma and healthcare. They later expanded to work on legal advocacy and economic projects, and pretty much awesome. Check out their website! http://avegaagahozo.org/ I am working under two psychologist, which is perfect, because post-conflict trauma healing work is what I want to do with my life. So far I have attended a two day trauma counseling workshop!

Another piece of good news: I officially have a major! I applied and got into the Global Development major at my school! I have been planning on since I got into UVA, but have been a little nervous about because the major is small and competitive – less than 1 in 3 applicants got in last year. So its really nice to have a major :) I may also double major in religious studies, which is something I never would have planned, but I have just really enjoyed religious studies classes at UVA and have taken a lot of them, so I may as well get a double major out of it!

So life is pretty good :) Having my own house and making my own food has somehow made Rwanda feel mine. It is really home now. Some weird stuff is going on because of Genocide Commemoration Week, but that is a story for another day.