Being a white person in Africa is definitely a strange experience. I obviously became aware of this early on, considering that as soon as I stepped off the plane people started harassing me to take their taxis (see post 2), buy things from them (see post 3), marry them and take them to Canada/America with me (potential future post), etc. A few experiences, however, have been particularly off-putting.
When I first arrived at my guesthouse, the gatekeeper carried my extremely heavy suitcase up the stairs on his back (see post 3). [As a side note, when he asked me why my bag was so heavy, I responded that my husband was inside. No one laughed, however, so I deduced that either i) the joke was lost in translation ii) Swahili culture does not get sarcasm or iii) that despite my best efforts, I am not very funny.] Anyway, considering that carrying this bag was quite the task, I gave him a 1USD tip. He seemed happy, and I was happy. A few days later I came in late and was groping my way up the staircase in the dark when he sidled up beside me out of nowhere and said, “Do you have a thousand shillings for me?” (1,000 Tsh = about 0.70 USD). I was totally scared out of my wits and said “No I don’t have any.” To which he responded “US dollars are ok too.” Got to hand it to the guy for being versatile, but being approached and straight up asked for money by someone made me feel super uncomfortable with my “status”.
Another time, I was standing on the curb waiting to cross the street when a group of girls in their school uniforms came down the sidewalk behind me. One of the bigger ones shot her hand out as she passed and touched my hair, which apparently emboldened the others as they all started touching my hair when they walked by too. That was actually pretty cute.
Soon after I arrived, a couple of South African hunters (see post 3) took me out around Arusha and to their home base in Usa River for the day. The trip to and from Usa was really beautiful as we passed rows of people walking and biking down the road past banana and coffee plantations. The women were all dressed in colourful cloth with huge burdens of everything imaginable (water, sacks of rice, bundles of clothing) on their heads and then men were often herding goats, cows, or donkeys. We saw rows of small brick shanties with corrugated metal roofs that housed everything from barber shops to restaurants to butchers to churches to family dwellings. I was really happy to get this glimpse of real Africa, despite the small regret that it was from the back of a Landrover with a local driver up front and guns in the back seat.
This twinge of regret was blown away by how I felt when we arrived at the TGT. TGT stands for Tanzania Game and hunting something or other and is basically a big old-fashioned white boys’ country club. The grounds are absolutely stunning with tennis courts, golf course, etc. and when I walked up to the bar it was exclusively white South Africans and other ex-pats watching rugby. The only black people in sight were serving drinks and our own driver, who is black, sat in the car and waited for several hours while we had drinks and watched the game (which, by the way, I found super boring, but was somehow meaningful to the South Africans watching their local team rise above adversity and beat the English).
I think the worst part is that I always feel somewhat relieved and more comfortable in a situation like that than I do trying to make my way around like a local in Arusha. In Canada I would never just waltz into a country club or luxury hotel and hang out in their lobby or garden, sit by their pool, or join their gym (well let’s be honest, I would never normally join any gym for any reason anyway, but I was super bored), but here the fact that I am white means that no one blinks an eye when I do these things, and I find myself quite often needing to do these things because I find the poverty and the sheer enormity of the difference of being in Tanzania to be overwhelming. I guess the good news is the longer I am here the less often I feel that need and the less patience I have for white people here who act like it still is a colony. Just don’t take away my satellite TV.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Work
All of the difficulties aside, I absolutely LOVE my internship! I was assigned to an appeals team (ALAD) in the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) (note the UN’s excessive use of acronyms). My two supervisors are the team leader and her senior advisor, who are Swedish and Canadian women, respectively. They are both really amazing, super competent women. (Yesterday I watched them take on a whole room of men criticizing their brief and they basically took them all down. It was awesome.) They are both also very nice, make me feel a part of the team, are always open for questions, and actually ask for and respect my input. They are also both mothers of young children and happily married career women, which makes me think that maybe being a woman lawyer does not necessarily preclude having some sort of personal life.
Right now we are working on an appeal for the Zigiranyirazo case. Ziggy is the brother-in-law of the assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana and was an integral member of the akazu, which was the clique of Hutu political elites in Rwanda who planned and orchestrated the genocide. (As a creepy side note, just a few years before the genocide occurred, he was studying in Montreal and apparently had an altercation with a Tutsi man in the Montreal metro.) At trial he was found guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, and not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, and murder as a crime against humanity. He was sentenced to 20 years.
The interesting thing about the ICTR trials is that the prosecutor can’t just get up and say “This person planned and was involved in the genocide” and then tell the story of what happened in Rwanda. The accused needs to be charged with specific crimes related to specific events during the genocide (for example, the massacre of several thousand Tutsi at one particular location on one particular day) and then needs to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was involved. This is why, for example, Ziggy could be found guilty of genocide but not of conspiracy to commit genocide, because although basically everyone knows he conspired, the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he attended meetings where the genocide was planned. The trial becomes very technical, and can hinge on small details like what he did or did not say at a certain roadblock at a specific time.
Both the prosecution and the defence appealed this decision and since I have arrived I have been helping with the response to the defence’s appellant brief. Since I am working in appeals, I mostly look at previous ICTR and ICTY (Y = Yugoslavia) judgements to find legal arguments against the defence position. This is really interesting from an international criminal law point of view, and is good practice in legal research and argumentation.
Since appeals tend to be bigger picture issues, however, sometimes it is easy to forget I am working on a genocide case at all. A fellow intern, who works in defence at the trial level, on the other hand, spent a whole day reading witness statements from a young girl who had had both of her arms cut off, and basically broke down at the end of the day. So from a mental health point of view, my assignment is very fortunate, but I find I need to remind myself just how awful the crimes people like Ziggy committed in order to “stay hungry” as the Chief Prosecutor Hassan Jallow put it.
It would also be pretty cool to get sent on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda as a couple of lucky interns at the trial level have been able to do. One intern told me about interviewing a witness on the side of the road as he pretended to give them directions so that he wouldn’t be seen talking to ICTR people. (I edited out the rest of this post because I probably write too much...)
Right now we are working on an appeal for the Zigiranyirazo case. Ziggy is the brother-in-law of the assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana and was an integral member of the akazu, which was the clique of Hutu political elites in Rwanda who planned and orchestrated the genocide. (As a creepy side note, just a few years before the genocide occurred, he was studying in Montreal and apparently had an altercation with a Tutsi man in the Montreal metro.) At trial he was found guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, and not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, and murder as a crime against humanity. He was sentenced to 20 years.
The interesting thing about the ICTR trials is that the prosecutor can’t just get up and say “This person planned and was involved in the genocide” and then tell the story of what happened in Rwanda. The accused needs to be charged with specific crimes related to specific events during the genocide (for example, the massacre of several thousand Tutsi at one particular location on one particular day) and then needs to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was involved. This is why, for example, Ziggy could be found guilty of genocide but not of conspiracy to commit genocide, because although basically everyone knows he conspired, the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he attended meetings where the genocide was planned. The trial becomes very technical, and can hinge on small details like what he did or did not say at a certain roadblock at a specific time.
Both the prosecution and the defence appealed this decision and since I have arrived I have been helping with the response to the defence’s appellant brief. Since I am working in appeals, I mostly look at previous ICTR and ICTY (Y = Yugoslavia) judgements to find legal arguments against the defence position. This is really interesting from an international criminal law point of view, and is good practice in legal research and argumentation.
Since appeals tend to be bigger picture issues, however, sometimes it is easy to forget I am working on a genocide case at all. A fellow intern, who works in defence at the trial level, on the other hand, spent a whole day reading witness statements from a young girl who had had both of her arms cut off, and basically broke down at the end of the day. So from a mental health point of view, my assignment is very fortunate, but I find I need to remind myself just how awful the crimes people like Ziggy committed in order to “stay hungry” as the Chief Prosecutor Hassan Jallow put it.
It would also be pretty cool to get sent on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda as a couple of lucky interns at the trial level have been able to do. One intern told me about interviewing a witness on the side of the road as he pretended to give them directions so that he wouldn’t be seen talking to ICTR people. (I edited out the rest of this post because I probably write too much...)
Getting started
I figure it’s about time I talk a little a bit about the reason I am here: my internship. The fact that I had been abandoned at the airport and that I received no answer to my frequent email requests to begin working a few days early (I wanted to beat the rush of interns, and to be honest, I was pretty bored) made me a wee bit nervous, so when I showed up at the visitor’s entrance to the ICTR I was pretty relieved that the guard told me I was expected. The internship coordinator Felicia took me to get my UN ID badge and then escorted me to the Office of the Prosecutor (which is actually several floors of a building, not one office) for my assignment.
I’m not sure if it’s the UN or Africa (probably actually a combination of both), but getting started was extremely slow and complicated. To get my assignment I had to talk to one person, but to get my computer I had to talk to someone else, and to get a computer log-in I had to talk to yet another person, etc. etc. and everything has to be done in a particular order (i.e. before you get your computer you have to get a log-in), but no one really tells you what you need to do, who you need to talk to in order to do it, or where those people are, and if you do manage to find their office, they probably aren’t there anyway. Some other interns arrived before I did so they helped me through the process, but I still spent a few days without an assignment, then with an assignment but with no computer, then with a computer but it didn’t work, and even now sometimes I don’t have all of the programs I need and everything is more or less 2 small steps forward and one big step back. The comforting part is that everyone is in more or less the same boat so we try to have a sense of humour about it. One girl I work with quipped that EDP, which is the UN tech department, stands for “Everything Doesn’t Perform” and another, noting that the elevator doors are the doors of death and are always shutting abruptly on people, said “They are the only thing that works fast here.” And one day the fire alarm went off, but rather than being alarmed we were all giggling uncontrollably because no one was really surprised that the ICTR would, with all of its other malfunctions, catch on fire. (Turns out it was just a fire drill and that we need to reduce our exit time from 12 to 3 minutes). To be honest, I shouldn’t complain because I was more or less set up in three or four days, whereas some of the interns who came later than me were waiting weeks for a computer.
All of this, however, has made me realize that just the enormity of the UN is probably the main reason that it hasn’t always (ok, usually) been successful at solving the world’s problems. Being down at the bottom of the enormous UN totem pole (unpaid interns don’t rank very high), I now have a much better grasp of just how hard it is when something goes wrong to pinpoint who exactly is responsible or, at the very least, who to complain to. I did consider calling up Ban Ki Moon if my internship goes awry, but somehow I don’t think this would be effective as I’m sure he has more important things to deal with, like civil wars, AIDS, denouncing Israel, etc.
I’m not sure if it’s the UN or Africa (probably actually a combination of both), but getting started was extremely slow and complicated. To get my assignment I had to talk to one person, but to get my computer I had to talk to someone else, and to get a computer log-in I had to talk to yet another person, etc. etc. and everything has to be done in a particular order (i.e. before you get your computer you have to get a log-in), but no one really tells you what you need to do, who you need to talk to in order to do it, or where those people are, and if you do manage to find their office, they probably aren’t there anyway. Some other interns arrived before I did so they helped me through the process, but I still spent a few days without an assignment, then with an assignment but with no computer, then with a computer but it didn’t work, and even now sometimes I don’t have all of the programs I need and everything is more or less 2 small steps forward and one big step back. The comforting part is that everyone is in more or less the same boat so we try to have a sense of humour about it. One girl I work with quipped that EDP, which is the UN tech department, stands for “Everything Doesn’t Perform” and another, noting that the elevator doors are the doors of death and are always shutting abruptly on people, said “They are the only thing that works fast here.” And one day the fire alarm went off, but rather than being alarmed we were all giggling uncontrollably because no one was really surprised that the ICTR would, with all of its other malfunctions, catch on fire. (Turns out it was just a fire drill and that we need to reduce our exit time from 12 to 3 minutes). To be honest, I shouldn’t complain because I was more or less set up in three or four days, whereas some of the interns who came later than me were waiting weeks for a computer.
All of this, however, has made me realize that just the enormity of the UN is probably the main reason that it hasn’t always (ok, usually) been successful at solving the world’s problems. Being down at the bottom of the enormous UN totem pole (unpaid interns don’t rank very high), I now have a much better grasp of just how hard it is when something goes wrong to pinpoint who exactly is responsible or, at the very least, who to complain to. I did consider calling up Ban Ki Moon if my internship goes awry, but somehow I don’t think this would be effective as I’m sure he has more important things to deal with, like civil wars, AIDS, denouncing Israel, etc.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Microwave Panties
So I feel the need to qualify my last post before everyone assumes I am living a life of luxury and can’t really claim to be having an African experience with amenities like satellite TV. Yes, I have satellite, but seeing as the power goes out for extended periods about 3 times a week, I’m not really watching satellite television most of the time. Plus, most of the channels are in Hindi and Afrikaans. As proof of this, I once watched the same Ellen episode three times in two days. Luxury schmluxury.
My first night at the new apartment I was woken up in the middle of the night by the strangest and creepiest wailing sound I had ever heard and as per usual, curled up into a miserable ball wishing whatever it was would stop. Turns out I live near the local mosque and it was the (daily) 5am call to prayer.
And despite the fact that the maid picks up my dirty laundry and brings it back washed and pressed, for some unknown reason, they will not take my underwear. They take men’s boxers, since it is on the laundry list, but when I crossed out men’s and put women’s all I got was a pile of unwashed underwear back on the bed. Considering all of the other amenities I have it doesn’t really bother me to wash my own underwear, so I took it all in stride. I am slightly uncomfortable when all of the neighbours shamelessly watch me hang rows of panties on the clothesline, probably assuming I am some sort of western prostitute, but whatever.
The problem, however, is that apparently, when one hangs clothes to dry in Tanzania, there is some sort of insect that will lay eggs in them. Then, once the clothing comes into contact with the person, the heat from the body causes the eggs to hatch UNDER ONE’S SKIN. This is probably the most disgusting thing I have ever heard. The only solution is thus to expose one’s clothing to high heats which kills the eggs. So once a week or so the neighbours shamelessly watch me take in my underwear off the clothesline and then I stick it all in the microwave. What a place.
My first night at the new apartment I was woken up in the middle of the night by the strangest and creepiest wailing sound I had ever heard and as per usual, curled up into a miserable ball wishing whatever it was would stop. Turns out I live near the local mosque and it was the (daily) 5am call to prayer.
And despite the fact that the maid picks up my dirty laundry and brings it back washed and pressed, for some unknown reason, they will not take my underwear. They take men’s boxers, since it is on the laundry list, but when I crossed out men’s and put women’s all I got was a pile of unwashed underwear back on the bed. Considering all of the other amenities I have it doesn’t really bother me to wash my own underwear, so I took it all in stride. I am slightly uncomfortable when all of the neighbours shamelessly watch me hang rows of panties on the clothesline, probably assuming I am some sort of western prostitute, but whatever.
The problem, however, is that apparently, when one hangs clothes to dry in Tanzania, there is some sort of insect that will lay eggs in them. Then, once the clothing comes into contact with the person, the heat from the body causes the eggs to hatch UNDER ONE’S SKIN. This is probably the most disgusting thing I have ever heard. The only solution is thus to expose one’s clothing to high heats which kills the eggs. So once a week or so the neighbours shamelessly watch me take in my underwear off the clothesline and then I stick it all in the microwave. What a place.
Living
Not that I checked, but I’m pretty sure there is no Craigslist Arusha, so by the end of the first week I was becoming a bit concerned about finding a place to live. Additionally only one phone number actually worked on our list of potential landlords. I had been in touch with another intern, Saswati, from Toronto and we had agreed to live together, so I told the lone landlord, Mr. A, she and I would tentatively move in to a place of his that weekend, subject to her approval.
The house was located in Njiro, about 15 minutes outside Arusha on a dirt road. There were dead flies all over the concrete floors, roaches in the kitchen, and unidentifiable grime all over everything. And all for the low low price of 300 USD a month (plus electricity, plus maid, plus the cost of sheets, pillows, mosquito net, etc.). So we turned it down, thankfully, since one of the interns who did decide to move in now has like leprosy or some other weird type of illness.
The problem was we now had absolutely no idea where to live. As we were lamenting our fate in the back seat of the taxi and contemplating simply driving back to the airport (I did have all my luggage in the trunk after all), our taxi driver/guardian angel, Moses (how appropriate), began driving around to various apartment complexes and asking the gate keepers if they had any vacancies. We finally struck gold at a full-service building that had one vacant studio and one vacant one-bedroom in the same apartment block.
Saswati, upon discovering that the manager is Indian, put all of her negotiation and brown skills to use calling up “Auntie-ji” and informing her we were poor students with nowhere to go. We finally agreed upon a price and Saswati, another intern Elizabeth, and I had a place to live that includes all dishes, sheets, towels, mosquito nets, as well as microwaves, satellite TV (with about 1 million brown channels), daily maid service, and in-house laundry. I even have my own little balcony perfect for reading and we are within walking distance to the ICTR and next door to a grocery store and a luxury hotel with restaurant and pool. As I walked up to my little studio for the first time I saw a cute Indian family playing cricket in the courtyard and thought, thanks to Moses, Elizabeth, and Saswati, how glad I was to finally have a place to call home.
The house was located in Njiro, about 15 minutes outside Arusha on a dirt road. There were dead flies all over the concrete floors, roaches in the kitchen, and unidentifiable grime all over everything. And all for the low low price of 300 USD a month (plus electricity, plus maid, plus the cost of sheets, pillows, mosquito net, etc.). So we turned it down, thankfully, since one of the interns who did decide to move in now has like leprosy or some other weird type of illness.
The problem was we now had absolutely no idea where to live. As we were lamenting our fate in the back seat of the taxi and contemplating simply driving back to the airport (I did have all my luggage in the trunk after all), our taxi driver/guardian angel, Moses (how appropriate), began driving around to various apartment complexes and asking the gate keepers if they had any vacancies. We finally struck gold at a full-service building that had one vacant studio and one vacant one-bedroom in the same apartment block.
Saswati, upon discovering that the manager is Indian, put all of her negotiation and brown skills to use calling up “Auntie-ji” and informing her we were poor students with nowhere to go. We finally agreed upon a price and Saswati, another intern Elizabeth, and I had a place to live that includes all dishes, sheets, towels, mosquito nets, as well as microwaves, satellite TV (with about 1 million brown channels), daily maid service, and in-house laundry. I even have my own little balcony perfect for reading and we are within walking distance to the ICTR and next door to a grocery store and a luxury hotel with restaurant and pool. As I walked up to my little studio for the first time I saw a cute Indian family playing cricket in the courtyard and thought, thanks to Moses, Elizabeth, and Saswati, how glad I was to finally have a place to call home.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
First Week
Morning comes early in Arusha, partly because they don’t have daylight savings so the sun rises at like 6 am, but also because dogs, roosters, cleaning ladies, and African dance radio don’t really grasp the concept of sleeping in. So despite the fact that I had prayed I would not awake in this place, that I was sick and hadn’t really slept in a over a week, and had no idea what to do with myself when I awoke, awake I did. The fact that I had promised to inform my parents that I was still alive was the only thing that pushed me to get out of bed rather than hiding under the covers and wishing I was dead (well that and the fact that I was still trying hard not to touch anything, including the covers).
I asked the hotel owner, let’s call him Mr. P, if I could get a taxi to town and he gave me a weird look and told me I could walk. He took me to the end of the road and gave me vague directions to get to the city centre. Considering the state of the roads outside Arusha it was more of a hike than a walk, but luckily I was wearing my trusty moccasins. This came back to bit me in the ass exactly 2 minutes later when I reached the main road and men began yelling “Muzungu!” (white person) “Hey Muzungu eye liiike youuuur shooooes!” and “Cowgirl!”. As became a regular occurrence whenever I walked anywhere alone, a random guy started walking along and talking to me all friendly-like and then proceeded to try to sell me things. This one in particular led me to an Internet café, where I realized later he got a commission and I got overcharged for him bringing me there. I sat on the computer sending frantic S.O.S. messages to my parents and sisters and forced “Hey how are you? I’m fine” emails to friends.
My self-appointed guide was waiting outside when I emerged about two hours later and “invited” me to his shop. I told him the sandals were nice at which point he told me they were 90,000 tsh (about 75 USD). Shocked, I put them down and attempted to leave while he began the painful process of bargaining down from a price that had been inflated about 10 times. I finally escaped, or thought I had, when he came running after me down the street, sandals in hand, and grabbed my wrist telling me I had money and he didn’t so how much was I going to pay for the sandals. I gave him 45,000 tsh which is still about 5 times what I should have paid and cried again.
Later on that day a white South African hunter named George found me like a stray dog on the side of the road and took me in, as in took me for lunch at the Arusha Hotel, which is very modern and like an oasis in dirty downtown Arusha. As he told me how he hunts elephants and performs vigilante arrests of poachers, I felt like I was living some sort of weird Blood Diamond Leo Dicaprio-Jennifer Connelly type scenario, minus the phoney accent. Despite our divergent interests, it was quite nice to have someone to talk to.
The first few days felt very long. I ventured out a bit during the day, but in the evenings stayed in my room and read. This was fairly unpleasant because the power would go off between 7 and 10 pm. Mr. P would show up at the door with a candle and I hated opening the door alone in my room in the dark. I seemed to be the only guest at the hotel besides a man who had come up from Dar es Salaam on business, and so I assumed this was the reason Mr. P was so attentive. I also assumed it was some sort of cultural norm to ask young women whether or not they were married, seeing as both the business man and Mr. P did this to me fairly early on. I began to become a bit concerned, however, when Mr. P began to insist that I make myself at home and offering me free wine because “I love you”. This concern became alarm as one night while eating dinner downstairs in the dark as usual, the business man informed me “I will miss you” as I was checking out the next morning to which I responded “I’m sure you won’t” and then made an awkward attempt to say something about going to bed at 8pm while heading for the door. The alarm became outright panic when I realized the doors from the dining room to my part of the guesthouse were locked and I was trapped with the business man and Mr. P moving around somewhere inside.
It turns out the doors were actually just stuck and the businessman called Mr. P who had to come hammer them open (literally, with a hammer), but I still ran to my room and locked myself in until the next morning when Mr. P was banging on my door asking to borrow my cell phone charger. Thankfully I checked out a few hours later. I think I might have left my track jacket there, but at this point I cut my losses.
I asked the hotel owner, let’s call him Mr. P, if I could get a taxi to town and he gave me a weird look and told me I could walk. He took me to the end of the road and gave me vague directions to get to the city centre. Considering the state of the roads outside Arusha it was more of a hike than a walk, but luckily I was wearing my trusty moccasins. This came back to bit me in the ass exactly 2 minutes later when I reached the main road and men began yelling “Muzungu!” (white person) “Hey Muzungu eye liiike youuuur shooooes!” and “Cowgirl!”. As became a regular occurrence whenever I walked anywhere alone, a random guy started walking along and talking to me all friendly-like and then proceeded to try to sell me things. This one in particular led me to an Internet café, where I realized later he got a commission and I got overcharged for him bringing me there. I sat on the computer sending frantic S.O.S. messages to my parents and sisters and forced “Hey how are you? I’m fine” emails to friends.
My self-appointed guide was waiting outside when I emerged about two hours later and “invited” me to his shop. I told him the sandals were nice at which point he told me they were 90,000 tsh (about 75 USD). Shocked, I put them down and attempted to leave while he began the painful process of bargaining down from a price that had been inflated about 10 times. I finally escaped, or thought I had, when he came running after me down the street, sandals in hand, and grabbed my wrist telling me I had money and he didn’t so how much was I going to pay for the sandals. I gave him 45,000 tsh which is still about 5 times what I should have paid and cried again.
Later on that day a white South African hunter named George found me like a stray dog on the side of the road and took me in, as in took me for lunch at the Arusha Hotel, which is very modern and like an oasis in dirty downtown Arusha. As he told me how he hunts elephants and performs vigilante arrests of poachers, I felt like I was living some sort of weird Blood Diamond Leo Dicaprio-Jennifer Connelly type scenario, minus the phoney accent. Despite our divergent interests, it was quite nice to have someone to talk to.
The first few days felt very long. I ventured out a bit during the day, but in the evenings stayed in my room and read. This was fairly unpleasant because the power would go off between 7 and 10 pm. Mr. P would show up at the door with a candle and I hated opening the door alone in my room in the dark. I seemed to be the only guest at the hotel besides a man who had come up from Dar es Salaam on business, and so I assumed this was the reason Mr. P was so attentive. I also assumed it was some sort of cultural norm to ask young women whether or not they were married, seeing as both the business man and Mr. P did this to me fairly early on. I began to become a bit concerned, however, when Mr. P began to insist that I make myself at home and offering me free wine because “I love you”. This concern became alarm as one night while eating dinner downstairs in the dark as usual, the business man informed me “I will miss you” as I was checking out the next morning to which I responded “I’m sure you won’t” and then made an awkward attempt to say something about going to bed at 8pm while heading for the door. The alarm became outright panic when I realized the doors from the dining room to my part of the guesthouse were locked and I was trapped with the business man and Mr. P moving around somewhere inside.
It turns out the doors were actually just stuck and the businessman called Mr. P who had to come hammer them open (literally, with a hammer), but I still ran to my room and locked myself in until the next morning when Mr. P was banging on my door asking to borrow my cell phone charger. Thankfully I checked out a few hours later. I think I might have left my track jacket there, but at this point I cut my losses.
Arrival in Arusha
When I stepped onto the tarmac at Kilimanjaro International Airport the first thing I noticed was the smell. I had never smelled it before. It was like wood and earth and heavy air and will always be the smell that for me embodies Africa. (Soon after I discovered lots of other, less pleasant African smells, but for the moment that’s beside the point.)
Despite the images “International Airport” might conjure, KIA is basically two rooms: one for arrivals and the other for baggage. I made it past my fellow travellers to fill out my visa forms and thought I would be the first one through until I got in the wrong line and had to start all over again, but I somehow avoided paying any visa fees, so I was relatively pleased, mostly that I wouldn’t have to take any money out of the money belt mom made me wear and that made me look misshapen.
Considering I was on a direct flight from Amsterdam and my bags had successfully made six connections from the time I started my trip in Charlottetown about a week previous, it didn’t even occur to me they wouldn’t come until I heard the dreaded sound of the baggage belt coming to a stop and still didn’t have any of my luggage. A porter suggested I look around on the floor for my bags so I wandered around trying not to totally lose it and start bawling in the middle of the airport. All I had in my carryon were a few extra pairs of underwear and my malaria medication and I was about to spend three months in Africa. Soon after I got in the lost luggage line, resigned to the fact I would never see my possessions again, the belt came back on. Turns out they hadn’t unloaded everything because the plane was continuing on to Dar es Salaam. Hallelujah.
So I got my bags and tottered out to where all of the safari operators were standing with name cards looking anxiously for my own name or at least the familiar blue UN crest. Everyone knows how much I love the UN, but all of my dreams of the noble world government were shattered in that moment. They weren’t there. Soon I was surrounded by men saying “Taxi? Taxi?” and I was responding “No, ICTR, UN” and holding on uselessly to my “Intern Information Sheet” that indicated that the UN transport would pick me up at the airport. The taxi drivers or whoever they were started crowding around me, looking at my sheet and saying “Eye See Tee Are” and one even phoned the number of the internship coordinator, of course to no avail since it was 10pm. Despite the fact that they were all at worst harmless and at best helpful I was so overwhelmed I pretty much fled (as best I could with a luggage trolley) back into the airport and asked an airport staff/soldier (he really could have been either considering he had a rifle) where I could get a taxi. He pointed to one of his friends and told me he would take me for 50 USD and heard the voice of the guy on Unsolved Mysteries in my head saying “No one ever saw her again.”
As I slumped in the back of the taxi feeling sick, scared, and alone I looked out the window and realized that even the stars are different here. I had never been so depressed in my entire life. The cab driver Edward was nice and weirdly kept telling me “You are welcome” [which I later learned was because in Swahili, the word “karibu” means “welcome” but like the Quebec “bienvenue” can also mean “you’re welcome” (as in post-thank you)]. We arrived at my guesthouse in the pitch dark and I signed in, noting that I was the only non-African on the guest list and feeling this did not bode well, and went to my room with the gate person carrying my heavy suitcase on his back. It was actually quite decent even by Western standards, certainly not luxury, but functional. But after spending a week in pristine Bavaria with Miriam I felt like I had just been kicked out of the Garden of Eden and sent right to hell. They had turned on the TV for me to some Latin American soap opera dubbed into English and as I looked at the mosquito net hanging over the bed, the windows that didn’t quite close (thank goodness I was on the second floor), the Spartan furniture, and the drain in the floor that marked my shower, I really did cry. When I got into bed under the mosquito net I had my money belt and flashlight beside me and tried very hard to touch everything (including net, sheets, pillows, blankets, etc.) as little as possible. I curled up into a miserable ball and prayed that when I woke up I would be back in Montreal about a month previous when my life was still intact.
Despite the images “International Airport” might conjure, KIA is basically two rooms: one for arrivals and the other for baggage. I made it past my fellow travellers to fill out my visa forms and thought I would be the first one through until I got in the wrong line and had to start all over again, but I somehow avoided paying any visa fees, so I was relatively pleased, mostly that I wouldn’t have to take any money out of the money belt mom made me wear and that made me look misshapen.
Considering I was on a direct flight from Amsterdam and my bags had successfully made six connections from the time I started my trip in Charlottetown about a week previous, it didn’t even occur to me they wouldn’t come until I heard the dreaded sound of the baggage belt coming to a stop and still didn’t have any of my luggage. A porter suggested I look around on the floor for my bags so I wandered around trying not to totally lose it and start bawling in the middle of the airport. All I had in my carryon were a few extra pairs of underwear and my malaria medication and I was about to spend three months in Africa. Soon after I got in the lost luggage line, resigned to the fact I would never see my possessions again, the belt came back on. Turns out they hadn’t unloaded everything because the plane was continuing on to Dar es Salaam. Hallelujah.
So I got my bags and tottered out to where all of the safari operators were standing with name cards looking anxiously for my own name or at least the familiar blue UN crest. Everyone knows how much I love the UN, but all of my dreams of the noble world government were shattered in that moment. They weren’t there. Soon I was surrounded by men saying “Taxi? Taxi?” and I was responding “No, ICTR, UN” and holding on uselessly to my “Intern Information Sheet” that indicated that the UN transport would pick me up at the airport. The taxi drivers or whoever they were started crowding around me, looking at my sheet and saying “Eye See Tee Are” and one even phoned the number of the internship coordinator, of course to no avail since it was 10pm. Despite the fact that they were all at worst harmless and at best helpful I was so overwhelmed I pretty much fled (as best I could with a luggage trolley) back into the airport and asked an airport staff/soldier (he really could have been either considering he had a rifle) where I could get a taxi. He pointed to one of his friends and told me he would take me for 50 USD and heard the voice of the guy on Unsolved Mysteries in my head saying “No one ever saw her again.”
As I slumped in the back of the taxi feeling sick, scared, and alone I looked out the window and realized that even the stars are different here. I had never been so depressed in my entire life. The cab driver Edward was nice and weirdly kept telling me “You are welcome” [which I later learned was because in Swahili, the word “karibu” means “welcome” but like the Quebec “bienvenue” can also mean “you’re welcome” (as in post-thank you)]. We arrived at my guesthouse in the pitch dark and I signed in, noting that I was the only non-African on the guest list and feeling this did not bode well, and went to my room with the gate person carrying my heavy suitcase on his back. It was actually quite decent even by Western standards, certainly not luxury, but functional. But after spending a week in pristine Bavaria with Miriam I felt like I had just been kicked out of the Garden of Eden and sent right to hell. They had turned on the TV for me to some Latin American soap opera dubbed into English and as I looked at the mosquito net hanging over the bed, the windows that didn’t quite close (thank goodness I was on the second floor), the Spartan furniture, and the drain in the floor that marked my shower, I really did cry. When I got into bed under the mosquito net I had my money belt and flashlight beside me and tried very hard to touch everything (including net, sheets, pillows, blankets, etc.) as little as possible. I curled up into a miserable ball and prayed that when I woke up I would be back in Montreal about a month previous when my life was still intact.
Prologue
So I know it is cliché, but I have decided to start a blog. I had always resisted the idea, but I am really doing a crap job at writing in my journal, want to hold on to the experiences I have here, and I figure journal writing to an audience might force me to organize my thoughts somewhat and keep on top of things. I am also doing a crap job at sending emails (partially because UN computers and African Internet are so slow, but I’m just generally bad at it anyway) and this way I will be able to update everyone on what is happening. Also, the AUCC Students for Development, which is mercifully funding my African jaunt, recommend blogging as a public engagement activity that makes up part of my responsibility as an award recipient. Finally, to be perfectly honest there isn’t much to do on weekend evenings in Arusha when the power is out, so this is a creative project to keep me occupied. I figure since only people who love me will read this anyway, at least none of you will be judging me based lameness and lack of writing ability (hopefully).
So as a basic intro, I am spending three months this summer in Arusha, Tanzania working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is the UN court for government, military, and other leaders responsible for the 1994 genocide that resulted in over 800,000 dead in under 100 days. This blog will hopefully be a more or less accurate picture of my experiences working at the tribunal and living in Arusha. Enjoy!
So as a basic intro, I am spending three months this summer in Arusha, Tanzania working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is the UN court for government, military, and other leaders responsible for the 1994 genocide that resulted in over 800,000 dead in under 100 days. This blog will hopefully be a more or less accurate picture of my experiences working at the tribunal and living in Arusha. Enjoy!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)