We had a lot of plans today. Firstly, we are planning to host a movie night in Kibungo once we return from Kigali at the end of the month, and our plan is to hold it at the district building , the place with the huge screen and projector where we watched the Euro Cup finals. Our goal is to introduce ourselves to the community, let them know who we are and what we are doing, and then screen Born Into Brothels since it is very similar to what we hope to achieve here. Kara had designed some posters for the event, and this morning Lama had a meeting so we were going to go with him and print up and distribute our posters. We often joke that every single thing you do is harder in Rwanda, one way or another, and printing is no exception. The computer we were trying to print on (the one and only on campus) didn’t have any program that reads pdf files, and that is what Kara had saved the poster as. Normally, we would just download and install acrobat or any other free software, but even downloading is nearly non-existent. It would take a day or two (if the power/internet doesn’t cut out) to download a regular sized program. So plan B had Kara re-exporting her design as a JPEG and the result was a pixelated, poorly cropped version of her very smooth and slick poster.
Back at our house we were waiting for some important phone calls regarding our scheduling – Cassimir wants us to host our movie night at ETO, and we and Bernard think it would be better to host it at the district. Of course we need to know where it will be before we go through with printing our posters, and we wanted to have our posters ready tonight so that we could give them to the group of students we were planning on having over in the evening. Waiting for the call is fine and dandy, except we had planned to interview Antoinette Masengesho in the afternoon and our scheduled time for the interview was looming. Lama ran back UNATEK to see what he could figure out, and we waited at the house for Antoinette. Lama made it back before she arrived and told us that Bernard said we should just go ahead and plan for the district building and not wait for Cassimir’s word, and that is what we plan to do.
Antoinette arrived and Lama and I interviewed her for about an hour, and it went according to plan. Lama says she said a lot of great things, and filled in anything that Sigfried didn’t talk about. By the time she left, we were hungry and we only had an hour and a half before the students showed up at 7. Since Alice (formally spelled Alysse) couldn’t prepare the food that quickly, we decided to head to St. Joseph to eat. We’ve never really had quick service there, or anywhere for that matter, but Lama felt that if we went and stressed our hurry, our food would come quicker. That plan was very far from accurate. We received the exact same service we’ve come to depend on at St. Joseph. It was unfortunate that we were running so behind and were going to be late at our own house for our own meeting, but we were laughing really hard the whole time. The situation was just too funny not to.
I would also like to mention, that as we were speed walking to St. Joseph, there was the most spectacular sunset I’ve seen in Rwanda yet. The hills, trees, and sky were just so marvelous that I couldn’t stop looking at it. Except we were in such a hurry I wasn’t allowed to actually stop to look, so I had to walk and look over my shoulder at the same time. It felt like a crime to not watch that sunset disappear all the way behind the hills. I don’t think there could be a single place on the planet more ironic than Rwanda to be too busy to stop and appreciate a sunset, but tonight we were.
So we scarfed down our food, payed and ran home and by the the time we got there we were only about 20 minutes late. Fortunately though, not everyone was there yet, and it didn’t seem like anyone who was there cared we were late. The students we had invited over are the ones that we plan to work with in regards to the Kazo project. They are the ones I’ll be teaching/coaching to make the documentary over the next 6 weeks. The meeting was awesome. The students were all excited and enthusiastic about the project, and really thinking of ways to apply this knowledge and skills to what they’re doing. 4 of the students are survivors and they are extremely interested in documentary work so that they will be able to document their stories themselves. We started it off by going around the room and said who we were, what we do, and why we had come and what we hoped to achieve. They asked insightful questions, made great comments, and demonstrated their desire to learn. I can’t wait to work with them, and although I’ll be showing them what I know, I can tell it’s going to be a lot of learning both ways. We ended the meeting with exchanging emails and phone numbers, and we took down everyone’s schedule so that we can actually plan the first workshop and set up it for the week we return. I’m glad we’ve set this plan in motion and I really look forward to the next step.
