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.  

Muzungus in Uganda!

Gulu, Uganda

Uganda has been full of some amazing tourist experiences! I wish I could write them out for you, but for some things pictures are just better. So here is a photographic journal of our adventures in Uganda!

On our second day in Uganda we crossed the equator!! Turns out the equator is a line painted across a road surrounded by cows. Who knew??

Then we crossed the Nile!!

And fed some crazy baboons who lie in wait and mob buses for their bananas. I am really not exaggerating that much. 

Then after a couple of days in Gulu we went for a field trip out to this amazing rocky outcrop in the middle of the Savanah, which stretched out forever. It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been: the most spectacular thing I have seen in Africa! We spent the morning scrambling around the rocks, guided by the local king: Chief Jeremiah.

Gulu has been a lovely break from the comparatively large and busy Kigali. I enjoyed wandering the dusty streets in search of food – Indian, Ethiopian, Ugandan, even Pizza -- Gulu is home of the best food I've eaten in months. We learned a lot about Uganda's recent struggles with the LRA and went to the headquarters of the now somewhat infamous 'Invisible Children'. If you are looking for a place to put your money I would still not necessarily recommend them, but they are not the bumbling imperialist fools I have heard them described as either.

Look for a post on the ultimate tourist destination, SAFARI, soon!  

The Pied Piper of Refugee Children

Hello from Uganda! 

The beautiful mountains of Uganda, close to Rwandan boarder

I've been here a week with the whole group, with another week of mad adventuring to go before returning to Kigali. I will post about some of the awesome touristy things we have done soon. But on our first day in Uganda we went to visit Nakivale Refugee Settlement, a sprawling home of 70,00, more of a rural town than a camp. We drove through drizzling skys and rutted, muddy roads which pitched our bus at startling angles to the town, between rows of vegetable stalls and huts of scrap wood and UN-provided tarps.  

We got to meet with Rwandan refugees, and hear for the first time the voices in the shadows of the current regime. We heard of midnight disappearances, short jail sentences from which husbands and brothers never return, wives and children that had been killed in revenge for the genocide. It is the darkness of the sparkling story of resurrection we hear over and over, the sacrifices this government claims for the sake of stability, which the refugees claim is for the sake of power only. The truth is a shifty thing. I am convinced everything I have heard in this country has some truth to it, but many lies as well. Do I live in a democracy or dictatorship? Yes and yes. Is Rwanda a miracle of development or a festering of old hatreds? Yes and yes. But I begin to see the connections and what I think may be the turth behind the state. It is far cleverer than I could have ever guessed without living here. Nothing is simple. Nothing is only what it looks on the surface.

After the unsettling talk we wandered the camp with a Rwandan guide. At least, that is how it began but quickly my guides became the hoards of children who followed giggling and calling 'Muzunguu!” A brave little girl with six fingers in a torn purple velvet dress held my hand for an hour. She was quickly joined by at least a dozen children who held onto my fingers and wrists and elbows, and we moved like a massive shambling beast giggling madly whenever we looked at each other. 

This camp affirmed so much for me. In a town of 70,000 who had all suffered immensely there was not a single psychologist or program for addressing trauma. I want more than anything to work on trauma healing with refugees, and this day confirmed this completely. If I could move there tomorrow I would – though I will have to wait years until I've gathered enough skills to be genuinely useful. Now more than ever I know the path my life should take. 

The super amazing kids at the camp. The girl to my right reaching for the camera was my best friend for the day.