…BEES! Covered, just
covered, really swarming with BEES! It
was very frightening. The Rwandans were
laughing at me because I thought I might die of anaphylactic shock just looking
at the crawling buzzing pile of fruit.
They assured me that the bees were not, in fact, interested in the
muzungu just because the Rwandans were.
They only wanted the fruit.
Rwandans are smart, first of all, but they also have a real sense of
humor. And…it's ok if it's at a muzungu’s
expense (even mine…I think I’m hilarious (otherwise I might cry at being afraid
of so many things at this age)).
OK, back to the lecture at hand. Some background on the more personal, and not
so sociological but leading into the sociological, endeavor that is Rwanda for
me:
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in
Rwanda. This cannot mean that I was
interested from a very young age because I know that I became interested in
1994 when it was on the news.
Let me back up. As a
child, I was uber sensitive. I could
have been the one voted, in my kindergarten class, most likely to pursue aid
work or start an animal shelter or something.
One time, I was sitting of a melancholy autumn day in my underwear at
about the age of five staring out the window at the leaves blowing and feeling
the ever-crisping breeze blowing after such a hot Texas summer. I was trying to imagine what it was like to
be the proverbial “child starving in china” or as it became later from my, at
the time, more news following mother, “child starving in Ethiopia”. I started to feel what it was like to be
hungry and to be alone. I started to
think of all the food I had thrown away and how cheap food was and about the
pear tree in the back yard. I thought,
why can’t I just give it to them? Why is
that so hard? I was feeling so
frustrated at the “powers that be” – that is, the adults, as I so often felt –
for not being able to figure out such a simple problem. What is wrong with adults? I have to admit, I have never stopped
wondering this. This critique is
something along the lines of the Breakfast Club quote, “When you get older,
your heart dies…” Here is a clip if your
memory is rusty:
Anyway, this was the point at which I began to cry. My mother came in and asked me what I was so
upset about. I told her it was the
starving children. She laughed kindly
and thought her daughter the best of all possible daughters as parents do.
Later on, I couldn’t stay away from trauma. I have other and more personal reasons, as in,
someone very close to me suffered a tragic event that shaped their life in
every traumatic way since and this affected me tremendously and shaped most
things about my life. If you are
interested to know exactly what this is like, and not that I mean to compare
myself to the world’s worst hate crime survivors or their children, but if you
want to know something about it, read this:
There are more academic and also more accessible articles on
the subject, but this is the most perfect marriage of the two that I have found
thus far. Young people raised by those
surviving trauma are in no way protected by that trauma. They are swaddled in it as if by the loving
hands of an overwhelmingly personal and yet a collective and cultural memory of
tragedy.
I was taught empathy even as I began to understand language
and foods that I like. I, first and
foremost, look for the human face behind actions and find it very difficult to
resort to “black and white” thinking about the always grey (and usually brown
of different shades) face of trauma, whether perpetrator or victim.
I am not sad that I am aware and care about the emotions of
others. In fact, apart from driving in
Rwanda and being in small planes surrounded by clouds experiencing turbulence,
I can't think of anything more anxiety causing than being unable to read the
emotions of the person I am near. I am
happy with who I am and the contributions of those that raised and helped to
raise me. I like me. And more than that, I like so many of those
who have chosen to tie their wagons to me.
Apart from that description, there is also the silly story
where one day, waiting for my mother to open the door to our house when we were
arriving home after dark, I began to empathize with moths. We went inside and shut the door and my
mother switched off the porch light. I
began to absolutely freak out. It never
occurred to me that she would switch it off.
I began to cry. She asked why and
what and how can she help! I wouldn’t
tell her until she turned the light back on.
Once she did, I explained to her that the moths wouldn’t be able to find
their way. That they spend their entire
short lives searching for lights in the dark and find one only for it to be
shut off. My mother, very reasonably,
explains to me that, first, lights cost money and we can't afford to keep the
light on. Second, the moths will see the
next porch light.
I, then, explain, equally reasonably, that moths have small
eyes and they probably can't see the next porch light. Next, that maybe everyone is trying to save
money and turns theirs off and then the moth wanders around in the dark for
what for it, with such a small and short life, would be an eternity of fear and
doubt and pain and searching. Last, 8
hours of one light bulb being on shouldn’t cost that much. I demand to know how much it was and suggest
that my allowance should be enough to cover it at a whopping two dollars per
week (paid for chores of course).
I don’t remember when I gave up on the moths, but the next
thing was a plastic bag and straw protest, but that is another story.
My first book report was on Hitler, because I wanted to understand
what is explained as the total mastermind of the Holocaust to a 7 year
old. It turns out that it's amazing just
how many 17 and 27 and 57 year olds still thing that Hitler was the “cause” of
the holocaust (do we just kill all extremists then? Modify the first amendment? How do you deal with that?)
Fast forward to 1994.
I was 13 years old and extraordinarily unhappy. Basically, without getting too personal, here
are my reasons in list format, as any good Capricorn would want to do:
1.
Extreme trauma, not of guns and bureaucracy but
of your neighbor chopping you up with a machete
2.
Extremely different experience from me, already
undeveloped, with malaria, starving, dirty, authoritarian regime, etc etc and
then chopped up with a machete
3.
Nobody seemed to care in the USA at ALL. I heard the same thing over and over
again…tribal warfare, going on for centuries, nothing you can do, will fight no
matter what, choose machetes over guns for cultural reasons. And all of this was deadly, DEADLY wrong
wrong wrong. (Remember the earlier
post? “Americans don’t know anything”)
4.
I was desperately unhappy and found it soothing
to study other people’s trauma. I often
felt like I could not survive. And yet
they survived (another earlier quote, “a broken heart keeps beating”). How can I complain about my small and
otherwise privileged life when these people are surviving that?
5.
20 years later next April, Rwanda, like me, is
simply getting better all the time. It seems
like every year is better than the year before.
And that means that every year is the best year of my life. I think Rwanda is experiencing something
similar. I want to pay absolute
attention and just enjoy and study every kernel of these “best years of our
lives” (Rwanda and me) because the experience will plateau into bickering about
details as routine stability always does.
I just received a notification that there were two attempted kidnappings
at knife point on my campus back home.
Kigali is safer than the USA. I
just have to worry about my iphone here.
It's a miracle. Are you really
listening? A bona fide MIRACLE, the
peace in Rwanda. Sociology tells me that
there is nothing more special about this people over that people. So, there must be something in the heart of
people more generally (peoples is peoples) – immaculate strength, strength and
beauty passing understanding and time and death and, yeah Americans, even
taxes. And Rwanda was an experiment in
this basic human nature. That human
survival is already always SOCIAL and not individual. I believe that Horatio Alger can get nowhere
when being chased by a machete wielding 12 year old who hates Alger because
someone said all Algers were smarter than the kid and that therefore you should
hate all Horatios.
Just because I am married with a
dog and great roommates achieving all of my career dreams, however later than I
wanted, with lot's of people who love me with a garden and lot's of friends and
with a job that I want and with lot's of nice amenities living in the richest
country in the world…doesn’t mean that I don’t carry the trauma inside of me
still. This is the basis for all
curiosity, for all wanderlust, and, most importantly, for all empathy. Durkheim believed that god was society. I argue the following syllogism, if you can
follow: understanding = love, love = god, god = society, society =
solidarity/cooperation, and solidarity/cooperation comes from
understanding. Therefore, empathy = god
in my most holy of “books” – the ethics of my life.
I heart Rwanda.
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