There are so many applicable adjectives to our day. Hilarious. Heartbreaking. Long. Compounded. Disappointing. Challenging. Stressful. Bizarre. Absurd. Taxing. Rewarding. But I’ll take it chronologically.
Freddy and Lama picked us up early to hit the road to Gashora. We stopped by Bourbon for a coffee and a pastry to go, and when Freddy filled up at a gas station Lama and Kara bought a few snacks for the trip. Freddy also brought his adapter for an ipod so we took turns playing tracks. I only ended up playing one, but it was a banger, Hey Little World by the Hives. I was specifically trying to counter the lack of fast paced music I experienced thus far in Rwanda.
We stopped at Nyamata to check into our hotel and Freddy just laughed at us. He said “Guys, why are you coming to Gashora?” and although we explain to Freddy that we’re pioneers and we’re trying to start something, he still doesn’t get why we’d come somewhere like this. Regardless of his disproval, he drove us down the bumpy roads to the building where the COVAGA women work and had to take off right after. Kara had planned to work with the women to help them start coming up with ideas for the website she’s going to be making. She hoped to have them sketch some designs and prototypes to start their thinking and hopefully come up with something together with them, instead of for them. I was shooting the whole time, and some of the footage looked great at the time although I haven’t yet captured it.
We wrapped in the early afternoon but had no way of getting back to Nyamata, about half an hour drive away from Gashora. We waited until Evanitie’s son Eugene would arrive with a truck that we were going to rent for the day to drive ourselves back to the hotel. It turned out to be a long wait, and in the mean time we put on the muzungu show. The fact that we had arrived drew tons of attention in this tiny little community, and the longer we waited, the more time there was for passing kids to see the crowd and join in. At one point people were just everywhere, and even the COVAGA women were yelling at the kids to leave us alone. They would respond “What the hell else are we going to do?” and besides, this is their chance to see a real muzungu. One unfortunate thing is kids, and some adults, have learned only one english phrase of “Where is the money?” So they just say it over and over again. Sometimes they walk up and don’t even say hello, they just say money. That’s all they want from us. It wears you down pretty fast, and eventually we took refuge in a dark storage room. We were also terribly hungry and we had our snacks but I would rather die than eat in front of these people.
Eventually Eugene arrived with the truck, but it was out of gas. He sent a guy on a bike to buy some fuel and again we were waiting. When the guy came back, he had around a cup of gas. I was skeptical about the amount but they reassured us it was enough to make it to the gas station to get more fuel. The truck is a right-side drive, left hand shift standard. Since Lama can’t drive stick and Kara didn’t want to, I was going to drive, which I was excited for anyway. The three of us piled in and took off down the bumpy road. It took about two bumps to realize that the truck had absolutely no shocks to speak of, and even when the road looked flat we were being tossed around. Every single kid we would drive past would yell “Amuzungu!” and some would even start chasing the truck and running after us. About halfway to the paved highway, the truck started lurching and we ran out of gas.
At first I thought it was really funny. We weren’t too far from gas and the day had a lot of setbacks so running out of fuel was just fitting. I decided to get my video camera out and start documenting the out of gas experience. Just like before though, people started flocking to see the muzungus. Right before I got out my camera, down the road some guy had violently attacked a women and bit her breast and another guy had caught him and was hauling him down to the police station. I took out my camera and started filming just as they went past us, therefore there was already a commotion before we broke down. Then another guy who was intoxicated started explaining to Lama what was happening, and I filmed them talking about it and I didn’t know the guy was drunk at the time. While we were shooting, this young guy who could speak English came up and started asking if I had a permit to film. I thought “What permit?” I am filming out in public. But he seemed pretty choked and adamant, and he started grilling Kara about what we were doing. The reason he was concerned was because he thought we were here exploiting Rwanda and filming this guy and then showing people the video would slander the country and give it a bad name. Lama cleared the air and explained that we had no intention of doing so.
To solve our out of gas situation, Lama had to trust a guy with a bike and just give him the money up front to go get us some gas and bring it back. We sat patiently and hoped he would in fact return. Where before at the co-op we were a spectacle to behold, this was now completely overwhelming, and it was propelled by the fact that I had brought out my camera. At one point I flipped the LCD outward so the kids could see themselves and they went BEZERK. It was out of control. Fortunately, as always is the case in my experience in the country, the guy on the bike was good on his word and he returned with the gas. We put in the little amount we had, hoping again it would be enough to get us to more fuel where we could fill up.
As the engine sputtered I put it into drive and started moving, and I was just anxious to get as far as possible as fast as possible in case we ran out of fuel again. The situation got scary, for me at least, when as we were going all the kids started jumping onto the truck. The truck has a cage over the back and they were all clinging to it. I was terrified that one of them was going to slip and fall under the wheels and I was going to run over a little kid. Lama started yelling at them to get off and they wouldn’t listen, they were all latching on like a plague of ticks. We didn’t make it too far and the engine died again. The situation was just frenzied at this point with all the screaming kids and we just wanted to get out of there. I cooed to the truck as I turned it over again and it did start up, and luckily while we stopped all the kids got off, and so I punched it so they couldn’t climb back on. They all started chasing it again but I put it into second and we sped, aka bounced away too fast. We did end up making it to the “gas station” luckily enough. Except the gas station is just a store filled with gerri cans of gas. Slightly dangerous. Again, it took about 10-15 minutes to get the gas that was plenty of time for kids to notice something different and surround us.
Once we put in a quarter tank of gas, we made it no problem to Nyamata. We were so hungry and so glad to be back at the hotel so we could eat. Unfortunately, Cafe de Nyamata (the name of the hotel) had no food. I figured they should lose the café from their name then. So we walked to a (the only?) restaurant. When we got there we asked what they had and they gave us a list of things. They didn’t have rice, beans, or much really, but we put together our orders. What I’ve eaten here never seemed like something worth writing about, but now I should note that my vegetarianism is extremely difficult to maintain here. I’ve had fish a couple of times because sometimes it’s come when I didn’t order it, or there aren’t any other choices. I still tried to maintain eating no animals, but now I’ve actually accepted that I’m a pescetarian. I don’t want to be unhealthy here and I can’t live on bananas. Besides, the situation is slightly different: the fish are caught locally, the animals come from the backyard, so their lives and the origin of the meat is not as questionable in Rwanda as it is in Canada. But tonight, at this restaurant, all they had was goat meat. Our waitress had come back after our order and reported that no, they did not actually have any of the things she had said they did. So we said just bring us whatever it is the restaurant did actually have. Goat skewers only. So I ate them. I don’t like it, but I can be a vegetarian when I get back. It’s not really realistic here.
Our dinner was almost silent. We had had a draining day, and you could feel the tension everyone was still carrying. We were exhausted, hungry, and the day was a bust in some respects. Eventually the tension broke and we had a really good discussion about how we felt and why we felt that way. We were really honest, we put everything out in the open air and all of it, especially our three-way relationship felt a lot better afterwards. In fact I think it felt like a milestone for us. The day was stressful but in the end I think our tight knit group got a little tighter.
I had taken the attitude for the day that if things are going to go wrong, might as well let it all happen at once. That’s why I found running out of gas funny. The more things that went wrong, the funnier the day got for me personally. So the final joke was when we got back to our hotel. Kara had put the bag of snacks in her room and an entire ant colony had found it and moved into the bag. They were everywhere, and there was a solid black line of them from the door to the bag, and the bag itself was covered. I didn’t really care about the ants and I could tell Kara did so I offered to trade rooms with her and she gladly accepted. So a couple thousand ants and I hit the hay together, and yes, we shared the bed. A fitting end to a long day of very little going right.
Lastly, on a completely side note, here is one of the videos I’ve made that I finally managed to successfully upload. Any feedback (especially critical) is encouraged/welcomed.
Amazi from Mitchell Stookey on Vimeo
