And my Rwandese mattress ain’t helping matters: I fall asleep each eve in the time-honored position of supine horizontalness…yet awake each morn with my bod remolded into the painful shape of a U (my most favorite vowel but least favorite bodily form). You see, my mattress slowly crumples as soon as my eyes close and then my lumbar region is slowly lowered into a subterranean vault of tortured bedding-foam. Eight hours later, my eyes pop open and the first thing I see are my shins five-inches from my face. This masochistic quality is common to Rwandan mattresses and Laura and I frequently hobble past one-another in the morning, gripping our backs and moaning. Even my trusty 15-minute “AM Yoga DVD” is no match for the ultra-odious Satan mattresses of Rwanda.

Elie, Nancy, and I load ourselves into the Land Cruiser and motor to the clinic where we find a large work crew filling the incipient Meeting Area’s freshly dugout foundation with piles of lava boulders. I record the effort thru time-lapse cinematography while reconfirming my awe at the strength and endurance of female Rwandan laborers…these babes are made of solid stuff! Impeccably dressed iron ladies stacking piles of boulders atop craniums and ambulating these to the foundation in a daylong display of strength and balance gilded uncannily in the dressings of proud beauty. Women in this country do the hard work but they do it with dignity.

First bit of the Nutritional Garden Project is planted today - a mini miracle considering the biblical plague of setbacks the project has endured. We aren’t actually sure if half this stuff will even grow up here (given the elevation and frigid climate) but endeavoring to increase the local nutritional options is unquestionably a worthy pursuit, as the Bisate diet is based almost entirely upon potatoes and beans – and since the potato is a relatively nutrient-poor food (excepting its discarded rind) the population must therefore derive the majority of its nutrients from beans…(beans being the only other staple)…and the price of beans has substantially skyrocketed lately with the result that most people iare now eating substantially less of them... In short, Bisate could use more edible options. (Post-Note: Several weeks after this diary entrée this nascent Nutritional Garden was leveled & buried by the biogas containment unit structure and, as of January 2008, has yet to be replanted - hence the project’s streak of ‘biblically plagued’ setbacks remains quite alive and well.)

5/2/07:
Arrive at the clinic mid-morning to find our female rock haulers still hauling. Boulder after boulder is being fed into the freshly dugout foundation of Bisate Clinic’s incipient Meeting Area. Two men stand in the center, sorting the arriving stone into what’s fast becoming the structure’s base.

Nancy begins her day with Head Nurse Jacqueline in the Consultation Room. Every arriving patient is examined, diagnosed, and prescribed in the Consultation Room before being dispensed to the sick ward or pharmacy. Today a young boy with little bumps all o’er his body steps in the door and Jacqueline immediately begins jotting a prescription for Scabies. Frowning, P.A. Nancy steps forward for a physical examination. Jacqueline sighs at such needlessly close scrutiny and continue scribbling the prescription. The 23 year-old Head Nurse prides herself on rendering these split-second ‘off-the-cuff’ visual diagnoses (or, as I call them: ‘wild uninformed guesses’). Jacqueline’s sole systematic style is to systematically forgo the superfluous hassle of practicing any sort of systematic medicine. After all, why conduct proper examinations when glance and knee-jerk reactions suffice? On her medical exams, Jacqueline scored the highest mark of any nurse at Bisate Clinic and yet perversely she appears to demonstrates her superior medical intellect by projecting a general distaste for sick people and utter disregard for examining, diagnosing, or treating their medical problems in a comprehensive manner. I cannot decipher whether this attitude reflects a personal insecurity about her own abilities or rather a social aversion to treating those who typically are much lower on the social totem pole then she. Jacqueline perhaps feels that the act of associating with lowly patients is beneath her station and therefore beyond the purview of her medical responsibilities. Anyways, patients are non-priority & Jacqueline is a piss-poor nurse.

Today Jacqueline guesses wrong. Upon closer examination, P.A. Nancy diagnoses the boy not with Scabies but with Chicken Pox. Nurse Damascene (our most proficient and most arrogant nurse) steps in to second Nancy’s diagnosis. Head Nurse Jacqueline shrugs her shoulders in disinterest at the mistake, as if to say: ‘Chicken Pox, Small Pox, Ebola Virus, who cares, why waste time on insignificant issues.’ Despite CCHIPS’ efforts to teach and institutionalize SOAP Training (a systematic approach to examining, diagnosing, and treating a patient, which stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) Head Nurse Jacqueline has steadfastly refused to adopt this system and instead she continues practicing nursing in her own special way, via glance and snap judgment, while rarely condescending to actually touching a patient. Even so, Jacqueline’s ‘visual diagnoses’ doubtlessly have a high degree of accuracy as the majority of patients in the area suffer from the same predictable few diseases…(for example, the predominant skin affliction among local children is indeed Scabies)…but, still, if you refuse to focus or listen or examine or touch, and you refuse to treat the individual patient in a systematic manner, frequent mistakes become unavoidable. As Dr. Peter (our Dec 2006 medical volunteer) so often refrained: “always listen to the patient, it keeps you out of trouble.” Today Jacqueline ignores the patient, ignores all rules of basic nursing and makes a silly mistake – and the sole reason this particular mistake is noticed and amended is that today, miraculously, a western medical professional is supervising her work (unlike all other days of the year), which begs one to ask just how often an unsupervised Jacqueline makes similar mistakes that go unnoticed. My instinct is that she must make such errors with regularity and yet doubtlessly rarely discovers these, as there’s no system in place for patient feedback or follow-up. After receiving their hastily scribbled prescriptions, the clinic’s patients literally disappear into the hills of Bisate and if they do return there’s usually no record of their previous visit. This situation makes my job inherently frustrating, as I’m able to capture the patients while they’re at the clinic being treated but I almost never have the opportunity to learn or see what happens to patients after they departure. They simply leave and that’s that, we never see them again - there’s no opportunity to conduct follow up. Most of my patient stories are therefore dead-end stories…there’s no way around this. This is how it is, this is what the film will reflect.

My medically untrained eye views our medical leader’s nursing skills to be dangerously blasé and uncaring. Jacqueline, I would proffer, has chosen the wrong profession…she is a terrible nurse…and did I MENTION SHE’S THE FUCKING HEAD NURSE!!! She’s the example, She’s in charge, She’s responsible…a leader whose attitude is that patients are unworthy of attention. How far can a health clinic truly progress under such leadership? With a true leader, one who was proactive and passionate and intelligent, we would be light-years ahead of where we now idle…but we’re stuck with this horrible leader…stuck with trying to implement projects and upgrade a clinic while the deadweight of this ‘leader’ pulls everything constantly downwards in an attritional mudslide of tacitly endorsed neglect and indifference that drifts upon a passive-aggressive undercurrent of anti-CCHIPS rhetoric and undercutting. Nothing defeats a project like shabby leadership and nothing so needlessly intensifies patient suffering like bad medical leadership. We desperately need to deep-six this head nurse...but unfortunately Jacqueline is politically connected (she became Titular because of her political connections and I suspect these connections may have also played a part in her lofty medical exam scores…as the test apparently includes a bizarre political quiz section of verbal questions and answers to determine the taker’s ‘political knowledge’. In brief, our desire to expel this deadweight is likely to go unfulfilled. As Rumsfeld often expounded: “you go to war with the army you have, not with the army you wish you had.”

Laura’s spidey-sense starts tingling around lunchtime and suddenly she’s peering with suspicion through the Land Cruiser’s windshield at an empty clinic courtyard. Laura, Elie, & I are seated in the back of the Cruiser (which serves as Laura’s office while we’re here at the clinic), we’ve been seated here for some time when this feeling hits all three of us at once…Bisate Clinic feels too quiet. Laura exits the mobile office and steps through each clinic room (of which there are 8) and returns 30 seconds later having confirmed her suspicion…the clinic’s entire medical staff has disappeared, en mass. Patients are in their beds – all nurses are all missing: what a synergistic combo?

With regards to patient care, the clinic staff lacks that sense of duty, primacy, urgency, and responsibility that we expect in the West – in Rwanda these are replaced by distaste, disinterest, and avoidance. Patients and their care are non-priorities here and there’s little leadership or concern for the subject. Patients take what’s given (if anything) period. NO ONE complains. Before CCHIPS arrived, the Bisate nurses often skipped work and the former Head Nurse, Ali, frequently vanished for days on end. It is small wonder therefore that several of out nurses have retained this former behavior. There has never been a work schedule at the clinic. There has never been a lunch schedule. There has never been anyone to conceive, create, or enforce a schedule. If every nurse is present, if no nurse is present, it all depends upon utter chance…if you are a patient in need of immediate life-saving medical attention, well, then you had better arrive at a fortuitous staffing moment, otherwise the chance does exist that you may suffer and/or die unattended at an empty medical clinic (this is precisely what happened to Elie’s sister). Now CCHIPS is attempting to correct this situation…and stamping out old habits has become one of Laura’s toughest challenges.

Laura is furious – appalled by the staff’s utter lack of concern, communication, and self-regulation. It is becoming apparent that, as a body, the staff is incapable of such things.

She rampages up into Bisate Town screaming for someone to come mind the clinic.

5/3/07:

Laura remains home while I drive Elie and Nancy to Bisate. We arrive just as several men march in carrying a stretcher upon which writhes the hyperventilating & shrieking figure of a woman. I’ve such an immediately visceral reaction to her high-pitched retchings that I’m unable to bring myself to film any of this… Meanwhile, off to one side, a soldier is restraining a chap while another is winding-up and hitting this chap with a long stick. What the Hell’s going on here. Throngs of people pour onto the clinic grounds to goggle at the unfolding spectacle, which has quickly become the most striking and public scene of trauma that I’ve ever witnessed. We learn that this groaning woman was beaten by a group of men who arrived at her house earlier today desiring to buy her entire crop of pyrethrum flowers…she would only consent to selling them part of the crop…so they attacked and beat her with the flat sides of their machetes.

I jump out of the Land Cruiser and a woman who’s gasping for breath and hyperventilations with shrieks and clearly suffering from major trauma.

Gorilla Baby/Woman beaten with machete day.

Nancy feels abandoned and insulted by the staff today.

Someone just told me that 1 in 5 women going to Kenya from developed countries are looking for sex!

5/4/07:
School Outreach. Good day for Laura. Jacqueline II impresses. Workers finish the rock foundation part of the new structure.

5/5/07:

THE FALLACY of SUNRISE:

Awake before dawn for a solo excursion up to Bisate Clinic, departing Ruhengeri at 5:30am in order to arrive in time to catch the rising sun cresting Bisate’s horizon. I arrive to a sky suffuse in clouds and drizzling rain…no sunrise today.

STARING INTO THE ABYSS:

The Staring Factor: Someone’s staring at me right now. Ere I type this at Shingiro Clinic, someone’s staring straight relentlessly at me. I’m in the Land Cruiser passenger seat and a woman has stopped by my window and she’s now standing two feet from my head and she’s staring at me, mercilessly. No greeting, no shy peek and on her merry way…just this long, incessant, unfathomable stare... I haven’t made eye contact yet (that’s the death knol, you know, eye contact) but I can see her out the corner of my eye, standing there, staring. All right, all right, here goes! 1st-hand ‘as-it-happens’ account of the infamous Rwanda stare: is it a meditative infatuation…an obsessive curiosity…a mere mindless proclivity? Well today perhaps we’ll find out. I’m clocking her. I’m timing this staring woman’s stare…and what I am wondering is precisely how long she’ll keep up this continuous staring. Its been 7-minutes so far (from 7:31am to 7:38am) and she hasn’t blinked yet. Her non-budging eyes appear to be still going quite strong in their fixation upon my person. She has even leaned-in a bit and is now staring at me from about a foot away. It’s especially intense, this Rwandan stare, the starer seldom moves a muscle while thusly stare-engaged. They fall seemingly into a trancelike state of wide-eyed-ness. The object of their blank-faced mulling cannot be a mere person but must rather be a concept or an object or perhaps a space alien? She (or He) just stands there and stares at you and she (or he) does nothing else but stand there and just perpetuate this continual act of unmitigated staring. They can stare like this for hours. Are they unable to believe their eyes? If you stare back, they don’t appear to be deriving any degree of entertainment or pleasure from this frenzied staring…their faces are always uniformly and unfathomably blank…and they will return your stare as if it were a small pebble falling ever deeper into a bottomless mineshaft…as if you’re some indefinable wonder. Or do I read too much into this? Is it instead the vacant stare of a vast void? Or is someone actually home in there but the lights are all just off to conserve electricity? Is it simply a stare for the sake of staring? Or am I yet mistaken…am I perhaps the local equivalent of a hit HBO show? I mean this lady ain’t taking her dilated pupils off me! (To be honest though, can you really blame her? I am rather easy on the eyes). This staring would be understandable if I was doing something…anything…but I’m not. I’m just sitting here, absolutely motionless, looking downwards, and doing absolutely nothing else whatsoever. And now it’s 7:43am and she’s still standing there staring at me…twelve inches from my mug…staring an extra pair of holes into my head… captivated…obsessed…transfixed!! We’ve just passed the 12-minute barrier and she’s still going very much strong…solid stuff this stare, I say!!! Oh Shit Oh No! We have disengagement!!! At 7:49am our session comes to an abrupt cessation after a measly 19-minutes of uninterrupted eyeballing. This is pathetically short of even the average. Had hoped for something special here today but it’s not to be. Only 19-minutes!! I mean, really! 19 bloody minutes!!! That’s IT! Anything less than 35-minutes is a slap in the face!!!! Am I truly such uninspiring eye-candy!!!!! I’ve had kids bug-eye me for a quarter of a day without batting a lash…but this little woman can’t even summon the concentration required to surpass the 20-minte mark!! ADDHD has apparently finally arrived in Rwanda! How ridiculously sad and embarrassing for us both! 19-minutes!! Oh, I Say! For Shame!!

A duo of Access Project volunteers (Jeremy & Kara) appear out of nowhere to tour the clinic property, guided by an official named Bertrand. We discuss Mutuelle and the Access Project’s failed attempt at computerizing the insurance process into a vastly cheaper and speedier all-in-one production.

5/6/07:
Laura & Nancy are away in Gisyeni. Sean's at home harranging himself for letting the cat in his bed last night – allergies act up big-time! Keep awaking at 3am gasping for air...quite unsettling.

5/7/07:

The Great Rwandan Computer Scandal:

Hindsight shall prove this to be a pivotal day in the CCHIPS Project annals. Laura is confronted for the first time with wanton subterfuge and criminal misconduct on the part of Head Nurse Jacqueline, whom, with a single deed, accomplishes the impressive ensemble act of callously disregarding the welfare of her clinic while slapping the CCHIPS project in the face. In the process, she ruptures any notion that CCHIPS and Bisate are working together in a collaborative partnership – we truly are not and today proves it.

This is what transpired: about a month ago, Jacqueline spent several days periodically lobbying Laura to buy the health clinic a new desktop computer for $300. Laura refused the request for the following reasons: 1. The clinic has no one who’s trained to use a computer 2. The CCHIPS project already has donated a new laptop computer to the clinic (which no one can use because no one has the training to use it) 3. (This is the Big One) There’s no electricity in Bisate or anywhere close to Bisate with which to power a desktop computer 4. If and when Bisate got a solar electrical system, the system will be incompatible with desktop computers (they require way, way too much energy) 5. And, oh yeah, almost forgot this last one….the clinic already possess a brand new flat-screen, state-of-the-art desktop computer that has never ever been used! Donated a year ago it has since sat unopened in its box and in a corner (for all the reasons listed above). 6. Add to

Inexplicably, Laura’s reasoning has absolutely no affect whatsoever on Jacqueline’s apparently blind desire to purchase this $300 computer seemingly for the sole reason that, well, it should be purchased. Jacqueline simply kept repeating the same point over and over again - that this computer was a great computer and the price was very low and so we must therefore simply buy it first and then worry about using it later. Laura’s host of reasons why it would never be could not be used at the clinic for a host of reasons did not seem to dissuade her whatsoever.

A young, narrow-minded, extremely shortsighted Rwandan with no clue as to how to deal with these westerners or their project; her only inclination is to take today whatever immediate benefit she can get from these silly white people, however small or petty this may be, and to otherwise completely ignore both the project and the consequences of brazenly undermining it. It is a mentality that contains no awareness or concern whatsoever that thieving a single tin of paint today may prematurely endanger a project that has committed to spending $200,000 at the clinic over the next two years! Even if this consequence were clearly and directly communicated it would be ignored and deemed irrellevent, as stealing pennies today is the only thing that means anything to these people, it is the only thing that they view us white-ies as being any good for.

_All that concerns these people is what they can get out of us today... _

JP: “We are above the ground and they are working in a cave”.

5/8/07:

Computer Scandal Continued...

Go up to Clinic. Jacqueline's not there – talk to Anistair – he says the health committee never okayed Jacqueline to spend 250,000RWF on a unusable computer. He says it would be illegal for her to spend such money.

Nancy & Elie leave early – I stay behind, hoping to catch a ride home later with JP but JP takes off a short tome late while I’m still shooting – so just ask him to tell Gabby to pick me up between 5 & 6.

Terrific cool sunny day – shoot timelepase of the last of the new structure’s pillars going up. School children come for a second-round of stone hauling for our poor driveway. Shoot all day long.

The 100-year-old man who got in a bike accident is looking better.

Two guys come – one dripping blood and crying – the other the one who put him in this state. I film the guy as Emannual cleans him up, injects three needles into his cheek and then sews the wound shut.

I start to wonder if I’m spending the night in Bisate. A local named Peter kindly asks me to his place for dinner…but I refuse, insisting that my ride is on its way here. I notice that there is no Nurse at the Clinic from 5:30 - 6:30.

Turmoil at The CCHIPS Project House:

Crazy love-letter guy bangs on our gate late at night. No he’s not in jail like his father promised, he is however quite drunk and stoned. We’re snacking on our porch by kerosene lantern light. After hearing him carrying-on and smacking our front gate we all meet at the front gate – we don’t open it – Laura screams at the guy who then leaves. Walking back into the house I notice that Gabby is holding a foot-long carving knife and that I’m holding an empty bottle of beer. Gabby tells us that if the guy had tried to attack Laura he would have killed him.

We learn today that not only is our gas tank on empty but Rwanda is apparently out of gas! That’s right…out of gas…as in there’s zero gas.

5/09/07:

Computer Scandal Redux:

We all go to clinic. Jacqueline’s not there. Talk to another Health Committee Member who says she never gave permission for the $500 computer. Mayor and Governor are supposed to come tour the clinic – but neither shows. We do get two German doctors and Emannual (the head of all Musanza Health Clinics).

On the way home a motorcyclist hits a fleeing cow ahead of us.

5/10/07:

The Computer Scandal Continued:

Laura calls Felix in the morning to describe her problem – he is incredulous, noting that the District is only advocating that clinics WITHOUT ANY computers get a machine…and these for around 80,000 RWF…he is flabbergasted that a clinic with three computers (none of which are being used due to lack of training and electricity) would spend 250,000 on another machine.

Talk to the Health Committee President - she knows all about the $500 computer and says all the health committee members know about it too – also says she’s new and so cannot be blamed and everything technical is left up to Jacqueline anyhow.
Talk to Damascine – he never knew about the new computer.
I tell the HIV Mobile team to stop occupying our fucking lab tech every Thursday.

5/11/07:

Bullet Holes in 12-year-olds:

Nancy instructs a record turnout of Health Animators (27) on how to fill-in Growth Charts. Elie, Nancy, Jacqueline II go to teach health at the school. Meet a 12-year old patient shot twice by a soldier for sitting on a jerry can - shot with an Ak-47! Nancy attends to him...

The Color of Your Meds:
Rwandans don’t like white pills – they feel white means weak medicine...colored and plentiful are what they desire...often patients trade other patients for their pills bases on what color they think is the best medicine color for them.

5/12/07:
Sean reads Wonder Boys. Well writ. Good movie, decent book. Katie, Veronica & Gretchen come for dinner. We learn that Gretchen has been robbed of $160…later we hear she miscounted and it was actually $260. She and Veronica blame the cook/housekeeper whom neither likes. Gretchen remembers the bloke coming out of her room a few days ago with a strange expression on his mug and she now suspects that the only thing he was cleaning at the time was her wallet.

A huge fire appears close by. Gabby and I go to investigate – case of arson by a jealous ex-husband.

5/13/07:
Nancy goes off to see the Mountain Gorillas and returns with a bad limp.

5/15/07:

A DFGFI volunteer named Gretchen joins us for the ride up to the clinic today. Along the way we stop at a neighboring sector office for an hour of baby weighing and vaccination supervision. Elie & Nancy wade through a throng of newborn-touting mothers to double-check that that local Animators are filling-out the growth charts correctly. I film (via time-lapse photography) dozens of tykes being hung from a makeshift scale slung o’er a mud hut’s door-frame.

After arriving at Bisate Clinic later in the day, the bad blood feud between Laura & Jacqueline reaches a public head in the form of a solemn, somber, and occasionally bitter staff meeting. Accusations and complaints fly as this power struggle continues between these two strong-willed women...with an on-looking health staff that’s still trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. Emmanuel asks Laura to forgive Jacqueline and voices concern that my filming of this incident will showcase the clinic in a bad light…how savvy of him.

Presentations at the Karisoki Office in the evening on Global Warming and bird migration followed by a screening of “An Inconvenient Truth”…I stay for only the first few minutes but find Gore’s demos rather highly convincing. If he is correct and there is so assuredly no tomorrow for humanity then we are all so fucked already that we might as well live life high on the hog without a care whilst we still can.

5/17/07:
Elie & Nancy have a short morning of rounds at the clinic and return to Ruhengeri early. I remain behind to continue recording the Meeting Area’s construction via time-lapse cinematography.

Out of the blue, towards the end of the day, all the local medical and political bigwigs suddenly arrive at the clinic for a meeting that I’m sure Laura would be interested in knowing about. The Access Project (who donated the computer that’s now the subject of our recent local scandal) shows up in the form of the tall, bald Bertrand and his dower-looking lackey. The district clinic administrator Emannual appears with a couple of females and then Roge appears, the local administrator, looking like a well oiled tallish turtle and to my great surprise the man marches straight over to me and wags a long finger right in my face and tells me that what I’m doing is, in his words, “very very bad”. (shooting time-lapse of a building being built) I give him the smiled equivalent of “fuck you” and return to the book I’m reading. He wonders away shaking his head. Suspect word may be getting out that the Bisate Muzungus are causing something of an unwelcome stir.

5/18/07:

CHINESE SPEED BUMPS (part I):

Everyone (Laura, Elie, Nancy, and Me) goes to the clinic today. The drive up takes considerably longer than usual, as the Chinese road crew re-building this road between Ruhengeri & Bisate has just installed numerous concrete barriers across the road! These we’re told are speed bumps. To my untrained civilian eyes however they look shockingly similar to short, unmarked cement walls without ramp or gradient! Every approaching vehicle must halt completely before gingerly tiptoeing over these unwieldy obstructions. I jestingly refer to them as ‘speed-blocks’ (and chuckle at my wit) but actually these chunky squat devils look quite dangerous! You can barely even see ‘em during the day, let alone at night (there are no markings whatsoever and so they just blend in with the rest of the road)! Hit one at anything above fifteen miles an hour and your tires will be sheared off tear off and you’ll catapult off the road in a vehicular summersault ending in a compact death - the last things to enter your mind being the dashboard, the engine, and a truncated banana tree. Woe unto those who fail to see the Chinese speed-bump!

SEAN MEETS WALL:

Yours Truly is in a venomous funk today. We depart the project house over an hour late due to Laura’s last-second decision to put together a Health Animator handout followed by a last-instant realization that 50 copies must be printed. By the time we finally do hit the road I know I’ve missed a significant portion of the new Meeting Area construction (I’ve been filming this structure’s up-going progression via time-lapse cinematography and, until now, had managed to entirely record every stage of construction). Sure enough, upon our late arrival, I see that half the roof frame has gone up in our absence. Muttering oaths and sputtering wrath, I setup my cameras and slog through the rest of the day fuming in frosty silence.

I’m tearing my hair out wondering why the hell IT IS I’m still here! Today I’d rather be anywhere in the world then here. I’d rather be in the middle of bloody Kansas for fuck’s sake. And, as always, when one’s feeling poorly, the local adolescents select the moment to resume their incessant staring. I’ve been here every day doing exactly the same thing for the last six months! The white guy with the camera is no longer a mother-fucking novelty item!! And yet these relentless pint-sized mini-monsters just keep perpetually eyeballing me every day like I’m freshly beamed down from the Starship Enterprise each morn. After screaming at the runty buggers to disperse with the reverse effect, I set the Land Cruiser on stun and motor around to the opposite side of a large hedge…(if you can’t beat ‘em, hide from ‘em!). Today I hit a wall…a hard solid wall…I hit this wall at high velocity… I am DONE with this country! FED UP with these people! FINISHED with this project! FATIGUED to the bone-marrow…and of course as I type this an overly-cheerful-looking Nurse Emmanuel bounces his uninvited butt right into the empty back of the Land Cruiser and jam-joins himself right smack up against me in true Rwandan fashion…personal space is shunned in this county, they don’t know what it is…and this is simply an unforgivable annoyance on a day like today. We sit without speaking…I’m sick n’ tired of friends with whom I cannot communicate! What’s the point! And so I sit and type these words and ignore Emmanuel for the better part of an hour until he finally scrams (thank God!) & then I feel like the fucking complete asshole that today I entirely am... Personal space is non-existent here and I’m finding the absence to be increasingly difficult to reconcile with my personal sanity…constantly feels like I’m trapped beneath the crumbling walls of my own one-man Alamo.

Nancy holds three health & hygiene trainings today: the first with the local Health Animators (of which there’s a record turnout of 40), the second with Jacqueline II to a classroom-full of Bisate Primary School students, and a third to the Clinic Staff itself. Nurse Telesphore immediately disappears from this third training the instant Nancy mentions SOAP (a systematic approach to Subjectively and Objectively Assessing a patient’s malady and making a Plan for treatment)…all are concepts which Nurse Telesphore has no use for. The quality of patient-care & service at Bisate Health Center hovers, for the most part, between god-awful and criminally negligent. In-coming patients take for granted the medical negligence, inattention, and off-handed dismissal they will receive - and so trainings focused upon the comprehensive examination of patients contain nothing whatsoever to interest those such as Nurse Telesphore who know better.

I continue my time-lapse cinematography of the Meeting Area construction. The entire roof frame is completed today. I’ve brought tall beers (Mutzig & Primus) for the workers and as usual my eyes cannot help but widen in respect as these blokes drain the 1.5 liter bottles in one long solo gulp…punctuated by celebratory exclamations of ‘Komera!’ (strength!)

5/19/07:

A FILMMAKER SWEPT AWAY

Long metal sheets are rapidly covering the Meeting Area’s rooftop, pounded into place by nails hammered through bottle-caps (to help prevent leakage). Translucent plastic sheets are used in the center to allow light though. All but two of the roofing sheets are in place when a terrible storm obliterates the day’s remaining work and everyone bolts for cover as Bisate is transformed into a world of cascading water. My super8mm has been recording the Meeting Area’s constructional progress all day via time-lapse and in anticipation of shoddy weather I wrapped the camera in a raincoat so I’m now quite happy to leave it clicking away and recording Nature’s dramatic blasting of this day’s work effort. Only the front of the lens will get wet and I enjoy those time-lapse shots wherein rainwater obliterates the screen and is then evaporated and vanishing the next instant by a hotly storm-pursuing sun. Unfortunately for me, my transportation back to Ruhengeri today is unwilling to wait for the sun’s arrival. The driver wishes to depart pronto, fearful that the road is fast becoming impassable. And so with that documentary filmmaker’s oft uttered sigh of exasperated masochistic acceptance, I velcro my rain jacket tight and scurry into the elements to grab the clicking camera and wrap-up my day’s operation. Things, however, are not as they once were…I discover that I’m now separated from my camera by a newly raging river of brown water that has materialized seemingly out of nowhere to cut Bisate Road in two!! This newborn aquatic monstrosity is even widening and deepening ere I stare! Charging uphill alongside it, I muck through a field and duck into a bamboo grove in search of a crossable juncture. Finding a gap amidst the bamboo that appears jumpable, I back up and charge and hurl myself off this bank and towards that one but that one is actually just deceitfully grassy-topped water and so I plunge through this subterfuge and become submerged beneath the deluge and am swept downstream like a bamboozled ape until an aptly placed bamboo trunk permits me to haul myself out and onto the muddy expanse of the opposing shore. Eight years of independent filmmaking have instilled me with the capacity to endure utter degradation and horrifying misery without batting a lash…so I stagger to my feet, mud and grime plastered across every frozen inch of my flooded façade as my body proceeds to stomp over and grab my still-clicking camera and then about-faces and marches straight back thought this Rwandan Rubicon, muddy water surging throughout each sneaker and gushing up my pant-legs…but with everything infinitely easier now that abject misery has so thoroughly been achieved. My driver is less than thrilled at my re-appearance…so I go through the usual social motions of scraping off the filth and wringing myself out before stoically plopping my soggy bottom down upon the tidy dryness of his condemned passenger seat.

On the drive home a new release is playing on the front windshield, it’s one of those over-done Hollywood disaster films replete with a ridiculous flood that’s consuming hapless African villages like M&Ms - everything everywhere is somewhere along the process of being swept away via mega gushes of torrential earth and water. We pass homes that are now houseboats, crop fields that are now fishing lakes...our car charges straight through river after river and somehow we keep managing to make it across to dry road again…a real-life version of ‘Oregon Trail’ wherein our driver’s repeated Russian-roulette decision to caulk the wagon and ford the river is time after time proven incorrigibly correct! We are untouchables!!! I make it home, a dripping miserable frigid wreck who’s prepared to ravish himself with an hours-long steaming-hot shower…only to discover that the electricity is out…so instead my shadow steels itself through a torturous minute-long freezing cold shower and afterwards curl-up in a sleeping bag and prays for God to take pity.

CHINESE SPEED BUMPS (part II):

I predicted a bad accident…I said ‘Beware Of Chinese Road Construction!’ Yesterday’s critique about the newly installed ‘Chinese Speed Bumps’ is today proven prescient. To recap, scores of cement blocks have recently been laid across the new Chinese-made road between Ruhengeri and Bisate (upon which we travel every day). However, these speed-reducing impediments are unmarked and impossible to see and, well, they’re not speed bumps!!! They’re short, blocky, cement walls…with no ramp or gradient!!! Anyways, we’ve nearly killed ourselves a number of times since their appearance and I’ve been predicting that a bad accident was in the offing…and, well, today we learn that a large military vehicle hit one of these ‘speed bumps’ last night and the entire truck flipped, scattering soldiers everywhere and pinning the driver beneath the auto’s mangled remains. Chinese roads may be cheap but their crews don’t do shit for safety.

PATIENTS of The Day:

Today our Notable Patients of the Day are an adorable husband and wife couple that somehow managed to place one another into clinic beds last night. Both got roaring drunk and commenced a domestic dispute that abated once each had smashed the other over the head with a hard blunt object. Today both are in clinic beds with matching bandages wrapped around their bludgeoned noggins. I’ve seen so many beaten women here that I suppose it’s a relief finally to find one who gave back as good as she got. We chuckle at this particular case but the local frequency of abuse is shocking. Rare is the day when the in-patient ward isn’t sheltering at least one female recovering from a beating. And so often these women flee here for medical attention and safety whilst having no idea what’s happening to their children in the meanwhile. They enter the clinic suffering from acute physical and emotional trauma and spend a day or two in a valium-induced stupor (valium is the only sedative/pain killer available)…and then they leave and we never hear from them again…there are no other available treatment options. No social workers, no therapy, no support, nada. C’est la vie.

5/20/07:

PA Nancy Departs:

CCHIPS Volunteer, P.A. Nancy departs today…she has accomplished such a tremendous amount in so short a period – her relentless work ethic and easygoing manner render her perfectly suited for this type of arduous endeavor. She will be missed. Everyone vanishes off to Kigali for the day leaving me all alone at the project house, all alone on a warm peaceful day…what joyousness! I’ve not experienced true solitude in months! Finding even a wee bit of actual ‘alone time’ in a country like this is an event worth celebrating…so I flip open a page, crack a Mutzig, pop a wasabi pea, and lean back into a patio lounge chair for a day-long bask…utterly protected from the outside world by a comforting brick wall topped with reassuring coils of barbed-wire.

5/21/07:
Laura & Gabby are still off in Kigali so I hitch an early ride up to Bisate Clinic with the DFGFI Trackers to shoot time-lapse footage of the construction workers carrying lava rocks, digging dirt, and finishing the Meeting Area’s roofing. I learn how to say “please don’t cry, I will return!”

Get my first seven rolls of Super 8 footage back convereted to mini-DV…yes there are a few nice shots but overall I’m disappointed...with regards to full-filling my esthetic hopes the format fails. Too grainy and unsteady, contrast range and color rendition leave much to be desired.
Possible Title: The Creeping Light
Stay up late to help sis with report.
Rats in the plencenta pits

5/22/07:
Stay up ‘til 3pm helping Sis finish the 6-Month Report. Apparently no one actually ever reads these reports so our real mission is to make the thing as thick and heavy as a cinderblock and thereby impress upon all recipients the importance of minding it, even if for no other reason then fear it may fall and kill someone. In short, the report’s impact relies entirely upon the perceived size of its potential crator. Rather than embracing the naïve prayer of successfully conveying information, we instead embrace the more practical and effective approach of playing upon one’s base instinct for self-preservation.

5/23/07:
JP tells us about Assistant District Secretary’s accusing Laura of tree-thievery to the Mayor. Elie spends the entire day at the local Stapels-substitute to get Laura’s Report copied and bound. I send off a letter to my friend Flora and finish my second Le Carre novel this month.

5/24/07
Laura delivers her 300-page report to Felix – flabbergasted at the bulk he tells Laura he only expected a couple pages. We learn the opposition has also submitted a report. Laura sets up a meeting with the Mayor for next Mon-Tues.

5/25/07:

Laura has her second long talk with Katie in as many days. Everyone’s got something to gain or loose depending upon how this little scuffle concludes.

5/26/07:

The Impassioning Art of Logging & Digitizing:

All day spent at home, logging & digitizing…logging & digitizing: what an action-packed adventure it is! Such absorbing and rewarding work! Permit me a brief aside to espouse on this most enriching activity... I’m shooting a feature-length documentary on the rebuilding of a rural health clinic and currently am nearing the 300th hour of raw footage. Now, the intriguing aspect of this is that for every single hour of raw footage I shoot I must thereafter go back and digitize that hour into my computer in real-time. Then, once that hour is fully digitized, I gotta keep sitting here again like an rump-eating automaton and watch this same gosh-darn hour all over again, bit by bit, while painstaking writing notes on what’s happening in each & every scene while also transcribing much of the dialog whilst also classifying all these ‘descriptive elements’ under easily searchable ‘categorical’ headings! I know I know…what a Fantastical Fun Pot! So now you’re chomping at the bit to learn HOW you too can overdose on such over-engaging stimuli, right! Well, I’m here to tell you HOW! Write me at sean.clauson@gmail.com and unless you’re a super-naturalistically ill-fated monkey we shall setup for you a life-affirming system that encompasses the salubrious act of you digitizing and logging several dozen tons of hours of inspirational footage (and even more if you wish). This selfless generosity on my part is but one benevolent element of my overall magnanimous desire to share this vital work with you and those like you.

5/28/07:

The Wild Water Buffalos Massacre

Of all the days NOT to go to the clinic I pick today …FUCK ME! While I’m here lollygagging in Ruhengeri, daydreaming about what a dramatic documentary I’m assuredly in the midst of shooting…whilst I’m here seated upon my skinny indolent arse…a huge freaking feral herd of water buffalo stampede down from their forest lair on the volcanoes and abruptly trample Bisate village!!! WHAT!!!! YES!!! Dozens of these ill-tempered 2-ton beasts overrun the five-foot-high, two-foot-wide barricade of rock (made to keep them inside the park) and proceed to ravage the town below, rampaging over farmland and farmer alike while sowing the earth with much blood of man! While I sit munching morning yogurt and lamenting Rwanda’s appalling shortage of organic muesli…while I’m thusly engaged…all-out war explodes across Bisate! And I miss every gushingly-gruesome, superbly-sensationalistic, outlandishly-opportunistic and extravagantly-entertaining-istic second of it!!! God herself is now apparently joined the ranks of those opposing my Oscar hopes! And so, NO! I’M NOT at the clinic to film the influx of broken-boned bloodied patients! World War III roars into Bisate and I’m still at the Ruhengeri project house ensconced in an Oprah Magazine gossip column whilst wriggling my pedicured tootsies!!! Scores of brutalized villagers get carted to Bisate Clinic upon stretchers and two more are ambulated away to Ruhengeri Hospital for emergency service, one in mortal danger….and I am aware of none of this until this evening and can only bat my lashes and guffaw while Elie recounts the tale of how the Bisate’s populace rose up, enraged by its casualties, and mutated into a revenge-reeking mob of machete-wielding maniacs that counter-attacked from behind the beasts, striking at flank and hoof, butchering every staggered animal amidst frenzied bouts of spurting arteries and convulsing limbs! But, by the time we hear of it The Battle of Bisate is long over and the defeated party’s smoking remnants are rapidly dispersing down the digestive tracks of several hundred mollified villagers…

--- END of MAY 2007 BLOG ---

B) Each morning after finishing her chilled coffee drink, Laura likes to suck down a glass of locally produced Agasha Juice…but this morning all the Agasha juice goes AWOL!  Except for one bottle that has got only the tiniest-weeniest little smidge of juice in it. (“Oh dear, who drank all the juice!!!!!!!”)

C) Each morning my sister consumes exactly two slices of toast…except for this morning that is, because all the bread vanishes and only a sprinkling of crumbs has been left behind in the basket…(“Oh gosh-darn it! Who finished ALL the dang toast!!”)

D) Laura invariably smothers one piece of toast with peanut butter and the other with Vegemite…this morning however the only visible peanut butter & vegemite jars are empty peanut butter & vegemite jars!!! (“Oh dear, oh dear, what a rotten morning this is!”)

E) Each morning with her two pieces of toast my sister also religiously devours two poached eggs…but this morning all our eggs have disappeared, save one! And it’s a pretty tiny one too!

F)  Meanwhile, much like Old Faithful, Laura regularly ‘blows her stack’ whenever we run out of fruit…this morning, wouldn’t you know it, we run out of fruit!!  What are the odds!

G) Sis delights in dousing all edibles with salt…this morning however the saltshaker is suddenly mysteriously quite empty & our extra salt supply has up and vanished like a fart in the wind!

H) Even worse, all dishes, plates, and glasses are kept in a lockable cabinet in our dining room and somehow this morning for the first time ever this particular cabinet has become locked and the key is now nowhere to be found!!!!!!!

I) Yet even more maddening, try opening the dining-room curtains to let in the morning sun and, well, you’ll work up quite a sweat trying but with markedly little success…since the twin sections of the dining-room curtains have been mysteriously tied and knotted together at the top!

J) The chairs on the front porch inexplicably disappear.  Damn thieves!  

K) All bottles and toothbrushes on Laura & Flora’s bathroom shelves somehow become knotted and strung to each other by long lines of dental floss!  Go for the shampoo and you’ll drag everything else onto the floor!!  HAHAHA!!!

L) And, oh crap!  I almost forget…if you need to take a crap…well, jolly bad timing old sport!  I’ll be damned if there taint a scrap of toilet paper to be found in the whole bloody house!

Now, one will suggest that “I go too far” and that “I overdo it” and one will be quite right obviously and so to vicariously partake in this gleeful ‘overdoing-it’ deviltry, you may now listen to a clandestine audio recording of my poor Sis stumbling into this fateful morning as she enters the kitchen intent upon quenching her vampire thirst for chilled coffee…   J

My self-designed, hand-made wooden worktable arrives today…it’s great!  No more editing in bed with the laptop on my chest like an utter amateur.  Elie, our Project Manager & Translator, has been visiting the woodshop daily to ensure the unavoidable fuckups typically associated with this type of customized order, are, well, avoided!…and miraculously (and somewhat dissapointingly) I see nothing about which to bitch.  The semicircle cutout in the front-center fits snugly round my waist, just as desired, and I can pull the whole structure right up to my belly-button while it encircles either side of my hips, the writing surface itself is less than an inch off my lap…a setup that will unquestionably promote positive posture habits.  J

4/2/07:
Inexplicably, Clinic Titular (Head Nurse Jacqueline) continues to aggressively lobby Laura to purchase a $300 desktop computer.  Jacqueline says that the machine is valued at over $1,000 and that we should therefore take advantage of the great deal.  “Are you serious?” is Laura’s reply, as she reminds Jacqueline that the clinic has no electricity with which to power a desktop computer.  Indeed, a brand new flat-screen desktop computer (donated by the Access Project) has already sat at the clinic in its unopened box for over a year because, once again, there’s no bloody electricity up here!  Furthermore, Laura continues to explain, ‘if and when Bisate Clinic does get a solar electrical system, this system will be entirely incompatible with energy-guzzling desktop computers’.  In addition, Laura adds that CCHIPS Founder & Funder, Ro Wyman, has already donated a laptop (the only type of computer that will work up here) to the clinic, which also cannot currently be used however because none of the staff possess any degree of computer training or knowledge.  This all adds up to a summation: the clinic already possesses 2 computers neither of which can be used…therefore begging the question: why buy a third when we know it won’t be coming out of its box?  So, not to make too fine a point, but purchasing a $300 computer doesn’t make a scrap of Goddamn sense anyway you looko at it.  Laura lays all of these points out for Jacqueline but it’s as if the Titular (Head Nurse) cannot hear what Laura is saying…Jacqueline continues to look dejected and morose while murmuring random phrases about how we must have this $300 computer, the deal is just too good to pass up.

Driving home later, we receive a breathless call from our Ruhengeri friend, Jean-Peter, who is calling to ask if we already bought Jacqueline’s $300 computer and then, in his next exhalation, urging us NOT TO BUY IT!  He informs us that the whole thing is a scam being carried out by local bigwigs…explaining that these computers were donated to the Rwandan health clinics and are supposed to be distributed FOR FREE…but that instead these corrupt local officials have contrived to sell these to the clinics for exorbitant sums ($300 is a few months worth of income for Bisate Clinic).    Stop the presses, scandal and corruption in Ruhengeri!  

I ask if I can videotape an on-camera interview with Jean-Peter about this scandle and how he came to know about it…he immediately declines…sincerely fearful of retribution if someone learns he’s tipped us off.  And the last thing any Rwandan will ever do is stand up and make a public ‘stir’ of any sort by themselves…such behavior just isn’t in the native DNA.  Though, if anyone were to do it here, Jean-Peter would be your man.

 So now we understand why Jacqueline has been pushing so inexplicably hard for Laura to purchase this ridiculous machine.  No doubt someone higher up the local political food is pressuring Jacqueline, someone who doesn’t care two squibs if Bisate has electricity or not.  And for sure the schemers’ calculations with regards to us must center upon the belief that Bisate’s rich, white (and doubtlessly stupid) supporters will cough up such chump change without a second thought. We are disappointed in Titular (Head Nurse) Jacqueline.  The clinic staff & patients deserve a leader whose priorities are the clinic, its staff, and the patients…and yet it is becoming clear that our Titular’s priorities include none of these.  At best she is being pressure to do something that will hurt the clinic…at worst she is ‘in on it’ and has been promised ‘a cut of the action.’    

The computer in question, we hear, is part of the Global Fund’s effort to provide a computer to every clinic in Rwanda…a goal the GF seems to be doing a superb job at reaching…except that these machines are supposed to going to the clinics FOR FREE.  It would appear that certain pocket-padding individuals in upper regions of local power have hit upon the ingenious idea of shaking-down their own impoverished clinics.

4/3/07:
We arrive at the wedding of Nurse Alexis’ son in time to watch the colorfully attired congregation marching into a mammoth stone church that looks like it might buckle and crumble at any moment unless some long hard praying gets underway pretty darn fast.  Around us is a spectacular mish-mash of cultivated fields rolling outwards to a horizon of looming volcanoes, a fresh sunny day.  Inside we find a ramshackle affair with the original makeshift wooden scaffolding still in place against the walls, no doubt added security against the toppling inwards of this structure upon our heads; the place certainly does impel upon one the critical and immediate necessity for fervent prayer.  In lieu of pews, the uneven earthen floor is lined with lava boulders laid across with bare wooden planks, upon which our butts find purchase.  

A familiar face rises to address the assembly: it’s the same pastor from our last Rwanda wedding!  The one who gave that hour-long exhortation about how ‘Eve had Breasts and so Homosexuals shall therefore Roast in Hell’.  Today his subject of abomination is Tardiness, specifically the tardiness of the Groom’s family, whom were, by the pastor’s own timepiece, over an hour late for this service.  The pastor wonders aloud if his flock truly believes their Shepard has nothing better to do with his time than waste it upon their miserable untimely Asses?  The man lavishes a half-hour’s rant upon the unforgivable sin of lateness, venting discontent upon the congregation like a Nazi machine-gunner and deviating from this excoriation only long enough (almost as an afterthought) to actually marry the adorable stone-faced couple.  This was, remember, originally a wedding after all.

The wedding ceremony concludes with the chastised flock filing out while performing a popular Rwandese wedding tradition - a synchronized ‘duck-like’ line-dance to a by-now familiar Disney-esque electronic tune.  The procession is headed by two duck-dancing rows of little tykes attired in fancy hats and coats and led by two tiny flower girls rhythmically dispersing handfuls of fresh white petals into the air on the beat.  

Afterwards, we make the obligatory appearance at the reception, chug the standard warm Fantas, sit in the usual dark mud hut, and look obligingly back at the on-looking locals…where’s all the fun you ask?  Sorry, no fun permitted, this is Rwanda.

We spend the remainder of the day back down at Karisoke Office recovering our respective sanities in the heart-warming wasteland of Western Culture (the Internet).

4/4/07:
Gabby (our House Manager & Cook), Musayhay (our Night Guard), and Alice (our Housekeeper) all go visit the Mountain Gorillas today (Laura gifted them each a Gorilla Trip for Christmas).  Along with the Genocide, these endangered Mountain Gorillas form the backbone, heritage, and fame of Rwanda.  And yet the number of natives who have actually seen a Mountain Gorilla is miniscule (tourists pay $500 for the one hour experience while locals only pay $20)…the average Rwandan lives on a dollar a day or less in wages so this one-hour experience would represent a month’s worth of work.  So, as you can understand, few Rwandans ever see the Mountain Gorillas.

Sis, Flora, and I, stay put at home.  We’ve all been up to see the Gorillas before.  Sis last year, me in 2003, and Flora lucked into getting a free visit some days ago.  Every day eight groups of eight members each are led up into Virunga National Park by an assortment of trackers and soldiers to spend an hour with their own exclusive wild gorilla group…and the price tag has become such that no matter what happens or how little or much you may enjoy your experience you will nevertheless declare it from now on and until your dying day as ‘The Experience of a Lifetime’.

Awake to a familiar sound: Laura is screaming furiously into her phone.  The Christmas gift to her house staff (Gabby, Alice, and John) has been ruined!  And Laura’s in the process of making someone pay.  One of today’s gorilla groups was overbooked and John (Musayhay) was made to stay behind.  Laura relentlessly chews into the receiver about how madly interesting it is that it is the Rwandan who is made to stay behind while all the fat white rich westerners get to go up.  Hours later, Alice & Gabby return home giddy & excited from their Gorilla experience (their group was not overbooked).  Alice had a baby Gorilla wonder over and touch her leg – I suspect to ask her for a drink (Alice just had a baby & is still perhaps lactating?).  Alice & Gabby went up with a bunch of bumbling puffy Muzungus and Alice enjoys to no end pantomiming the helpless behavior of these tourists by repeatedly stumbling and toppling over into a confused giggling heap.

After a good twenty minutes vent into her phone, Laura has arranged for John to go up tomorrow.

No clinic today.  I concentrate on logging video footage…have not been doing this as regularly as I should (I’m a lagging lollygagging logger).  Friggin hate logging.

It’s April: Genocide Memorial Month - the absolute worst month to be in Rwanda.  All thoughts are upon the Genocide, on those 800,000 lives lost in 100 days.  In a country of only seven million (1994 numbers) everyone lost friends and family…many lost everything & everyone.  In April everyone is made to reflect upon this loss and so everything everywhere becomes acutely horrid and depressing and awful.  

I’m closeted away in my room, logging, and so I miss Elie telling Flora a bit about his personal Genocide history.  I learn later that Elie explains to Flora that he was from a family of nine children and that two of his younger brothers were killed in the War (Rwandans call it The War rather than The Genocide).  Gabby, I know, lost his older brother, he has never spoken about his father.  Alice & John, I don’t know what happened to them and theirs…

The northwestern Musanza District that we inhabit is predominately Hutu and the bitterness here still runs deep even today.  The 1994 genocide is not the genocide that devastated this area, no, that would be the ‘reverse/revenge genocide’ of 1996-98 in which the conquering Tutsi Army exacted genocidal revenge upon the Hutus for the Hutus 1994 decimation of the Tutsi population.  No one, however, is permitted to publicly recognize or memorialize this reverse/revenge genocide.  The Tutsi’s control the government and no recognition or admission whatsoever is permitted regarding the Tutsi’s own genocidal crimes.  I suppose it is tacitly proffered and accepted that this ‘reverse genocide’ was simply what the Hutu population deserved after its own murderous 1994 uprising.  In short, this ‘reverse/revenge genocide’ was a ‘just genocide’ and therefore, by definition, not a genocide at all.    

Not to take sides but if you look at the death tolls alone, including the massive massacres perpetuated by the Rwandan Government (in the form of General Kabila and his Rwandan-Outfitted Army) against the millions of unarmed Hutu refugees who fled across the border to Zaire (today’s Congo), well, then it seems relatively clear that the Tutsis actually murdered a shit-load more Hutus than Hutus did Tutsi!  Some put the number of Hutu deaths in Congo alone at 3.3 million!!  But, again, no one is permitted to speak of these atrocities.  Not the Rwandan government.  Not the US government (our guilt over doing nothing, less than nothing actually, to halt the 1994 genocide compelled us to likewise do nothing, less than nothing actually, to prevent this ‘reverse/revenge genocide’ by the Tutsi’s that obliterated the Hutu populations in Rwanda and Congo.  So no one speaks of it.  Not Kagame.  Not Clinton.  No one.

4/5/07:
Flora heads off on the 2-hour drive to Kigali (Rwanda’s Capitol City) to alter the departure date on her plane ticket and, more importantly, to make a food run at City Market…and she will hopefully return with several boxes of Muesli and jars of Nutella or else I shall be rather quite put out.

Laura, Elie, and I go up to the Clinic.  We get the health data.   

A boy is brought in, transported face down on a log borne by four men.  Something as big as my fist is sticking out of his back, perhaps his spine, I don’t get a good look.  The ambulance arrives but the boy has no Mutuelle (Insurance) and therefore cannot be transferred to or treated at the only local hospital…the kid is nonetheless placed inside the ambulance where he lies for another half-an-hour whilst clinicians argue about his case.  His family is rumored to be bringing money to pay for the ambulance ride but they never show.  Roge, the District Secretary, materializes and begins lecturing the motionless boy and the surrounding spectators on the importance of having Mutuelle (Insurance) - a year’s worth of insurance is $2 and yet many here cannot afford it.

Flora returns with Muesli & Nutella.  Sean is relieved; survival is assured for at least another month.  Ruhengeri is severely limiting when it comes to satisfying our sophisticated Western palettes.  No restaurants here except Rwanda restaurants and so veggies, soup, potatoes, goat, and Mutzig Beer rule every menu…one’s craving for Thai, Italian, Indian, Mexican, Japanese (basically anything different) eventually becomes distressingly acute after about 24-hours in country.

 John, our house guard, finally gets to see the Mountain Gorillas today – and, on its way up, his group also encounters a colony of golden monkeys, hundreds of them – so John get a big-time-double-whammy-bonus!  And he returns a changed man – he explains a bit tearfully that he always thought Rwanda was a tiny little enclosed box but that now, today, he has seen that Rwanda is a vast open beautiful land.

4/6/07:
Fireworks explode at today’s monthly Health Committee Meeting.  Jacqueline yells and then yells some more, seemingly non-stop and at volume, an intrinsically un-Rwandan performance.  The Committee, we learn, has finally decided upon something,  it has decided it is displeased with the slow pace of the CCHIPS projects.  This from a Committee that has done nothing, suggested nothing, offered nothing, solved nothing, and said next to nothing…about anything.  A hostile attitude seemingly materializes out of nowhere and Jacqueline sits before us bellowing that things are taking too long and that people don’t know what’s happening.  

Laura, visibly agitated, becomes increasingly exasperated with each translated word…she has repeatedly told Jacqueline and the Committee about CCHIPS’s plans in explicit detail…just the other day I filmed Laura walking Jacqueline around the new pit latrine explaining for the umpteenth time everything that was occurring with the project…only to have Jacqueline, apparently uninterested, wonder away amidst the tour.  Yet, today Jacqueline is yelling her head off that it’s insufferable that neither she nor the Committee understands what is happening with these incoming toilets!  It’s like Laura is dealing with infants…she explains the same thing again and again and yet, for some reason, the information refuses to achieve cranial penetration.  I could just smash Jacqueline over the head with my camera right now, perhaps then she’d get the picture?  But, no, no, no, I’m just an innocent, unbiased, non-judgmental, amateur filmmaker, and so I keep my trap shut.          

The new Health Committee President, Salome, manages to make Laura’s eyes bug-out still further when she wonders aloud if Laura understands that water is a problem in Bisate? She then explains to Laura that the new water tanks must therefore arrive with haste!  If Laura carried a tomahawk, Salome’s scalp would be in danger.  Laura explains that the water tanks were supposed to arrive two weeks ago but are delayed – Aqua San (the company providing them) has had electrical problems and their manufacturing process is delayed…plus they’ve apparently just taken a huge order from UNICIF and we suspect that our tiny order may have been placed on the backburner. And no, there are no competing companies here to which we can turn.  As for the new Meeting Area Structure, Laura explains the delays there too (problems finding suitable timber & finding transportation for this timber).  Sis exits the meeting shell-shocked and angry…didn’t help that she was up working ‘til 3am this morning.  She got bushwhacked.

The Committee informs us it is receiving RWF 300,000 to launch a sanitation program.  We are delighted as this is exactly what we had been hoping for, some real self-initiative that has led to some governmental financing!  That is, we’re delighted until we hear about their program.  Is it a program for soap?  Hand-washing?  Medical Waste Management?  Sanitation Education?  Sanitation?  Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope and Nope!  This is the first sanitation project we’ve encountered here lo-and-behold it’s a ‘sanitation’ program for planting flowers.  Pretty flowers.  That’s their friggin self-created sanitation program: planting flowers!  What the Hell!!!  Does anyone in authority around here actually care about improving patient care or health, or about the women giving birth in the clinic’s pitch-black, dirty, blood-encrusted delivery room - a room that exudes a stench that will empty your stomach into your mouth if you open that door unprepared!?! Never have we heard anyone at any meeting ever say anything whatsoever about patient care or education or about a genuine sanitation and hygiene program.  No, let’s buy flowers instead.  Pretty flowers.

The Health Committee’s points and concerns about CCHIPS are valid (things are moving too slow) but I come out of the meeting rather affronted and pissed-off (and I’m the unbiased innocent bystander remember).  Though the meeting was admittedly more heated and productive than all our combined meetings from the past several months.  And yet it’s still just six committee members who, rather than asking what they can do to help, rather than offering solutions, rather than doing or thinking anything themselves…instead just sit here and offer only criticism and complaint.  Frankly this project is supposed to be a partnership between CCHIPS & the Bisate Community and yet The Community representatives seem to view the situation otherwise, as CCHIPS organizing doing and paying for everything while the Community watches and judges while sitting on its Collective Ass.  Frustrating because although we’ve had some help from the Community it has been far too little, too scattered and difficult to organize...and little of what community volunteerism has transpired has been brought about, spurred, or encouraged by The Community.  If CCHIPS doesn’t push, nothing gets done.  The Community and The Committee have been of depressingly little assistance.  How can we succeed in such an environment?

Laura and I have a long talk in the evening about overall strategy.  We both realize that if things continue along like this that Laura’s mental & physical underpinnings will soon become unhinged.  While such an occurrence might provide bonanza material for my film, she is unfortunately my sister and so I must look after her.  So my advice is simple: don’t go to the clinic so much.  Instead of going six days a week, go one, two at most.  Send Elie up I your stead everyday.  He can handle the on-site details.  Take a step back and run things from your office in the project house.  Preserve your sanity while accomplishing more - she has a whole other side to her job, you see, with all the paperwork/accounting/health tracking/etc which she currently never has time for.  She’s going to try this approach.  

4/7/07:
Day off.  Today, Tomorrow, and Monday are all national holidays.  Today’s Genocide Memorial Day, tomorrow’s Easter, Monday’s whatever…

Go for 6am tennis lesson and my young-punk coach fails to show.  Meet a bloke named Richard and we play for an hour.  Flora shows and we play for another hour.  Flora talks trash non-stop!  Rather a poor-sport I might add.  Sure, she’s talking trash mentally rather than verbally, but I can still tell.  Shame on you Flora!  Afterwards we spend an hour at the pool and the remainder of the day back home.  It’s so fantastic having a friend here whom I can do things with!…(my sister being the proverbial stick-in-the-mud and shunner of all things physical and active).

Unhappy Easter!  No Easter baskets for us, therefore the holiday BLOWS!  I go out for a long run to take my mind off the unsettling absence of chocolate-bunnies.  A long run too because I become lost somewhere in the ‘back-alleys’ of Ruhengeri and spend an extra hour jogging in widening circles along tiny dirt pathways and through banana groves and over potato fields in an attempt to find myself.  Farmers and their families stare as the perspiring alien from Planet Muzungo as he trudges by.  Fortunately, volcanoes tower above everything here and so maintaining one’s sense of direction ain’t so complex…after a sun-baked hour I finally find the right path and follow it back home.

Spend much time today at the office on the Internet.  O’ Internet, why do I love thee so?  Though it is so great to be able to go a week or two without any web surfing at all – I suspect that too few westerners comprehend just exactly how much of their lives they waste each year stuck in traffic upon the Information Super-Highway.

Flora is leaving on Friday.  Will be very sorry to see her go, such a sunny, intelligent, and lively personality, with a dash that has made things significantly more pleasant around here these past months.  After four months at an Ethiopian Orphanage and three more here at our Rwandan clinic, she is now preping an epic travel-itinerary for her oncoming summer that includes half-a-dozen flights around the globe this way and that and back again before supper.  She’s exceptional for an 18-year-old.  Indeed, to be honest, she’s sort of annoyingly over-exceptional really!  One of those rare individuals with such a curiosity and pluck about things that it compels those around her to reflect upon what in the blazes we did with their own teenage years!  Which, after minimal reflection, turns out to be comparatively litte.  All I recall from my teens is playing too many thousands of hours of ice hockey and eating too much peppermint stick ice cream (my family bought it by the industrial vat size).  I am not even remotely confident that my teen years included the realization that the ‘rest of the world’ existed.  I was, in short, an idiotic creature…(and little has arguably changed since)…though somewhere along the way I did manage to discover that ‘the rest of the world’ does exist…and indeed I now find myself standing shockingly deep within this existence.

4/9/07:
Day at home.  Laura has an extended discussion with Elie about implementing her major change in strategy.  She will now remain at home much more often in order to concentrate on the paperwork/accounting/reports side of things and pursue a more comprehensively ‘overall vision’ of the project while also hopefully preserving her fragile sanity.  Above all, she wishes to cease being so enmeshed within the minutia and petty details that bog one down so incessantly upon each and every Clinic visit.  Elie agrees with Laura’s plan but he’s unsure of going to the clinic by himself to get things done.  This is a big change.  His job is easier with a white person there to run interference.  I advise Laura to give him a day or two to adjust to the added responsibility and she’ll see that Elie gets the job done.  The guy’s a pro.  Yes, it’s more responsibility, but it’s also a clear sign from Laura of her trust and confidence in this man.

Our multilayered hanging basket of fruit tears away of the cement wall of the kitchen this morning and nearly brains our house cleaner, Alice.    

4/10/07:
First day of Laura & Elie’s new approach.  Each morning they will meet and go over the day’s plans and then separate to pursue their individual agendas, Laura to her office, Elie to the Clinic.  Together they’re a formidable force but apart they may actually accomplish more and achieve a higher level of efficiency…and Happiness!  

So Laura goes over her itinerary with Elie and then remains home while He, Flora and I go to the clinic.  And boy did Laura have the right idea today, which is one of those miserable torrential rainy days in Bisate.  I go up explicitly to capture the incoming Water Tanks on film & video and learn, after standing in the rain all day long, that (surprise, surprise) the Tanks aren’t coming today.  Fucking Hell.

The baby plants that Flora has been cultivating for weeks at the CCHIPS House are being given away to the local population from the back of the Land-Cruiser…more are given than I think was wise…since, you see, these plants are primarily for a yet to be planted Nutritional Model Garden…and looking into the back of our Cruiser after the handout I cannot imagine how the handful of remaining plants is enough to start a garden.  But Flora says we’ll have enough.  She has apparently some ‘spares’ back home.  I look at what’s left and raise an eyebrow…but Flora knows best.  

Flora continues stenciling the alphabet along the top of the Maternity Ward wall.  Her hands are covered in green paint and yet she absolutely refuses to as much as smirk at a single one of my brilliant ‘green jokes’! (Have you painted before because you seem kinda ‘green’ / Great job with those plants, you really do have a ‘green’ thumb don’t you! / Flora, are you turning ‘green’ with envy?)  HAHahaHAAhaa!  I kill me!

At home, I have a rather brutal fight with our mutt when the sonofabitch infiltrates our chicken coup and pilfers the two fertilized eggs that poor Mabel has been so diligently sitting upon for ages.  An especially painful loss after all the trouble we’ve gone through to get these eggs fertilized (shipping in a rooster and all).  I get two dog bites to the hand for my efforts and finally pickup the vile cur by the scruff of her neck and deposit it outside.  I hate the beast; cannot imagine a more perfect candidate for the world’s most miserable half-bred mongrel hyena shit-head canine in existence than the one we habe here.  So now Monster-Dog has murdered two adult and two unborn chickens.  If Laura didn’t worship the rascal, I’d toss it out the front gate along with the trash.  It’s is the first dog I’ve met that I simply intuitively dislike.  In fact, I loathe it.

4/11/07:
Today.  Today may have likely included one of those small defining moments that affects the remainder of ones life - or rather of my life.  I get a short email from my NYC Landlord cheerfully advancing me the news that he’s given away my room.  My beautiful sanity-saving oasis room; replete with its own walk-in closet and private bath & shower!!!  Given away no doubt to my backstabbing Russian housemate (never trust a Russian).  Though I have admittedly been working outside NYC for almost two years now, straight.  I guess one can only sublease for so long until one’s landlord starts becoming itchy.  This event does however prompt the realization that if I have no NYC apartment to return to why return at all?  Sure, my friends and business contacts are all in NYC, so at some point I must return.  However, with my oasis annexed, what’s the rush?  Why not spend all 2006 in a little country called Rwanda…why not indeed.

Our time at the clinic is cut unexpectedly short when Elie suddenly relays the info that we need to be back in Ruhengeri tout-suite so that Laura can meet w/the District Dip-Shit, I mean District Supervisor, Dayo.  Why did we come to the clinic today?  We hadn’t the time to accomplish a single thing besides arriving and departing...!

Laura has a good meeting with Dayo.  She is fully prepared for the expected onslaught of ‘where are the new buildings?’ and she repels the usual one-noted harping-on about the sacred all-importance of ‘how things look’…with of course never a word wasted upon such insignificant trivialities as patients and their quality of care.

4/12/07:
We arrive at the Clinic to discover that Jacqueline has forbidden Flora from planting anything in the area designated for The Nutritional Garden. All of us (Jacqueline included) have already discussed and agreed upon this site.  Jacqueline is not present to explain herself but the clinic workers tell Flora that Jacqueline has forbidden planting in the designated area.  As usual, Jacqueline’s timing is disastrous.  Flora is leaving tomorrow.  Flora has spent the bulk of her time here raising the seedlings for this garden.  Today’s planting was to be the climactic achievement of her whole stay – this was her project.  Once again Jacqueline has mangled things.  

And then we suddenly learn that Elie has to be back in his neighborhood for a Genocide town meeting.  So we depart in frustration, our trip up today was completely pointless.  I drive everyone back to Ruhengeri with Flora seated beside me in what Elie calls the ‘Presidential Seat’.

I go to the Karisoke Office for Internet and begin furiously purchasing items online – have to have all this stuff to my New Hampshire household in time for Mother Clauson to give it to Dr. Nancy (our next Medical Volunteer) who is leaving for Rwanda next Thurs.  I spend $800 and buy 2 new B6 Countryman Lav miss (the most depressing part of this job has been the rate of breakage for these $300/a pop mics).  Also purchase special high-altitude tennis balls (tennis & jogging are the only activities Ruhengeri offers aside from soccer, of course, but I don’t play soccer), DVDs,  Super8mm film stock (200T and 64T), lens adaptors, camera cleaning supplies, more miniDV tapes…etc.

Elie, Angel (Elie’s Wife), and Divine (Elie & Angel’s youngest daughter) come for dinner.  We have meatloaf for the second night in a row (this stuff makes me sick).  Angel inspects Laura’s imported Origami packets with fascination.  Little Divine inspects our dog and cat with equal parts interest; I keep offering her fruit, which she relentlessly consumes in impressive quantities.

4/13/07:
Flora flies away today - always difficult losing someone to whom one has grown attached.  Cannot begin to say enough good things about Flora, a most extraordinary young lady.

I do my best to make our moody car ride to the airport even moodier by spending the entire 2-hour trip biting my nails and furiously cataloging and burning a Project DVD before we arrive at Kigali Airport (for Flora to take back with her and mail from within the US) …all this while managing to complain nonstop about the nonstop potholes.  I burn my DVD up ‘til the last minute and then give Flora the DVD and a hug goodbye…want to give her a much bigger hug but she’s wearing a backpack that’s larger than she is so I can manage only a sad half-a-hug.
Later that day, Laura and I take advantage of Kigali’s culinary range and gorge our-selves upon a glutinous $60 lunch of Indian food, which is worth every single last red faranga.  We haven’t tasted anything but Rwandese food in months!  Three mango lassies later, with foreign food in our guts, we sit back and enjoy that fleeting sense of luxury and happiness.

Laura collects a big baked clay pot with BISATE written on one side.   

We have a delightful Italian dinner at Papyrus with Simon and Veronica during which I concentrate fixedly upon my gnocchi and contribute nothing to the conversation.

Laura is not happy with the work environment here.  It is wearing to be working with and depending upon so many individuals who seem entirely unconcerned with improving the clinic.  

4/14/07:
Today we sleep late, get up late, surf the Internet ‘til late, and then go food shopping.  Laura’s favorite juice is out of stock and so is my Muesli!  We grumble, irritably. I try to extend the departure date of my airline ticket and come face-to-face with a $500 fine if I step outside the ticket’s 6-month limitation…double-damn-wham!
Afterwards, we sip lattes in a soothingly familiar “starbucks-esque” establishment next door and meet Bethany Muller who hails from our hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire!  In town for several months she’s working on a program aimed on bringing genocide killers and their victims together for group therapy and forgiveness.  Sounds like a hard job.

We steal a pile of Alecia’s DVDs and head home.

At home we learn that unbeknownst to us, or anyone else, the Water Tanks were brought up and installed yesterday!!!…Fucking pisser!  I’ve recoded the entire construction of the Water Tank structure and now I’ve missed the climax!!  Fucking-Fuckitty-FUCK!!!!

Night is slept away at Alecia’s home/office in Kigali.  Stayed up late chatting with my brother Ryan who appears to be instigating Boston’s 2nd Tea Party over an effort to save the job of a freshly fired college professor…seems the college is firing all profs without Master Degrees in order to rise the school’s ranking in that category…firing them regardless of their merits…later we learn that Ry’s effort was successful!  He headed a protest & the school reversed its decision!  Attica! Attica! Attica!

Finally lie down in bed and pass out from mosquito coil fumes.

4/15/07:
Sunday.  Stay at home with Sis today.  It’s our first time together without any bothersome visitors bumbling about; a cold, quiet day.  Laura reads on the porch.  I log footage in my room.  After several severe sneezing fits I diagnose myself as being allergic to my only remaining friend in Rwanda, my dear little ishuti, Gomi the Kitty-Cat.  With tears in my eyes, I usher her out of my room …in just two days time I’ve managed to lose all the friends I’ve ever had in this country.   

In the evening, Laura is online checking on the lodgings that our Mother has booked for a Tanzanian safari we’ll all going on in July.   

Laura reports that her friend, Innocent, has quit the Access Project.  She wonders if he might be groomed to take over her job here.  She also wanders if he’ll ever repay that $100 she loaned him some months ago.

4/16/07:
A supposedly slow/non-clinic day turns into a wild clinic Jamboree day ride!

I awake to the sound of Laura berating our clinic Titular (Head Nurse) Jacqueline in the dining room.  From this cacophony, I decipher that Laura has about had it up to here with her one time protégée.  Sis is sick to death of this 23-year-old ‘leader’s’ seemingly conscious incompetence.  Once upon a time we had hopes that Jacqueline might transform herself into the leader that Bisate Clinic desperately needs…but that time has gone.  Instead we are stuck with a “leader” whose chief attributes include an abysmal overall attitude, zero regard for patients, shoddy nursing skills, a complete absence of listening skills and equally deficient communication memory retention skills, and who has somehow managed to undercut and sabotage every project she’s been involved in…(the current one being the Nutritional Garden)…the only good thing about Jacqueline is that she occasionally displays a temper, which at least makes her somewhat unique in these parts where outward emotive displays are an endangered species.   

Two days ago, I miss videotaping the arrival of the Water Tanks to Bisate Clinic.  This arrival was a big deal.  It marked the first time in Bisate History that the Health Clinic (and the town for that matter) came into possession of its own reliable water source.  I’d spent weeks filming the prep work for this project and patiently awaiting the arrival of these tanks…and throughout the weeks I had been repeatedly assured that “they’re coming soon, today perhaps, whoops, nope, sorry, tomorrow! whoops, our bad, next week maybe, probably Friday, not sure really, undoubtedly in a month or two, don’t fret, we’ll let you know, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum!”  Until the day of course that I hear the words “Oh, the water tanks! They were delivered yesterday, why do you ask?  Did you want to film them?”

The issue remains that no one, not even the deliveryman, has had nor ever will have any idea when anything in this country will be delivered!  To look ahead by more than a day and actually summon the audacity to predict the date of a particular delivery is akin to witchcraft.  So of course the single day that I don’t go to the Clinic (because we drive to Kigali to see Flora off) is the same day that the BLOODY WATER TANKS GO IN!!  INCONCIEVABLE!!!!  I take meager solace in the fact that I had predicted some days ago that precisely this would happen.  Murphy’s Law in practice.  Despite my constant treks up & down the mountain and incessant inquiries and wild goose chases, despite all this, I had known that my mission was likely doomed, doomed I say, doomed.  I wanted it too much and flew too near the sun with wings of wax.

However…today!  This morning!  We receive an anonymous tip that the Water Tanks for the Bisate Trackers Lodge (just up the road from Bisate Clinic) are about to be hauled up for installation…and the Tracker’s House has been outfitted with a water tank housing structure quite similar to that of the Health Clinic!…And the water tanks going in will be exactly the same make and model!!  In a Eureka moment I realize that I’ve been given a second chance!!!  I realize that the whole process (pickup, drive-up, and installation) can be shot in such a way that you (the stupid spoon-fed viewer) will never realize that neither the location nor the tanks are in fact not the ones at Bisate Clinic. Take Two!

4/17/07:
Elie stops by the Project House to report to Laura on Bisate Clinic’s Health Committee’s Meeting (the Committee is comprised of six locals Bisatians - including our Clinic’s Titular (Head Nurse) Jacqueline, all of whom are responsible for ‘guiding’ the Clinic in the right direction).  Laura has become so fed up with these meetings that she no longer attends them, preferring to send Elie and then suffering only through his brief summation.  Today Laura rolls her eyes at the entirety of Elie’s report.  She’s sick-to-death of having to repeatedly withstand the Health Committee’s utter ineffectiveness - and I do realize how my tone sounds here - but what can I say?  This is how I feel too!  And remember that I’m just an innocent unbiased documentary filmmaking bystander.  The Committees concerns are clearly not ours.  What we take for granted as ‘The Important Issues’ (improving patient care, improving nursing skills & upgrading sanitation and infrastructure, etc) they never mention.  On the rare occasion that The Committee does hit upon an idea, it’s invariably one that makes Laura’s eyes roll so far up into the skeletal regions of her sockets that her eyebrows develop little beer-bellies…ideas such as spending all monies for a ‘sanitation program’ on planting pretty flowers.  People are suffering from lack of proper medicines and medical attention, from lack of $2 insurance cards, from preventable shit!!  And the important thing for these people in charge is to buy flowers.  Appearance is quite literally All-Powerful up here…but we ain’t buying it!

Electricity is off all day.  Hot showers are becoming something of a luxury around these parts…hot showers are the last vestige of civilization from which I’ll willingly part.

A package arrives filled with baby things and candies from Laura’s friend Susie.  Thank God for a little taste of chocolate.

We have Greg from Amahoro Tours and a random Masters Student from Holland, Rual, over for dinner.  Greg brings his youngest daughter who is petrified of dogs.  We try our best to keep our feral mutt outside but Emi (aka Monster-Dog) breaks in at regular intervals (damn dog has learned to use the doorknob!!) and so Greg’s little girl is sent on repetitive howling dashes into her father’s arms.  She does however like the cat…proving once again that our dearest little Gomi can do no wrong.

4/18/07:
Awaken this morning to a wild rumor – THE NEW TOILETS are being trucked up to the clinic RIGHT NOW!!   I’ve been wanting to film these toilets going in for weeks & weeks (these are the 9 toilets that will be feeding the Clinic’s biogas system which in turn will be supplying the cooking gas for our patients and their families) and so I leap from bed and dash about, tossiall my gear into the Land-Cruiser, pull on a moldy pair of mismatched socks (one with a big hole in its heel), forego my morning shower, skip  breakfast, and peel-out of the driveway for DFGFI’s Karisoke Office to suss out what’s up.  Once there, we learn that “oh no, we just checked again, toilets aren’t coming today…our mistake, or maybe they are…but probably not…maybe Saturday.”  “WhaaaH!” (my response)

It’s a criminal offense that no one in this country can tell you for sure when anything’s going to be delivered!  Not even the darn people making the deliveries!  It’s almost as if advanced planning is considered an over-indulgent luxury item and, as such, considered too unseemly and improper for this Spartan Rwandan environment.   Thing tend to be done last second, spur of the moment, with the least possible planning, and with a chronic degree of uncertainty…but perhaps I do protest too much.  We assuredly suffer these same ignominies in the US, no doubt…the difference is that in the US we have options.  We have alternative choices, other companies we can turn to.  If your business’s service is abysmal the customer can more often than not can immediately consider ten other competitors and chances are you’ll be out of business before dinner.  Here in Rwanda there is no selection, no choice, to alternative – there is one company for each product, if that!  Our Toilets are coming from the same company that delivered the Water Tanks (another delivery problem plagued project turned natural disaster for me because of my inability to ascertain when the bloody things would arrive - I thusly missed the Tanks going in and had to ‘fake-film the installation’ at the nearby Gorilla Trackers Lodge).  So I’ve been through this before you see.  How confounding to have one’s life kept so perpetually in the lurch by individuals who cannot look further into the future than tonight’s dinner, by those whose only reliable communication is an inherent ability to convey what’s NOT going happen and when this NOT HAPPENING is probably NOT going to happen as well!

Pasta.  Every day we eat pasta.  Our cook, Gabby, makes pasta for lunch and then for dinner.  Goddamn fusili with tomato sauce.  Menu never changes.  I’m going nuts eating this stuff.  I friggen hate fusili!  And this weak-ass tomato sauce is chomping upon my Will to live.  I HATE eating perpetual pasta and sauce every day of my life.  Pasta, Pasta, Pasta!

Damn perpetual power outages are continuing to devour my logging and editing time…and I just can’t keep commencing my days with cold showers, I just can’t - it’s the one vice of civilization that I’ll die fighting to defend.  Far as I’m concerned, a hot shower is what The United States of America is mostly all about.

4/20/07:
Get lost in a Grisham novel and remain up way too late…hate it when I do this.  Hoping my documentary film proves to be as engrossing to my audience as this book has been to me J

4/21/07:
Dr. Peter’s wife, Nancy (a Physicians Assistant), arrives today for her month-long volunteer stint.  Dr. Peter was a delightful volunteer (back in Dec ’06) and also a modern day ‘Renaissance Man’ with an intense curiosity and a vault of knowledge about most subjects under the sun that he was a pleasure to spend time with - so I have high hopes his wife J  We collect Nancy at Kigali Airport and bounce about the Capitol on our usual panoply of errands.  I change my departure date beyond its original 6-month limitation and get smacked with the $500 fine…ouch.  I then meet the others at City Market where I approvingly note that my precious Muesli has already been piled high in the shopping cart, I may yet survive this country.  After our shopping spree, we grab coffee ‘n crepes next door at Kigali’s answer to Starbucks where we also meet two western water engineers who will be staying with us at the Project House for the next two nights.

I watch the movie ‘Red Dragon’ and then continue consuming my Grisham thriller and once again I stay awake much too late...hate it when I do this!!!

CMR.  I have a dream about a girl I once knew - weird dream as I keep semi-waking-up during it and then drifting back into the same dream…was the first and perhaps only girl with whom I’ve ever been infatuated, which is strange in itself because it was the shortest, least remarkable, non-relationship ever to transpire between two human beings…and yet somehow she managed to leave an indelible mark on me.  Some things in life never stop eating at you, seven years after the fact and she still pops into my head on occasion to deliver that same pang of pain and regret that I remember so well from our final conversation.  As Winston put it, KBO.  KBO.  KBO.

4/22/07:
 Awake to the sound of Laura filling-in Nancy fast & furiously about what to expect up at Bisate Clinic.  
 

Nancy’s first clinic visit: we go up late for a quick tour.  It has been two weeks since our last visit and we are greeted as if it has been two years.  

Stumble upon a young former patient (Pacifique, the badly-burned baby).  His mother pulls up his shirt to reveal the remarkable improvement to his stomach skin – there’s a trace of scarring but the previous swath of huge, ugly, 3rd-degree bubbly-red-burned epidermis across the entire midsection is gone, healed completely.  No word on if his testicles ever descended (this had been the mothers prime concern when she originally brought in the scalded tyke).

A rumor comes in that bandits attacked Bosco’s wife last night quite close to our own project house….don’t know the story yet.
        
4/23/07:
I wake and workout and quickly discover that I’m in one of my by-now-very-familiar funkish bad moods.  Grrrr…..

It is PA Nancy’s first full day at the clinic (PA = Physicians Assistant).  The idea is to have a group meeting to discuss Nancy’s monthly schedule so that we may organize everything from the get-go and use her time as effectively/efficiently as possible…and ironically the meeting begins several hours after its scheduled start due to a lengthy wait for our Clinic Titular (Head Nurse) Jacqueline to become finally available.

The Water Tanks are in and today the workers lay bricks around their bases, while also refortifying the newly installed gutters with metal supports (the first round of gutters were all knocked down and broken by a hail storm!).  (If you see me in person, remind me to tell you the story of Bisate’s first Aqueduct).

Jacqueline III paints white the frames of all the Ward windows and I capture her work though time-lapse cinematography.  I also shoot time-lapse of the Bisate Clinic sign with a sky full of clouds flowing over its top.  Halfway through this shot, village kids besiege the scene…so the shot became either unexpectedly cool or entirely ruined unusable…more likely the later…but won’t know for sure for several months (as Super8mm film cannot be developed in Rwanda).

I drop the camera for the first time…it suicides from a full-legged tripod and smashes onto the earth, which, fortunately, is soft, wet, and forgiving.  There appears to be no damage.

Nurse Damascene takes his usual hour and fifty minute lunch break…and, yes, he is indeed the sole person responsible for hospitalized patients today…hmmm.

4/24/07:
Awake early to setup a Super8mm time-lapse shot of the rising sun striking our project house.  Afterwards I go for a long run, then shower, breakfast, and thereafter spend the day’s remains working quietly at home on the film.

Nancy & Elie putter off somewhere to see immunizations.  If I witness one more endless line of howling toddlers being injected and incubated and whatnot I’ll self-combust.

Laura learns that Bisate has been rated #1 in sanitation among of all of our sector’s 11 Health Clinics!! Furthermore, the district government is planning for all other Clinic Heads (Titulars) in our sector to tour Bisate Clinic in order to see first-hand what we’ve been doing so right!!!  In other words, sanitation ratings must be exclusively based upon clean sheets and painted walls!…who knew!!  (just don’t look into the Delivery Room!).  

Rural Rwandans live in fairly dirty conditions and yet manage to dress beautifully.  Appearance…and the degree to which it is maintained…is truly so all important here.

We learn that the delay in receiving our nine delayed toilets, may be due to unrest in Uganda.  A mass protest has begun there against an Indian corporation’s impending take over of a large swath of protected parkland.  Apparently mobs are roving about stoning-to-death all Indians who cross their paths.  They’ve just killed an Indian who had exactly zero connection whatsoever to the infringing company.  Just a simple case of wrong place, wrong time.  Crowd mentality is a terrifying thing…pack of wild animals.
 
4/25/07:
The first patients Nancy sees on her rounds are two women who’ve been badly beaten.  The husband of the first severely beat her ‘round the head while she was working in the fields.  She fled, leaving behind her children, and now she has no idea as to the whereabouts of her kids or their pugilistic pappy.  She is also, unfortunately, an orphan, and this puts her in an especially terrible clinical position because she has no family to bring her food and water (the clinic has no program to provide these).  The woman has therefore already been here two days without eating or drinking anything.  The nurses are unsympathetic, explaining to us that she is a ‘bad patient’ because she has been complaining non-stop.  We find this news rather shocking because patients here never complain about anything.  She must truly be in a miserable state!  Being sick without family at Bisate Clinic is a prescription for disaster.  Nancy, Elie, and I discuss providing money for food - a good meal costs next to nothing ($0.36) and the town restaurants are just a three-minute walk away - yet one needs cash and also someone to fetch the food and she has neither and we Muzungus (whites/foreigners) can’t be here to watch over her all the time.  We broker a deal with a patient in the adjacent bed to provide for the ladies needs and we hand over cash for a few days worth of meals.  Later, we hear that the beaten woman’s husband was thrown into jail, surprising news, since, from what we’ve seen, domestic abuse is not taken very seriously in these parts.

Lying in the next bed is another badly beaten girl, very young, she was poring drinks for guests at a wedding yesterday when she accidentally spilled water on a man’s jacket – he turned around and hit her so hard in the head that he knocked her unconscious.  So here now she lays, a little girl in a clinic bed.

Shoot some time-lapse photography of two men digging a huge hole for our biogas pit latrine and then shoot more time-lapse footage of a woman tilling the clinic’s fields while her baby lies on a nearby patch of grass – every so often she drops the hoe to nurse the child.  She holds out a hand to me and asks for money.  I have none.

4/26/07:
Go to The Clinic alone today; stop in town to pickup the ‘HIV Mobile Team’ from Ruhengeri Hospital…a mobile team with no form of transportation, how quaint.  

Reach the Clinic and shoot more time-lapse footage of the workmen digging the biogas pit latrine.  Shoot them from atop the pit, from alongside the pit, and then from within the pit itself.  Outside the pit is a bourgeoning landslide of expelled rock and debris.  One of the workmen is a machine, he hammers through rock and tool alike – breaking his mallet every so often only to smash it back together again.

Shoot a bit of footage of the water-project’s gutters getting connected – but the guy doing it departs halfway though the day.  

A storm hits and I film a bit of it too before calling it a day.  Lousy freezing weather and Bisate Clinic go together like Thelma & Louise.

4/27/07:
Wake early to a torrential rainstorm and cancel my morning jog.  During breakfast we receive a rumor that The Clinic’s toilets are on their way up!  (These nine toilets will quadruple the clinic’s toilet facilities and feed a biogas digester pit that will supply the patients with cooking gas…I’ve been following and filming this project closely and the arrival of these toilets is a climactic moment).  So Gabby & I sprint out the door with my gear in tow and drive a 40-minute dash to Bisate Clinic where we find that the toilets have…not arrived yet.  Phew!  I issue a sigh of relief.  I want to film these suckers coming up And going in, you see.  Instead, we find men digging a foundation for the Clinic’s new Meeting Area.  I setup my video camera to record the progress of this work in time-lapse and leave behind two bottles of Mutzig Beer for the workers and then Gabby and I leap back into the Land-Cruiser and bolt back down the mountain in search of these elusive incoming toilets.

We wait forever, staked out between a house that Rosamond Carr is rumored to have once inhabited and another across the street that we refer to as ‘Laura’s Dream House’ – a once noble structure that is now being slowly deconstructed, brick-by-brick, by the military.  Sit like this for two hours.  Torture.  Every few seconds brings a new band of staring strangers…shoeing them away is a continual headache.  Enduring the ‘smoosh-faces’ against my window is like spending eternity in Hell’s seventh circle.  Hate to say it again, and I know I sound like a broken record, but Rwandan Kids ‘round these parts are FUCKING RUDE!!!  I clandestinely film some of the brick-by-brick deconstruction of ‘Laura’s Dream House’ until a soldier marches over to warn me that I’d better not be filming anything of the kind…take a soldiers picture in this country and you’re begging for trouble.  I deny everything and reorient my camera’s lens.

The toilet truck finally rounds the bend and we peel out ahead of it with the Land-Cruiser’s back door open and me filming away at 1-frame per second.  We are bouncing so much that the string I’ve used to tie the rear-door open snaps and the door now slams shut on my leg every time we round a corner.  So I’m suddenly filming away while striving with one leg outstretched to keep the rear-door open while my body is flung about the back of the bouncing Land-Cruiser like a lottery ball.  My eye is pressed tight to the eyepiece but we’re bouncing so hard that my head is repeatedly being slammed into the camera body.  One particularly nasty bump and my face come down so hard on the camera battery that I split open my lip.   Thereafter, I’m sucking blood while continuing to film (they learn us to be right fucking soldiers at NYU).  Then the mother-fucking camera battery dies and I’m trying to get the damn thing operational again while being dribbled about like a Globetrotter basketball.  The footage is hopefully usable – should look like that toilet truck is traveling at about Mock 4.

We arrive back in Bisate only to discover that these toilets I’ve just been filming aren’t actually the ones for the Clinic…these are for the school…I’m not doing a documentary on the school’s toilets!!!  The Clinic’s toilets are completely different in color & design.  Hello useless footage, hello battered body…goodbye high spirits…hello northern province…

4/28/07:
We all go up to the clinic.  

Un-holster my Super8mm Canon 814X-LS to shoot some time-lapse footage (1 frame per minute) of the foundation being dug for our new Clinic Meeting Area.  I’m very conscious of and uncomfortable with the color line here as it pertains to manual work – the black people do all the manual labor while us whites film, make notes, gab & feed our fat faces…such scene makes me uneasy…so I place my camera on time-lapse auto-pilot tripod mode and step over to lend a hand…gonna show these locals that we whities ain’t so soft neither!…And I pitch in and start moving earth with the best of ‘em…and they’re impressed!…The local townsfolk stop by to ask (in Kinyarwanda) what the fuck the white guy thinks he’s doing?…no one here has probably ever witnessed a white man engaged in physical labor…anyways I apparently win the respect of my fellow laborers because after a couple of hours of this they start responding to the townsfolk that this white guy is komera charne (very strong)…so I haul dirt…and nearly break my back…and not only do I uncover much soil but also the fact that I’m going to pay for this big-time tomorrow.  I don’t care though, have never been one to stomach standing around watching while others do the hard work… have actually always had a natural aversion to people who are ‘above’ ‘pitching in to lend a hand’ regardless of their position or title or whatnot…(though as I grow older I’m rethinking this position a bit)…All I can say is Thank God for Vitamin I (Ibeproferin)…gonna need some serious dosages tonight.

Capture some great Super8mm time-lapse shot of the sand piling up as we work – piles got to be seven feet high!  

Gutters go up and then crash back down when a fierce rainstorm hits – one gutter nearly brains the guy standing next to me.  First a hailstorm destroys everything and now this!  Whose side is God on?

I fall on rocks and cut my leg.

Camera falls over and I jam my finger while unsuccessfully attempting to arrest its fall.  Check the camera…camera is still living.  

My back goes out of commission.  I’m a wreck by day’s end.  Shoveling thousands of pounds of dirt is the worst job in the world.     

Nancy and Elie see a baby with pneumonia that is released the same day.  Pneumonia is no big deal around here.    

Gabby drops glasses and cuts his hand at dinner.  

Just one of those days.

4/29/07:
A quiet day at home.  Elie & Nancy drive up to the clinic.  My aching back keeps me in bed.  I’m in agonizing pain.  Yesterday was the last time I ever attempt to ‘prove my strength’ to Rwandan workmen.  Those guys are made of granite.  Two days of that sort of labor and I’d require two years Intensive Care Ward recuperation while having all my vital organs reconstructed.

Elie calls at lunch to report that the clinic’s toilets have arrived!…of course they have…why would they be delivered tomorrow as we’d been assured!  They wouldn’t now would they!  And of course they’ve been delivered today, the only day of the week that I’m NOT up there to photograph them... c’est la fucking vie!  Oh my aching back!!    

Laura keeps me awake until midnight as she hollers (her standard ‘on phone’ volume) into her phone for two hours with the Wymans and then another hour with her brit-bound beaux.  All the hollering and my lack of sleep therewith result in me acquiring a decidedly shabby mood.

4/30/07:
I stew in a festering mood all day due to lack of sleep.  Hate these terrible moods!!!  I could just SPIT!  Anyone look at me the wrong way and I’ll go Postal!  WHAT!  Are YOU LOOKING AT ME!!

Visit Elie’s Parent’s house before going to the clinic and Elie invites us to a party at his house this evening.  

The workers finish digging the foundation for The Clinic’s new Meeting Area.  

Huge storm hits, knocking down trees, and we’re compelled to take a detour in order to circumvent the toppled lumber and make our way home.  The storm relents around 7pm and we head over to Elie’s to party.    

Rwandan Party’s Suck (no offense Elie): they are depressingly uneventful and extremely painful affairs.  At Elie’s party we sit in the customary round-circle of non-talkative Rwandans.  The roof leaks.  We all move in closer to stay dry.  No electricity in the house so everything is wrapped in shadow.  I wrap my lips around a beer bottle and attempt to drown my senses.  It’s actually probably a pretty good party but I’m just not in the mood today.    

END OF APRIL 2007 BLOG