All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [72]
“Are you going to be all right?” he asks, his eyes briefly searching mine.
“Sure,” I say, looking away. “Take it easy.”
I really am not all right. My European, joie de vivre attitude about food and wine is turning into overeating and drinking to bloated grogginess every evening. I stop meditating, as if willing myself down a black hole. I am listless, writing whatever any magazine editor calls up and suggests I write—about an interior designer in San Diego who makes creative use of ottomans, the five best budget hotels in San Francisco, the Queen of Organic Greens—and have zero ideas of my own. The bottom comes when I agree to do a slick women’s magazine story on “stumbling blocks to women’s friendships,” thinking it is a personal essay I can whip out quickly, but instead the editor wants me to interview random but demographically balanced and zip code–diverse women about their myriad issues with female friends. I just can’t make myself do another of those interviews with friends of friends about a vague topic, I can’t write another article that starts with a breezy dramatic anecdote, goes on to a nut graf defining a faux trend, then speeds through three more gripping personal stories, each illustrating a different aspect of the supposed trend, finally having a Malibu PhD who recently wrote a peppy self-help book on the subject weigh in with friendly solutions and bullet points so we can all stop thinking about it and go back to shopping already.
I am simply unable, psychologically incapacitated, paralyzed. I have not been so depressed since my husband left me or George W. Bush stole the White House from Al Gore, I’m not sure which.
One afternoon I have coffee in the Mission neighborhood with my friend Trish, whom I met a couple of years ago while doing a story in Nicaragua, where she organizes Fair Trade coffee cooperatives. It was inspiring, to see what a huge difference a puny increase in coffee prices could make to people living in huts without shoes, how it could build health care centers and schools; it was also fun to dance salsa and soak in hot springs in view of a volcano. All that seems very far away now. Trish is still traveling to coffee countries but is now packing up her entire life and moving to the East Coast to be with an international development expert she happened to meet and fall in love with. It won’t slow her down: she will travel out of Dulles instead of SFO, meeting in exotic locales with her fiancé, who also travels frequently, and I’m glad she seems happy, having sorted things out after forty, able to retain her independence and love of travel and still have a committed relationship with someone.
Over steaming lattes, I confess how depressed I am, how I have no prospects in romance or work, no energy to come up with ideas or do much of anything except stay home at night and devour DVDs, as if consuming culture were the same as creating it.
Trish suggests I should go to Rwanda if I am so depressed. At first I think that is a surprisingly scolding, unfunny remark: if you want to make yourself feel better about having a midlife crisis, go take a look at the aftermath of genocide, that’ll put things into perspective. It is true, of course, that in the big scheme of things I have absolutely nothing to complain about and everything to be grateful for, but nevertheless it seems extreme, and maybe self-righteous, to bring up Rwanda in the context of our conversation.
But Trish is serious. She is leading a trip to Rwanda for coffee importers and tells me that if I pay my own way, I can come along. Surely, she says, you can find some sort of a story to write from Rwanda.
That gives me reason to wake up the next morning, rouses my inner Brenda Starr, and less than a month later, I find myself arriving at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda.
IN THE INTERVENING weeks I have read everything I could find about Rwanda and the 1994 genocide there, but nothing has prepared me for being in that tragic and beautiful country and encountering its people and ghosts. I have never been to Africa