All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [74]
From Kigali, our group drives through rolling green hills, densely populated with villages, to a resort that serves as a staging area for treks to see the silverback gorillas of Dian Fossey fame. We encounter these massive and playful creatures face-to-face the next day, and they are an impressive, once-in-a-lifetime sight but an odd juxtaposition to the genocide tour (so much public outpouring of concern for those endangered gorillas, so little for the widows). I share a room with Alice, who wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and it overwhelms me to realize that she always wakes up screaming in the night and that there is no possible way to comfort her, only to leave the lights on, hug her, and say that we are safe, there is no reason to be afraid. The worst has already happened to her.
We go on to Butare, where we meet people who work in a coffee project that is markedly improving the circumstances of the local growers. A charismatic and visionary American agriculture professor set up a program to help the Rwandans process their high-quality coffee beans to sell to the gourmet market, at many times the price of what they’d been selling in bulk to the big-can companies. Rwandans have a long history of being forced to grow coffee, mostly by colonial Belgians who beat them if they refused to comply, so it was a complicated task to get Rwandans to care about growing coffee (because of their brutal past, most Rwandans prefer to drink tea). But by building clean, landscaped washing and sorting stations for the coffee, which serve as a kind of community center for the villagers, the program created an atmosphere where women whose husbands were killed in the genocide can work side by side with women whose husbands are in prison for the crimes. “Reconciliation” is the word repeatedly used by the nongovernmental organization workers and politicians we met to talk about progress in Rwanda, but this is a real example, former enemies working together for a common economic good. I’m astonished at the resiliency of these women, who can cooperate under the most humanly unlikely circumstances and create new stability for themselves together.
The village is prospering; a new hair salon and restaurant have popped up, along with an Internet café sponsored by the coffee program. Some people have wooden bikes to haul their coffee the long distances to the washing stations, instead of carrying large baskets on their heads. It is, amazingly, a genuine good-news story from Rwanda.
I send a postcard to Maya in Nevada, who will be so eager to hear about these optimistic, grassroots projects with women in Africa, and I can’t wait to tell her about them the next time I see her.
The optimistic feeling of the project dims later in the day, when we arrive at the hotel where we are staying in Butare, which has an intensely creepy vibe. I go with Helen, the owner of a coffee company, to check out which rooms we want to stay in, but each one scares us. Without speaking, we agree that we are going to share a room, to stay together. The rooms are simple and tidy, with an innocuous bed, table, and chair, but something about each makes us too uncomfortable to stay. We finally settle on one, and, though there are two beds, we decide to sleep together, to feel safe.
“My one time in bed with a lesbian, and nothing happens,” I joke with Helen, trying to lighten the mood.
(I later read that there was a reason the hotel rooms felt so creepy. Butare had initially been a relative haven during the genocide, because the prefect was Tutsi and it had the largest Tutsi population in the country; but the government sent in militia groups from Kigali to begin the massacre, starting with the eighty-year-old widow of the former Tutsi ruler, moving on to professors and students at the university, then to the hospital, and working systematically