October 31, 2002

One of the things about law is that you are almost always dealing with dates that are over. We all know, of course, that different days mean very different things to each person. Someone had a baby today, we say, and someone lost the person he loved most, on this day when I went to work and sat there doing work things workishly all the working day. In law, though, every date means something. Every day I hear dates. Many of the dates mean little to me, except that I think about how I was in law school at the time, or was just a child. Today, someone mentioned October 31, 2002, and I realized that is the date I arrived in Rwanda for the first time. I waited my first five hour layover in Nairobi - I remember sleeping sitting up with my head on a table in the transit lounge, drooling because I was sleeping so deeply after two sleepless nights on airplanes. I flew for the first time over Lake Victoria and above those green hills of Rwanda. I heard the woman behind me explain to her seatmate that you know you are flying over Rwanda when the houses are built in rows along the road and covered with shiny new metal sheets, because those are the post-genocide reconstruction projects. I remember thinking that first time I landed at Kanombe Airport about the plane that was shot down in 1994 and wondering what it would be like for our plane to take missiles at the end of the runway. We drove through Kigali's streets, and though my bleary exhaustion I thought them far neater and more precise, if a bit dusty, than any African capital I'd seen.

Someone addressed a letter that day, on October 31, 2002, and someone sat in a boring meeting. Someone learned the truth, and someone never woke up after their afternoon nap. Someone fell in love, and I, I met a new home, and no one around me today knew that, that date or that meaning. No one but me, sitting at work, working and remembering.