12/31/06: We celebrate a Rwandan New Years over a homemade Chinese meal at the house of Simon, Winnie, and Veronica: European Scientists working for The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.  While dining, we watch 'Pirates of the Carribeen II': a brain-ruination machine that everyone everywhere worldwide adores like the Second Coming.  Last year, I worked the 'Pirates II Red Carpet Premier at Disney Land' and witnessed this celluloidal cow-pie of a flick drop into our universe to the wail of sousaphones…but that's another story altogether.  Anyways, after two and a half hours of piratical torture, our Rwandan New Years celebration totters back to its feet when the Europeans decided to screen something 'more European' which entails a video of a giraffe, a sizeable electric anal prod, two guys with a ladder, and a tsunami of giraffe semen engulfing an elderly female bystander.

For a nightcap, we watch a Bill Hicks comedy routine 'til 1:00am (pausing for the usual 12-midnight nonsense).  Funny guy, Bill.  I'm told that he died recently.

Everything in this country has a price tag, even friendship, in fact especially friendship.  Disconcerting to know that on a daily basis 99% of the people I make eye contact with are interested in me for precisely one reason…handouts.  Every white person here is 'Muzungo': a rich white person.  The only local 'raison d'etre' for Muzungos is to serve as givers of handouts.  This jilted atmosphere unfortunately incites me to act perpetually stand-offish towards every person I encounter while at the same time it plagues me with guilt for acting rudely towards persons who haven't yet asked me for anything (I know it's coming though).

New York City has its share of beggars.  If you're like me, sometimes you give and sometimes (most times) you don't.  However, in this region of Rwanda (where tourists throng to see Mountain Gorillas) the begging is different…it's not perceived as begging, rather it's standardized routine behavior that is promoted by the general population and carried-out by the children with an unabashed sense of blind entitlement and belligerent expectation.  Foreigners exist only to distribute money, bottles, pens, cell phones, English lessons, you name it.  Describing this attitude without sounding like a cold Western ass is difficult.  This is a poor country.  The people are often cold, wet, sick, and hungry, and there's little they can do about it.  By western standards, the population of Bisate is impoverished.  However, there's enough to eat and the people do not consider themselves impoverished, this is normal life.

And despite what liberal communist naysayers say, America looks good, from afar.  We enjoy freedoms denied to countless others.  In Rwanda, for example, everyone is REQUIRED to participate in certain social activities.  You must attend state-sponsored parades and soldiers go door-to-door to ensure participation.  Everyone is required to attend the local one-day-a-week genocidal 'Gachacha' court systems.  When you vote in 'an election' someone stands beside you to ensure that your thumb marks the correct candidate.  This is not the case in the U.S.  Sure, the U.S is a far cry from the country it should be.  We have a decent legal system and decent human rights legislation but our healthcare and welfare systems are despicable…Cuba bests us in important global categories.  We neglect, marginalize, and forget the poor in the USA and hide this act behind a veneer of politically correct (whatever that means) slogans that nealry always mean the opposite of what they mean literally.

 
1/01/07: Today, I shoot more of this zero-budget Rwanda music video for Jean-Beaufort, a new acquaintance/artist/beer-brewing scientist/and now first-time music video director.

The weather is precarious: alternating back-and-forth in mere minutes between sun, clouds, and torrential down-pores.  We deploy an old rickety bicycle with one flat tire as our dolly, atop which I perch wobblingly and attempt to film a marching hoard of singing kids.  Two assistants attempt to keep the bike upright and rolling but I topple about like a drunken sailor upon a stormy sea.  Jean-Peter, my overly rationalistic friend, tries placing me instead in a rusted-out wheel-barrel but the results are similar.  Amateur-hour reigns. Thereafter, I waste two more hours attempting to do eye morphs of video dancers: a process wherein clear plastic tape is placed over the camera LCD screen upon which is traced the first singers' eyes.  The camera then remains absolutely motionless while the eyes of all subsequent video dancers are lined-up exactly with this tracing.  If done correctly, one may create (in post-production) cool-looking fades/morphs from one singer to the next in which heads morph from one singer to another while eyes remain constant.  Our singers, however, cannot keep their flimsy heads from lolling all over the place and so these efforts too are wasted.  I watch the camera like a hawk lest one of the many milling children latches onto it, something that they seem wont to do.

Today is spent lounging on the porch cursing the dog.  MonsterDog murdered one of our three chickens last night.  Eamonn buries the remains, those that can be found, under a rock, yet Monster Dog has hidden away various bits and pieces for future nibbles.  All day I curse the beast in an effort to make it stop gnawing on these ill-gotten gory gains and to make it stop from generally gnawing on everything in sight…chairs, beds, people, my feet, used toilet-paper...you name it! 

Eamonn's trek up Africa's second tallest peak (Karisimbi Volcano) is cancelled last minute and rescheduled for tomorrow. I think this brings a sigh of relief as Eamonn is still attempting to determine how exactly to erect his rubic-cube of a camping tent. On Friday my new computer will arrive with a visiting group of water-quality-investigating MIT students.  Spoke with brother Kev and sister Tash tonight: they are trying to unravel the unfathomable mystery behind arranging my new Pelican computer case's pick-n-pluck foam - no doubt screwing-up everything - got my fingers crossed.

 
1/02/07: Town meeting today with the CCHIPS house staff to get thing sorted before these five MIT visitors descend upon us.  I type a list of House Rules for the incoming hoard.  One must have rules.  Organized and civil society must be preserved.

1/03/07: A break-through day:  I conduct my first staff interview with Nurse Emannual, a man who greets me every morning with a wide smile and a "SEAN!!  Ca Va?"  For the remainder of the day, he will shout "SEAN!!  Ca Va?" each time that he sees me.  This happens on a daily basis.  The repetition of "SEAN!! Ca Va??" becomes nerve-wearing on occasion, especially on days when I hear it over a dozen times but I do like Emannual and therefore if he is always-and-forever going to be perpetually shocked and delighted to see me, so be it.  He is the only staff member who is present at the clinic WHENEVER we arrive.  This is a good thing.  Emannual is not an actual 'nurse', as he never attended high-school and is therefore officialy classified as a 'Health Worker'.  We call him 'Nurse Emannual' because he seems to be the only person here who actually tends to the patients.  As a Health Worker he is paid the lowest salary of anyone on the medical staff (about $0.72 per day).  I listen to him speak with patients while he bandages their wounds, he talks to them about how to better care for themselves, more than anyone else, Emannual enjoys the human contact aspect of his job; helping the hurt and sick comes naturally to him…he also loves babies and never tires of showing me newborns.  

1/04/07: We collect Eamonn from his two-day trek up Karisimbi Volcano.  His boots and pants are encased in mud and yet his British mug radiates a clean happy energy.  The guide, Felix, reports THAT THIS CRAZY MUZUNGO was at one point sprinting up the 14,000-ft peak whilst waving his porters and twelve-man military escort onwards with all due haste to the peaks of glory.  Eamonn's tale of alpine combat ensues and we learn that his porters each brought exactly one potato to sustain them on the grueling two-day hike.  Felix, the guide, brought only bread and margarine, the later of which he slathered on the former like an over-enthusiastic bricklayer troweling mortar.

On the way home, we pass the health center and spy a swarm of kids playing in the medical waste pit…!  Everything is dumped and burned in that pit: bloody-bandages, used syringes, broken vials, body parts…  We stop and scream at the kids to get the bloody hell out of there!  The infantile mob half-listens to Eli expound upon the dangers of playing in medical waste.  The problem is that the clinic's waste is not thoroughly burned but rather sprinkled with gasoline and ignited - this chars everything but does not destroy all the waste and thus kids jump into the pit to pick through the remains.  When built, the new CCHIPS incinerator will fry all the medical waste to ash and be enclosed behind a security fence - both these attributes shall bring considerable improvement to the local child hygiene and welfare.

 
1/05/07: Eamonn departs for London and is replaced by three MIT student visitors on a three-week study of Bisate water quality.  Joining them is their professor and their professor's daughter, both visiting for just a week.

 
1/06/07: Elie arrives late today because a woman giving birth in a field of beans by his house unexpectedly preoccupied his morning.  The lady was on her way to Ruhengeri Hospital when her water broke miles short of the mark.  She pulled herself into a bean field for privacy and that is where Elie discovered her in time to sacrifice his new shaving razor (cutting the umbilical cord) and his towel (wrapping the baby).  This emergency is preceded by another when Elie's own daughter is taken to hospital sick with serious-sounding symptoms and placed on an IV.

Despite all the newsflashes, it is for us a day of rest.  Quiee-vu-gah – the Rwanda dance in which tribal males heft spears and shake shields while yelling for enemies to beware.

 
1/07/07:  Our friend and local environmental health expert, John-Peter, gives the MIT students a PowerPoint Presentation on what is presently known about the local water situations, sources, and sanitation…  As I am wont to do at PP Presentations, I fall fast asleep.  Elie's daughter returns home from the hospital feeling better.

1/08/07:  All eight of us go to the clinic.  The MIT gang promptly sets off to collect water samples from various Bisate sources: the school, the town pump, the town water tank, Jacqueline's tank, the DFGF Trackers Lodge tank, even two randomly passing jerry cans.  The testing is thorough.  These students are intent on examining each link in the local water chain to see if/and/or/how contaminants enter as it descend s from its high volcanic source to the town well to the town pump and into the children's jerry-cans and onwards down the local gullets.

Four young white females and one older white gentleman freshly transplanted from Boston City, no doubt about it, they cut quite a spectacle in Bisate.  I'm constantly on the run to stay ahead of this roving gang of excited scientists and I confirm immediately that (as hoped) the group does serve as a splendid decoy for distracting attention away from myself.  With the locals finally eyeballing something aside from my own white ass, I'm finally able to capture some shots I've been hoping for… shots impossible to grab when I'm the sole white blip on the local radar screen.  At days end, we return to the clinic, exhausted but contented.

Laura once again finds a sick patient bedded aside a newborn in the maternity ward...a discovery that would be near comical by now in its repetitive nature if the associated danger wasn't so obviously dire.  Laura has been waging an unsuccessful campaign to get the staff to enforce this simple principle: keep diseased patients and newborns SEPARATE!  However, as it has been going, she then returns the following morning to discover another sick patient lying beside another newborn.  The Staff understands and agrees with the principle and yet they seem strangely helpless to enact it.  Changing long-embedded behavior, any behavior, is a tough nut to crack - even when the benefits are crystal clear.  We all must cling to the way we do things…but Jesus Christ stop putting babies and sick people in the same room already!!!!

1/09/07: Day of rest. The MIT group goes off to see The Mountain Gorillas while Laura drives to Kigali to collect a high-school student/volunteer from the airport.  Flora is visiting for three months to work on a soap and a food project for the health center…(a high-school student, just what we need).  Meanwhile, I sit here in my room with my brand new 17' PowerBook DualCore G4 all day and attempt to get caught-up digitizing and logging a distressing backlog of videotapes.

Laura returns with Flora who I notice is much too good-looking to be a high school student.  She is also impressively unfazed by an airline that has just lost all of her luggage.  The girl arrives at our house with nothing.

MonsterDog disinters the buried carcass of a chicken it murdered some weeks ago and endeavors to re-devour it.  The ensuing stench of decay engulfs our house and Laura gags and then shuts her windows, praying that someone else will handle whatever this new nightmare may be.  

1/11/07: If this project is a success it will be because of days like today.  Original plan was to head to Bisate Clinic at 11am but we don't leave town 'til after 2pm due to a stop at Ruhengeri Pharmacy where we cram our LandCruiser full with 2-3 months worth of drugs and medical supplies for the clinic.  In order to fit everything, we pack and then re-pack the Cruiser with an ungodly number of boxes, it takes forever.  This is the enactment of CCHIPS' plan to solve the chronic drug shortages and outages that have plagued the health center for years.  Today, CCHIPS spends $3,000 on drugs, and the center finally jumps a few months ahead of its demand.

Somehow we manage to tessellate ourselves into the vehicle as well and then weigh-anchor for the clinic only to immediately encounter a Chinese road crew and a closed road.  As usual, no sign has been posted to warn of the closure and no information is forthcoming regarding its duration.  Laura's eyes bulge and she goes into her standard tirade of irate screaming, fuming, and fist shaking, after which we wait an hour for the road-machines to clear.

The mood at the clinic is buoyant when we arrive.  More buoyant then I've seen before.  Sunset is an hour away and the day is warm and breezy.  A fair-sized crowd gathers to watch the pharmacy's shelves disappear beneath an onslaught of supplies.  I set-up a time-lapse shot of the Cruiser being unloaded and then lend a hand.  It feels good to carry the supplies inside.  Locals join the effort and the Cruiser is quickly emptied with smiles all around.  The mood is heightened upon learning that several patients on the verge of leaving the clinic due to drug outages can now stay. Outages at Bisate Health Center are over for now.

We've brought new pillows for the patient beds and so the locals are also treated to another 'Bisate First': beds with clean new mattresses, clean new sheets, clean new bedcovers, clean new blankets, and clean new pillowcases on clean new pillows.  It's hard to imagine a more simplistic and inexpensive upgrade and yet the improvement to overall mood is noticeable.  Our only disappointment today is that project founder, Ro Wyman, is not here to share this experience with us - a day that is a rejection of every apathetic soul who bemoans the futile inability of individuals to make a difference.  To those who hold such notions, to those whose humanitarian concerns begin and end in a hapless shrug and a 'what can you do?', to you I answer that the shocking thing is not that an individual can do so little but rather that so many individuals do nothing whatsoever. Mother Teresa once described our limitations as individuals by saying "we can only do small things but with great love."

I keep seeing a little boy with an unsettling face.  Kid can't be more than five years old and yet has such a sad world-weariness to him that it would be comical if it weren't so permanent.  It's an expression I've never seen on such a young face. No one can entice a smile from Mr. Serious.

A newborn greets us in Maternity, a good day.  Then Laura discovers a sick patient in the same room and hits-the-roof so hard that Bisate Clinic is momentarily in danger of instantaneous skylight renovations.  I'll write no further on the subject. 

We almost hit a man on the way home and indeed the man does a little dance over our hood but the Cruiser's breaks save him from a visit to the emergency and, quite likely, the cemetery as well.  Locals trodding this road seem to be stone-deaf and entirely incapable of detecting anything so inconspicuous as a oncoming-high-speed-honking-vehicle.  One of these days we're going to clobber someone but good.
 

1/12/07: Back to the Clinic today. Our high-schooler is impressive, I must admit. A Nutritional Garden is first on the list and Ms. Flora starts right in tilling the clinic's front field while a large local audience gapes in amazement at this young hoe-wielding Muzungo.

The sick ward: a young woman lies in bed covered-over from head to toe by a sheet while crying, moaning, gasping, wheezing.  It is an awful mixture of hyperventilating and shrieking – both common symptoms we're told of mental trauma. Cannot bring myself to film this.  It would be gripping, chilling, heart-wrenching footage but I've never seen anyone in such a state!  Chastise myself afterwards for being cowardly and unprofessional.  Hadn't the heart to capture this one.

A crazy old pygmy lady with a face dired like a prune starts harassing us in the Clinic courtyard and is repeatedly run off by the nurses only to reappear seconds later.  A crowd forms to enjoy the spectacle and the lady has them roaring at her sign-lingual attempts to communicate with us Muzungos.  She's made for the big-stage and uses an exaggerated array of comedic gesticulations to indicate a desire for food, money, and (from the way she's acting) more banana beer.  Bit awkward.  Drives home our ever-present dillema of no handouts…our policy is to avoid handouts like this because it will only encourage everyone else to constantly pester us for the same.

1/13/07: The MIT girls and I trudge into town to visit Ruhengeri Market.  The girls appear to assume that I know where we're going and so I say nothing to correct this misassumption.  I've been living here for several months and I probably should know where the market is by now…perhaps I even do.  Confident in my masculine sense-of-direction, I lead us to the wrong part of town where we wonder about aimlessly in circles for half-an-hour whilst I steadfastly refuse to ask directions and instead continuously reassure the girls that the bloody market is somewhere just up ahead…my house of cards soon collapses and I admit that I haven't the foggiest clue...I AM however 100% positive that the marketplace has not been placed where it certainly should have been placed.

After the girls request directions we locate the market and find ourselves immersed in a claustrophobic affair of sprawling wooden stalls that stretch a square city block.  The butcher's stall is manned by machete-wielding hacker who lifts a swarm of flies off the meat haunch with each blow.  No meat for me today thanks.

The clothing stalls are stuffed with shirts advertising every failed American TV show from the last thirty years.  The shoe stalls dangle their wares from every wooden inch of surface while beyond, over the marketplace wall, rises an enormous green hill topped with a puffy-clouded blue sky.

1/14/07: We shoot more of Jean-Beaufort's music video today.  The 'classroom scene', replete with twenty small children with distressingly miniscule bladders follows the 'kid waking up scene'.  Quite tired today - under confidant that we capture anything of quality.

Major storm hits as we're returning home in the late afternoon.  Electricity goes off and on and off.  I turn in early.

Dog again digs up dead chicken that we buried weeks ago…made aware of this when the smell nearly drops us in our tracks.  Gabby buries the ever-increasingly gnawed carcass deeper.

1/15/07: We retrieve Flora's lost luggage and proceed to the Clinic where Laura discovers that the nurse in charge of hospitalization is stinking drunk.  Laura asks the clinic titular if it's safe to have a stinking-drunk nurse caring for patients.  The Head replies that this stinking-drunk nurse is not nearly as stinking-drunk as he usually is, and so not to worry...how resoundingly comforting. <br>Laura discovers the quality of the local volunteer effort suffers when she is not present to supervise it…two small rooms were supposed to be cleaned this morning look untouched, cobwebs and all (reportedly, they were cleaned this morning by seven volunteers).

Laura and Jacqueline spend an hour discussing the clinic's accounting.  The books and book-keeping methods are in an absolute shambles.  I do not envy the task of sorting it all out.  However, Laura is converting everything to QuickBooks and I trust her to have things shipshape in a month or two. 

Today's success story is that no newborns are found in the same room as sick patients.  After so many consecutive days of Laura exploding over this issue, this news is a relief.  The only problem Laura encounters today (aside from a stinking-drunk nurse and a non-cleaning cleaning crew) is that the pillows on the patient beds have no pillowcases on them…so this does at least permit her a rendition of "this is very bad!" which is her daily-due at this point.

Greg from Amahoro tours takes us on a tour of his Ruhengeri Guest House where future CCHIPS personnel may stay.  Nice place, impressive man.  Wife passed away last year and Greg now has three small children on his hands.  Fortunately, he's also got an unusually powerful entrepreneurial spirit and around here that puts him well ahead of the pack.  He is, I think, doing quite well for himself.

We visit the hilltop Pygmies and order two of their baked-clay plant pots.  I get a big hug from a little pygmy grandmother and stare on in surprise as a small child waddles past us in true Rwandan fashion with a baby strapped to its back…however the child is no more than an inch taller than the baby she's carrying!  I'm impressed.  I then videotape a boy with Dumbo-sized ears.  The surrounding pygmies start cackling because the correctly surmise that I'm filming this kid because he's got freeky-looking Dumbo ears.  Quite true.

Gabby makes a world-class dinner of rice, veggies, guacamole, and beans.  Although sick with Malaria as well as something else the Doctors cannot identify, our guest Nando (a deranged round-the-world Spanish cyclist) is still a pleasure to have at the dinner table.  Anyone who bikes across Africa while being deathly-ill and yet can still manage to make fun of themselves and everyone else too is Aces in my book.  Crazy of course, but still Aces.  

1/16/07: Drive to the clinic today with Flora and Nando.  Stop on the way to visit a Musahe (old man), Kacquera, who crafts the beautiful walking sticks that we see all the local Musahes carrying.  The old guys also wear wide-brimmed Seahorse cowboy hats that, depending on whether the left or right or both brims are turned upwards, advertise how many cows that man owns. 

We're detecting a tendency in this country for people NOT to plan ahead.  When a supply of something, say, for example, vital life saving drugs…runs out, someone thereafter exclaims "Oh my God, is finished!!"  Whatever is finished then remains finished until it can be re-ordered and re-collected a good many days or months later and tough-toenails to anyone who suffers and dies in the meanwhile.  Anyways, thinking of the future is not a Rwandan attribute.  They seem to live only in the now, in this day. 

Today the "Oh my God it's finished!" something is paint.  The painters have had weeks to prepare for the final phase of the painting.  In a meeting with Laura they assured her that all necessary supplies were on hand.  Today, however, they come to do the actual painting and…"Oh my God paint finished!!"  After this discovery they look at Laura blankly, waiting, I suppose, for her to clap her hands and conjure paint from thin air or else dash out and drive the five hours to Kigali to fetch some more.  Laura (as she is wont to do) HITS THE FUCKING ROOF!!!"  She answers with such an earful of angry distain that the project supervisor crumbles like a human piñata of cascading excuses.  The man cannot meet Laura's eyes but rather stands there with a hung and shaking head, murmuring that 'the Holidays were crazy…. crazy!' 

In other news: days ago, Laura bought a large bolt of beautiful cloth to have turned into window curtains for the clinic.  She gave the bolt to the local Bisate seamstress and ordered the curtains cut into 4.5-meter-long sections.  Today the man delivers curtains cut into 1.5-meters-long sections and, rather than making a single curtain to be approved by Laura as requested, he has instead cut all of the curtains to this same dimension.  Laura is incredulous. 

More political intrigue when we return home…but I cannot now remember what this was.  

1/21/07: I stay up much too late working on the project video trailer.  Go to bed at 4am and ruin myself for the following day.  Cutting a 2-minute 'teaser trailer' is not easy.  Two of the patients in it, an old man and a young girl, are now dead.  Ethical and moral questions bubble.  I'm not being paid to do this.  I'm doing it because I want to do something worthwhile…but am I exploiting sick people for my own gain?  There's no way around this question.  My intentions are good though, I think, and I'm trying to be polite about it.  

1/22/07: I'm exhausted all day long.  Should have stayed home and slept.  Instead, I follow Laura up to the clinic to shoot for an hour until I can shoot no more.  I drag myself into the back of the LandCruiser and fall asleep.  Half conscious, I hear there has been an auto accident and the injured are being brought in…but I am so goddamn tired that I'm only able to nod my head and pass out again.  Our good friend and budding environmental health scientist, Jean-Peter, has located a potential A1 nurse for Bisate Health Center!  Obtaining an A1 nurse would be a HUGE feather in Bisate's cap.  A1 nurses have actual nursing-school degrees.  A2 nurses have high-school degrees only while A3 nurses don't even have that.  Bisate Clinic is staffed exclusively with A2 & A3 nurses.  Rwanda has an extraordinarily short supply of A1's - something in the vicinity of only 2,000 for a country of 9 million.  Each year's small crop of new A1 graudates are gobbled up immediately by the countries' few large hospitals.  In these parts, no clinic have any A1 nurses.  Today, however, humble Bisate Clinic is being visited by an A1 nurse named Alphonsine, who is apparently interested in working here!   An offer will be made to sign her to a one-year work contract but I'm skeptical: why would an A1 consider working in the boondocks of Bisate when much higher-paying (and, I'm sure, more satisfying) work can easily be procured at a big city hospital?  It's unfortunate but I'd say that the first grounds for immediately disqualifying any potential A1 candidates from consideration is if the show a genuine interest in working here!  Something must be very wrong with them.

The MIT girls are a pleasant bunch.  We joke around and kill time by munching these annoying 100-calorie snack packs and tubes of Pringles.  

1/23/07: I wake early to finish the video trailer.  Must finish as we're going to the capital today and I'll be handing it to a woman who's flying to the States tonight and she will in return hand it to my partner in NYC.

Tense day in Kigali: Sis, Eli, and Flora all go off on various errands.  I sit in the DFIF office working furiously at creating two CDs of project materials for my NYC partner, Peter.  Cataloging hundreds of pictures takes all day and I end up burning the CDs at the last second while driving to drop them off. 

Before returning to Ruhengeri we stop for dinner at Kigali's sole Italian Restaurant (Papyrus) where we enjoy our first Western food in months.  

 
1/24/07: A warm sunny day with a slight breeze.  A package arrives from our Mother filled with godly things like block extra sharp cheddar cheese and boxes of Wheat Thins and gourmet pepperoni…oganic pudding, yogurt cultures…my! my! my!  Thankfully the MIT students are away in Kigali today and will never need to know about this special delivery, the items of which are quietly spirited off to sundry hiding places. 

Two of Nando's (the mad Spanish Cyclist) friends come for dinner.  One is a Japanese man who has biked here…from China!!!  The other is a German who has biked here from…Germany!!!   Who are these crazy bastards?  The Japanese man, we are interested to hear, has developed the ability to smell what a country will be like as he is crossing its boarder.  Rwanda he says smells of people and green.  

1/25/07: A staff meeting at the clinic to discuss Internal Policies.  The discussion revolves around an awkwardly tacit staff desire to have non.

Visiting university student comes for dinner.  He's studying traditional medicine vs. modern medicine and informs us that there is rampant paranoia within Rwandan society of neighbors poisoning each other!  Apparently much sickness and misfortune is blamed upon poisoning at the hands of one's neighbor.  Seems this poisoning can be transmitted either through actual concoctions or through a sort of voodoo spell.  

1/26/06: Inspection today of the clinic continues for hours by the District Administrator, Emmanual.  Laura can barely contain her inner-rage as Emannual and his committee make what, in her view, are shoddy observations from shoddy supervisors who offer no solutions whatsoever (not even shoddy ones) and who care primarily about cosmetic improvements.  Their questions go something like:  "Do you have a computer?"  Yes…but we can't use it, no electricity.  "Oh well, as long as you have one, that's the important thing." 

It rains…what else is new. 

1/27/06: During my first days at the clinic I witnessed a remarkable transformation that came from just a few hours of volunteers scrubbing dirt and grime off the ward walls.  It was an easy task requiring a bit of bleach and a few cheap scrubbers and yet it was something that hadn't been done in years, if ever.  This task was completed due solely to the outside influences of CCHIPS.  I had wondered during those early days why the locals hadn't done this sort of easy, cheap, and basic cleaning all along?  Did the community not care?  Do they NOT want/need/expect a clean medical center?  I found no answers then.  My answer now is that there is a noticeable lack of initiative among the local population when it comes to doing 'community work'.  One might argue that the nation-wide 'Umuganda' (community-works program) is proof that community work is ingrained in the culture but I would disagree.  Umuganda is a day that occurs once a month during which all citizens are required to do community work.  The population performs this work because it's told to do it, not because it wishes to do it.  When Laura asks the Health Workers to organize a community service day to dig drainage ditches and fill the clinic driveway with rocks the reply is 'we cannot do anything 'til the end of the month because we must wait for Umuganda.'  There's no sense that community work can be done on any other day of the month, there's no sense that people can organize themselves for such things.  'Western' notionns of self-initiative & forward thinking & thinking 'outside the box' are qualities one rarely encounters here.

Beasts of burden are unknown.  Bisate locals work incredibly hard hauling water and farming crops by hand – crops are harvested by hoe-wielders and transported atop individual heads.  Many walk long distances to collect polluted water and when sickness strikes these people go to a filthy health clinic where the general nursing attitude seems to be get better or die.  Such hardships are the norm.  No one complains; there is no one to complain to.  The clinic has been horribly mismanaged for years and yet no one has ever questioned or protested the gross variety of criminal behavior & negligence that have characterized the place.  Drug supplies run out with regularity, diabetes and blood pressure medications are unknown, newborns and mothers are bedded aside the diseased.  Years of clinic accountings are bogus, the health stats are absurd fabrications, money has been stolen, land misused, employees cheated…and never has an opposing voice been raised.  Rather than complaining about the clinic it seems the people just do their best to avoid it altogether.  Most still go to the traditional healers.

With regards to changing and improving things, the local attitude seems cemented around a self-immobilizing notion that improvement and changes are possible only through outside help – namely NGOs and National Government.  No matter that this area receives the least amount of NGO support in the country and that NGO support overall has been steadily declining throughout Rwanda each year and that one hears suspiciously little about NGO projects that have actually made a sustainable difference.

Could the post-genocidal rush of every global NGO to Rwanda leave behind a country so utterly dependent upon outsiders for everything that self-initiative ceases to exist?  What happens when critical problems remain unaddressed?  When community leaders sit idle?  When a clinic is left to rot?  All because of an attitude that eschews self-initiate and self-reliance in favor of a mentality dictating that "only rich outsiders can fix the problems."  There are too few rural Rwandans with entrepreneurial spirit, too few with a lets-it-ourselves attitude.  Perhaps there is too little trust in rural Rwandan communities…how can everyone work together for the betterment of everyone when there is so little trust among everyone?  Is it impossible?  And yet Rwanda's rapid improvements since the genocide have made it the poster-child African countries.  The government does seem to be somewhat competent, honest, and motivated…but these qualities have not yet trickled down to the individual communities in the north. 
 

1/28/07: Quiet day:  Edited Rosamond Carr's memorial.  You can see it on YouTube.com<br>A cheese day: we munch cheese and delectable pepperoni with friends Katie and Glen while lounging on our front porch.  Few things better than a good cheese day. 

MIT Students depart.  

1/29/07: We meet the health center staff in town this morning to truck everyone to the photo shop and then to Caisse Sociale where each will sign them up for his or her Social Security.  Ironically, the old head of the health center, Ali (who was pocketing the staff's Caisse Sociale for years and never openend accounts for anyone) walks past exactly as we're picking everyone up at the bus station.  Everyone says hi and no one mentions where we're headed.

After a day at the clinic, we head home and pass a group huddled around a woman on the ground.  We stop to pickup this woman.  She has been hit by a bicycle and blood is rapidly saturating her dress.  The guy who hit her climbs aboard as well (if you injure someone you pay their hospital bills).  We drive them to the hospital while the injured lady rips angrily into the silent, contrite-looking young biker for the duration of the trip.