Entries in Life

After spending 30 hours on planes and in airports, I arrived in Philadelphia Sunday evening.  With so much time spent in economy class in full planes, I could have kissed the ground.  Today, I slept off 3 hours of jet lag. Overall, I’m extremely happy that I went.  Actually going to Rwanda gave me a lot more insight into how what I’m doing might be used.  I understand the limits of what I’m working with better. Airports are funny places.  In the airport in Brussels, I ran into a woman who works with the blood transfusion center and had been attending a retreat with some fellow Capacity Project workers. She had just learned about the software that I was helping to customize and install. One thing we talked about was American’s perceptions of African countries.  Say “Rwanda” to almost any American and they’ll think “Genocide” and “Hotel Rwanda”.  The country, though, has accomplished much in the way of economic and political stability compared with its neighbors. On of the reasons for this is, as one business consultant evidently told the government, because the country is blessed.  It is blessed with a lack of diamonds, oil, and other natural resources (though the land itself seems verdant and fertile). As a result, it doesn’t have the continuous conflict that plagues many other African nations. Fifteen years ago, Rwanda was in the middle of a civil war that ended up in genocide.  Now, Rwanda is prosecuting Genocideers and chasing foreign investment while growing its domestic industries, including ICT. In the meantime, after being a model country for years, Kenya is beginning to backslide.  This means its neighbors (including Rwanda) see an increase in oil prices. Which brings us back to the point of the perceptions we have about African countries.  Often times, they’re 10 years out of date, at least.  One friend, when I mentioned I was going to Rwanda, said “I’d go to Kenya [where he had been before], but not Rwanda”.  He said this during the height of the Kenyan riots.  He wasn’t watching the news coming from Kenya.  (Neither was I.) The riots have affected where the Brussels ➔ Kigali ➔ Nairobi flight refuels.  It used to refuel in Nairobi, but with the riots, it now refuels in Kigali and still tries to minimize the amount of time it sits on the ground in Nairobi.  (The health care professional I met in the Brussels airport told me that during the hight of the riots, the plane would land just long enough to unload and load passengers.  We were there longer. than that.)

(I plan on writing a summary of my thoughts on Rwanda, but felt like this deserved a special note.) As I mentioned before, Paul Wolfowitz was staying at the same hotel as I was at in Rwanda.  Evidently, I’m a good friend of his.  Good enough, that he thinks I’ll pay his bills for him. The hotel serves a decent little breakfast and which they include in the cost of the room.  Every morning at breakfast, they’ll give you a bill, and you sign your name with your room number.  If you have guests, you’re expected to pay for them. On the 4th, he was checking out (he left on the same plane as dcm) and had two or three guests at breakfast. For some reason, he put my room number on his bill and signed it. Did he forget his own room number? Or is he just the sort to try and skip out on his bills. Perhaps we’ll never know. (The signature is not clearly and distinctly “Wolfowitz” but, then, few people’s signatures are clear and distinct. The first part is obviously “P. Wolfo…” and the end looks like a “z”, Which leaves us to fill in the “wit”.)

It has started to rain!  It is nothing like the easy storms that we usually get in Pennsylvania.  This rain is much more like the windy torrents that I remember from New Orleans when we were there.  Thick rain, coming down in sheets. Sitting here in Rwanda, I’m taken back to a New Orleans storm in May 1995, later know  just as “the May Flood” when dvfmama  and I made an attempt to run through the  torrential downpour.  I lost a shoe when it was swept away in the flood and had to borrow some clothes from a priest in the Catholic Student Center. Rwanda makes me feel nostalgic in so many ways.

I’ve put up some more pictures of monkeys, dcm, and guns.  What a combo!

The hotel I’m staying at is amazing.  Kigali does not have an abundance of good hotels and, unless you go out of your way to find a deal, you’ll end up staying at the Serena. The Serena itself is nice enough.  You could hunker down here for days and never see the poverty just across the street.  This is, in fact, what I’ve been doing the past couple of days as I work on customizing the software we’re delivering.  This is why I haven’t written much. But as nice as the hotel is, that is not what makes it amazing. Instead, the regular stream of interesting characters that congregate in the lobby of the hotel make it so amazing.  As I watch the people and listen to the conversations, I feel like I can get a good sense of where this tiny little country is headed economically. The first weekend we were here, we shared the hotel with Tony Blair and saw President Kagame making his way through the lobby..  There were the various UNICEF conferences, aid workers, and similar activities throughout the week, but when we got back from our weekend trip, we started to seeing Paul Wolfowitz skulking about the lobby.  Evidently, he has been working on economic development in Sub-Saharan African. At the same time there were several Pentecostal leaders (President Kagame seems to be courting the Pentecostals while shunning the Catholics) here talking to Americans and natives about economic development projects.  I heard conversations that ranged from farming and using the proceeds to fund Rwandan School Lunch programs to Beauty School programs for a small number of students.  The groups shared the patio with Wolfowitz, and while I suspect the programs they were discussing had something to do with is visit, I didn’t really see any hard proof of that. Beyond the observing, here at the hotel, on the street, and in the offices of the Capacity Project and the Ministry of Health, I have been reading the local English language paper, the New Times.  One front-page article that caught my eye was on the amount of money that the country spends on consultancies. Rwanda is the beneficiary of a lot of aid from Western countries.  But, not all of it is well-spent and, as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man hints, a lot of that economic aid seems to be directed at the donor country’s private companies rather than the direct recipient.  Just this week, the New Times printed an article about the $80 million dollars that is being spent every year on consultancies (registration may be required for that link).  These are, for example, software developers performing maintenance tasks on software that was “given” to Rwanda. I’m still struggling to figure out exactly how I feel about working with an organization spending aid money — my fiscally conservative libertarian tendencies are uncomfortable with it — but, as I said before, I’m extremely pleased to be to work on software that the country will be able to own and maintain itself.

pictures for sad children:

“It has never mattered how thin a computer is.”

Yesterday was Meatfare Sunday, or the Sunday of the Last Judgment.  Next Monday, we Orthodox begin our Lenten fast in earnest.  Father Stephen has a great meditation on the meaning of the Last Judgement: The Last Judgment:

When I think about the Last Judgment, apart from whatever cosmic images one may draw upon, I’ve often come back to the simple question: “What do you want?” … “Do I want God?” is not the same thing as “I want health,” or “I want prosperity,” or a number of other things that some attach to the Christian religion. … This is a very different matter than saying “I like religion” or “religious practices” or “I like thinking about God and arguing about theology.” Such things may have a desire for God in them or they may simply be distractions like any number of other hobbies in which we engage. The test of our desire, of course, is love. Do I love God – do I want to love God? Do I want to know God? … Christ Himself makes the question even more concrete, or immediate, in His parable of the Last Judgment. There He says that “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” Thus our love of God is as concrete as our love for every other human being around us – down to the very least.

This weekend, I spent doing stuff in Parc National Des Volcans. The 90km trip took about two and a half hours.  (I should add that a good part of that driving was on mountain roads and half the time I felt lik e our driver was pulling insane stunts.)  We drove through the mountains, passing a lot of terraced fields.  Even rural areas arefull of people and at least half of them are walking along the road. Or riding a bike.  Or, in a few cases, taking the bus.  Hopefully everyone doesn’t try to buy a car.  The smoke from burning fires is already bad enough — adding a lot more automobile exhast would only make it that much worse. The road we used was a narrow strip of pavement from Kigali to the mountains for people who want to see the gorillas as well as commercial trucking.  Most roads that diverged from ours quickly turned into dirt.  People filled every village we passed through. Every other woman that we passed had a child strapped to her back. The country is set to double its population by 2020.  It doesn’t seem like that is a hard target to reach. After eating a buffet at the resort (which seems populated, at the moment, by a large group of touring families from France), a local dance troupe came in do a traditional Rwandan dance.  It was great fun when I turned the camera on the drummer and watch her face light up with 10,000 watts of smile.  All of them exuded energy and joy. After that, we hopped back in our mini-bus to take a ride to volcanic crater lakes.  After a frightening ride up the side of the mountain, sometimes chased by children who ran beside the car on the dropoff, we arrived at the summit and began to take in the view. The twin lakes are beautiful.  But we didn’t remain alone for long. Children in a village at the edge of the lake spotted us (“Muzengu! White Man!”)  and rushed the peak we were on.  They surrounded us and asked for our email addresses.  Talk about surreal!  Two of the boys gave us yahoo.fr adresses and spoke a passable English. We’ll see if I get an email reply. We trundled back to the lodge and tucked in for an early departure the next day.  I fell asleep around 9:00pm and, then woke up again around 2:30AM. It has been a while since I had a chance to see the night sky free of light pollution, so I got dressed and went outside.  I didn’t recognise any of the sky.  I’m no astronomer, but I can pick out a couple of constellations.  There were even some bright clusters that I know I would have recognized had I seen them before. A bright moon ruined some of the fun.  But waking up and listening to the stillness was awesome.  Something to do again.  I went back to bed till 6AM. In the morning, we were off at 6:30.  We met up with our guide to the golden monkeys and a few minutes later we were driving off the pavement and then walking through people’s fields and villages to get to the bamboo forest where they lived.  (We had an armed escort — the park is on the border of Rwanda.) We spent an hour amongst the monkeys as the ran around us.  For the most part, they seemed oblivious to us.  They didn’s sit still for us to photograph them, but they didn’t run away.  It is their mating season, so they were chasing each other around quite a bit. (Evidently this particular species of Golden Monkey only exists around those volcanos and they are an endangered species.) After a muddy hike back, I collapsed in my hotel room.  I can hardy wait to go back, but, for now, I’ll read a book. (dcm has an update with pics, too)

With each new release, the authors of SpamAssassin re-evaluate their scoring.  Justin Mason writes about why they put the cutoff at a score of 5.0 instead of somewhere else.

Today, Vanessa took us on a tour of some local markets.  The first was quite a shock. As our taxi, filled with three obviously non-Rwandan (i.e. white) people, pulled up, it was surrounded by young men shouting at us.  I had no clue what they were asking us.  The most I could make out was “Remember Me?”  I thought surely he must be talking to the cab driver.  None of us would remember any one of these guys. We wandered around a bit (I managed to get a poor picture of the airport from a distance) and finally wandered into the main part of the market.  The place had everything.  One line of stalls was freshly butchered meat.  Fresh (as in today, probably), but not refrigerated.  There was a slight smell. Across from them were several stalls that contained toiletries. Around the corner were several stalls filled with people willing to sew you anything you wanted, provided they had a pattern or you showed them a picture. Since I’ll do almost anything dcm tells me (he is the reason I own winkyfrown.com), I asked them to make me a pillbox hat.  They didn’t know what I meant, though.  (Should I go back now that I have directions?) Across from them was a woman selling already made clothing.  I’m pretty sure this was the clothing that the Salvation Army (and other Charities in the U.S.) can’t sell and, by way of brokers, finds its way to markets here in Africa. (We saw a couple of trucks carrying several bales of this sort of clothing on the way to the market.)  If you’re wondering why African countries no longer have a textile industry, it is because you give your old clothes to the Salvation Army or GoodWill and it ends up here at, among other places, the market I went to. Then we wandered inside the covered area.  They had a few stalls with tourist trinkets, but since this is market wasn’t focused on the tourist trade, there were only a few.  Stalls across from them were selling shoes. And then we came to the stalls with flour.  And more with beans and fruit. It was crazy and and a great way to learn how to say “No” and say it forcefully.  I bought a few things in the tourist area as well as some “Super Pilipili” sauce and pili pili oil. Buying the tourist trinkets was the beginning of understanding the madness that surrounded the car when we first arrived.  The stall lady asked me if should could put the items in the bag that the young man following us like a puppy dog provided.  I acquiesced.  I had just bought us a minor fight. A few minutes later when the other man — the one leading dcm around — helped me find and purchase the pili pili, the two began to exchange words.  I could see no good was going to come of it, so I grabbed the oil and stuffed it into the bag my other stuff was in.  Thankfully, they both let it drop. Once everyone was tipped and paid, our two guys made sure that we would remember them.  They gave us their names and numbers (one wore an yellow shirt with the number 12).  I guess repeat customers mean good business.  This was the answer to the mystery surrounding the “remember me?” schtick at the beginning. Next we went to a craft market.  I purchased a couple more items and, this time, I actually did some bartering.  First time in my life I tried to dicker with someone.  I discovered they expected it, I started to walk away and they lowered the price.  Amazing!  I’m sure they still made a handsome profit on the carved giraffes (probably imported from Kenya) and I was no where near the place where they would have stopped.  But I felt a little better about those purchases. Finally we went to what looked like a western-style grocery store.  I didn’t barter at the market so I ended up paying 150 RFR (Rwandan Francs, about a quarter) more than the grocery.  I’m sure I could have bartered them down if I had thought to try.  I ended up buying some ground Rwandan coffee.  I may have to go back to the market if I want whole beans. That ended our crazy afternoon.  Tonight, we’ve been trying to get a ride out to see the country-side this weekend.  I just found out they got the ride.  I should be offline all weekend as I go check out the wildlife.