sometimes all you need is some goo goo dolls, preferably loudly

:::
how can the world want me to change?
they're the ones that stay the same
they don't know me
cause i'm not here
:::
they can't tell me who to be
cause i'm not what they see
the world is still sleeping
while i keep on dreaming for me
:::
and the words are just whispers
and lies that i'll never believe
:::
i'm still here
:::
ggd

Actually, the word democratic didn't even go there. I made it up, apparently. And then completely misspelled it.

i'm losing it

In the last three minutes, I have caught myself (rather, the spell-checker has caught me) attempting to pass off the following as sensible:

1. combatible then combatable instead of compatible

2. demogratic instead of democratic

They were in the same SENTENCE, actually.

Exams. No good.

Disclaimer:

What you are about to read on the last posting on this blog has been posted more than three years after the events described. What can I say? I didn't have a blog then.

arriving in Kigali

on the drive to Kibuye

the view from my porch, aka why did I move to New York again?

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.

one of my many attempts to capture the color of the water in the most beautiful town in the world

snowfall

When I woke up and looked out (contact-less) to a dim world, it took me a second to figure it out. It has finally snowed in New York. The curliques on the fire escape outside my window were all covered in little shadows of snow.

Of course, by noon it was all melted and the streets are just slushy and wet. The problem with snow in New York is that it has nowhere to live. Every inch of space is used over and over every day.

Bye, snow.

yay for Liberia

So I found blogs about Liberia. Very very exciting. I used to read obsessively about Liberia when I was in college but then I graduated and went to work and after a while to work just happened to be in Rwanda and the two years there were some of the best and worst and most interesting and most difficult years of my life (so far) and my obsession transferred and last summer all I wanted was to get back to Rwanda. I am a go-backer. Some people leave and move on. I go back. I need to go back. I went back to Rwanda and now I want to go back to Liberia and be a big kid there instead of depending on other people to arrange everything for me.

This is the thing about Liberia. I remember it as a backdrop for being a kid: the beaches were for playing in the waves, the roads were for riding bikes, the markets were for buying marbles. And we lived in Buchanan which, let me just say, has to be one of the most boring second-biggest cities in the country in the entire world. Not that Kibuye, Rwanda was any better (although smaller, I think). And touristy. Ish. For Rwanda, anyway.

But when I read Kevin's blog, I realize that Liberia could actually be, well, fun. I realize that this is possibly akin to heresy in the hardy Protestant missionary community in which I experienced Liberia, but I'm excited. In my head, Liberia is something completely different from Rwanda or Uganda or Kenya or Tanzania. I think of East Africa as an entirely different, far more developed version of Africa. And it might be more developed - think sour gummy worms at Shop Rite and good dish soap at Uchumi, think movies at the Sarit Centre and chana batura at Garden City Mall, think movies twice in two days in Nairobi and BMWs in rows in Arusha, think perfect roads in Rwanda and upcoming wireless access everywhere in the country. But I'm getting the impression that Monrovia (where I've actually spent very few days of my life and in recent memory none except one horribly hot night at CHAL in 2000) might just have enough NGO and UN people (war does that) to have decent restaurants and a few things to do at night. The key is finding them. Not that decent restaurants and things to do at night make a country. Kibuye had pretty much nothing except the guesthouse and our NGO gatherings on Thursday nights and there were many nights when I lay on my couch reading by candlelight and thought, "What is there to DO here?" But I still loved it.

Just that Liberia might not really be all that different. Except hotter. The good restaurants in livinginliberia.com are all air-conditioned, unlike Rwanda where every single restuarant is open to the air and you have to bring warm sweatshirts or freeze (people say that it's not that cold, but trust me, it's cold. I often wore a long-sleeved shirt and a fleece and was painfully cold while around me the very strange people wore t-shirts).

Okay, story: the Kibuye Guesthouse was the only thing of note in Kibuye and now it's closed because the owner didn't have enough money to make the upgrades necessary to fit into the grand plan for tourism development in Kibuye. It's tragic, really. The little cabanas are going to be replaced by some horrible tall hotel with a pool. When the lake is swimmingly right there. But anyway. The Kibuye Guesthouse was classic in that it rarely had the stuff on the menu. Regular ordering food scenario:

Friend = "I'll have an omelette simple."

Server = "We have no eggs today."

F = "Okay, I'll have two beef brochettes."

S = "No beef today."

F = "Well, then, I'll have a salad."

S = "No salad today."

F = "Fine, a fillet of tilapia a l'ail."

Server goes off to kitchen. Forty-five minutes later the table next to us, which arrived after us, gets four plates of fish. Ten minutes after that, the server returns.

S = "No fish today."

F = "What do you have today?"

S = "We have goat brochettes."

F = "I'll have that. Anything. Anything edible. Bring the goat live and I'll eat it, I'm so hungry."

Meanwhile, I ordered grated carrots, chopped green peppers and chips (S = "No peppers today"), which arrived with undercooked chips (I sent back every plate of chips three to five times a week for a year before they started coming the right way) and carrots garnished with the green pepper they supposedly didn't have.

the problem with studying on Friday night

is that there is nothing to distract me save what I create for myself. There are, for example, no emails coming in. Usually I can at least count on the law school exchange listserve for some amusement. A few hours ago, for example, someone sent out an email urgently asking for a sample outline (we make outlines to prepare for exams) for a first year class that, erm, doesn't have an exam. Someone did not read the syllabus. Or pay attention. Ever. Which is funny, because he's so overachieving that he's getting ready for an exam that does not exist but usually those are the very people who read the syllabus and pay attention in class.

tempted

I'm tempted to just post a whole bunch of pictures because, well, I figured out how. And I like advertising Africa and I have some amazing photos of Africa. But I always find it boring when people post one miiiiiillion photos on their blogs, so I won't.

Yesterday I sent in all my stuff for a scholarship that had to be postmarked by yesterday and most of it was fine and my references were fine and all was on time, but at the last minute (that would be Wednesday afternoon, while babysitting) I realized that when they said, "cumulative college transcript" they probably did not mean, as I had assumed, my undergraduate transcript but college and law school. The application is for people all the way from high school up to grad school, so the instructions get a bit confusing.

Yesterday morning I went to the Registrar's Office at the law school and filled out a form for an official transcript, but they told me it would take five to seven days and I could send in an unofficial one pending the sending of the official one and the two women behind the counter were glued to their computer screens and had no time or patience for me, so I left, but then I started thinking, sitting in class, and what I thought was this:

There has to be some way to get around this.

One of the side effects of having been female, blonde (enough), and young in Africa is that I no longer believe that the rules apply to me. Well, the RULES I believe apply to me, but not the rules, the bureaucratic nonsense that controls so much of our lives. Now that I think about it, there are other reasons for this belief I have, but they are more boring. Anyway, I learned in Rwanda that, for example, it's not strictly necessary to actually possess all the documents that you are supposed to have (and, conversely, that actually possessing all the documents you are supposed to possess will not necessarily be enough - there will always be more they can ask for). And those rules about where you are supposed to be allowed to go and what you are supposed to be allowed to do? I would say more but I might incriminate all the nice people who've helped me out.

Just so you know, I never paid a bribe of any sort to get around the rules. Mostly I got around rules through a strategy that I like to call, "Give people a chance to use their power for good, not for evil." That is, by helping me. There is usually someone in every bureaucracy who has the power to do things a bit differently than they are usually done.

So yesterday, when I needed a transcript immediately, I took matters into my own hands. I went to the regular registrar (not the law school) and asked them and they told me to call the main processing center, which I did and described the situation for the woman in such a way that she could best show her power through good and not evil and one fax later she was calling me honey and printing out my transcript and bringing it to the mailbox herself to make sure it was postmarked Dec. 1. There are, after all, really really nice people who are also trapped working for the horrible bureaucracies (which I can only imagine is even worse than trying to get the horrible bureaucracies to work for you).

I miss the days of my undergrad college, where I think I still owe them about $20 for transcripts they've sent out but they still keep sending them out for me and where once when I couldn't get the fax machine to work to fax the request, the nice lady just asked me lots of questions to prove my identity and then faxed the transcript to me.

Any sensible person would tell me, "You need to learn to deal with the consequences of your actions and get this stuff done on time." And I will, I will. But in the meantime, it's nice to have some people who will help me out of messes of my own creation.

Photo! Me in the Baby Jeep

[photo removed]

I am a blogging maniac

I thought today of something that happened in Zanzibar, because I am wearing a scarf that I bought in Zanzibar. And it is an Africa story, so it fits here. IE and I went to Zanzibar the weekend of her birthday. Other interns went to Zanzibar that weekend, too, but IE and I only had the weekend and the others had an entire week (because they were staying longer or didn't have the ten week work requirement that I did or something, lucky people) and so we left them to their leisurely exploration of the island and went off to see beautiful beaches as quickly as possible. This is when we rented the baby jeep and rambled about getting lost by neglecting to turn when we were supposed to and then ended up driving on the beach and randomly through the bush for about 3 extra hours.

It is hot in Zanzibar, unlike Arusha, and so we were wearing tank tops, but Zanzibar is largely Muslim and we didn't want to be culturally inappropriate so we got out scarves and when we came near people, we covered our shoulders with the scarves. (Meanwhile, in Jambiani, we saw some wazungu tourists walking on the road - relative term, it was basically rocks - and the girl was wearing shorts and we gasped in horror and said, as we always did, "That girl did not get the memo." because we had gotten so many lectures at work about dressing in a culturally appropriate way.)

So we stopped at a little store in Jambiani and IE ran in to get some water. Actually, IE ran in to buy an entire crate of water because now that this being lost thing had started there was no telling where it would end. But we did have snacks. It had started to rain and when IE ran in and then out and then opened the trunk and got back in and we started to move again and she took off her scarf, her arms were covered with bright blue polka dots. It turned out that the bright blue scarf she was wearing leaked dye when it got wet, so when the raindrops hit it, it transferred the dye to her skin in exactly and only those places.

There was also this air freshener in the baby jeep, in the glove compartment, which we hated the smell of, so we wrenched it out of the glove compartment (it was stuck to the bottom) and threw it under the passenger seat, but the smell only got stronger, so we tied it into a plastic bag and put it back in the glove compartment, hoping the two barriers would tone it down, which they did not, but we tried. And Ali Keys was not so happy with us when he found out that we had removed the air freshener. But we had not crashed the baby jeep (I am a good driver, even on the beach) and we had filled it up with gas, so he could not say too much.

The End.

notes on today

Some things make me unreasonably happy. Cases in point:

1. My humanitarian law professor replacing my international law professor for today's class. I just like my IHL professor. I think he's great. And interesting.

2. My new black pants (trousers, international people). I like the way they swish around my ankles. I like them a lot. I look down and they make me happy.

3. The thought of going to Liberia on my own as an adult. I like being an adult. I like being independent and capable.

4. Talking on the street corner to two friends for far longer than I should have, considering all that was waiting to be done. But it was so nice.

Before the talking to the friends on the street corner, where the caterers for the law school kept coming through with carts of herbed chicken and other catering sorts of things which we had to move out of the way for, I ate breakfast at the coffee shop that also makes me unreasonably happy because it is so very normal. It's not a prissy coffee shop with $12 cappucino, it's a hole in the wall where a bagel and iced hazelnut coffee cost me $2.75 and the son double-stamps my frequent buyer card and tried to stamp my forehead. I had to go there because I forgot to buy milk yesterday for my cereal, but I was happy to be there. It was like a minibreak in my day, before my day even started.

Oh, but the story is: I leaned down to smell my coffee to make sure that it was hazelnut (sometimes the father forgets to make it hazelnut or doesn't hear me when I ask for it, although the son never does) and it was but in the process a piece of my hair landed in the cup and now smells of hazelnut coffee, strongly hazelnut coffee which has ruined all other hazelnut coffee for me because they don't actually taste like hazelnut. So the coffee is gone but the lovely smell of the hazelnut coffee drifts along with me.

a little story of incoherence

I woke up with a start in the middle of the night - it was dark - to a very loud crash, very loud because my window was open, and because I was so very much still asleep, I irrationally thought that my building was tipping over. Tipping over like a tree falling, that is, all in one piece but just falling sideways. Anyone who has seen my building would know that this is impossible. It's only six stories tall and, while it isn't that wide, it is certainly more squat than, say, the Empire State Building. It's just not tall enough to tip over sideways. It's like a fat bush deciding to tip over. It just doesn't work. So I incoherently stood on my bed to reach the top of the window, since it was open top-down (it was open because it was too warm in the apartment with it closed since my roommate insists on having the heat on all the time, even when it is 60 degrees outside), and then tumbled back down onto the pillows. The force of the fall woke me up enough to think, "I just thought the building was falling over, but it can't."

sore feet and cookies

I made the mistake yesterday of wearing my new black boots all day long, even though I knew I was going to be tromping all over the streets of New York because I was babysitting and had to bring the boys to school. But I was so excited to have something new, since I am on a strict budget this semester (I only spend on frivolity and groceries what I make babysitting, if that), so I wore them. By the time both the boys were safely enconsed at school, my feet hurt. By the time I got insoles (interestingly, they are taxed less than other Walgreens products - because they are medicinal?), my feet were throbbing. By the time I got the boys back home and walked the dog and went to school and sent some emails and walked home, I was hobbling. It was the combination of cheap shoes with bad soles and with heels, which I'm not used to. Even today, my legs hurt and my soles hurt and, filled with fear of the boots, I have returned to the brightly-colored sneakers which I love so very much and wish I could afford to buy more of. There are these great green adidas with yellow stripes at the place where I bought my running shoes. And Foot Locker has these bright pink pumas.

The nice thing about not having money is that I'm very definitely learning to prioritize my materialism. And to delay gratification. I keep telling myself that I'll buy these things next semester. But by then I will have forgotten what they all are.

Now I'm sitting before a cup of almond cookie tea which smells exactly like a baking cookie involving almonds and makes me think of Christmas cookies which I will not have a chance to bake this year unless I completely slack off about my exams which are causing me to freak out because they start in two weeks and anyway, my Christmas cookie recipe passed down through the generations does not involve almonds, but it should. Sitting here with this tea, I definitely think it should.

I have to outline a class worth of professional responsibility. I wish I could continue to put it off as I have been doing for days. I can't.

nothing to say

I seem to have run out of things to say. Nothing occurs to me as blog-worthy. Writer's block or something.

I still have the unending cold. Boring.

It looks like Liberia might be okay. Maybe. Not to hope too soon - Liberia has turned around from peace before. Anyway, the new president-elect is the first elected woman president in Africa. I'm excited to go there next summer.

Literally, nothing else is happening. Good-bye.

details, details

Oddly, the best thing for my sore throat turned physical addiction to ibuprofen for the headache reducing and throat soothing properties is actually these mint candies that I picked up at the front desk at Arthemon's hotel when I was helping him lug his numerous shopping bags of speakers, iPods, clothes, shoes, books, cds, and skype headsets from my place where they had been stored as the most convenient location to the shopping areas I am familiar with to his place where he can pack them all for his flight out. The front desk guy described them thus: "There are some really funky cherry mint ones and those pink ones are weird mint-tasting. I've never even tried the orange ones. Too strange. The mostly white ones with red stripes are good." But I like the pink ones. They work better than cough drops on my throat. I have no idea why. I'm running out of them, though. I could only steal so many.

Also, I can't sleep lying down because my head fills instantaneously with... stuff and I can't breathe. When I sit up it feels oddly empty and dry. In a dizzy sort of way.

Yes, I know that the details of my cold are boring. It's just that it's been a long time since I've posted anything here and this cold fills my head. Literally and figuratively.

the amazing, the good, the bad and the awful

I don't get why that's usually just the good, the bad and the awful. It's unbalanced on the negative side.

The Amazing:
Hope, blue sky, a little boy falling asleep in my arms, and coconut tea (again, I love this stuff).

The Good:
A three-drawer roll-y thing, a tiny waste basket, and a silverware basket for the dish drainer (it doesn't take much to make me happy).

The Bad:
Living on cough drops for the throat (again).

The Awful:
Five exams coming up about a month from now.

still not

For once, ONCE, I thought I was ready for my international law class. I read all 64 pages last night (the professor has odd ideas of what a reasonable amount of reading is). I was ready, maybe even to, you know, talk in this class.

But I read the wrong thing. I read the reading for next class, the contents of which I will have forgotten by the time Friday comes around. Foiled again.

lip balm

I have literally chapsticked my lips out of having a scab and into softness. Ymm. Blistex Herbal Answer.

announcements you don't want to hear while dragging two suitcases through Penn Station:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, due to an earlier incident, there may be a lingering smell of smoke in the terminal. Please ignore this smell."

yay!

I can't even tell you. Happy.

run-off in Liberia, people

It gives me chills to check the poll results (nothing in yet) because I so want it to go well and not end in war again.

What else to say?

It's Tuesday. End of story.

I left my phone charger in Princeton and was without phone power yesterday - disaster. But a friend has the same charger and I'm borrowing it and charging the phone and sitting drinking tea (self-reward for lots of buzy-ness) and not studying and waiting for 9 pm so that I can call people who don't have Verizon. I don't think. I'm not sure. Why don't phones tell you when you call them? "You are calling a Verizon number." "You are calling a Sprint number." It would be so nice. So helpful.

Can't sit still.

Why do people not answer their phones?!?

Enough.

discovery

There is money to be made in New York RENTING OUT YOUR ROOM OVER CHRISTMAS! I might be able to make it home for Christmas after all. That and NWA apparently has a sale on tickets that get me into GR at 11:30 on the 24th. Law school has completely ruined the joy of getting ready for Christmas. I thought once I was back from Rwanda I would get to, you know, make Christmas cookies and trim the tree. But no. I won't even get home until early in the Christmas am. But I will get home, and that's a bonus. I wasn't sure I would.

Sometimes I can't help but think, "I should BE THERE." I almost didn't come to law school because of it.

i'm the only person i know who is klutzy enough to sit on my iPod while it is in my bag, leaving the iPod intact but the headphones cracked. and i'm one of the few people I know who just pick them up, shrug, and put them back in my ears.

baby boy

So I said that I'm babysitting like mad for the money. And I do need the money. But I also love the kids. B I don't see quite as much on Wednesday because I take him straight to school. But after I drop him off, I have an hour with J and we go to the park so he can play on the slide if it's nice like today or to Starbucks so he can color with my pens on a piece of lined paper if it's cold. At school, while we wait for his class, he practices the stairs and every week he's better at them. Last week he needed two hands holding on to the railing or my hand or the next step and this week he did it with only one.

J wants his mommy or his daddy a lot. The first time I babysat for them, last year, he cried nearly the entire time, pulling at the door. Now he tears up for a minute and then is okay. He likes me enough, I think. But today he beamed when he saw me at the door to pick him up from school and upstairs, while B was checking his pocket for his Jimmy Neutron so that we could leave, J came over to where I was sitting on a little kid chair and held out his arms. I thought he wanted a hug, so I gave him one, but he held them out still, higher. I picked him up and put him in my lap, facing me, and he pulled my hair around and tried to stuff it into my mouth, laughing. I laughed, too, and then set him down to run off to B.

I could use a few of my own little people, if I ever find a man who takes my breath away.

poor as I've ever been

I mean, I can eat. But I look longingly at sandwich shops and think, "I once just bought those things. $6! And I just spent it, without thinking!" Now, in order to be able to pay rent, I'm saving every possible penny. No more impulse buying. Yesterday, upon receipt of the $1000 that the school owed me for my summer, I celebrated by buying a bottle of almond syrup from a coffee shop so I can make my own almond steamers at home. (But not with a milk frother. Oh, no. I'm too cheap for that. I use a whisk on the milk just before it gets hot enough to boil. It works.) And I bought some bread and have been eating it with the cheese that Tante Dieneke gave me when I was in the Netherlands. I brought it for lunch today, in the coffee bag that the coffee shop gave me to protect the glass bottle of almond syrup.

I'm poor as I've ever been, but not really, because never before have I had to pay $900 a month in rent. So I have a lot more money than, say, college, but a lot more of it is tied up. (Oh, and nearly all of it is borrowed from Citibank, my owner.) I'm trying to recover from the expense of getting this apartment by babysitting like mad and living on the babysitting money and even putting some of said babysitting money in the bank. It's a tightwad's dream. And I might (maybe, possibly) be able to pay rent through January, until I get my next loan check.

How can you not love this place?

I still get the US Embassy newsletter from Kigali and I love their descriptions of how to get places. I may have put Rwanda directions on here before because they amuse me so much (I know from personal experience that it takes at least four tries to find something by the descriptions in this newsletter), but here is another round:

Directions:

From Kigali Business Centre going on the road to the airport, take the 3rd right (dirt road going downhill) immediately opposite the parliament building. Continue for approximately 600 metres and when the road bends round to the right it is the second house on the left (dark green gate).

hop, skip and jump

I moved the last of my stuffs out of the far-off place. It only took nine boxes (two tiny), a bookshelf, a set of tall statutes from Rwanda and a tennis racket. And two men in a bright yellow van. Who were supposed to be one driver and a one mover but were kind enough to carry the stuff up to the sixth floor for me in Manhattan while I watched the van which was parked in front of a fire hydrant illegally.

As I left my old place, I felt like the end of a movie - you know, when the scene suddenly freezes while the person is walking or leaping or skipping? At the end of my far-away place movie, I was leaping off the stoop and clicking my heels together in the air.

--Freeze--

Then, in my head, I saw the camera continue as I lost my balance in mid-air and went crashing to the ground, bruising and scraping every part of me and hitting my head on the pavement with a large thud.

The scary thing is, that's what would happen if I lept off the stoop and tried to click my heels together in the air. Gracefullness continues to elude me.

evil cars

This weekend, when my mom was here, she kept asking about the cars, which are obstinately making turns across your path before and behind when you are crossing with the white "walk" light. I made light of them and said that they were mostly taxis and have to watch out for you because it would be such a problem for them if they hit you.

Yesterday, I dropped her off at the airport (the M60 bus is a horrible thing) and moved some stuff from my old place to my new and went to school for a while to read my assignments for today. On the way home it was raining (as I mentioned last night), so I stopped at the drugstore and bought a wasted umbrella, because I had one at home, but my newspapers held over my head weren't going to make it all the way home. They were beginning to disintegrate.

As I crossed the scary corner, the one where you think cars are coming straight at you, with the light on my side, I noticed a car making a left-turn right at me. I skipped forward a few steps to get out of its way, but it turned more sharply and continued straight at me. I had to hop forward a few more steps and barely made it out of the car's way - the side of it brushed against me. Like any good African, I thumped twice on the hood of the car and flung up my hands in frustration at the scared white little face of the girl driving the car.

Then I reached the sidewalk and started shaking.

raining

It is pouring rain - again - and I'm wearing a down jacket and I have no umbrella. How am I going to get home? This coat smells icky when it gets wet. I'm stuck and it's time to go home to bed.

gick

Some mornings I get to school and then realize that I really don't like the clothes I put on. Maybe I shouldn't even own these clothes since I don't like them. Oops.

things are crazy i tell you, crazy

ConEdison had to come on an emergency basis today because we apparently had a gas leak which the landlord swore didn't exist and therefore did nothing about it. To be fair, the ConEdison guy said that it was deep in the stove and undetectable unless you tore the stove apart and had the right detecting equipment. Except for the gas smell permeating the apartment which required that we leave the window open at all times. Then again off-setting my understanding nature about the difficulty of finding the leak, the super did give me a lecture earlier in the week when I told him that we smelled gas. It went something like this: "You have to turn knobs all way off. See? All way off." AS IF I HAD NEVER USED A GAS STOVE BEFORE. AS IF I DIDN'T CHECK EVERY KNOB. AS IF I DON'T CHECK EVERY KNOB EVERY NIGHT BEFORE BED. Honestly.

To get the super to do something about the fact that following the fixing of the leak the stove would no longer ignite, the ConEd guy shut off the valve to the stove and tagged it with a red tag saying, essentially, "THIS STOVE IS BROKEN." So, okay, we can't use it until it gets fixed, but at least it's proof that something is wrong and maybe the slacker property company will have to fix it.

We are a bit suspicious of them considering that we didn't have hot water for FIVE DAYS after we moved in. Nor did anyone in the building. Money-saving measure, perhaps? These are the perils of renting your own place. I love it.

Okay, who is it?

I want to know who it is who has been SCRAPING MY THROAT WITH AN ICE PICK.

tired

I'm tired and tired and tired. I don't even know how to say this enough times or in a way that really conveys how tired I am. There is this theory that has been passed on from my ancestors to me through my mom about how every hour of sleep before midnight counts twice. I wonder: what if you don't get to sleep until 3 am three nights in a row? I think years start detracting from your life.

I'm either getting sick (along with everyone else on campus) or I just worked myself into being sick, because, well, I'm getting sick. Or I'm just so tired that my throat feels like sandpaper and has for three days but I've been ignoring it in favor of finishing the world's most horrible paper on superior responsibility in international criminal law which has been the bane of my existence for weeks.

I wish tomorrow was empty, but it isn't. I have so much to do, still.

For now I'm going home to my lavender eye pillow and my mattress pads on the floor, since I have no bed and apparently never will because I have no time to get one. Or money to get one.

1:41 am

I just hit 6 lines onto the 31st page of my 30 page paper whose extended deadline ended at midnight (the midnight just past). What can I say? I moved this weekend. It's still not done but the end is in sight.

11:11 pm

Who needs to sleep?

This paper is worth $1000.

I can lose one night of sleep.

= frustration

Calling ConEdison for the third time (the first time the wait was too long, the second their servers were down), waiting for 20 minutes, getting a customer service representative, getting put on hold without actually saying anything but why you called, and promptly dropping the phone so that it skitters across the counter, loses its battery, and ends up in the sink full of ice that you just pried out of the defrosting freezer. I give up.

I'm never moving again. This is it. I can't face the five flights of stairs ever again.

two things:

coconut tea.

every part of me hurts.

moving yet again

This week:

Monday - sent an email to the friend of a law student who had emailed around saying that his friend needed a place to live in Manhattan.

Tuesday - met the friend. Friend and I visited one very icky little apartment that had ceilings exactly 6 feet high. She is 6'1". I am 5'10". Six foot ceilings did not sound appealing.

Wednesday - friend and I looked at two more apartments and she looked at a third alone. The third was perfect and we filled out applications. I bullied the brokers into reducing their commission to $600 less than than the standard.

Thursday - application accepted (thanks to the driving rain, we had no competition).

Friday - we sign a lease. We get keys. We move in.

This all happened startlingly quickly. I only told my previous landlady this morning that I was moving out. I didn't expect to have the keys and be sleeping in the new place already tonight. But I have a new address. And this one, because I'm on the lease, is mine for a year. Plus 17 days (so the lease ends at the end of October 2006).

Welcome home, self.

Yes

In some moments, the hardest word I can think of to say is "yes."

As in, "You are moving out?"

"Yes."

But then, 'though I feel bad, there is this:

I'm moving out!

confirmed...

My new home will be a five minute walk from class, closer than my current walk to the subway.

Now I just have to figure out how to get as much as possible in security deposit back from my current probably illegal sublet even though it is the 13th and the next rent cycle would start on the 15th, leaving her no time to find someone new. The probable illegality of it does give me some leverage in several ways that I as a law student think of immediately, though.

And I have to move and write a 30 page paper at the same time. This paper has been going nowhere. Nowhere. I have too much else to think about. I'm really going to hate myself if the result is an all-nighter on Sunday when I've been "working" on it all week.

Sometimes when I go to Starbucks near campus there is a huge line and so I just get a table and wait to order a drink until the line goes down. But by goes down I mean that there are no more than two people at the counter and after an hour of sitting here I have finally gotten a good table that I can spread things out on and where I can access the non-Starbucks wireless which is free, but with the rain and wind driving people inside, I have not gotten close to being able to just walk up to the counter and order. The line varies only between long and really long.

Monrovia today:

:: With bad roads, poor communications and no electricity, pulling off an election this complex was an uphill battle for a poor nation like Liberia, even with significant help from international donors. Looking worriedly at the setting sun, Mr. Kollie said he was concerned that voters would not be able to make out the ballots by the dim light shed from the single battery-operated lantern given to each polling place.

"I only have eight batteries," he said. "God willing, they will last until the last ballot is cast."::

~NYTimes

Sometimes good things make me want to cry, too.

despairing and hoping

Yesterday on the train, I picked up a newspaper that the man next to me dropped and read an article about the earthquake in Pakistan. I read that over 20,000 people had died and more than 50,000 were injured. Click on this link for today's story: Earthquake in Pakistan. By the time I finished the article, I was fighting not to cry on the train and I pushed the paper away and stood to leave and at that very instant my iPod started playing, "Great is thy faithfulness, oh God my Father..."

Despair?

Sometimes.

Today I've been reading about the elections in Liberia. 22 candidates, including the favorite, an international football (soccer) star, George Weah. In 2000, when we were driving from Buchanan to Monrovia, his car raced by us at obscene speeds honking the horn and flashing the lights in a ridiculous display of impunity which I can only assume is likely to continue if he becomes president. Then again, I might have made a scene, too, if I were passing someone driving that slowly in an overloaded pickup. His main competition is a woman, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who used to work for the World Bank. My new-found Liberian electoral process knowledge tells me that a candidate needs 51% of the vote to be elected, so there will likely be a run-off. More information and pictures of the polling can be found by clicking on this link: Liberia's Election.

Hope?

I don't know yet.

yay!

I just talked to someone who just moved to New York and wants a roommate and loves this area and we are meeting tomorrow to see if we could stand each other. I may be back in non-horrible commuting distance before the end of the month. I feel bad about leaving Corinne, but I can't afford to eat in town every day. I want to take naps in my own apartment if I have a long afternoon break. I want to drink tea at home. Tea, I tell you. I want to drink tea. I love tea and I love drinking it and I never get to drink it in my own house because I don't get back to my own house until after 10 pm every night and anyway it doesn't feel like my own house because every part of it is decorated and taken over by her stuff. I have one corner of the bathtub. One of four. And there's a wire shelving thing, but I have no space on it. I have no space on the sink. My dishes don't fit in the cupboard. My food is in my closet because it also has no cupboard space. Worst of all, the cats believe that my room is a passageway to the back yard and if either the door to the kitchen or the door to the back yard is open, they come through and stand by the unopened door, waiting for me to come open it. Once at morning breakfast time I just didn't open the door for one of them until Corinne started knocking repeatedly and asked if the cat was there. I like cats, but not that much. Not enough to stop whatever I'm doing and leap up to open doors for them.

But I do love my loft and the neighborhood. I just hate everything in the world at that moment each evening at 9:30 pm when I'm leaving school and know that I have perhaps 40 minutes of subway and walking in front of me before I can go to sleep. Mostly subway. The walking, in the cool night air, is nice, but the minority of the trip.

I hate moving. I hate leaving a place. I'm tired of doing it over and over these last few years. I don't want to do it again. Yet I know that I will be glad to have done it the first night I leave school and go home within 10 minutes and I'm asleep within half an hour. I remember with longing all the extra time I had when I could do things around school, go home for dinner and back to studying, and then suddenly leave studying and go to bed. No commute. I think I've said this a few times, but I hate the commute. I hate it. I HATE IT.

watching Gorillas in the Mist

I love it when I watch a movie and can say, "I drove on that road."

Looking through my pictures of Rwanda, I sometimes wonder if it was real. Did I really live there for almost two years? But there I am, smiling out of the pictures.

I miss my house on Lake Kivu. And everything else.

Would it be REALLY terrible if I moved already? I keep hearing about better options (closer, for example).

observations

1. Police officer carrying a large weapon slung over his shoulder in front of a black Suburban with tinted windows = not subtle.

2. The store called "Tejada Market" does not actually carry any items other than the normal bodega-in-New York items (ie. no cool Latin American items) except FrescAvena (apparently horchata but made by Quaker?). This is disappointing.

3. If you are driving a car or an SUV with spinning rims and blaring rap music, you will look a lot more gangsta if the music you are playing is not something to which I, a white girl who hasn't turned on a radio in a year, know all the words. (That means BOTH of you.)

kid cuteness

B, the older of the boys that I babysit for (he's four), occasionally loses one of his toys and gets very upset about it. One day he cried for a while about the loss of the Jimmy Neutron figure that we had looked for in every single crate of toys in the living room to no avail and then he finally sighed and said, "I'll make one out of Play-Doh. Then I'll feel better."

today in new york

From the New York Times Metropolitan Diary:

Overheard by Allen Rabinovich on the subway:
"Sir, I couldn't help but notice you keep your wallet in the back pocket of your jeans," the middle-aged woman said to a young man in his twenties. "You must be a visitor to our city, but that's a big no-no. You are too easy a prey for pickpockets."
The young man responded politely, "Ma'am, I was born and raised in Brooklyn. That's a decoy wallet."

Someone please remind me why I signed up for these silly student groups.

ginger drop

Last night I bought a ginger candy at the bodega on the corner. I found it in my bag and put it in my mouth on the train, just before my stop. It was strong. STRONG. I kept it in my mouth for a few minutes and then couldn't anymore because of the burning burning burning in my mouth but there was nowhere to put it. I had to carefully hold it between my teeth with my mouth closed around it as the train stopped and the people got out and we walked up the stairs and through the turnstile and up more stairs and into the rain and then finally I could spit it into the trash can on the corner. Blech! And I love ginger.

new places

It's amazing how much of a difference two bookshelves and a desk can make. Before the bookshelves and desk, my room looked like a big storage locker in which people had been throwing things around and digging through boxes and then walking away and leaving everything. Which is pretty much what it was, because that's what I'd been doing. There were five suitcases, at least eight boxes, and random bags that I had filled with things coming out of the suitcases and boxes while looking for other things.

But now I have two bookshelves (full) and a desk and a chair and a paper lamp that I bought at a garage sale. (I have another paper lamp but I can't find it - must harass anyone who might know where it is.) There are still some unpacked boxes, but nothing like what it was before. I can sit in my room and read or check email.

Now I would be perfectly happy with it, if it weren't so far away from school that I'm never actually in my nice new room.

things that make me inordinately happy

1. Rosemary mint body wash. I wanted the rosemary mint conditioner from Aveda when I went there on Wednesday, but it turns out that the rosemary mint conditioner is for fine hair, and that's not mine. Then I considered the rosemary mint lotion from Bath and Body Works because it was on sale, but finally I sprung the extra few dollars for the rosemary mint body wash, which was not on sale. It is very worth it. It smells amazing and it actually tingles. For a cheap soap person like me, it's a wonderful luxury.

2. Green pen. The only pen I had with me ran out of ink (sad - I bought it near the roundabout in Arusha) and I had a class and needed a new one. So I bought a green one at the stationery store and it writes really nicely and the green brightens up my notes and my entire day.

3. Clothes. Not new clothes. Not expensive clothes. Just clothes that are not the same clothes I've been wearing every day for the last four months. I only took so many clothes with me to Africa, you see, and I lost some of them and I left some of them there and I gave some away and now I feel like I've been wearing the same few shirts over and over and over but yesterday I got my boxes from DTL's apartment and opened them up and now I'm wearing clothes that are different from the ones I brought with me to Tanzania. Finally.

4. Human rights book. I'm taking all these classes. They require books. But until the school got around to giving me my loan money, I couldn't buy them. Now I have the money and I can buy them and it's a whole new world when I can sit in class and open the book to the page that the professor is talking about. Better still, most of them (although not the human rights book) are used. I think I'm spending less than $300 for books this semester. Terribly a lot, but very very little for law school which requires all these ridiculously huge casebooks.

5. Mr. Freezes. The sickly-sweet artificially-colored juice in the plastic bags that you freeze. I bought a box at the grocery store the other day and they are perfect at the end of a long, thirsty day, although I don't think the makers intended me to eat four of them in a row because I'm so thirsty. Maybe that's what water is for.

6. The beginning of fall. Today I miss my house in Rwanda a lot, but I'm also delighted with the cool breeze and I'm bubbling with excitement about the idea of the leaves changing colors.

7. Figuring things out. I work on this law journal and today I had to figure out how to cite a UN report and it took an hour and it was really complicated and I had to look in a million different places and offer different options to the executive editors and it made me smile. It reminded me of Classical Greek - it's a puzzle that has rules but also freedom. I love things like that.

cravings

I'm sitting calmly in class, "taking notes" (ie. blogging) and for some reason an overwhelming craving for a donut has come over me. I don't eat donuts. I can't remember the last time I had a donut. I don't like donuts. I don't even know where I'd buy a donut. But for some reason I really want one of those glazed, poufy ones.

Yesterday I went shopping. Not very remarkable, because all I needed was a brush, conditioner, some tea... you know, basic stuff. But I was so excited about it. It was so wonderful to shop and be able to buy the stuff I need without thinking to myself, "My bank account is now down to about $15." I've never actually had as little money as I had last week. Well, okay, I still have no money (or negative about $1 billion from all those loans), but at least now I can eat. When I got home I drank comfort tea from Aveda while I read conventions prohibiting the use of explosive projectiles.

I also started babysitting for my lawyering professor from last year. Her kids are adorable. And having kids with you makes people in New York so much nicer. People open doors for you. They coo and compliment the kids. They let you go ahead of them in line. They even (sometimes) smile. It's crazy.

One final life-at-this-moment story: the kids had sandwiches yesterday, but I was dizzy with hunger (my internal hunger-regulating mechanism is a bit faulty - I never feel hungry until I'm so hungry I could fall over). So I stopped at a cart on the street that sold Afghan Halal food and I got a falafel and rice plate from a nice man who called me "honey" and wore a hairnet over his beard, looped up around his ears. Sometimes I love New York.

these last few days

On Thursday I was around the demonstration area at the UN. I love being near the UN and all the action that goes on there, especially during this week of the summit. There were protests against the Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi, for a free Tibet, in favor of the current administration in Togo, against the Chinese communist party, in favor of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and against poverty. I reveled in the excitement. Everywhere there were big black sedans with papers in the front windows saying, "China," "Kenya," and all the others.

On my way home, I stopped in a Duane Reade (a drugstore, for those of you not from around here) to pick up some stuff for my new place, which I was about to move into, and I discovered the real reason why delegates come to New York. Forget the summit. Forget the UN. Forget diplomacy. UN delegates descend on New York for a much more pragmatic reason, the same reason US citizens descend on New York: to buy stuff. There were African and Latin American women in the makeup aisle filling their carts. European men grabbed bottled water out of the cooler. Two men from Kazakhstan passed me in the deodorant aisle. Everyone was wearing their UN badges - did no one tell them not to wear them just around in case they got stolen or they are targeted because of them? Maybe this isn't a problem in New York. I was quite possibly the only non-UN person in that store, other than the employees. And just so you know, Central Asia is now fully stocked with candy and women in Africa now have enough lipstick to paint every house on the continent.

just wondering

Why does my evian bottle say, "Do not refill."?

What's going to happen if I refill it? Which, by the way, I've already done, with no apparent negative consequences save that evian did not make any more money from my water drinking. As far as I can tell, this new water is not reacting badly with the evian bottle. What is evian going to do about this refilling? Come and get me, evian.

I obviously have it in for corporations lately. Next semester I'm taking corporations. He he he.

new york today

I accidently tarmacked the bottom of my shoe today. After an entire year of covering a large hole in the road with a piece of very slippery metal that I slipped on every time it a) rained or b) snowed (ie. for most of a New York winter), the City of New York suddenly chose five minutes before I needed to walk over it to re-tarmac the hole. Five minutes later, sweetly oblivious, I walked over it and tarmacked the bottom of my shoe. Scraping and poking at the sole did no good - I think the holes in the rubber sole are permanently full of tar.

Later I had a breakdown about housing because I got done with a dinner at 9 pm and have to be back at school at 9 am and I realized that all year my commute will be an hour a day and I don't think I can take it. It's stressing me out but good. I would go back to the dorms but if I do that, I will literally have about $100 to spend on food and clothing and subways for the semester. I'm still having a breakdown about it, actually.

I hate money and I hate it that you have to have it to get an education. It's another example of the world's injustice - and I'm not even that moneyless compared to a lot of people. But already I feel trapped.

living space

I put down a deposit on a place to live. It's with a 43-year-old Swiss woman whose job is arranging cultural exchanges - as J says, "So... no house parties?" Well, no, but the room is cozy and homey and allows me to have something I have always secretly wanted (not so secretly anymore since I'm blogging about it): a loft! It's a queen-sized bed and the ceiling is high enough that you can easily walk under the loft (maybe 7 feet high) with space enough above it to sit up on the bed. There is a nice window and a door with a window to the backyard, which is shaded by a big magnolia tree. It's on a quiet street in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and I love the neighborhood. It's full of beautiful, well-kept old brownstones, giant trees, and people of all ages and races.

Best of all, there is a washing machine in my new kitchen.

I am moving in on Thursday, assuming that the Financial Aid office has bothered to give me my loan money. They have it. Oh, they have it, because Cit.ibank (which owns my life and my future and that of any offspring, dependants, heirs or assigns that I have or may one day have) has sent it to them, but they have not bothered to send it to me. My regular bank account is down to $13. The other one has a tiny bit more, but I can't access it because I don't have the debit card because of a whole situation involving a fraudulent charge on that card and the bank being a meanie-head. And you thought it was only in Africa that banks could cut off all your access to your money without even trying.

S's kitten, which I like to refer to as "small kitten" even though its name is Birka, is currently trying to hop into my very large blue plastic suitcase. She managed it a minute ago and clung with her little claws to some random souvenirs made of wire and I had to pick her up (souvenirs dangling beneath her feet) and pry her off them one claw at a time.

bah humbug

New York, I tell you, is not a fun place. Okay, school is fine, and the weather is no longer so absolutely unbearably hot, but I still have no place to live. Did you hear that, people? No place to live. I am homeless. I live on Stephanie's couch. My suitcases live along the wall in her living room. My boxes of stuff from last year live in DTL's living room. (He doesn't want them there anymore, but where can I put them?)

I spend my free time (and a lot of class time) looking on craigslist for a place to live. I finally figured out how to answer craigslist roommate postings and I have now gotten a grand total of two responses - but neither of them are in a hurry because they don't need someone until October 1. So they say, "How about you come by and meet me next week?" and I say, "I'M LIVING ON SOMEONE'S COUCH!" But you can't sound desperate, so I can't say that. I am calm, of course, and say things like, "I have some appointments with brokers and it would be great not to have to meet with them if I don't need to."

Yay! One of the people just emailed back and asked if I can come by tonight. I hope, I hope... it's a beautiful place just around the corner from where I'm staying, with exposed brick walls and a fireplace. It would be so nice to have a home.

Jessica, Stephanie's roommate, just came home and I asked her if it was okay to resend emails to two people who I contacted before to ask about apartments (they never answered - this was before I had figured out how to answer the postings) or if they would think i was a stalker. She pointed out that these people don't know me, so it doesn't really matter if they think that I'm a stalker, because all that will mean is that they don't contact me, if they even remember me. And if they don't remember me, maybe I will get to live with them.

I love people who manage to have perspective. I manage it so rarely, about my own life.

no more africa

I'm back in new york, sitting in class. It's not the adventure that was sitting for days in Nairobi without a plane to get on. It's not the adventure of trying Rwanda's mini-buses for the first time. It's not the adventure of arriving in Tanzania with no idea of where I would stay that night. Although, I guess, it did start with something like the same adventure: I arrived at Newark Airport with no idea of where I would stay that night.

I have nowhere to live. This means I have a lot of work to do (other than school) before I feel like I'm really back.

Right now, I'm staying on my old roommate Stephanie's pullout couch. I didn't sleep very well the first night - classes the next day, it was really hot, and there are all these trucks roaring up and down their road at night. So I have been jet-lagged like never before. By 5 pm, I'm drooping. By 7 pm, it's all over. I can't study. I can't think. I need to sleep, but if you sleep at 7 pm, you wake up at some ridiculous early hour.

So I've been staying up until 11, then getting up at 7... not enough sleep when I am mad jetlagged. Finally last night, wearing ear plugs (I've never before slept wearing earplugs - it's weird) I managed to sleep - and oversleep. I almost missed my first human rights class. But I feel better. Of course, it's morning and I always feel fine in the morning - it's daytime in Nairobi right now, too.

no hope

There is no hope, people. I am stuck in Nairobi until my scheduled flight, which makes me wish that I had not wasted two days and over $75 in phone cards working on getting on an earlier flight.

So, I'm off to play in Nairobi. By which I mean, I'm getting money and a book and heading directly to Java House to have a bagel and their amazing coffee.

transit

I started to feel like Tom Hanks' character in that one movie in which he lives in an airport. You can live in an airport, actually, and it doesn't even have to be the size of O'Hare or Schipol. You can live in even the Nairobi airport. I ate at Java House and the One Dollar Cafe. I slept at the Sleep & Shower (tiny bed in a room just large enough to walk on one side of the bed - $60). I wandered around, doing nothing and periodically checking on my waitlisted status for the flight to Amsterdam.

It's a comedy of imcompetence, actually. Northwest and Kenya Airways are currently on my irritated list and rising quickly to the top as the most irritating institutions of all time. When I originally bought my tickets from Northwest, using miles, I had to call them 8 times to get the tickets. They didn't know where Kigali was. They couldn't find the flight numbers from Amsterdam to Nairobi. They couldn't contact Kenya Airways. They couldn't access the Kenya Airways system. Finally we found flights. Not the days I wanted, but flights. I was ticketed for Kigali-Nairobi on the 25th and Nairobi-Amsterdam on the 29th. The Northwest people told me to check with Kenya Airways in Africa to see if it was possible to continue on the 25th to Amsterdam.

So, in Kigali, I went to Kenya Airways. The Kenya Airways people in Kigali sent messages to Northwest asking how much the fee was to change. Never got a response. After THREE MONTHS. They finally told me I'd just have to try to change at the airport and fly standby to Amsterdam. Okay, fine.

I arrived in Nairobi at 230 pm on the 25th of August. I went straight to the transfer desk and explained my situation. They told me that they would waitlist me for the 1010 pm flight to Amsterdam and I should come back at 900 pm. I came back at 800 pm, only to be told that the change of date required approval from the Flying Dutchman (KLM) helpdesk and they had closed for the day. I called Northwest in the US instead (used $20 worth of phone cards) and tried to explain to them, although they did not understand. They told me they couldn't change my flight because they didn't show any empty seats on the 1010 pm flight (thus the meaning of the phrase, "flying standby"). Then they told me to have the Kenya Airways desk send an OSI on the PNR asking for the change to be permitted, saying that they would answer "immediately." The Kenya Airways guy I was dealing with claimed NOT TO KNOW WHAT AN OSI MESSAGE WAS and to be unable to send one. Note that neither Kenya Airways nor Northwest are allowed to call overseas, which means their only means of communication is these messages which Northwest apparently does not answer and now the Kenya Airways employee claims not to know how to send. So I missed the pm flight.

Then I cried to a supervisor for a while, and he promised me a spot on the morning flight because it was a Kenya Airways flight like my original flight (not KLM like the evening flight) and so the change should be no problem. He told me to come back at 900 am. I went and slept and came back at 820 am and talked for a while to another employee who said that an OSI was something that everyone knew how to send and he sent one. He called the KLM desk but they said that the approval had to come from Northwest Airlines. I tried to call Northwest at about 840 only to find that they had closed their office at 830 Kenya time (1230 am Central US time) and would be closed for five hours. Apparently the supervisor was wrong when he said that it was simple to switch from one Kenya Airways flight to another. So, I missed that flight.

At about 1145, sitting dejectedly in an internet cafe trying to blog without hope, I ran into an old friend from Rwanda, traveling to Uganda, who, after coffee and a sandwich and sympathy, said to me, "You need to get out of this airport right now or you are going to go crazy. Go get some sleep in a real bed."

So I did. And now I'm at a hotel in Nairobi. Still no flight. I spent another $26 on calling the US, to no avail. Right now my mom is working on it.

I hate the Nairobi airport. I hate Kenya Airways. I hate Northwest Airlines.

WHY AM I STILL STUCK IN THIS COUNTRY?

blogging!

I'm back blogging! How amazing is that? (Very amazing, if you knew how many times I've tried to blog, only to be foiled by bad internet connections.) Still not back in the US, for those of you who are wondering.

Much has happened.

There was Zanzibar - buzzing around in a car the size of a pocketbook, accidently driving south instead of east and then having to drive all the way back up along an often-questionable dirt road which once disappeared and left me nowhere to drive but the beach, fishermen staring at me all the way, turning a one and a half hour drive into a four and a half hour drive. This island lives up to all expectations, by the way. I had heard so much hype that I expected to be disappointed and initially was, with Stonetown, which is, you know, a town, although it does have a fish-fry every evening in the dark along the waterfront that has atmosphere even if the snapper, tuna, etc all appear to be the same fish that they lie to you about when they tell you that they are different fish. But then there was the pocketbook-sized car, which freed us from Stonetown and then the island was fantastic. It's like Africa, with amazing beaches. Seriously, what could I possible love more?

There was Nairobi - I did something that probably stands near the top of the list of things not to do in a random African capital, which I'm not saying yet on this website although I promise you it was hygienic. I checked. The first night, there was this hotel that lasted about four minutes because there were two huge cockroaches that scuttled through the room as we entered. IE killed one and then there was another and then we left. We told the receptionist, nicely, that we had spoken to some friends and we had another place to stay, then burst through the door as B arrived with his coworkers (he was on leave from Somalia) and said, "We couldn't stay there, there were huge cockroaches! We didn't even dare set down our bags!" and then realized that the receptionist could hear and our polite lies were for naught. But we stayed at my favorite Methodist Guest House for a night even though it is expensive and then B's friend E offered us his extra rooms, for which we thank him profusely (also I thank him doubly because he works in southern Sudan and is going to tell me what I might be able to do there next summer :-). So IE and I were free to do what we do best: shop. Trust me, we (well, mostly IE, but I helped) have completely revitalized three economies in East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya) through the sheer power of purchasing everything in sight. Except for the part where I'm a pretty strict bargainer (this is why IE brings me along) and so maybe we didn't pay enough to revitalize everything.

Now there is Rwanda - what can I even say? I love this country. The best part is being here and the worst part is that I don't know when I'll be back. I went to Kibuye. I rode motorbike taxis without helmets (hey, I tried the helmets once and they stink. A lot.). I bought some masks and stuff. I sat and did nothing and looked at the lake and the hills. I took the Okapi (as G calls it, the Okrapi) for the first time and didn't die. Possibly partly because I made friends with the driver and told him that I was afraid of the big buses that hurtle down that road and asked if he could please drive slowly so I would feel safer. I think he did.

I still want to buy land in Kibuye, except I don't have any money.

air tanzania

On a whim, some of us went to Zanzibar for the weekend. We flew, because Zanzibar is more than a day of travel by bus and boat but 50 minutes by plane. Zanzibar is incredible and amazing and worthy of an entire week's worth of posts on it's own when I get the time, but the topic of the day is Air Tanzania.

The Jessica (the plane that flies from Dar es Salaam to Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar) is about 15 rows long and five seats across. Not bad. Not like the Beechcraft or the former Rwandair Express plane. Perfectly reasonable. But for some reason they fly it like crazy people. No turn is smooth. The wings are never level during the landing. The plane, in fact, is never quite side-to-side level. Considering that it's an old plane from somewhere in Scandanavia (one knows this by the signs on the exits, which have the little dots and the null-sign looking letter - is that Denmark?), I try to pretend to myself that it's just because it was from before the days of power steering - you know, the pilots have to constantly adjust like drivers in pre-power steering cars, but I find myself just constantly praying, "Please keep this plane safely in the air. Please."

I never felt that way on the 12-seater Beechcraft. Somehow, when I'm traveling for a purpose I never believe I'm about to die. The UN plane wouldn't crash, right? When I travel for fun, I always think the plane is about to go down. God doesn't want me to have fun in Zanzibar. Now that he's seen how completely I was willing to disregard my health by getting completely fried in the sun by forgetting sunscreen, that's probably correct, actually.

cold

I'm in Africa, three degrees south of the Equator. Essentially on the Equator. So how is it that I wear a thick hoodie every day and every day I am still cold? So cold. Baridi sana. Some mornings I can see my breath. Some evenings I wear the hoodie and a fleece and a scarf and I'm still cold. They told me Arusha was cold, but I assumed cold for Africa, not late October in Michigan cold in which you are never actually warm. Brrrrr.

"tell me something nice."

and let me forget about everything else.

if i ignore it, will it go away?

or will it just stay, even when i'm not looking?

this morning two crows ate the chicks of a pigeon out of a nest on the building across from my window. the pigeon flapped her wings at them frantically, but they persisted, tearing the babies apart and eating them. i couldn't watch.

now all that remain are a few strands of straw where the nest once was.

sometimes i feel that way about the world. sometimes working at here doesn't help.

if a commander knows or purposely doesn't find out what his soldiers are doing, can you still convict him for mass rape?

if we know or purposely don't find out that families are starving because of the way we shop and eat, can we still be convicted for murder?

posts are getting shorter

::my heart is aging i can tell::

missing you

i never miss things from the US, but i miss people and i miss places.

it's always hard to leave. it's hard to leave the US - impossible to end that last phone call with my parents when i'm on the plane about to take off. it's hard to leave Rwanda. it's hard to leave Africa. i don't even want to think about another leaving in a few weeks, but it is lurking back there in my mind. i push it away but it never completely leaves.

at least i have an apartment to go to. a little bit of a home for a few months.

the first theft i was present for

I mentioned that they always tell us how unsafe Arusha is. I have yet to have a problem, although I have friends who have lost phones, money, and UN ids. On Thursday, on a very crowded dalla-dalla with IE, we were barely balanced on the step in the doorway of the dalla, the door of which wouldn't close because there was an additional row of men hanging out the door. IE had her backpack in her hand in front of her, near the floor. At the end of a very miserable one stop long ride, involving severe cramping in my one foot that had a tenuous position on the step into the dalla and in my one hand that was clinging to the back of a seat while my body tilted awkwardly sideways against that of the man next to me because I had no control over it given the precarious hand and foot positioning, we sort of tumbled backwards out of the dalla to let someone climb out from the back seat and IE discovered that her backpack was open and her wallet gone. I was first reluctant to make any assumptions and asked all the usual questions, "Where did you last have it? Are you sure you had it when we left Mr. Price? Could it have fallen out?" But it became clear that the backpack had been opened and the wallet - and nothing else - removed.

I expected the dalla people to shrug. Happens all the time, right?

Instead, the bus pimp made everyone climb out of the dalla. There were about forty people in a bus built for 17. Every person, before they got back in, got patted down by the bus pimp. I looked under the seats with a flashlight. Little kids had their school backpacks opened. Women showed us the contents of their purses and pulled their own wallets out of their bras to show us that they were not Ildi's. One woman sympathetically looked through IE's backpack herself and nodded in commiseration. Nope, no wallet.

We didn't find the wallet. There were just too many people and too much potential for someone to move to the edge of the crowd, toss it in the bushes, and put the money in their pocket. We suspect this one guy who was hanging out the door right behind IE. But it was a great moment, all of us outside the dalla getting searched (they insisted that I check my bag, too, although no one patted me down since we were obviously riding together - why would I steal my friend's wallet?)

After we all got back in the dalla and started going again and the people started getting off and I finally got a seat, one of the guys who had been helping us search (keep in mind that he is a Tanzanian, looks like a Tanzanian, talks like a Tanzanian, is a Tanzanian) squeezed in next to me on the flip-down seat in the last row and looked at me sorrowfully and said, "You cannot trust black people."

Erm...

quote of the day

"I like you too much!"
~ a random man pushing a handmade wooden wheelbarrow along the side of Njiro road as I walked by

thursday night

whenever someone says the words "thursday night," i think instinctively of igisafuria.

even writing that word will forever make me think of this one time when k, s's organization's country director, once came to kibuye and joined us for igisafuria and he couldn't get the word figured out and s tapped the table with each syllable and repeated over and over "EE-gee-sa-FUriya" with four taps and the last three syllables all blended together into one syllable when really there are supposed to be six syllables in the word. we laughed really hard, approaching falling on the ground laughing, which was relatively common at igisafuriya, and for years (okay, two years now, probably) we imitated that whenever we had to tell the word to someone.

gisafuriya is a traditional casserole, made of bananas and potatoes and every potentially edible part of a goat. once we found this strange-looking soft gray twisty piece in it that we could not identify but which was either small intestine or a worm. probably a small intestine.

on thursday nights in kibuye, when i lived there, someone would order igisafuriya from the cantine, a little restaurant-ish place between the prefecture and the tennis court of the guest house. when the power was out, it was really dark in the back where the little eating huts are and even when the power was not out, it was always a bit of a game to come into the back area and find your group because the lighting was never that good. no matter what time we told them to have the gisafuriya ready, it was never ready when we got there. mostly i showed up at least half an hour after the set time and sometimes an hour. and i never touched the dish, anyway, because it was goat.

but we laughed. always, we laughed. there were nights when we laughed until my stomach still ached when i got home. n would say outrageous things. we would provoke b for fun and get him to say ridiculous, impossible medical things ("fish are plants" is the classic). i flatly forbade a to make any more speeches under threat of my leaving the table. we argued about the population of nairobi. we argued about who drove the fastest to kigali. we argued about whether the new mandatory working hours were a good idea (i thought they were preposterous - 7 am to 3:30 pm? crazy. i just continued starting my work day at 8:30).

last night was thursday night and all day yesterday i wished that there was igisafuriya, but i'm in arusha with different people and there was none. instead, we roasted a wildebeest. by which i mean a gnu. one of j's fellow soccer players went hunting last weekend and brought us some nice pieces of one of the ugliest animals ever. i don't usually eat, say, meat, but i had to try it, because it was wildebeest, after all. i can't just not try it. so i did. it was nice, as meat goes although, you know, it was meat.

so lots of people came over and ate wildebeest. it wasn't quite igisafuriya. but it was still fun.

My current favorite song lyrics in the world:

i believe in the quest and the journey
i believe that the answers come in time
where we begin is where we arrive
~nn

I love her writing.

day in and out

One of my favorite parts of the day is in the morning just after all of my housemates leave. They are usually gone by 7:30 and the maid doesn't come until 8:00. I have half an hour in which I know that I am alone in the house and I can dance around to non-existent music while I make toast or pancakes in the frying pan. I get to decide if I'm going to have tea or hot chocolate or just water with my breakfast. The air is still fresh and I usually haven't yet encased my feet in shoes. I walk on the cool cement.

One of my other favorite parts of the day is coming home as the sun is setting. At the turn from the main road into our neighborhood, there is a woman who sells roasted corn. Not sweet corn, which I don't really like, but hearty corn well roasted so that sometimes a few kernels are half-popped open like popcorn. I buy an ear from her every day. It's become a tradition. I greet her and shake hands with Elaine, her little daughter. Elaine swings around the sign post and I talk to her in English, which she doesn't understand, while her mother makes sure the corn is brown all over. The corn sometimes comes wrapped in pieces of the husk - to-go packaging.

When I get home, I always realize that I forgot to buy an extra ear for the guard and I give him 100 shillings (10 cents) so he can go buy his own, which I think he prefers because it means that he gets to go out of the yard for a while. I go out on the balcony and watch the sun set behind the long field and the low hills. I eat the corn and sometimes a popsicle and then usually I get so frustrated with the corn bits in my teeth that I have to go fix it before the sun actually goes down.

vanilla tea

once, when I lived in Rwanda, my mom sent me a package and inside it were several kinds of tea. My favorite two were vanilla hazelnut and vanilla. When the teabags she sent ran out, I started buying these little tubes of vanilla essence at the Baguette in Kigali which is no longer called the Baguette and has not been since I before arrived in Rwanda and is actually called La Gallette or something silly like that, but which I still call the Baguette because everyone else does. A drop or two of the vanilla essence (which comes four tubes to a pack for 1000 FRw) makes tea exactly perfect, with lots of Nido and some sugar. It does not work so well in the US because skim milk does not serve the same function as full cream milk powder. But I'm back in Africa, baby, and the vanilla tea is back and it's good. Really good.

always fatal for me: a bookstore

I was going along just fine here in Arusha, spending more money that I should have, but still managing to be relatively thrifty. Now it's all over. I found a bookstore. Not just a bookstore, but a bookstore with lots of the sort of books I like: stories of homecomings in Lebanon, women's lives in India, third culture kids all over the world. The bookstore sells great coffee and in theory I could just read the books as I sit there, but it never works. I buy. I always, always buy.

Nothing exciting has been happening lately. People tried to get me to go to a club last night. I refused. I was too tired. When I'm tired, a club is the last place you want me to be because I will crabbify the entire place.

Dallas have been ripping us off. Maybe the price of fuel went up, but only the price of the halfway home trip went up. To go all the way home costs the same.

I wear my wrist brace a lot, for typing. Usually once I put it on in the morning I don't take it off until I leave the office, so I get really sympathetic looks from everyone. Once on the street a girl said, "Oh, poli sana." I looked around madly. "What, what? What's wrong?" It was just my wrist. When I go through metal detectors wearing the brace, I set them off every time. I have to tap on the metal slab in the brace to show the guards that I'm not scary.

nice shoes

Yesterday morning, walking to work, I passed a nun walking the other direction. She was dressed head to toe in a practical brown, even down to her tights. I looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing black platform sandals with two inch clunky heels, quite similar to some of my sister's.

This is a nun I would like to know.

in court, in court

Guess what? I'm in court! I am using an attorney's laptop. The defense attorney is cross-examining someone about something. I could tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you. The whole thing is BOOOORING at the moment. I'm not sure why I'm here... I was hoping there would be some fireworks, but so far, nothing. Not even one little sparkler.

The last time I saw fireworks (not real ones) was actually on the 4th of July. My housemates took the opportunity to create their own - ie. one yelling (literally) at another. I think I was all the more startled because the yelling took place in Africa. It was so much more striking here. You expect people to yell in the US. Here, you don't.

Same housemate got back from a trip to Rwanda this morning (twenty-four hours of bus from Kigali - the little plane is on annual maintainance). The group took Jaguar from Kigali to Kampala, which I TOLD them not to do (these are the buses that I fear so much because they nearly killed me every time I drove to Kampala). But they didn't listen to me and they took Jaguar anyway, and they claim they have never been in so much fear for their lives. They claim they saw things in each other that they've never seen in a living being. They clung to strangers. They screamed in fear. It was raining and they saw dead bodies near other spun off vehicles along the road. One of them turned off the dvd in the bus and screamed at the driver. Meanwhile, the other passengers were telling them, "Doucemente," gently, telling them to be nicer to the driver (although I doubt this part of the story because that is also the word that is used in Rwanda to tell people to slow down).

Speaking of accidents, on the way to work this morning (in the most lackadaisical dalla-dalla I've taken - we were only three passengers and they just didn't seem to CARE if they had riders or not, while usually dallas are frantic about filling up), I saw a ditch problem. Now, these ditches are a hazard. At least four of my friends have fallen into them. They are uncovered. They are deep, sometimes as deep as four feet. They are immediately on the side of the road. You leap out of the way of a car and land in one (D). You get out of a taxi, drunk, and fall directly into one, dragging in your immediate neighbor (J and M)You walk along the road in the dark, saying, "When I came, I didn't even know there were ditches here!" and simultaneously fall into the nearest one (IE). I've seen a few vehicles in them before, usually just a front wheel. This time, it was a UN Nissan Patrol, and it was not just IN the ditch, it OWNED the ditch. It was obviously taking a curve too fast and just slid sideways, both left wheels into the ditch. Or, to give the driver credit, maybe it was forced off the road by other manic vehicles. It fit in perfectly, left side against the side of the ditch, right wheels just on the edge, tilted 45 degrees on its side. It appeared to have slid about 6 or 7 meters along the ditch, nice white paint decorating the ditch. There was a tow truck guy looking at it, just beginning to think about how they'd ever get it out, it was so wedged.

I hope, but I doubt, the passengers were wearing seatbelts. Otherwise they might be a bit bruised. How I do love seatbelts.

driving everyone

I said that I miss having a car and I thought that what I missed was having a way to get around, to get home after dark, to bring lots of groceries home. Turns out that what I really miss is the driving itself.

Background: IE invited a bunch of people over to her house for drinks and cake. Eventually we decided to have the mini-shindig at my place because all of my housemates were gone for the weekend. It ended up being a bit of a tiny party because there was some dinner put on by an attorney that some of the people were at and some people just never showed up and some people we didn't invite because we don't like drunken debauchery and they carry it with them wherever they go, but it was still fun, especially the part involving a really yummy chocolate cake.

At some point, somehow the conversation turned to the idea of going to Moshi (near Kilimanjaro) the next day and we ended up asking someone who works with my case how one gets there. He had no idea how to get there by poor intern sort of transport, but said that he would like to go himself and we could all go in his car. So he showed up with car the next day and we set off, four of us (IE, C, D, me), with the driver.

About 2 kilometers down the road, we pulled into a petrol station and D said, "Okay, [amazedlife], you are driving us to Moshi. You said you wanted to."

Yes, I had MENTIONED wanting to drive, but I didn't think anyone would pay attention to me!

I had my international driving permit, the car was right there full of fuel... I swallowed my nerves about driving on the wrong side of the road (I mean, the left side of the road) and about the fact, did I mention, that this car is a brand-new BMW? and off we went, sans driver.

I have always vehemently acclaimed the virtues of driving old reliable cars. And yes, I believe that. And yes, unnecessary materialism and walking with the poor and blah, blah, blah. All important.

But can I just say, since I will probably never own one, this is an amazing car. I mean, amazing. You get what you pay for, it turns out. I have never driven a car that went that fast, that quietly, that smoothly, that controllably, that comfortably, that powerfully. I mean, amazing. The power... the little gadgets... the leather seats... the acceleration... the steering... Passing people was positively delightful. It swooped out into the next lane and, let me say once again, the acceleration is perfect. Such power, and you cannot hear that the gears might want to be changed until you are well above 5000 RPM.

On the way back, in the dark, I discovered that you can adjust the angle of the headlights from inside the car. Tell me this is not the most amazing car ever. And there is this red glow over your hand when you shift in case you need to see.

Oh, yeah, we saw Kilimanjaro. And a waterfall and some caves dug in 1915 by the Chagga people to hide and live in during their war with the Maasai.

But the CAR. I offered to be D's driver in exchange for some use of it and $99 per month, which is $1 less than what he pays his current driver. In fact, just for $99 per month. As long as I could keep my day job at the Tribunal. I cannot get over how in love I am with this car. It is the kind of car that makes you feel like the best driver in the world (and also the most terrified that you might wreck it). It is the kind of car in which 130 kph feels slow. It is the kind of car in which you see the signs that Arusha is getting closer and you wish you could just keep driving. I would PAY to drive further, in fact, even just driving someone else (everyone else) where they need to go. I'm going through withdrawal now. I want the car back.

ju-eece for lunch

Juice in East Africa is pronounced as ju-eece, two syllables. In Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania, fresh juice is readily available - I know that they tell you never to drink such things in Africa, but I always do, with adverse results very rarely. Mostly, you get passion fruit juice and I pretty much universally love passion fruit juice unless it is made from concentrate, which is horrible and yet somehow very popular in Rwanda, where the concentrate companies buy up all the passion fruit and raise the price of the fruit and make fresh juice too expensive for any restaurant but Sol e Luna to bother with (which is why Sol e Luna has my undying affection even though they overcook their pasta). Here in Tanzania, fresh passion ju-eece is everywhere, although sometimes people don't understand me when I say juice like a North American.

Trying to get more fruits and vegetables in a healthy eating kick (okay, the juice has sugars, I know, but the orangeness is there) and being horribly thirsty because I went running at 6:30 this morning, I drank passion juice at lunch and then tried tangerine juice, which was amazing and fresh - they made it after we ordered it - and full of lovely pulp. Then we bought beautiful big red raspberries at Meat King (Meat King? I don't eat meat) which are only 1700 shillings, about $1.70, which is cheap for raspberries but expensive for Tanzania. But anyway, they are good. Very good.

Mundane details, again, partly because I remember people from churches saying to me, "It's so wonderful that you give up so much to help those poor people." when I left for Rwanda. I give mundane details to show some of the things that I love so much about Africa - some of the reasons why I'm gaining more than I'm giving up to be here.

my head is stuck in the trunk

we went shopping over lunch - to grocery stores and i bought a book. as we were leaving shoprite, we were a bit late, so we decided to take a taxi. with four of us, it's not expensive. we hailed one i've used before, an ancient peugeot that lives in the parking lot of shoprite. he opened the boot (with a screwdriver) so we could pile in all our bags, but the car started rolling forward, so he let go of the trunk lid and ran back to the front of the car. the very heavy lid of the trunk landed on my head and pinned me in place. i started saying "help! help!" in a pathetic voice, because it didn't occur to me that i could put my hands up and lift the lid. maybe my hands were still in the handles of the bags i was putting in the trunk. i don't remember. IE called the driver, who came running back to lift the trunk off me, but then realized that the car was still rolling and turned and ran back to the front.

my head was wedged under the lid as the car was rolling forward. finally IE lifted the lid off of me just as the driver got the car to stop.

"my head was stuck in the trunk!" i said. "and the car was moving!"

blah, blah, blah

I'm back in Tanzania, having again taken the plane the size of a peanut. No, seriously. I used to complain about the old Rwandair Express plane being peanut sized, but it held something like 24 people. This plane holds 12. 12! That's not a plane, it's a van in the air. It is narrower across than a car. Unacceptable. Of course, it's free, which makes even the complete lack of amenities (read: seats that date back to the 1970s, at least, with armrests that are broken) a rather good deal. We puttered our way back to Arusha on this beast, me trying all the way to remind myself that prop planes are safer than jets because if the engines go out the plane can glide for a while.

So... Arusha again. I have nothing to say about Arusha. I miss Kigali. There's nothing like a city where every hotel and restaurant yields someone you know, or at least recognize. Okay, sometimes it feels really claustrophobic and you wish everyone would just leave you alone but then your friend's phone gets stolen and you realize that you have the phone number of the chief of security for the capital city and that there are people everywhere who will take care of you. For two days, I had no money because I needed to change some and people just kept buying me things. I ate three meals a day, without money. I drank cappucino, without money. I took taxi motos, without money. I swam in the pool at the Novotel, without money. Two of those things (the cappucino and the pool) were paid for by people I had never met before.

I love Rwanda.

oh, right

regarding that work thing i do - on monday at 4 pm someone handed me "[opponent's] response to [our] extremely urgent motion" about one of the witnesses and said, "look up US case law for us so we can respond to this. give me a two page summary of what US law says before you leave tonight. then have fun in Rwanda."

i was leaving for Rwanda at 7 am the next morning.

it took me until 9 pm to get the summary done. the cases that were in the original motion were unfindable. i had to start over and i wasn't sure exactly which aspect he wanted me to look at. i saw about ten that were possible. finally i looked up all this stuff about closed testimony and limiting cross-examination. i assume it was right because i haven't gotten any complaints. so far.

everyone in my office was jealous because i got to do something, okay, stressful and uncertain, but actually legal.

did i mention that i love my trial team?

back to beautiful Rwanda

So today I'm sitting in a former hotel, now an office building. From my window on the third floor, I can see the runway at Kanombe Airport.

I just threw a bag of banana chips at the trash can because they were stale and they scattered all over the floor. I had to pick them up one by one lest someone should come in and see that I'm a slob.

Yesterday I was in Nyamata. Wednesday I was in Butare. Tuesday I was in Arusha. I don't know where I'm sleeping tonight.

Landing in Rwanda feels like a homecoming every time. This time, in the little UN plane, I could see the runway through the cockpit and the green hills around us and I was happy happy happy to be back.

I thought there would be friends arriving here today but I can't find them. Sad. I want to go to Gisenyi or something but I don't feel like going alone, even to Gisenyi, especially on minibuses. I miss my car so so so much. It gave me so much independence. And if all else failed, I could have slept in it. This guy who did Peace Corps in Mauritania looks at me like I'm a snob because I say almost daily, "I wish I had a car!"