Friday, March 18, 2011

You Can't Always Get What You Want


As Americans we reserve the feeling that we are entitled to have control over everything we do. Example: traveling. If I choose to take a bus from one city to the next, who is to stop me?  Petty problems that obstruct travel abilities in Rwanda would never be acceptable in the states, and I find I have to deal with this issue everytime I go as far as 10 minutes outside of my village. Rain, bad roads, broken down vehicles…these are typical. If I paid for a bus ticket in the states and the bus was cancelled because of bad weather, I would demand my money back. That concept is completely lost here. Instead of practicality there is a lot of frustration in the art of just sucking things up.

This weekend I left my site to visit the bush on the other side of the country, and I must say it’s quite different. I traveled to the Eastern part of Rwanda where it is hot and flat (er). I’m used to rain several times a day, cold mornings and nights, and mountains 360 degrees around. I only spent 2 days in the East, but I could tell it was a different world. Traveling back to the south at the end of my weekend, however, was not. On Sunday morning I caught a taxi van to Kigali, where I caught another taxi van to the bus stop in Kigali, where I took a bus to Butare. Four and a half hours into my trip I reach Butare and look for a taxi van to take me to Munini, a small town about an hour away from my village. The taxi services aren’t running for some official reason or another, I heard a rumor about police check ups? I wasn’t sure what that meant, I just wanted to get home. I contemplated paying for a hotel room in Butare and catching a taxi in the morning. I would risk being late to class but taking a taxi is about 9000 Francs cheaper than the alternative, a moto, for 3 hours. I decided to wait a few minutes and shop for some things I desperately needed at home, only to be disappointed by all of the closed shops. Sundays. I guess I hadn’t learned my lesson yet, on Sundays most shops are closed and if they are open, hours are limited. At this point it was closing in on 5 pm, well after shopping hours. So now I’m officially frustrated, just wanting to get home as fast as I can so that I can get on with my life minus the eating and bathing and using the restroom because I couldn’t buy anything I needed. But at least my home had a bed, I wanted to crawl into it and forget about the day, but the truth was I was still only half way done with my journey. Butare is the closest city to my village, but that doesn’t mean it is close. I still had 3 hours minimum of traveling left to do.

Thankfully after about 20 more minutes of desperately asking several locals about taxis heading South I started to see moto taxis returning to their usual post to offer rides. A moto ride from Butare to my village is a minimum of 10,000 Francs and at this point in the night there was no way I would get home before dark. I cracked and decided to take one anyway, figuring that spending 10,000 Frw on a trip home was more practical than spending 5,000 Frw on a room and then having to spend more on a taxi the next morning anyway – and probably missing class. I was determined to make it home, so when my moto driver was speeding along like a crazy man I didn’t tell him to slow down, to be honest I was hoping he would prove he had a lead foot anyways. I was just thinking we were making good time when it only took 40 minutes to reach the beginning of the dirt road when we spun out of control. A flat tire, at dusk, in the middle of nowhere. I tried to tell my driver in my very limited Kinyarwanda that it was imperative that I get home before dark, and that I needed another driver asap. I think he understood me but chose to ignore me anyways, I was stranded on the side of the road with him as he called every person he knew in the area searching for a scrap of leather large enough to plug the massive hole in his tire. Fast forward 30 minutes, and the tire is “repaired”. We were only about 40 minutes outside of the city at this point and I had to fight a serious hunch to just go back to Butare and stay the night like I originally contemplated. But then I would have to pay the driver for taking me nowhere, pay for a room, pay for travel the next day, and possibly missed class. My bull-headedness took over as we set out for my village, second try. So really I should not have been surprised when the tire blew out again after another 40 minutes. A moto traveling to my site is like a skateboard going down an escalator, it’s just not stable. What was worse about this time was that this was truly the middle of nowhere, the middle of the forest. I laughed to myself as I helped the driver push his moto up the hill towards my site in the dark, for an hour. It was such an unfortunate series of events it was as if it were cosmically on purpose. Laughing about it was all I could do to stop myself from crying. And don’t even get me started of the locals gawking and laughing at me, there is nothing more entertaining to a Rwandan than a foreigner in trouble, this I can say with full confidence. After our trek to the nearest village I see the sign and read Cyihanda…thankfully I knew of another volunteer living in Cyihanda. I had never met her before, and she is leaving Rwanda in 13 days, but I called her up and she was happy to help me. I don’t know what I would have done if it would have been 2 weeks later. I tried to pay the moto driver 5,000 Frw, half of what I promised him for taking me a third of the way and making me push his moto up a hill for an hour. Even still paying 5,000 Frw was too much, but I felt bad for the guy, he was stranded too. But he didn’t accept this. He started making a huge scene demanding that I pay the full price and insisting that it was my fault for his tire blowing out. What am I, a wizard? Thankfully the other volunteer was very persuasive in Kinyarwanda and she corralled a entourage of townspeople that were supporting me and not the driver. But he wouldn’t back down, he started getting physically aggressive with some people and that’s when we decided to just throw the money on the ground and run. I was so exhausted that that decision made complete sense at the time.

The upside to this horrific tale of travel is the rest of my night spent in Cyihanda, specifically in a perish that is run by a large church that has rooms for people that need it. The volunteer helped me find a room, which I didn’t have to pay for. Then a woman at the church named Katarina fed me and gave me tea, showed me a bathroom where I could bathe, and gave me some essentials to keep with me on the rest of my journey. I ended up getting some food, water and toilet paper for free when I was so upset about not being able to buy it earlier in Butare. I remembered just a few minutes before I arrived at the perish I was arguing with locals about traveling the rest of the way to my village that night. They were trying to persuade me to stay and I was just insisting that I was too close to quit now. It’s possible to travel at night but not advisable, and although I was adamant about getting home they finally convinced me. In the end, I got everything I needed from that perish, including a minute to calm down and just look at my situation. I ate, bathed, cleared my head and slept well before taking another moto to my village the next morning, getting home just before my first class started. So I guess it’s true that you don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes (and take a breather and trust the people that have been living in the village their entire lives as opposed to a few months and thinking you know everything) you get what you need. It’s funny because in Kinyarwanda there is only one word used to express needs and wants, and there is no variation between the two. But last night in one of the most fickle situations of my experience here so far, I truly understood the definition of that word.