I am only one person, clearly. Me. So I don't know how other people remember things. I only know how I remember them. And how I remember them is in pictures - snapshots - of people and places. They are surprisingly clear and detailed, when I concentrate on them. I can call them up, of course, but sometimes they also call me. Sometimes the pictures haunt me, sticking around in my head until I can't concentrate on other things. Sometimes they appear while I am doing something completely different and are, for a moment, clearer than the world around me. I've had a lot of these moments of memory this week and I'm not quite sure how to piece them together. Or even, for that matter, if they need to be pieced together. Maybe they can just be.
First, I remembered trying to back out of the Guesthouse in Kibuye. I liked to pull straight in, nose of the Prado into the bushes, rather than angling off to the side. I don't know why. I just did. Unfortunately, there is a ditch in the way of backing out when you pull straight in. Ditches, completely devoid of any sort of protective railing, are quite a common thing in East Africa. I learn quickly, though. I only actually backed into the ditch once and then developed a sixth sense about the location of the ditch so that I could swing out backwards quickly, even in the complete dark on the nights without electricity, and somehow I had this moment of memory this week of the dark of the Prado, the glow of the lights on the dashboard, and the instinctive knowing where to stop backing up and start pulling forward rather than drop my back wheels into the ditch. (This instinct only worked for THAT ditch, by the way. I drove and/or backed into a ditch or a hole about once a month in Rwanda. I can only say that it's a good thing I had four wheel drive. And that I could hire people to lift me out when four wheel drive wasn't enough.)
A day or two later, I had a sudden vivid memory of lying in the grass staring up at the Milky Way from just outside the Masai-Mara game park in Kenya in 2000. I was with a group of students from my college and after a long drive to the park and through the park, we wandered away from the fire (smart move when there are large animals all around, no?) and lay down in the grass to see the most brilliant display of stars I've ever encountered. The Milky Way was a whitish glow clearly visible all the way across the dome of the sky. Orien had not just a belt but a sword and feet and a head. For an instant this week, I was more there, lying in the grass talking about everything and nothing, six years ago, than I was here, in New York in 2006.
Then I was studying a few nights ago and remembered the basketball games I and then my brother and sister used to play on rec leagues in elementary school gyms around Michigan. I remembered the bleachers and the sound of the ball and the smell of the place (this one is clearly more like a movie than a picture; sometimes - often - they are). All the parents were in the bleachers and the guy was selling candy at the door. It came back to me all in a rush and I let my immigration law book drop slowly onto the bed and stared off at the pictures in my head.
The final one was the road winding up from Kibuyeville into Itabire, one of the districts where we distributed goats in Rwanda. It was a little dirt track hugging the mountains, spiraling up and down again, over rivers, through pine forests, above waterfalls. In places the mountains rose straight up on one side and fell straight down on the other. The track was rocky, and slippery when it rained. One day we were driving along, up, headed to Itabire, and another truck was driving down, toward Kibuye. It was one of those steep places, where the road was barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. We pulled off as close to the edge as we could, and folded in the side mirror, and the other truck inched past us with its side mirrors both folded in, and stopped to talk for a minute. There was an old white nun in the other truck and after they passed, the veternarian with us said, "That woman has been here so many years. She speaks Kinyarwanda like a Rwandese." Doing or being anything "like a Rwandese" is the highest compliment a Rwandese can give.
So I remembered all these things this week. They don't necessarily need to have meaning, but I remembered them, and at each of them I smiled.
First, I remembered trying to back out of the Guesthouse in Kibuye. I liked to pull straight in, nose of the Prado into the bushes, rather than angling off to the side. I don't know why. I just did. Unfortunately, there is a ditch in the way of backing out when you pull straight in. Ditches, completely devoid of any sort of protective railing, are quite a common thing in East Africa. I learn quickly, though. I only actually backed into the ditch once and then developed a sixth sense about the location of the ditch so that I could swing out backwards quickly, even in the complete dark on the nights without electricity, and somehow I had this moment of memory this week of the dark of the Prado, the glow of the lights on the dashboard, and the instinctive knowing where to stop backing up and start pulling forward rather than drop my back wheels into the ditch. (This instinct only worked for THAT ditch, by the way. I drove and/or backed into a ditch or a hole about once a month in Rwanda. I can only say that it's a good thing I had four wheel drive. And that I could hire people to lift me out when four wheel drive wasn't enough.)
A day or two later, I had a sudden vivid memory of lying in the grass staring up at the Milky Way from just outside the Masai-Mara game park in Kenya in 2000. I was with a group of students from my college and after a long drive to the park and through the park, we wandered away from the fire (smart move when there are large animals all around, no?) and lay down in the grass to see the most brilliant display of stars I've ever encountered. The Milky Way was a whitish glow clearly visible all the way across the dome of the sky. Orien had not just a belt but a sword and feet and a head. For an instant this week, I was more there, lying in the grass talking about everything and nothing, six years ago, than I was here, in New York in 2006.
Then I was studying a few nights ago and remembered the basketball games I and then my brother and sister used to play on rec leagues in elementary school gyms around Michigan. I remembered the bleachers and the sound of the ball and the smell of the place (this one is clearly more like a movie than a picture; sometimes - often - they are). All the parents were in the bleachers and the guy was selling candy at the door. It came back to me all in a rush and I let my immigration law book drop slowly onto the bed and stared off at the pictures in my head.
The final one was the road winding up from Kibuyeville into Itabire, one of the districts where we distributed goats in Rwanda. It was a little dirt track hugging the mountains, spiraling up and down again, over rivers, through pine forests, above waterfalls. In places the mountains rose straight up on one side and fell straight down on the other. The track was rocky, and slippery when it rained. One day we were driving along, up, headed to Itabire, and another truck was driving down, toward Kibuye. It was one of those steep places, where the road was barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. We pulled off as close to the edge as we could, and folded in the side mirror, and the other truck inched past us with its side mirrors both folded in, and stopped to talk for a minute. There was an old white nun in the other truck and after they passed, the veternarian with us said, "That woman has been here so many years. She speaks Kinyarwanda like a Rwandese." Doing or being anything "like a Rwandese" is the highest compliment a Rwandese can give.
So I remembered all these things this week. They don't necessarily need to have meaning, but I remembered them, and at each of them I smiled.
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