Rwanda Archives - Maggie InkMaggie Ink

We are a family

March 4, 2015

“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” — Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist

Dear Everest,

Once, on drizzly Rwandan morning when the Virungas were swathed with mist as fine as cotton candy, I hiked into the mountains to follow a family of mountain gorillas. To get there, I sliced through tangles of vines and branches with a long, solid machete. When the mountain got particularly steep and slippery, I used the machete to carve steps into the mud. Finally, after a few hours and a lot of sweat, I reached the gorillas.

They were remarkable. Truly. Gorillas aren’t aggressive unless threatened, and I think this group knew they were among friends. The silverback walked past me and put his enormous hand on my shoulder before moving on. He paused at the edge of a clearing and surveyed the landscape.

There were other adult gorillas. Some male, some female, although I didn’t really know how to tell the difference. They were gentle and kind. And there were babies, joyful baby gorillas, who plucked ripe berries from the bushes, scratched their heads, and awkwardly tried to swing from one tree to another.

I watched as the gorillas nurtured their young, the babies riding on their mothers’ backs or nestled in the crook of an arm.

One of the adult gorillas flattened some of the foliage into a nest and placed her baby there to rest. When the baby was good and comfortable, the mama perched nearby where she could keep watch. They were so much like humans.

Even so, I remember thinking, “Nope. Not me.” I didn’t think I could ever care for a child in that way. I didn’t have that capacity for selflessness, and when I searched within myself, I found zero maternal instinct. I was a woman who wielded a machete in the mountains, after all, not the type to nurture anyone.

Even when you arrived, I was unsure about this arrangement. I spent the first few months struggling to figure out how to make room in my life for a baby. Your bassinet was shoved between my bed and my nightstand, and it always felt like I was trying to wedge you into someplace you didn’t belong. Someone said to me, “I guess you’re done traveling now,” and I wondered if that was true, if my world was shrunken and small now.

But somewhere along the way, my world didn’t just stretch to accommodate you — you completely expanded it.

In fact, I suspect now that everything I’ve ever experienced, every skydive and every sunset, every place I’ve ever been, every trail I’ve ever walked, it was all leading me to you. And everything I have yet to experience, it already seems bigger and brighter because I’ll be experiencing it for two.

I get it now, this primal drive to care for another being. All I want to do is build a nest for you, a place to keep you safe and warm while I stand watch. We are a family.

Love, Mama

Fake limbs and forced sobriety: My first night in Rwanda

November 28, 2011

NOTE: Rwanda ended up being one of the highlights on my round-the-world trip. The first few days, however, were a little bumpy. This is the story of my first night in Kigali.

They call Rwanda “the land of 1,000 hills,” but I couldn’t see any of them from my room inside a prosthetic limb factory.

I was paying $35 a night for an excessively tall jail cell, fashioned from windowless walls that loomed cold and hard at least 25 feet high. The mosquito net above the bed looked like it had been vomited out by the ceiling. It sagged with knots on one side and was peppered with golfball-sized holes on the other.

A smaller stone wall partitioned off the bathroom, consisting of a shower head, a clogged drain, a wobbly sink and a toilet that didn’t flush. For an extra $10 a night, I could have received an “upgrade,” which meant that the owner would turn on the hot water, but my budget was too small to indulge in such luxuries.

I wasn’t even sure what I was doing in Rwanda, although it was easy enough to form a number of rationalizations. I had already spent a month in Uganda, and it was time to add another African country to the list. I was looking for a place to volunteer for a few weeks, and Rwanda sounded as good as anywhere else. And Rwanda is small and manageable, about the same size as Maryland.

Plus I really liked the movie, “Hotel Rwanda.” I imagined a land populated by 10 million Don Cheadles.

It helped that it was an incredibly simple border jump from Kampala, Uganda, to Kigali, Rwanda. The bus journey took just 8 hours — that’s lightning speed in African bus time — and cost only 25,000 Ugandan shillings — about $10. So what did I have to lose?

I arrived in Rwanda with no map, no plan and no idea where to stay. When the bus stopped at Kigali’s clogged and smelly Nyabugogo market, where every step involved a piece of garbage or rotting entrails, I simply hopped into a cab and asked the driver to take me someplace safe. And that is how I was steered to a prosthetic leg factory on the outskirts of town.

After I checked in, it was too late to travel 15 miles into the city but still too early to go to bed, so I explored the property instead. In the windows of my building, firestorms of sparks illuminated men in welding masks, constructing limbs for thousands of people who had been maimed during the 1994 genocide. On my way to the hostel bar, I stumbled over a stray fake leg.

The bar was reggae-themed, with portraits of Bob Marley sagging from mossy beams of wood. Steel-drum music blared from tinny speakers on top of the beer refrigerator. I perched on a leaning bar stool and ordered a Primus, the Budweiser of Rwandan beer.

“Primus for boys,” the bartender said, her face as flat and hard as a river stone.

“Um, that’s OK. I’ll take a Primus anyway,” I said.

“No.”

“Er, OK. Fine. I guess I’d like an Amstel?”

“No.”

“Are there any drinks I can have?”

“No. You already too drunk, lady,” the bartender said, matter-of-factly. “You don’t even know what you want to drink.”

With that, she dismissed me. This was my introduction to the incredibly frustrating task of communicating my desires in Rwanda, but it wouldn’t be the last. Only an hour later I would have the following exchange with the manager of the hostel/limb factory:

“Do you have a kitchen?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling, but offering no follow-up.

“Is it a kitchen that guests can use?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, again with a wide grin.

“May I use the kitchen?”

“Oh, no.” With that, he walked away. No explanation.

Sober and hungry, I took deep yoga breaths to avoid punching anyone in the face. I grumbled to myself and kicked rocks all the way back to my room. There was a 4-month-old, smashed Bolivian granola bar in the bottom of my pack, so I ate that and threw curses at the blank wall of my cell. I paced the concrete floor like I was trapped inside a mental institution. I felt weak with an absence of power.

Just as my pity party was hitting its climax, the one lightbulb in the room gave up and went dark, as if it committed suicide.

I cried. I cried as the room remained frustratingly dark. I cried as mosquitos flew through my protective net and into my ears. I cried as the toilet spontaneously belched foul water onto the floor. Then I thought about how I had no real reason to cry in a land of genocide and unspeakable horror, and that made me cry harder. I cried for people I’d never known and the people I never would and all the ache in between.

That night I dreamt of malaria and detached body parts.

Scene on a bus

December 16, 2010

I’m on the bus from Kigali, Rwanda, to Kampala, Uganda.

The trip takes between 9 to 19 hours, depending on the bus company and road conditions, curling around terraced hills, banana trees and fields of feathery papyrus.

“Careless Whisper” is playing on the radio. It crackles every time George Michael hits a high note.

A man across the aisle has his shoes off, legs extended. His socks are long and have individual toes, striped with various shades of purple.

I’ve been in that hazy place somewhere between sleep and consciousness. I smile at my new friend, Santo, sitting in the seat beside me. He helped me navigate through border offices and made sure I wasn’t cheated at a currency exchange bureau. We’ve been taking turns watching each others luggage during bathroom stops.

As we’ve rolled through the countryside, Santo has pointed out things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: Fish drying on the hood of a car, drums made from stretched cow hide, metallic grasshopper traps used to collect the insects for food, the dirt road that leads to his father’s village.

“How long –” I begin.

He answers my question before I even get a chance to ask it.

“Eighty kilometers.”

Mudflaps thwack against the truck in front of us. They say, “Different colors. One people. One love.”

The host

December 15, 2010

Travel is hard.

And nothing drives that point home more than a case of parasites.

NOTE: If you are at all squeamish, you should probably stop reading now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

First problem: Red spots peppering my belly. As much as I like polka dots, these little buggers were starting to worry me. See, I’ve never had chicken pox, and they look kinda chicken poxy. Plus a guy who recently stayed at my hostel had shingles, and well … it all makes sense. I’m going to die.

Problem 2: Yucky, unsettled stomach. Enough said.

Were the two problems somehow related? There was only one way to find out — a trip to King Faisel Hospital in Kigali!

I checked into the ER.

“We’re busy. Come back later,” a guy said.

Um, really? This is a hospital. But the request caught me off guard, so I obeyed. An hour later I returned.

When I asked to see a doctor, there was a lot of whispering, some muttering in Kinyarwanda, then a couple phone calls.

“We’re trying to find a doctor who will see you,” one of the clerks told me.

Again, this caught me off guard. Are you not hospital? Do you not see patients?

Eventually, they led me to a room and I waited. When the door opened, a female American doctor was ready to see me. I explained my problems, and she examined my skin.

As soon as I said I recently went rafting the Nile, the stomach problems were easy to explain. The doctor said I have schistosomiasis, a very complicated word that basically means I have organ-eating parasites. Left untreated, it could be devastating to my health, but with the proper medication, it is quick and easy to flush out of my system. Excellent.

Next up — polka dots.

The doctor said these are bites from a fly that lays eggs in laundry. When a piece of clothing is air drying, the fly burrows into the most moist part of the clothing, usually the waist band. Then the eggs hatch and the insects start burrowing into human skin where they lay more eggs. Eventually they die, and they don’t cause any major health issues.

“I know it sounds gross in theory …” the doctor started to say.

I interrupted, “No. It’s just gross.”

“Yeah. Pretty gross,” she agreed. “But also pretty common in East Africa.”

To prevent this kind of nastiness in the future, she said I should iron all my clothes, especially the waistbands, which will kill the eggs before they hatch.

The good news: I was now armed with a prescription for anti-itch cream and some pills to kill my parasites.

The bad news: Even when you have a prescription, the pharmacy doesn’t necessarily have what you need.

Twelve pharmacies later, I am still on the hunt for my medication. Keep your fingers crossed, because I’m getting tired of hosting this parasite party.

Heavenly creatures

December 13, 2010

When the tourism office in Rwanda asked what day I’d prefer for my gorilla trek, I purposely chose a Sunday.

Better than any church or cathedral, Parc National des Volcans is my kind of spiritual place. Sandwiched near the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the majestic landscape is carpeted with flowers and lush greenery. The horizon is dominated by ancient volcanoes. The hum of birds and insects acts as a choir.

Many of the last remaining mountain gorillas call this place home. Because of that, this is also where famed gorilla researcher Dian Fossey lived and died.

Permits to see the gorillas are expensive, only eight people can see each gorilla family each day, and transportation can be brutal — which makes planning difficult and complicated. I hesitated to even do this at all, because it sounded like far more trouble than necessary. Besides, I’ve seen gorillas in the zoo.

But, my husband talked me into going. He said I would regret it if I came to Rwanda and didn’t see the gorillas, and I decided he was right.

On the day of my trek, several groups of people were sorted and matched up with guides, then we all took off in search of our different families. The families are tracked each day, so every guide has a good indication of where to go.

See this mountain? That’s where my group had to trek in order to find our gorillas.

We slogged through knee-high mud and thick tangles of stinging nettles that had to be sliced with machetes. The slopes were steep and slippery enough that many of us climbed on all fours — gorilla-style — occasionally clinging to bamboo stalks to keep from tumbling back down again. My boots felt like they were caked with molasses.

Because the terrain can be dangerous, my group was also accompanied by armed guards.

Here’s my bad-ass crew. Fo shizzle.

Then, magic.

My first glimpse of a gorilla in the wild.

The mud, the fatigue, the expense … all worth it for this.

Just a few arm lengths away from each other, this gorilla and I were sharing the same air. I could hear him breathe, and I could smell the musky scent of his fur.

I’m moved to tears just thinking about it again.

It didn’t take much longer before we located the silverback, Charlie.

And his baby.

And a mama, who was quickly joined by two more babies.

There were gorillas everywhere, all around me, eating, playing, climbing, even charging past me and grabbing my shoulder.

For the first time, I felt like I truly understood the meaning of the word “awesome.” The entire experience was inspiring, overwhelming, dizzying. It must be what some people feel when they are moved to speak in tongues.

Every part of this was holy.