March 2006

SEAN BLOG - March 2007: 4th Month in Rwanda

BACKGROUND:  Lying a spear’s throw from the Ugandan and Congo boarders amidst the towering volcanoes of Central Africa sits a tiny Rwandan town called Bisate.  My sister, Laura, arrived here in September 2006 to upgrade the town’s Health Center which serves 20,000 people and has no electricity, no water, no doctors, no sanitation, no sterilization, no waste disposal system, no bed-sheets, blankets, or pillows, frequent drug outages, no food, no nurses with higher than high-school educations (and none with nursing-school degrees), and no window-panes that hadn’t been blacked-out with black paint (due to a curtain shortage).  Laura found a dark, dank, foul-smelling place, in which young and old suffered, recovered, or died from or despite a complete lack of basic medical necessities.  Laura is field directing a small project focused on improving these miserable conditions.  A local man, Elie, has been hired to be Laura’s project manager and translator.  Elie’s sister came to this clinic one year ago to deliver her baby but no medical staff were present to help her, she bled to death and the baby died with her.  The clinic has been criminally mismanaged for several years and is frequently devoid of any staff whatsoever.  However, no one in the Bisate community complains, there is no one to complain to, and there is no idea that there is anything to complain about – this is what healthcare is like here, period.  A month after Laura’s arrival, I follow her to document the project; below is my account:

“No one ever dies.” – quote from Bisate clinician

3/2/07
We drive two hours to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, where we stop at the airport to bid our project president, Ro Wyman, farewell…only to learn seconds later that her flight has been cancelled (Rwanda, thankfully, is NOT one of those arrogant countries where passengers can ‘call ahead’ to check on their flight’s status).  Ro will be spending another night upon African soil.  Meanwhile, I bounce over to Kigali’s fancy-shmancy Novitel Hotel for my first haircut in a year - my friend Glen swears that these Novitel barbers are the only ones in the country who can cut ‘Muzungo hair’ (White Man hair).  I wait my turn beside my friend Gabby (our House Manager & Cook) and watch as he chomps upon a freshly baked giant croissant, most of which is crumbling down his chin and onto the barbershop floor.  Every three minutes a woman with a broom and scoop obligingly appears to scoop away these croissant-crumblings.  I watch this in horror.  After a while, the woman also points to my own as-yet un-munched croissant and beckons for me to begin slobbing away as well, waving at her broom and scoop to indicate that she’s all ready for me.  I shake my head in shock and place my crumbly consumable away for later.  A floor isn’t a plate!

With regards to my haircut…I’d thought I’d seen it all…my poor head-o-hair has been butchered around the globe from Hanover to Hanoi (where a Vietnamese chap once used nothing but a straight razor).  Rwanda ads a novel twist today when the barber, upon encountering my hairy white neck, exchanges his sharp razor for a dull one and the ensuing mow is so painful that it leaves all my remaining hair standing on end (kudos if this was an intentional hair-styling technique)…but this pain is nothing…NOTHING! …compared to the intensely riveting agony uncorked when this barbarous barber bastard douses my freshly-shorn-neck-flesh with a liberal dollop of Hydrogen Peroxide!  I stifle a scream as my face turns as red as a Stop sign and my hands vice-grip the seat sides.  Were I a POW I’d a spilled every last military secret in record time.  Anyways, after this hairy interrogation, I seek solace beside the hotel pool and start nibbling on a mini pizza (comfort food) while Gabby sits across from me gorging himself sick on his first-ever giant chocolate éclair…all of which, I note, is somehow making it into his mouth.

Laura collects us from poolside and we rendezvous at ‘Modern Supermarket’ (actual name), which is such a wonderfully restorative civilized refreshingly westernized-type-of-place…and sheer Heaven after these many months of surviving in a town that hasn’t got any butter!  Next door to ‘Modern Supermarket’ is Rwanda’s first ever ‘Starbucks-type coffee place’: it’s newly opened and we take refuge inside for a blissful hour of sucking down grande-sized-cappa-mocha-chino-latte-bullshit-type drinks while envisioning that we’re in Manhattan with a Barnes & Nobles just downstairs.  Our translator, Eli, imbibes upon his oversized mocha-latte-caramel-whipped-cream-venti-crazyccino drink like a bear with a honey-pot, stirring it occasionally with a dreamy expression, while intoxicantly intoning “you know Sean this is beer, I am making beer here...”  It is the closest we come to a religious experience in Rwanda.


3/3/07:
Play a vigorous game of tennis with Glen this morning and I might add that since commencing this bourgeois sport a few weeks ago I have yet to lose a single match!  Apparently being a natural-born athlete is my cross to bear.  Our 18-year old vunder-volunteer, Flora, is sick today and cannot play.  I’m concerned, as one can only imagine the ravages inflicted upon a delicate Western immune system by four months of Ethiopian Orphanage living (from whence Flora has just come) followed by three months of rural Rwandan living (her current pursuit)…but Flora is a tough nut, you’ll see, and I am betting she’ll be just fine and dandy by tomorrow.


3/4/07:
Flora continues to feel sick today and so unless something changes quickly I suspect she’s on the verge of becoming the first white person to be treated at Bisate Clinic.  I personally cringe at the thought, as this would no doubt necessitate the collection and delivery of a fresh fecal sample…call me a limpid leprechaun but such degradations are beyond the pale for me – just too fricken mortifying for my delicate sensibilities – better to die.

Cannot recall what I did today…something of import no doubt…if you know what I did on this day today please write me at sean.clauson@gmail.com.

Days here blend together and dissipate like smoke rings in the wind and concepts such as Time and The Future are only as meaningful as the rain clouds on the horizon.

3/5/07:
Together, Flora and I have diligently ploughed halfway through the first season of ‘Lost’ (on DVD) only to abandon it today when Flora officially declares it monkey manure.  I regrettably agree…the series began all right but has corkscrewed rather quickly into a nonsensical mess where the more you learn the less you understand and the further you go the closer you arrive at concluding that this particular narrative is a treadmill to mindless oblivion.  So we chuck it all in favor of a sure bet: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy!  Now THIS is a SAGA!  Love the books, love the movies…only drawback is that since becoming sick a few days ago Flora now needs to take bathroom-breaks at five minute intervals!...so I glue the Pause button to one thumb and dust off my waiting skills…God Damn Intestinal Parasites!

Relevant Side Note:  Here in the tiny Muzungo (White Person) Community of Ruhengeri, one’s status is tied directly one’s DVD collection, which, in turn, is inversely related to one’s sanity.  Let me explain.  There are nine Muzungos living here and all of us are in the same predicament - cut off from our societies, friends, and families, in a place where beyond these barbed-wire-topped compound walls there is extremely little in the way of recreation, entertainment, or fun.  We therefore have scant recourse but to immerse ourselves frequently in Hollywood’s Finest in order to achieve a measure of stress relief.  Indeed, our collective sanity is so DVD-dependent that everyone is somewhat perpetually on the prowl for new movies – and one finds oneself too frequently receiving or releasing long diatribes of “seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it…” while flipping though someone’s collection.  The most popular Muzungos here are the ones with the largest DVD collections but these larger collections also denote longer stays within country and, thus, are quite accurate indications of the owner’s mental deterioration (since the longer one stays the crazier one becomes).  Therefore the ‘coolest’ most respected Muzungos among us are the craziest as well…so here I sit eyeing my own rapidly growing DVD collection with equal parts trepidation and pride.  In layman’s terms: these disks are the equivalent to radioactive bars of gold.  And, yes, Amazon.com delivers to Ruhengeri J


3/6/07:
We make a late afternoon trip up to the clinic stopping on our way to collect a handyman named Joseph who may be in charge of building the new Meeting Area structure.  We stop at the fancy Gorillas Nest Hotel to show Joseph an example of what’s structurally desired…and a good thing too because we discover the man has completely misunderstood Laura’s initial explanations of what’s wanted and has instead drawn-up plans with triple the previously agreed upon number of support beams…the guy’s got beams all over the place…where the hell are the people going to go, we wonder!  My gut tells me this chap ain’t fit for the job – building a mud & stick hut is one thing, building the Greek-temple Laura is describing is quite another...

Entering the clinic yard, we find work on the new water-catchment system in progress; some of the rain gutters are already up and the reinforced cement base for the four 10,000- Liter water storage tanks (which those gutters will be feeding) is nearing completion.

A woman is carried in on a stretcher.  She cannot walk so Nurse Emmanuel partly carries and partly drags her to a bed.


3/7/07:
I lie in my bed logging footage for several hours before escaping off for tennis with Flora.  All that’s keeping me sane right now is Yogurt, my kitty-cat, Gomi, and Tennis.  During our match, my serve discovers itself and suddenly I’m hammering balls so speedily past Flora that she is unable to see them as they zoom past her for ace after ace after ace after ace…  My life-long-tennis-winning-streak is kept very much alive.  

On the way home, we’re bouncing along a rutted lane when the Land-Cruiser is suddenly besieged on all sides by a pack of local urchins one of whom has the audacity to jump onto our moving vehicle (these local whippersnappers are wont to do such things)!  I scream, screech to a halt, throw open the door, and tear after an exploding beehive of adolescents while waving my arms about in a tizzy.  The one I’m after sprints away so swiftly he leaves behind one of his sandals which I violently grab-up and shake in the air before springing back into the Cruiser and triumphantly burning rubber out of there with the punk’s footwear clutched firmly in one paw and the flames of madness dancing inside my retinas.  In the rearview, I see the one-sandaled tyke reemerge from a bush and hop pathetically after us.  I open my window as we vanish from sight and send his footwear hurtling into the air out over a big field of potatoes.  “Suck on that you little bastard!” I scream, and then apologize to Flora for being such a psycho.  These little Rwandan runts are driving me slowly insane.  

Laura too is also steadily “losing it”.  She blows her stack at tonight’s meeting with Elie (our translator) and Jacqueline (the head clinic nurse).  Laura has spent the last several months agonizingly computerizing all the clinic’s health data in order to remedy the chronic accounting errors and omissions that have plagued this clinic’s books since forever.  Laura’s knows this new computerized system will free Jacqueline from hours upon hours she currently spends every week checking, re-checking, and transcribing all this health data by hand!  Tonight, however, after the entirety of the data has finally been entered and updated and victory assumed, Laura suddenly finds her-self eyeballing Jacqueline who is transcribing all this entered and tallied and verified computerized data back into handwriting!!!  “What! What are you doing?” asks Laura, “I’ll print you a copy!!”  Jacqueline, however, declines, replying that she must of course transcribe everything back into handwriting since the Ministry of Education Office only accepts hand-written data!…printed data isn’t considered “trustworthy”, you see, while handwritten data is considered “trustworthy”…and so of course we must transcribe everything back into handwriting so the Head Office can see that our data is “truthful” and can then type it into their computer.  To reiterate, to accurately compile our clinic’s medical & financial data and comply with local filing customs, we must take the clinic’s handwritten records, transcribe these into our computer, then re-transcribe this digital data back into handwriting so that it may be re-verified by someone who will then re-re-transcribe it back into another computer…(for me it recalls that line from A Beautiful Mind “petrified, mortified, stupefied”)…it’s like we’re playing the adult version of that infantile game called ‘Telephone’.

Laura totters upon the edge of a mental breakdown.


3/8/07:
Yours Truly makes the best dang yogurt he ever tasted and then spends much of the day tasting it.  Had hoped to play tennis with Flora this morning but she’s busy in the backyard rearing baby plants for the clinic’s new nutritional program and Glen, our tennis-playing neighbor, is off to Uganda all week…so no tennis for me today.  

Got great news yesterday that Eamonn’s (my sister’s boyfriend) job in Saudi Arabia appears to be going through.  Laura is tickled.

My birthday package arrives two weeks late.  Inside are 3 boxes of Wheat Thins (the best dang cracker in the whole world).  For some devilish reason one box of Wheat Thins has been marked “For Gabby” (our cook)!  What the hell is my Mom thinking!  I mean whose fucking birthday is it anyways!  But anyhow, two rounds of cheese, three pudding packs, and, joy upon joy, three delectable rolls of gourmet pepperoni…so Mom has done me proud.  Local meat is disagreeable, gristly, chewy, relentless stuff that makes one sick…hence my behavior towards this special imported gourmet viand is somewhat akin to that of a captive cabbage-fed Veloci-raptor set free in a cattle yard.  


3/9/07:
We go to the clinic.  I shoot time-lapse footage of the roof going up over a nearly completed water storage enclosure.  My Super 8mm snaps away at 1 frame every 5 seconds while my DVX-100 rolls on the scene in regular mode (24PA) - I’ll speed this up in post.  The cement base is done, the roof is completed today, now we’re just awaiting delivery of our 10,000-L Aquasan water storage tanks and for the first time ever Bisate Clinic will have a reliable water supply.

Every week we ferry several jerry cans (20-L each) of purified drinking water to the clinic for consumption by work staff and in-patients.  This water is purified at our project house using a truly revolutionary nano-filtration system that we’re field-testing for Seldon Laboratories.  The filtration system is powered by a bike pump which sends the water from an intake bucket up into a pre-filter (to filter the large substrates) and then into a nano filter which cleans the water at a molecular level!  The nano filter is so effective that the water comes out sterile… it’s cleaner - much cleaner - than what we’re drinking in the United States!…I mean this stuff is clinically injectable!!  And it tastes absolutely heavenly.  Today however we forget that we’ve also brought up an unmarked jerry-can of petrol along with all our usual jerry-cans of water…and so the clinic handyman, Joseph, dumps all of these into the clinic’s communal water container.  Whoops!  Joseph immediately realizes his mistake and when we find him he is in a frightful state, apparently convinced that he’s about to lose his job…but we pooh-pooh the error and quite correctly blame ourselves.

Complaint Time: our Cruiser is invariably filled to the gills with locals.  Ours is one of the few vehicles to travel this road and it’s certainly the only one providing free rides to all comers while serenading them with Johnny Cash.  Riding in this overpopulated Land-Cruiser is an experience I’ve come to loath – every frickin day invariably concludes with my tired body being crunched and trash-compacted into the back of this sardine can with a slew of locals whom – and I am NOT disparaging anyone here – but many of whom stink!  Additionally, it is quite frustrating that once the Cruiser is packed like this my filmmaking whims go out the window.  I can no longer ask Laura to stop the vehicle so that I may shoot something…I can’t make everyone just sit there and wait for me!  How bloody rude!  And so the number of magnificent sunsets I’ve forgone capturing because all these fucking people are always in the way will haunt me ‘til my dying day.  But today….Today is different…today I say SCREW IT!…today with the Cruiser as packed full as ever I tell Laura to pull over.  The horizon is a mass of encroaching volcanoes and massive clouds backlit by a spectacular sunset on the loose …and I mean to capture it regardless of how long everyone has to wait for me.  I’m a goddamn artist, god-damn-it!  So Sis pulls over, I jump out and start clicking away with the Super 8mm, and immediately am beset by irritating locals who begin demanding money the second they see my camera – I’m very careful not to point it at anyone and keep explaining that I’ve absolutely no interest whatsoever in taking their stupid photos - and yet the constant din for dollars is hard to ignore – so, I simply bare it for as long as I possibly can and continue capturing most excellent footage of the clouds and mountains blasted from behind by a falling solar orb…and when I can stand the din no longer I grab the camera and scamper back to safety.

Flora and I play some last-minute setting-sun-type-tennis.  She’s somehow improving faster than I am…a concern…may have to very soon resort to trash talking her in order to gain that all-important psychological edge (in sport, as in war, every advantage must be sought).

Laura spends the end of her day cleaning and then re-cleaning the clinic’s communal water tank which we’ve brought back down with us…the smell of petrol is still quite noticeable…she calls our hygiene expert John-Peter for advice, he researches the problem and phones us back the exact ingredients and measurements required to clean it.

3/11/07:
My morning tennis lesson concludes and a little tyke who is always hanging around the court asks me for a ride…assuming he means a ride home, I tell him to jump in.  We drive five minutes down a road to the corner where I’ve dropped him before…but this time he points onwards down the lane…having no idea where this kid lives, I drive onwards, following his pointing finger.  We proceed to circle the neighborhood.  Every so often, I ask hano? (here?) but the kid keeps pointing me forwards…so I keep driving forwards.  We pass my house and then make a complete circle back around to the exact same point where we had begun…I look at the kid.  He points forwards again just like before and it dawns on me that this twerp just wants to ride around in the goddamn car!  I open his door for him and politely kick him the bloody hell out.   


3/12/07:
Awake at 7am to my third tennis lesson in as many days.  Coach is a young twenty-something punk with minimal English who has, perhaps, improved my game maybe a little bit, I guess.  We end our hour-long session and I await my pickup as ‘Coach’ runs me down the now familiar conversational pathway of “will you buy me a phone” followed by “will you pay for my English lessons”.  Young rural Rwandans begin making these requests the moment they meet you.  There appears to be no concept of perhaps cultivating a friendship or of pursing any sort of relationship beyond that of an immediate handout.  The offshoot is that, to a large degree, this precludes most possibilities of making local friends – it’s impossible to form a friendship when the first and only subject of conversation is how much can I donate to ‘my new friend’.  Young and old here seem quite indoctrinated on the idea that foreigners are nothing but sources of free shit…we’re not humans, we’re ATMs.  In the local view, us giving donations is our only reason for existing, they’re expecting us to exhale cash, and aside from that they’ve no use for us.  So my group of Rwandan friends is severely limited.


3/13/07:
I awake in one of my terrible moods.  Don’t know what brings these on…they just pop up from time to time for a day or two.  My acute distemper remains untrammeled as we waste all the afternoon hours hiking aimlessly up and down and across steep forested hills on a wild-goose-chase searching for suitably fat trees to serve as colonnades for our clinic’s new Meeting Area/Temporary Kitchen structure.  Rwandan trees, however, are like Rwandan people – skinny – and we find precisely squat.  My terrible mood does manage, however, to find a great deal about which to be continuously moody about.

Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.  Sometimes it just seems that the efforts of one tiny project such as ours can hardly aspire to the level of meaningless drop in the bucket!  If we’re here, if we’re not here, does it matter?  White people come and white people go – rich important people on world-saving missions - but look around and what do you see?  Nothing.  Are we changing anything for the better?  Are we fooling ourselves with superficially short-lasting touchups?  Is our project this year’s trite fad and next year’s forgotten memory?  Are we even wanted here.  In Africa, one seems to hear much about how astoundingly asinine, incompetent, and misplaced the values, goals, methods, and results of these white-skinned Western do-gooder NGO-types truly are.  You frequently hear nasty comments about UN aid workers too…and yet all these major outside organizations must be doing something right, right?  Given the mounds of money and people being thrown at these projects, they must be accomplishing a great deal of good, right?  Right.  Perhaps it’s just the nature of news: bad news travels further, faster, and lasts longer while good news seldom makes it past the front door.  Do we just not hear about the successful projects?  Or do the vast majority of projects simply fail because they’re aimed at ‘improving’ cultures whose traditions, values, and beliefs are entirely alien to these outside do-gooders?  Are these projects inherently doomed to failure due simply to our intrinsically different value systems and utterly dissimilar ways in which we view the world?  We don’t understand them, they don’t understand us; we’re on entirely different playing fields playing entirely different games…I mean it’s not even the same sport.  When informed that UN refugee camp aid workers in Sudan return each evening to $300/night luxury hotel rooms, one’s eyes unavoidably roll…but whether such stories are true, I’ve no idea.  This is just what I hear.  But look around you, what do you see?  Nothing.

Hate these bad moods of mine – actually never noticed until this project what a moody SOB I am – but they are quite decidedly real.  I’ll awake and realize pronto that today is ‘one of those days’ and that is that, there’s nothing I can do to snap out of it, on those days I just try to steer clear of conversation and keep to myself as best I can.


3/14/07:
Thankfully my crappy mood lasts only one day.  Awake at 6am feeling fine and drive to Ruhengeri Prison for my first ever Kinya-rwanda language lesson.  Got nothing else to do, so figure I’ll learn the local lingo and hopefully it will help me with my filmmaking.  I park the Land-Cruiser as a troupe of pink-clad, hoe-carrying prisoners marches out the prison gate shepherded along by a guard with an AK-47 dangling lazily from one arm.  Another guard steps over to ask what I want and I try explaining about my lessons while admiring the nasty scar that curls up one of his cheeks and ends just below his eye-socket – how did you get that little beauty mark I wonder.  A twenty-minute discussion ensues during which pink-uniformed messengers disappear and rematerialize through the front gate as the powers-that-be slowly sort out what it is I’m doing here.  Finally, I’m informed that the prisoner who was to be my teacher is presently at his Gacaca (Genocide court case) and thus unavailable.  I’m told to return in a few months time.  Curse my luck!…when and where else am I going to have the opportunity to learn language skills from a bloke who has likely cold-bloodily killed innocent human-beings?  I drive home and make fresh yogurt to dispel my disappointment, I like yogurt – th’stuff keeps me going.


3/15/07:
Flora is diagnosed with Amoeba, an intestinal parasite that eats your blood.  This diagnosis officially solves the mystery of why, for some days now, at remarkably short intervals, Flora has been fleeing off to the bathroom – especially conspicuous behavior when one is trying to watch a movie with her.  Bisate’s Lab-Tech, Jean-Baptist, makes the diagnosis and much to the bemusement of locals, Flora (a white girl) fills her prescription at the clinic pharmacy window.  She’s told to refrain from dairy for two weeks, which is music to my ears, as Flora’s yogurt consumption has, as of late, become something of a worry.  Yogurt is a limited resource ‘round these parts and it’s the only thing keeping me from tottering over the brink, so I’m rather protective of it.  As ever, though, Flora is most impressive in accepting the bad news, no complaints, no moping, no lollygagging – a tough cookie is Flora.

We meet an interesting local fellow who apparently is called The Rock-Man because he and his hammer can manually rip through any amount of rock.  We aim to negotiate him into ripping through a good chunk of the hill behind the clinic in order to supply the foundation rock for our new Meeting Place structure.  The guy looks like spun muscle but there’s something in his face I don’t like.

Later, we head off on our 2nd day of tree hunting.  Timber yards are non-existent so if you want a certain type or size of wood, well, you walk into the forest and start looking around.  Today we walk into the loveliest stretch of forest I’ve ever seen.  It’s a deep, mossy, and lush Eucalyptus forest lying at the foot of Sibinyo Volcano, and it emanates a smell so wonderful provocative that breathing becomes like a wonderful dessert…and it’s quiet…it’s the first place we’ve been outside our compound walls where there’s actual peace and quiet…you can walk here and not see or be seen, it’s a strange delightful peaceful unusual feeling.  I could live in this forest.


3/16/07:
Nurse Telesphore is told today that his penmanship is crap and that he and his illegible-ways are costing the clinic too much wasted time and money (the Insurance Company won’t reimburse for unreadable figures and the head nurse, Jacqueline, is spending hours per week correcting stupid staff writing mistakes).  Laura’s face-to-face accusation brings the first real battle between her and a staff member.  She claims that Nurse Telesphore is a lazy SOB and insists he could write better if only he tried.  Telesphore responds that he cannot write better, he doesn’t need to write better, and indeed he refuses to write better!  Laura replies that she’s damn near ready to get rid of Nurse Telesphore for good!!  Head Nurse Jacqueline (who has been excoriating Telesphore’s numerous shortcomings to Laura for weeks) selects this moment to bizarrely insist that Telesphore has impeccable penmanship and is one of her very best nurses!!! (to be fair, someone needed to take Telesphore’s side, as Laura’s wrath was about to incinerate the poor bugger).  Laura points out that Jacqueline’s memory is remarkably selective, which I have to agree with if only for the sole reason that the last time we were all discussing Nurse Telesphore was when he had shown up for work reeking drunk - and he had been the only nurse on duty!  Nurse Telesphore is a bit of a fuck up.

Now that our medical volunteer (Dr. Mary) has left, we wonder very much if the Bisate nurses are continuing to actually do their daily patient rounds and patient ‘hand-offs’.  I’m skeptical – today there are three babies on IV-drips and yet I see no nurses in the ward for most of the day and I even notice that one of the baby’s IVs has run dry.  

Aside from yogurt, the sole entity keeping me functional is our adorable cat, Gomi.  Each night she jumps onto my bed, boroughs through the mosquito netting, snuggles into my armpit, and lays her adorable little feline head upon the side of my chest.  I just love her to bits.

Our exhaustive tree hunt has led nowhere and Laura is rethinking things; metal is looking better and better.  The original idea called for a Greek-like temple with thick wooden columns but it may just be the case that Rwandan trees are too darn thin and skimpy!

The fabled Rock-Man disappoints.  He gives us a ridiculous “Muzungo Price Quote” for supplying the rocks for our new Meeting Area foundation.  Even the local Health Animator members laugh when they hear his price quote…and people don’t do much laughing around here, so we take these chuckles as rock-solid proof that Rock-Man is someone we don’t wish to do work with.  Laura explains that she needs the Health Animators help to get fair prices – she tells them that she is happy to pay for everything but that she cannot be the one who negotiates prices – locals see a white face and they immediately quadruple the price tag.  Laura asks the Health Committee to find a Rock-Man.


3/17/07:
We depart late and are rushing to the clinic when Laura smacks her head and shouts, “shit, I forgot my stencils!” so we turn around and return to the house to grab her stencils and thereafter we’re back on the road again, rushing up to the clinic lickety-split when Laura once again grabs her head and yells “shit, my brushes too!” so we turn around and jet back to the house to grab her brushes, after which we’re speeding up to the clinic just as before when Laura throws both hands in the air and exclaims “mother fucking PAINT!!!!” so we turn around and drive back to the house again…

Clinic Day.  It’s one of the gloomy days where the weather sucks and nothing goes according to plan.  We’re on the verge of cutting our losses and driving away when Laura says fuck it “I’m going to get something done today”…Laura pulls out her art supplies and starts stenciling in the In-Patient Ward.  This is exactly the type of perfidious, anal, and time-intensive task at which Laura thrives.  The patients and work staff are mesmerized at her work – nothing like this has ever happened She spends the next two hours standing on tip-toe atop a rickety wooden chair while painting the first row of pineapple stencils.  Every other minute she has to step down off the chair to refresh her paint supply and in no time she is dissolving into a complete physical wreck - after stenciling like this for two days she’ll be ready for a retirement home.  Laura, Flora, and Jacqueline also find time to throw up an Alphabet stencil in the Maternity Ward…did you know that in the Rwandan alphabet there are no Q’s or X’s, we had to remember to throw these out!

Flora, Joseph, and Jacqueline III also finish painting a 1st coat on the staff bathroom.  

I’ve shot nothing but time-lapse footage for the past two days.  I do hope the World’s entertained by Laura stenciling at incredibly fast rates of speed…


3/18/07:
Extreme fatigue from several non-stop days of non-stop work, we sleep blissfully late and take the afternoon off.  One can feel the emotional and physical stresses steadily accumulating in our minds and bodies – rest days like this are crucial.  In the evening we float over to dine at our friend’s house (Katie & Glen) along with several other scientists from the Diane Fossey Gorrila Group - dining with them is always such a treat, especially as Glen is an absolute cooking fiend and is audaciously adept at putting on a true feast.  Tonight, however, our delectable meal of Indian cuisine is destroyed by a phone-call: an injured orphaned gorilla has been found in a nasty Congolese snare and it’s being rushed in right this moment for medical attention (There are only about 700 of these Gorillas remaining in the world and half inhabit the extremely unpleasant side of the Congo/Rwanda boarder) - half the room vanishes in seconds to deal with this disaster… The rest of us, rather stunned, recline upon Ugandan sofas around a roaring fireplace and wonder aloud about what’s happening.  We learn later that one of the poor creature’s fingers had to be amputated and then we learn that this failed to halt the infection and so the entire hand had to be taken off to the wrist.  The Gorilla will be spending the rest of its life here in captivity.  It does pay to be a Mountain Gorilla that lives on the Rwanda side of the boarder - this one was brought in from Congo where scenes like this are too common.


3/19/07
I’m sick and tired of having no furniture.  For too long now, I’ve been editing and logging my video footage from a lying-down position on my bed with the computer perched upon my chest, and this is just an insufferably undignified arrangement.  So I scribble a design for a desk that’s custom fitted to my body and go off to show it to a Congolese furniture maker who works down the road.  My design includes a semi-circular cutout of the middle-front part of the desk-top so that it will perfectly wrap around my waist-line and allow me to really pull it right up to myself.  I hand over the design with high hopes but low expectations.

Clinic Day.  Flora & Jacqueline III put a second coat of paint on the staff bathroom.  I shoot more time-lapse photography of them accomplishing this.  It’s official, I am indeed now actually shooting paint drying – and I must admit that things have become rather dull of late.

A poor woman miscarries and has to recover in a maternity room full of mothers who are all holding their healthy newborns.  


3/20/07:
Today we douse the patient toilet in petrol and burn it to the ground.  No more squatting over ill-defined floor cracks (there’s no designated ‘hole’), no more lifting the door off the ground in order to close it, no more shit-strewn floors...  The pit beneath is apparently close to overflowing as well, and so Laura finally declares the whole thing an unbearable health hazard and she orders its elimination.  In scant order the clinic handymen, Joseph and Leo-Dormil, have stripped off the toilet’s asbestos–coated roofing sheets and two women have carted off the wall timbers atop their heads (one almost brains the infant tied to her back when the pyre of wood atop her head nearly falls off)…the remains of the toilet are burnt to a crisp and a fence is thrown up around the site which will be sown with lime and allowed to sit fallow and undisturbed for a year.

 Everyone seems rather stunned at the bonfire.  It turns out that the communication process beforehand wasn’t so good – some of the nurses are wondering why the fuck have we just burnt down the patient toilet!  But Laura explains again about destroying a health hazard and when they hear this they get it “oh you didn’t burn down the patient toilet” they say “that was just hygiene”.  Laura shakes her head in wonder.  All the dissembling and destruction is filmed in Time-Lapse and should be quite visually cool.

Am trying to weasel my way into shooting a few births.  I want to get my camera right in there and see those little heads popping out and whatnot.  After all, the CCHIPS program is focused on child and mother health…and what’s more symbolic of this connection than the act of giving birth?  But no luck yet.  Whenever I mention this desire, the response seems to be an incredulous chorus “of course not!”  Maybe if I pay someone though…

Ok, cannot avoid this topic any longer…cannot tell you how fricken sick I am of being stared at, ad nauseum!  I don’t mind a bit of it, mind you,…but after months and months it’s starting to eat away at my soul.  Ok, I see a pretty lady or a twelve foot giant and I take a peek, sure, I’m human, but I peak and (here’s the crucial point) then I look away and quickly too!…as Seinfeld once said “it’s like looking at the sun, you take a peek and then look away!”  We Westerners are accustomed to looking at each other, of course, but we seldom stare at one another, especially when we’re three feet apart!  Not the case here, children and young adults come up to the Cruiser windows in an endless stream and they will stand and just stare at you for 10, 15, 20, 30…minutes!  Sometimes they even do the squish-face thing against my window, which is indeed even more disturbing.  Apparently I am absolutely fascinating to look at!  As best I can I try to ignore these gawkers but then they’ll just resort to tapping on the glass and climbing on the car...it’s like I’m an zoo animal and the point is to pound the glass until they get some sort of reaction out of me.  From a Western standpoint it’s massively intolerably impolite behavior– but it’s the status quo here.

Today Laura has the genius to ask our housekeeper, Alice, to move all of the house-hold’s bedding materials out of my closet and into the closet in the big empty bedroom - so I now have oodles of extra space and am beside myself with glee.  My bedroom, you see, is about the size of a van so the extra space is appreciated.

On the way out, I hear John-Baptist has just diagnosed a 23-year-old girl with TB.  


3/21/07:
Clinic Day.  I wait forever for Laura to finish dashing about Ruhengeri on a dozen different chores and thereafter we head up to the clinic around 3pm.  

Today the clinic conversation goes straight down the toilet.  Laura and our water/waste expert, John-Peter, discuss whether the clinic’s new toilets system should be a simple open pit latrine system or a plastic septic system (which transports the human waste from toilet to plastic containment unit via pipes).  At first nod, Laura prefers the septic system - it seems the cleaner, more hygienic, less smelly option, and also the most familiar option for us Westerners.  However, the discussion keeps returning to the fact that the local population has no experience with a septic/piping toilet systems and also that in lieu of toilet paper the locals use a wide variety of sticks, twigs, leaves, and rags to wipe themselves.  Laura fears that this refuse will result in a pipe-fed septic system that is perpetually clogged.  Installing such a system would therefore require that we also alter long-established and very basic local behavior...and even if we had the trained personnel to do this (we don’t) we cannot think of a single locally produced wiping alternative that could be used and that wouldn’t clog the system...I mean how much behavior change can one accomplish?  Pit latrines, on the other hand, cannot become clogged and require no behavioral modification or education to use properly.  Pit latrine it is.

We discover an overtly inebriated man digging away at the hill behind the clinic, but very much on clinic property, and beside him is a rapidly widening pile of unearthed rocks.  He’s pounding on rocks and singing like a drunken sailor.  Laura asks a staff member what the devil does that man think he’s doing!  When he spies us, the Drunkard lowers his mallet and comes staggering, shouting, and swaggering our direction…we quickly learn through translation that he’s yelling at the nurses not at us and he’s lecturing them that “you may know all about medicines and health clinics, but I, The ROCK-MAN, know all about breaking though these rocks!!!”  After much confusion Rock-Man goes back to work while we learn that he is the guy the Health Committee has procured to supply rocks for the new Meeting Area’s foundation.  I look over and the man is tearing through mounds of volcanic boulders faster than an industrial mining drill.  Holy Shit!

The old outhouse we burnt down yesterday is still smoldering.  I want to shoot the birth of a baby...but everyone still thinks it’s impossible.  An amazingly beautiful day.  We arrive late so the sun is shining nearly horizontal and everything is gilded with a rim of beautiful gold light and then dark shadow.
A gang of village children is bedded down like vultures on the clinic’s back hill…awaiting our departure so that they may pounce upon the Clinic’s water supply.  There are only two water spigots in the whole town and we got one of them.  Mainly they’re small kids and girls; John-Peter tells us that these are the ones who have been muscled away from the main town faucet which, in dry weather such as this, is besieged by townsfolk and fights regularly break out and the strongest get dibs.

I lose my god-damned Allen-Key wrench…I’ve lost two others just like it on this trip and this one was my last…without it I lose the use of the second stage of my tripod!  Those familiar with the cinematography world would correctly diagnose this loss as an utter and complete horrible disaster…but later in the day John-Peter by some miraculous stroke of fortune finds it.  I had showed him the general area where I thought I might have lost it and then John-Peter just stands there and looks at the ground…and he keeps doing this for what seems like half the day…and then he bends down and picks it up.  If there’s one thing that Rwandan’s possess in excess…its’ patience!


3/22/07:
Spend the day at home logging video footage and overeating.  Am reading a great Bill Bryson book about the history of the universe and so I’ve taken to spouting off amazing facts aloud to everyone in earshot whilst reading – as this makes me feel incredibly smart.  Laura and Elie spend the day discussing and translating CCHIPS’ yearly action plan.  In the evening, we go to a lecture on gorillas at the Dian Fossey Office and afterwards we surf the moderately speedy Karisoke Office Internet for an hour.  I chat with brothers Ryan and Karl while downloading Stuffit-Expander and opening an AIM account and downloading Adobe reader…and I haven’t done this much downloading in AGES!  And it feels AMAZING!  My little brother, Ryan, is a college sophomore and is aburst with ideas, optimism, and money-making schemes.

Gabby got no sleep last night.  Interesting Fact - if Gabby awakes during the night and sees a lit light bulb, he is rendered incapable of going back to sleep for the remainder of that night…last night he awoke and saw a lit light-bulb…today Gabby is a zombie.

Have grown so mentally jaded that I’ve started filming our diners in time-lapse, 1 frame every 60-seconds.  Why you ask?  Well, I’m an artist, that’s why!  Tonight at dinner we discuss cultural experiences and realize we’ve all withstood a great many extremely painful, awkward, and uncomfortable episodes all in the name of ‘having a cultural experience’.  I propose that painfulness is the dominant trait of such activities and sponsor a bill to table all future cultural experiences.  One culture is more than enough for me, thank you.


3/23/07:
Go for my morning run.  Cold shower…(Laura’s apparently got a monopoly on all the hot water around here).  French toast flavored with artificial almond and vanilla extracts doused in Vermont Grade A Maple Syrup, with a strong glass of native Agasha juice (three parts concentrate, one part water) – now THIS is a breakfast!  I’m psyched, pumped, and ready to go up to the clinic.

Behind the clinic we find that drunken bellicose Rock-Breaker-Man is still breaking rocks at an alarming rate.  Laura takes Window-Screen-Man on a tour of all the clinic windows and we meet another man who claims to know where to find pumice and who even leads us to a nearby cliff of the stuff.  This pumice may be what we use to create the bricks for our upcoming New Kitchen building (regular wood-fired bricks are outlawed in this country due to rapidly dwindling timber resources).  In other news, Laura has brought a new nozzle for the Clinic’s water tap but cannot get the old connector ring unscrewed from the old nozzle…she tries dunking the old nozzle into a jar of coke for a while to soften it up but no dice.  

I am sick to death of snotty-nosed kids pressing their mud-encrusted faces against the Land Cruiser windows in order to stare at us endlessly.  I mean how fucking impolite is that!  And whether you say hello or bugger off, it doesn’t mater a bit, they just keep their filthy mugs pressed on the glass staring at you like they’re ogling the fornicating serpents at a reptile zoo.  Ok, that sounds harsh, I do love the kids here - a very innocent and adorable lot – and I don’t mind people staring at me – it’s just when they stare for several minutes and then several more minutes – all this starting just starts to add up and it starts to get to you, plays on your nerves, drives you bonkers.  Even when you scream at them in Kinya-rwanda to stop staring at us for Shit’s Sake!  They just keep on staring!  Why don’t their parents teach them some god-damn manners for Christ’s Sake!  Fuck!  And you can’t stare back because these people can stare you under the table – there is stuff deep in these eyes that a westerner cannot look into.  Bring Nietzsche to mind: “gaze for long into an abyss and the abyss will gaze also into you.”  Today is national water day.  Did you drink some water to celebrate?


3/24/07:
Elyse, my young punk tennis coach, is a no show at our practice this morning, so I spend half an hour worsening my serve until Flora shows up and we play for a bit…but she’s distracted by a desire to be lounging poolside at EER Hotel down the street and I’m distracted by my horrendous tennis playing.  She’s ahead and winning for the entire game until fortune shines upon me in the form of a distracted scorekeeper (the great thing about Ruhengeri Tennis is that for $1 you get a ball boy and a score keeper!): anyways, a loss for me, is somehow magically transformed into a tie and then - after I complain to the kid in the scorekeeper’s seat – I am declared the winner!!!  WOO-HOO!  The ol’ winning streak lives on!  Flora is nonplussed.  So we drive to the pool and lay out in the sun, which immediately vanishes behind a sky-load of long dark storm clouds.  After thirty minutes of this shadowy intrusion we are freezing and return home; me to eat yogurt, Flora to prep for a trip to Kigali.  

With my yogurt I mix in the very last of our Vermont Pure Grade A Maple Syrup…only God can save me now.  

Maybe a breakthrough idea for the film!  I’ve been looking for a through-line on which to base some sort of narrative development - what I’m currently capturing day by day seems to form so many separate random narratives…but last night I thought why not follow the babies?  The clinic should be seeing 55 births per month if it was hitting it’s goals, but it has been hard put to see half that number…perhaps I can make this ‘baby-shortage’ a center point of my film – something upon which to hang everything else.  I’m a loon.


3/25/07:
A Rwandan Wedding Day.  Before marrying a stone-faced couple, the preacher rants for half an hour against the evils of homosexuality, explaining that HE has found the smoking biblical gun that PROVES homosexuality is a sin…and this is that Eve had… BREASTS!  And as he says this, the pastor emphasizes his proof by cupping his hands in front of himself as if he’s hefting his own two large imaginary breasts - explaining that “there you have it, verifiable non-refutable un-equivocal PROOF that homosexuals are demons”.  I would have captured all this on video and it would have been one of the more interesting segments of my documentary, if only I had understood what he was saying when he was saying it …however, I understood and filmed nothing because I at the time I took it for granted that boring, long-winded, wedding sermons are a universal constant.  Not true though.

The sick ward is filled with patients, mostly babies on IVs suffering from diarrhea and vomiting.

Rock-Man is still pounding away behind the clinic.  The man is a machine and quickly is disappearing behind multiple piles of split boulders.  Two other blokes seem to be helping him…though mainly through moral support, as their work, it appears, tilts mainly towards working their mouths and nothing else; one Rock-Man, two Pebble-men.  

Our two clinic handymen, Joseph & Leo-Dormil, burn a huge pile of medical waste in the pit behind the clinic.  Everything’s dumped in this pit – syringes, bottles, bandages, body parts, and today even a moldy old mattress.  Joseph douses everything with gasoline and Leo tosses in the match.  The smoke billows over the clinic grounds, passes directly through Rock-Man’s work area ten feet away, and envelops the clinic beyond.  Everything smells plasticky and strange.  I feel nauseas and scamper upwind.  The patient and maternity wards’ windows are flung wide open and the smoke pores into both but no one seems to mind.  Part of the CCHIPS plan is to build an incinerator because burning medical waste in an open pit ain’t hygienic…and the pit cannot incinerate anything but just sort of chars everything into a fried amalgam and tomorrow children will play in the pit and pry up the half-melted glass vials and all the other burnt bio-waste that attracts their eye.

 I am so aggravated with all these damn Rwandan kids…hollers of “Muzungo” (“Foreigner!”) and “Agachupa” (“bottle”) and “Franga-franga” (“money) plague us wherever we go.  The children beg en mass and the culture seems to promote this behavior.  By most worldly standards I’ve encountered the kids here are a grossly impolite bunch (by comparison I’ve been to equally poor places in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Egypt) and I’ve never encountered such a weird sense of blind entitlement and expectation and acceptance when it comes to screaming at foreigners for handouts.  Children in this region seem pre-installed with a beggar-type mentality when interacting with foreigners.  This sounds harsh but it’s the harsh truth.  Partly the fault of the Mountain Gorillas I suppose, as all tourists come to this part of Rwanda for 24-48 hours to see the Gorillas and I think many of them tend to thoughtlessly shovel loads of shit out their Land Rover windows to the childish hoards without giving much thought to the long-term consequences.


3/27/07:
Out of nowhere the Clinic Titular (Head Nurse), Jacqueline, shows a dumbfounding burst of actual leadership action regarding the clinic staff.  She is pissed at Telesphore for missing work on Friday and she wants to…(get this)….do something about it!!  This comes a week after Laura’s tirade against Telesphore’s penmanship in which Jacqueline defended Telesphore as the embodiment of responsible competent nursing!  (fact: we all know he sucks)  My oh my! but how soon the tuneth doth changeth.

 
3/28/07:
It’s my first tennis lesson with Ruhengeri “Club Pro” Rasheed - the man runs me ragged - so ragged in fact that our session ends with me on my knees begging for clemency.  Elyse, the young punk who had been my coach (a very bad one) is non too happy with the personnel switch.  When I arrive, he tries to worm his way into displacing Rasheed but I put the kibosh on that.  NoGoMoFo!  

I walk home from my lesson, stopping to purchase a humongous 3-foot branch containing dozens upon dozens of little yummy bananas for less than a dollar, a gift that I’ll take up to the clinic today for my friend, Nurse Emanuel.  The banana woman doesn’t speak English so a man suddenly appears who speaks maybe two words of it and he assists with our negotiations and afterwards the chap’s after me for a ‘finder’s fee’.  I laugh and pay him and head home and make the mistake of offering a banana to a neighbor child…before I know what’s up a dozen excited infants stream out of our neighbors courtyard and ransack my banana branch.  Don’t mind a bit as I know their parental situation is a bit of a mess at the moment and we know these kids aren’t always getting enough to eat…

At the clinic, Laura and Elie escort Nurse Telesphore into a private room and read him the riot act.  They show him a letter outlining his chronic absences that will be sent to the district signed by both Laura and Jacqueline.  Telesphore denies everything and complains that the work schedule is unfair.  Shape up or ship out is Laura’s one simple response.     

I hold my first interview with Clinic’s lab tech, John-Baptist.  We hold it in the courtyard of his house.  Typical story.  His life is rough.  He doesn’t earn anywhere near enough money.  He’s trying to put a brother through school.  Childhood polio has placed him permanently on crutches and the cost of maintaining his wheelchair is everlastingly depressing.  He’s a lovely man though who we often hear singing aloud as he works and he is a natural soft touch with kids.  200 yards away from us, my Super8mm camera ticks away at 20 second intervals in what is hopefully an awesome recording of a setting sun plunging behind a mist-shrouded mountain…Ahhhh Africa!


3/29/07:
A quiet day at home.  Rainy season has begun and the cat has taken up permanent residence beneath my pillow.  

We have a bit of fun during our standard meal-time time-lapse film shoot and begin circling the table at a snails pace in our chairs as the camera clicks away at 1 frame every 5 seconds (sorry but here in Ruhengeri we ravenously suck dry any bastardized form of entertainment we can possibly sink our deprived fangs into).  I follow the meal with more time-lapse fun starring my nearest and dearest snugly friend, Gomi the Kitty Cat!  YEAH!  Without Gomi and Yogurt I would be a lost man with only SMPs to keep me company.

Anyone ever wonder why ‘minute’ and ‘minute’ are both spelled exactly alike!!!

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