no contest

Of course I should be studying human rights but I'm still flush with the victory of getting my evidence outline done and understanding most of it plus human rights is this really nebulous course that's hard to get started organizing, so I'm thinking of another story of Africa... Okay.

I went Rwanda for the first time at the end of October, 2002. It was also the first time I had gone to Africa by myself and I was thinking, expecting, in terms of chaos more of Liberia, whose airport is utter chaos and less of Nairobi, whose airport is normal traveling chaos. So I was a bit nervous.

Every time I fly through Amsterdam now on my way to East Africa, I think of that first time, when I was almost crying as I left Oom Cees and Tante Dieneke after an afternoon at their house and headed to a far-off terminal for the Kenya Airways flight. It always leaves from some remote place like the F terminal. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is the F terminal, at the end of a long hallway that seems almost certain to go nowhere at all until suddenly a few gates emerge going places like Nairobi and Bangalore on airlines that are not KLM and so get relegated out there. There is little to do in this terminal but the first time I got a shamefully bad hot chocolate (the Dutch need to look into this, seriously. It's a disgrace) and sat there thinking, "This might be my last hot chocolate for a while. And it's bad." Ah, the mental melodrama. It's embarrassing how at that point I thought of Rwanda as the end of the earth.

Unfortunately, because I had not been able to figure out how to call ahead and get seats, I was stuck on an aisle for an overnight flight. (Later, I would just call the Rwanda office of Kenya Airways from the US. The New York and London offices are worthless.) So I sat up miserably while the girl next to me slept peacefully against a window. In Nairobi, on a seven hour layover, I naively followed the signs to the transit lounge and slept, probably drooling, with my head on a table and my backpack straps wrapped around my feet (oh, I was prepared. No one was going to rob me.). I also ate a nasty greasy doughnut for breakfast because it's all the little cafe had. It's tragic, really, that I was so unaware. There is a perfectly nice coffee shop selling good coffee and sandwiches and muffins with CNN on the tv and windows to the outdoors and booths that you can relax in down at Gate 14 but I didn't know that until months later.

It's always fun to know, as something is happening, that it is a defining moment in your life, and I knew it when I got on the plane to Kigali. I finally had a window seat and it was midday in Africa, finally warm, and as the plane crossed Lake Victoria and headed over a swath of Tanzania, I could scarcely contain my excitement. In fact, I never could quite contain my excitement on that flight, even when I was only coming from a week of meetings in Nairobi. The woman sitting behind me was explaining to her seatmate that you can tell when the plane is over Rwanda when the houses begin to appear in neat rows of new tin roofs - all the rebuilding after the genocide is remarkably orderly. The landscape gets darker green and hillier and then the plane lands on a neat runway that is, I just saw on a satellite photo, nearly half as long as the city is wide.

The first day is a bit of a blur, although I remember that immigration and customs were no problem and the entire office was waiting for me and Jack and Elly asked me, on the way to the office, whether I could drive a stick, because the Prado had a manual transmission.

The next day, we drove to Kibuye. It is a drive whose beauty cannot really be described, all sharp curves around rich green mountains and deep green valleys and children waving at every passing car, but I get car sick and I definitely get carsick in the back seat on a drive like that. Most everyone gets carsick on that drive. The minibuses leave a trail of tied up plastic bags of puke that you have to try to avoid when driving or you'll get it all over your tires.

About 15 km from Kibuye, long after Lake Kivu had begun appearing on some curves, sunlight winking off the water in the distance, islands dark shapes with no sparkle, Jack got in the back seat and let me drive. And so, the first time I came up around the curve to suddenly find myself at Kibuye's only roundabout, the first time I drove up the hill past the Friday market, the first time I saw the sharp downward turn to my house that required quite a bit of skill to manuever, I was driving the Prado. Later, I would know that truck better than any other vehicle, exactly how it would handle mud or slippery pavement and precisely how much space it required to get between two obstacles, but the first day, it was all new to me. And nervewracking. Here I was with Jack and Elly, this retired couple who knew the country and the work and EVERYTHING and I knew nothing whatsoever and I was terrified that I would stall the truck or crash it or something.

Which I didn't. Fortunately.

I really miss that Prado.