Rwanda

On the seventeenth, my darling brother and his friend J are going to Rwanda to film a documentary.
I'm more than a little jealous.
This is the film that Caleb started filming way back in 2008, when he was just thirteen and not yet in high school (good lord he'll be a senior this fall) and is about soccer (or football, depending on where you live) opening a window onto the lives of the people who live in the village. It's a clever idea, and I'm confident that they'll come back with beautiful footage and the loveliest of narratives that will then be shown on NOVA, or something.
There's just one problem.
I would love to go with them.  I suggested this to Caleb a couple of times ("Hey!  Guess what?  I took film in high school - I could be really helpful!") but he chose J (who is a real live filmmaker who knows what he's doing) instead.  Hey, I would love to go if they decided they needed someone to hold the microphone or round up people to interview or to just get them tea every so often.
I loved living in Rwanda.  At fifteen, I think I grew up the most - seeing something so different from Boston, learning a ton about hospitals and people and society and how the world works outside of the US. And I would love to go back, to grow up a bit more, to see more of the world before heading off to college in August.
But J and Caleb are going instead, which is okay.  J has never been to Africa, and I think that he'll love it, and grow up, just as Caleb will grow up, and they'll come back with something they can share with the whole world.
Have you ever wanted to go on a trip that just wasn't meant to be?

Camping

When my father was little, he was a boy scout.  I tried Brownies for like half a year but it wasn't much fun, partially because Cambridge, Massachusetts is nothing like Knoxville, Tennessee.  When my father was a boy scout, he literally had the Great Smokey Mountains in practically his backyard - he grew up hiking in there, he led a trip to Alaska, and after college he went backpacking in India with my mother and his friend Blaine (at different times).  Anyways, when we were little (and still) we would spend a week every summer camping in Acadia National Park.  This wasn't serious camping - this was camping where you got to bring your car - but still, it was really cool.  And once or twice, we went backpacking in New Hampshire at this place called Unknown Pond.
When I was thirteen, my mother took me with her to South Africa for about a week and a half, and on the way back we stopped through Kenya, where my grandparents were.  The four of us had some pretty great adventures in the Rift Valley with Maasai families my mother had known since childhood, and then, at the end of the trip, my grandparents surprised us and told us we were going to Little Governers Camp in the Maasai Mara for two or three days.  That trip in the Mara was incredible - my family drove through and camped there again when I was fifteen on our way to Rwanda - and we stayed in huge platform tents beside a river where you could see the animals come to drink.  Seriously, we would be having lunch and there would be a lion across the river from us, just drinking some water.  It was incredible.
My family has some lightweight, nylon, backpacking tents that we take with us to Acadia and to New Hampshire and that we slept in when we all went to Africa, but sometimes this is what I think of when I think of tents....

(Okay, that one doesn't really count given that it's inside...)

(so is this one)

(and this one is more of a covered porch, but still)

All photos from Apartment Therapy

Seriously, guys

All of you should go read this piece on the gacaca from Texas in Africa.  What do you think - are they right?  I think maybe that's true - that there will be tons of resentment from the Hutu population and, ultimately, that's a really bad thing for reconciliation (well, obviously).  Isn't resentment what kind of led to the genocide?  Please, please tell me what you think!
Love,
Bronwyn

Homesickness (weirdly)

Sitting in the global health conference today, staring up at the projection, it hit me like a wave of nausea.  Homesickness.  It was just a picture of a hospital up there on that screen, but the speaker meant the hospital to be an example of private-public partnerships, and to me it was home.  Looking at that picture, I knew how long it took to walk through the long grasses and up the red dirt road to my concrete room on the hill.  I knew the slightly sneezy feeling in my nose from all of the dust in the Dry Season air.  I knew how god-awful the cassava pesto tasted.  I knew it all, hitting me over the head with just a picture of a hospital.
Ever since we came back from Africa before my junior year, I'm not sure I've been home.  Don't get me wrong - I love my room.  I love the Russian painting of a cat above my bed, the pointe shoes hanging on a hook, the Wall-E made of scrap metal, the calendar of vintage seed catalogs.  And I love my house.  I love the woodstove in the kitchen, the four windows in the library, the wheezing noises of the radiators.  I love my room, my house, my city.  But I'm not sure if it is my home.
I miss Africa more than anything.  I miss Africa when I hear Rwandan accents or see hospitals in the hills.  I hadn't realized how much I missed Africa until then, listening to a lecture in which the speaker showed a simple photo - a landscape that brought tears stinging behind my eyelids.  For the first time in a long time (which I don't get - did I just bury all of this?) I feel I can't go on without the red dust and heat and smells and noise that pull me back.
When the photograph came up I called a friend of mine.  His response was that people are normally homesick for their past and present homes rather than a future home, and I know that he's right.
It's odd, though.  I always thought that I could go wandering without being tied down to places.  And I love London and Paris and Greece (the extent of the rest of my travels).  I could live there for a while - I'd love to, in fact.  But when I see a photo of clouds over Parliament, I think "oh, I love London, I wish I could go back."  I don't think that I might die if I don't return.  That was melodramatic, but you know what I mean.  I still think that the light on the moors is perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, but my heart is not wrenched in the same way it is towards Africa.
Meryl Streep in "Out of Africa" understands the indescribable pull of the continent.  In "The Grass Is Singing," Doris Lessing examines its darker, destructive side.  But it is always there.  The rawness of Africa grabs you and holds you tight and never lets go.  So I am homesick.  I am not homesick for my past and present home, for the place of my birth, for all that I love about New England - fall and winter and muddy spring.  I am homesick for red dust and wooden bikes and the rawness of an entire continent.  Somehow, in this whole mess of things, I am homesick for Africa.

Cycling

via Ten Thousand Villages

When we lived in Rwanda we saw very few cars aside from the hospital vans and our own ancient Land Rover.  Instead, everyone biked.  More interestingly, most of the locals used wooden bikes.  I’m not talking about a wooden frame with a metal chain and rubber tires.  I’m saying that the entire thing was wooden – polished, gleaming wood racing down the dirt road beside our car.  Crates of coffee were balanced on the back of the bikes, and these guys were racing down hills with practically no brakes and definitely no helmets.  It was terrifying to watch these people plummet into valleys, but the craftsmanship and just the fact that they were on wooden bikes was incredible. 

While we were living at the hospital, two other expats who had mountain bikes were living there, too.  They went out biking almost every afternoon after work, and at the end of their bike ride, the village kids would swarm around them.  One evening, they good-naturedly got off their bikes and helped some of the kids on.  I remember sitting in the hospital, watching them pushing these kids up the hill on their bikes, the kids screaming and waving their arms around.  Not as cool as wooden bikes, but mountain bikes are still pretty neat, right?

Africa (most likely the first of many)

I am going to be overarching and overly general in this post, so stay with me. 

When I was thirteen, my mother took me to South Africa with her.  I had just graduated from the eighth grade, and we stayed outside of Durban for two weeks while she did something with XDR TB and I played with HIV-positive children at the hospital.  While we were in South Africa I assisted on a C-section in a tiny hospital near the Mozambique border, sung traditional songs, and learned to pronounce the Zulu clicks.  We would drive for hours across the countryside to get to rural hospitals and clinics, places where I played clapping games with children who were waiting to be seen by their doctors.  On the way home, we stopped in Nairobi where my maternal grandparents were staying, and they took us to see the Masaai that they had befriended back when my mother was a girl.  Driving across the Rift Valley, playing games with kids in Pietermaritzburg, my Africa addiction took hold. 

Then when I was fifteen, the summer after sophomore year, my mother took us all to Rwanda to live for three months, and Africa struck again.  We lived in a corner of Southwestern Rwanda, where the sunsets were hazy against the hill and where children in bright blue school uniforms sang songs.  We watched the Euro Cup in a tiny bar with the entire village crammed in front of the television, cheering for whichever team got a point.  I went to support groups for HIV-positive children and saw girls my age pretending to nurse dolls.  I visited malnourished babies two hours away.  I worked in the hospital garden, where we had planted different types of plots as examples of sustainable agriculture.  

Africa holds onto you and doesn’t let go.  I wake up dreaming that I’m back in my concrete room on the hill and try to push aside a mosquito net that doesn’t exist.  I stop myself from saying “amokouru” to strangers on the street.  There’s something about it, something that makes you pull back again and again.  Go and visit, and you’ll see what I mean.