Late Night Ramblings

It’s 4AM and I can’t sleep. Everyone is going to wake up in a couple hours so that we can go traipse up this damn mountain looking for gorillas.

In other news, how does one know if he has malaria? I have a cough. Normally a cough is just a cough. But when you’re in the jungle a cough is malaria, at least in my mind. Especially when you didn’t sleep in your mosquito net the night before.

The truth is, it’s almost certain that I don’t have malaria, but I’m paranoid and have hypochondriac tendencies, so I’ve convinced myself otherwise.

Also, I have a 30 page paper due when I get back to Cambridge on Sunday night. Current status: 0 pages complete. Hell, I don’t even have a topic yet.

I really hate when professors make big assignments due immediately after vacation. Way to fuck up everyone’s vacation.

Alright, I should try to go to sleep. Just wanted to check in. Pray that these gorillas don’t fuck me up today. Word on the street is that they can be pretty vicious.

And for your viewing pleasure, here are the women we met are the coffee cooperative the other day. For some reason, as they were introducing themselves, they broke out in impromptu dance.

 

Welcome to Rwanda!

I’ve been in Kigali for a couple days now. The city is really beautiful and the people are warm and friendly. I haven’t bumped into my old dean again. Thank God. But I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Normally I travel alone or with one or two other people, so I was hesitant to go on this trip with 11 other people. I was already friends with most of them, but when you travel with people you get to know a different side of them. And usually it’s the worst side.

But so far, so good.

It’s an odd experience being in a place that was ravaged by genocide so recently. Walking down the streets and seeing such friendly people, who wave and smile and come up to introduce themselves, it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that many of them probably killed, maimed or raped Tutsis in the genocide, or were complicit in the crimes.

The loss and devastation was so widespread that nearly everyone was affected. But once it was over, they had to rebuild their lives on their own–without therapy or financial support. We talked to one woman whose husband and children were killed in front of her, and then a few weeks later the genocide was over and she had to go find a job as a store clerk. Even though she was dealing with unimaginable grief she had to find a way take care of herself–and there was really no government support because there was no actual government anymore. On top of that, she didn’t have much emotional support because everyone was dealing with their own loss.

I just couldn’t imagine picking myself up and carrying on with day-t0-day tasks after everything that I know and love has been taken from me. It sounds cheesy, but this experience really has left me in awe by how resilient the human spirit can be.

Anyway, today the group met with a justice on the Rwandan Supreme Court, Sam Rugege. He talked about how difficult it was to bring perpetrators to justice considering that most of the judges, lawyers and magistrates were killed during the genocide.

On Thursday we’re meeting with the President to talk about rebuilding the country post-genocide.

But for now we’ve moved on to a new city so we can go gorilla trekking tomorrow morning. Climbing up mountains for 8 hours looking for gorillas does not sound appealing to me—at all—especially since it’s $500/person to participate. But apparently, this is the only place in the world where it can be done so the group was really excited to do it. And I, being one solemn voice, had to concede to the majority.

Anyway, below are some pictures from a women’s coffee cooperative we visited yesterday. I’m obsessed with these first two kids. Obsessed.

You Only Bump Into People You Don’t Want to See

From Boston to DC. From DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Kigali, Rwanda, I’ve been on a plane for the past 36 hours.

I don’t like talking to people on planes. I know I should. I‘ve heard that you can meet the most fascinating people that way. But that’s not been my experience.

I meet the Swiss missionary who spends a 16-hour flight trying to convert me to some religion he made up. I meet the Mongolian businessman whose English is completely unintelligible but who insists on holding a conversation for the entirety of an 8-hour flight. I meet people who don’t know when to stop talking. I meet the people who think it’s OK to cut their fingernails on the food tray right next to me. But for some reason, I never meet fascinating people.

So I’ve developed a strategy. I use the Angry Black Man stereotype to my advantage. I try to look mean as shit as I get on the plane. I walk to my seat wearing a hooded sweatshirt, bumping DMX loud as hell on my iPod. And I make sure not to make eye contact with anyone in my aisle.  And for those who are not scared off by that, I simply pretend to be sleep whenever it looks like they’re about to start talking to me.

They may seem like extreme measures to take but doing so brings me peace and tranquility.

The only thing is, the Angry Black Man strategy doesn’t work when you’re on a plane full of black folks. They don’t fall for that shit. Without a defense, I fell prey to all types of mind-numbing conversation. But none worse than the one I had with someone I know.

During our layover in DC, standing behind me in line at the airport McDonalds was the dean of my undergrad. We made eye contact at the same time. If it happened any other way, I think both of us would have pretended we didn’t see each other. But we decided to be polite and chat.

Backstory: During my senior year in college a lot of racist shit went down on campus. He was the new dean and completely unprepared to deal with any racial issues. Mine was a conservative, business school so when he took the helm he probably figured that he’d have to deal with small, petty issues of academic dishonesty.

But as one of the students leading the charge against racism on our campus, I was constantly barging in his office demanding action. Yet even then, I kinda felt bad for him. It wasn’t that he was a bad person, but it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable talking about race, let alone responding to the outrage that erupted after a white student walked around campus in blackface and posted on Facebook, “All niggers need to go back to Africa and die of AIDS.”  So the dean responded in the most tepid, unhelpful way imaginable. He made the racist student to go an afternoon session of diversity training, to the outrage of all the black students on campus.

Cut to back to the airport.

After an awkward moment, he smiled and approached me, “You’re wearing the wrong colors, son” (referring to my red Harvard sweatshirt). I responded in kind and searched for a way to be pleasant and yet cut the conversation short. So I asked about how things were on campus and after a few minutes I said, “Well, it was good to see you. But my flight is taking off soon so I should head back to the gate.” We shook hands and then started walking back to our gates. After walking along side each of other for a few minutes, I reached out to shake his hand and said “Well, this is my gate. It was great seeing you.” He responded, “Yeah, this is my gate too. Where are you going?”

“Kigali, Rwanda.”

“Oh, me too!”

Apparently, my undergrad is building a new entrepreneurship education center in Rwanda and he’s coming to oversee it.

After making small talk with this man off and on for the last 24 hours, I long for simpler times. Times when I got seated next to funky ass passengers with stank ass breath who speak broken ass English for hours on end.

But the good news is I finally made it to Rwanda!  And the bad news is dean is staying at my hotel—right across the hall.

Again, why do bad things happen to good people?

I’m Back!

It’s been a while.

Last time we talked I was living in Hong Kong, working at an investment bank and trying my damnedest to get fired so that I could get a severance package.

Well, eventually I gave up and quit. And after a few months—a few of the most bloggable months of my life, so bloggable that I didn’t have time to blog them–I moved back to the US and enrolled at Harvard Law School.

Now that the stress of the first year is behind me, I’ve finally started to travel again.

Later this week, I’m going off to Rwanda with some folks from Harvard’s Black Law Student Association. And I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

It’s good to be back.

YNTG