Well. I’m in Rwanda. Thanks to Alison & Brew, my luggage weighs less than me and I can actually manage to carry all of it at one time (though my clumsiness either inspires laughter or pity). I said final goodbye's at Union Station and struggled onto the train with my bags. Jeremy, a friend from NY days, picked me up at the Newark NJ train station, chauffered me through the grizzly bowels of Gotham to my old roommate Carey's home at Castle Terrace, in Hoboken, where pristine Victorians and towering trees line the brick street.

Monday, after a delicious breakfast with Carey at the Turning Point, my bags and I made the harrowing journey from Hoboken, across Manhattan and Brooklyn, to JFK. Big bag, little bag 1, little bag 2 and me all managed to get on and off the same planes at approximately the same time. It was lovely. My bags won’t tell me anything about their transport buddies, but I can gossip about mine.

Waiting at JFK was an African woman (west Africa) who was very confused. I think she was trying to visit the states but didn’t have the correct visa so they were sending her back. But she didn’t understand what was going on and ended up refusing to get on the plane. So, she and her bags had to be removed. Result – minor delays leaving JFK and foreign woman stranded in airport. Not allowed to enter the US, refusing to leave the airport and no one spoke her language. Sort of sad. While I was worrying about her (there was some commotion before we even got onto the plane), I met another worried about-her-passenger. She was ex-peace core, married to a Moroccan and contracting in Iraq. She was headed to Morocco to see her husband, who she hadn’t seen in two years.

On the first flight, there was this Frenchman who, according to his ticket, was supposed to sit next to me. He was a pastry chef at a hotel in Sonoma, CA. Lank. Bad teeth. Greenish skin tone. Didn’t shower. A bit stiff, put-offish (…and that’s coming from me). Gave me this slight sense that if I occupied just a centimeter of space, then maybe my existence might be justified...if that centimeter was further away from him. I guess that’s what people mean by “very French”. (I have had some sincere hospitality from the French so I know not all French fit into American’s “very French” stereotype. But he’s the reason that stereotype lives on.) As soon as he learned there was an open seat next to his friends, he left to joint them. I was delighted.

A minute after he left the Belgium boy from across the aisle asked if the window seat next to me was taken. Of course he could have it, I said, and hopefully he’d be able to see the NY skyline as we took off. Unfortunately the NY skyline ended up being on the opposite side of the plane. Still, Belgium boy was a nice flight mate. For one, he fit in his seat. Two, he was friendly. Three, he slept most of the time. Fourth, he showered. Cute little Belgium boy was about college age. He’d just finished a month volunteer program at an orphanage in Cusco, Peru. This was his 3rd day of “transit” – he’d had 15-hour layovers in Lima and NYC. So, he was a very tired little Belgium boy.

In Brussels airport, I and another person on my first flight chatted (half to keep ourselves awake) as we waited for our respective 2nd flights. She headed to visit her dad in the DRC. Her father is a prosecutor for Congo’s government. Years ago, when war broke out in the DRC, her dad’s life had been in danger. They had fled first Goma and then the Congo. Now he was back, working for the Government. The rest of her family had established residency in the States.

I was the one with the window seat on the final leg of my journey from Brussels to Kigali. The terrain was fascinating. It spanned the Alps, the length of Italy (you could even see the “foot” at the bottom), the Mediterranean Sea, the Sahara (where you could see Libyan oil wells puffing up large black clouds into the clean desert air) and then heavy grey clouds covering Uganda and Southern Sudan (which I’m told are quite green). A very talkative grandfather-like engineer sat next to me. He was Argentinean, with an ex-wife and seven grown children in South America. He is currently married to a legal consultant who worked and lived in Iraq, and he lives and works for a construction contractor in Rwanda. (2nd not together married couple of the trip.) I learned all about how to build a road through the Sahara (though the system has yet to be tested). I learned about how Goma’s streets are flooded with harden lava. I learned about the hotel business in Cancun, Mexico. I contested his claim that Christ never said he was the Son of God and that the NT was compiled by councils in the 4th Century (Dad – I really wish I had that FF Bruce book about the archeological record of the NT. Also, I need to brush up on my 1st and 2nd century church history. I knew there were earlier church councils, like Nicaea, and manuscripts that pre-date the 4th Century. However, the engineer was as locked in his thinging as I am. So ultimately, I don't think logical arguement would have persuaded him.) And I kept falling asleep on grandpa engineer. He liked to talk and would talk about everything. While it was interesting, my eyelids were heavy. I hadn’t really slept in 30 hours.

Finally, we arrived in Rwanda around 7 pm. It was the most turbulent decent I have ever experienced – probably because of the heavy clouds over Rwanda’s one thousand hills. I was surprised that the Sun had already set, but then grandpa engineer explained that the sun rises and sets around 6 every day, give or take a few minutes as we’re at the equator.

Everyone mobbed the visa office. People were cutting other people off, pushing themselves forward right and left. Including foreign nationals. I since learned that lines really aren’t formed in Africa – though – compared to other countries, people actually do queue up in Rwanda. After fighting more mobs to get big bag and little bag #2 off the world’s smallest luggage conveyer belt, I stumbled out the door to find Matt Smith waiting for me. Matt drove me like a madman past a funeral procession, up and down Kigali’s jumbled streets to Melissa Evans apartment. While most people in Rwanda have houses, she has a high-rise apartment – that’s what she prefers. It is a beautiful apartment the feels like it came straight out of a magazine. I’m staying with her for the next few days and working on projects for her at the bank.

Melissa is a cosmopolitan woman. She’s Urwego’s CFO. Born in the Philippines, raised in the states, educated at NC Chapel Hill, had a brief stint in Albany and has lived in Africa for the past nine years. Melissa loves to read. In fact, we share some of the same favorite books. She calls herself a recovered workaholic. So, I’m hoping to learn a few things from her.

Matt’s from Austin, TX (Can’t get away from these Texans. They’re everywhere. It’s like they’re gonna take over the world.) He manages special projects for the bank. Matt and I will be sharing an office and he’ll be the one that drives me to Urwego’s 27 branches, all over the Country as I work on my project. When he was talking me around town today to get my cell phone and exchange my money, people asked if we were brother and sister. Matt says that Caucasians look alike to them.

Matt showed me where I’ll be living, in Kyovue, the expat/rich Rwandan neighborhood. While the guesthouse has minimal furniture, it has a metal gate, security guards (dad aren’t you happy) and a cook/housekeeper. It also has a beautiful garden with lime trees, orange trees, herbs, and a gazebo. The garden looks down into the peopled valley below and across to the hills to the other side of Kigali.

Today, I meet everyone at the banks Kigali office. About 70 people. Unfortunately, I remember the names and faces of only 5 of them. Hopefully they’ll be forgiving as I learn to pronounce their names. I’m one of 4 non-Rwandans at the bank.

Rwandans (and foreign nationals) call the city “KIG-al-ee”. While some speak English or French, most speak Kinyarwanda. Hopefully I can pick up a little kin-yar-wandee in the next two and a half months.

Rwanda's Women are Leading the Way

The Op-ed section of Yesterday's Wall Street Journal - Europe had an article by Cindy McCain, on the role that Rwandan woman are playing to move society forward. While the estrogen power message is a bit heavy, it was an interesting article. It tells you a little bit about the level responsibility these woman have assumed forgiveness needed to continue in community with their neighbors.

John McCain's wife, Cindy, said:

I have recently returned from Rwanda. I was last there in 1994, at the height of the genocide that claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans. The memories of what I saw haunt me still.

I wasn't sure what to expect all these years later, but I found a country that has found in its deep scars the will to move on and rebuild a civil society. And the renaissance is being led by women.

Women are at the forefront of the physical, emotional and spiritual healing that is moving Rwandan society forward. One of them, from eastern Rwanda, told me her story -- a violent, tragic and heartbreaking testimony of courage. She spoke of surviving multiple gang rapes, running at night in fear of losing her life, going days without food or water and witnessing the death of her entire family -- one person at a time, before her eyes.

The injuries she sustained left her unable to bear children. Illness, isolation and an utter lack of hope left her in abject despair.

And yet the day I met her, she wasn't consumed by hatred or resentment. She sat, talking with me and a few others, beside a man who had killed people guilty of nothing more than seeking shelter in a church. She forgave him. She forgave the perpetrators of her tragedy, and she explained her story with hope that such cruelty would never be repeated.

It is a humbling experience to be in the presence of those who have such a capacity for forgiveness and care. It is also instructive. If wealthy nations want their assistance programs to be effective, they should look to the women who form the backbone of every society. With some education, training, basic rights and empowerment, women will transform a society -- and the world.

Women today make up a disproportionate percentage of the Rwandan population. In the aftermath of the genocide, they had to head households bereft of fathers. They had to take over farms, and take jobs previously done by men. But there were opportunities, too: Today, 41% of Rwandan businesses are owned by women.

I saw their impact first hand at a coffee project in the city of Nyandungu. All the washing and coffee-bean selection is done by hand, by women there. Women to Women International, a remarkably active and innovative nongovernmental organization, has already helped over 15,000 Rwandan women through a year-long program of direct aid, job-skills training and education.

The organization is launching a project to train 3,000 women in organic agriculture, and is reaching out to females across the country. The women who instruct their fellow war survivors in economic development are an inspiration to those who cherish the essential benevolence of humanity.

But that is just the beginning. A new constitution ratified in 2003 required that women occupy at least 30% of the seats in parliament. (In our House and Senate only about 17% of the seats are filled by women.) Some wondered at the time whether it was feasible to meet this target. Now, nearly half of parliament and a third of the president's cabinet posts are held by women. Rwanda today has the world's highest percentage of female legislators.

Rwanda has a dark past but a bright future. It has a long way to go -- the country remains one of the world's poorest, and the social reverberations of the genocide are evident everywhere. Yet in the midst of tragedy, the women are building something genuinely new. Perhaps it is fitting that a nation so wracked by death could give birth to a vibrant new age. I know that one thing is clear: Through their bold and courageous actions, these women should inspire not only their fellow Africans, but all individuals -- men and women -- across the globe.

Munyurangabo - a film in Rwandans language

Rwanda, Speaking in Its Own Voice

The film's website.

A clip from the NY times:

IT is safe to say that when most American filmmakers think about the global reach of their movies, they are not considering the concept in quite the same way as Lee Isaac Chung, whose first feature, “Munyurangabo,” happens also to be the first narrative feature made in Rwanda’s native language of Kinyarwanda.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Mr. Chung in Brooklyn. His film will be shown as part of the New Directors/New Films program at MoMA.

“I know this sounds idealistic, but it was a conscious decision to make a film for and about Rwandans,” Mr. Chung, 29, said in an interview last spring during the Cannes Film Festival, where his film had its premiere. “It was definitely not a practical decision,” he added, referring to the challenge of making a movie in a country he had never visited and where he did not speak the language. “But since it was our first film, we thought, ‘Why not?’ ”

A few years ago Mr. Chung’s wife, Valerie, an art therapist who had traveled to Rwanda as a volunteer to help those affected by the 1994 genocide, urged him to accompany her. He signed on to teach a filmmaking class at a Christian relief base in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in the summer of 2006.

Sensing an opportunity to make a movie that presents the country as it is now, not simply as a historical site of atrocity, he arrived with a nine-page outline — the story of two teenage boys and the single-minded quest that comes between them — which he had written with the help of Samuel Anderson, an old friend. He shot “Munyurangabo” at the end of his trip, over 11 days, working with nonprofessional actors he found through local orphanages and using a few of his students as crew members.

The day after his film’s premiere, sitting with a few of his actors in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Cannes, Mr. Chung seemed a little stunned that his intimate, micro-budget film had brought him to such glamorous surroundings. He had submitted it to the festival “blind and right on deadline,” he said. “I don’t know that we had any expectations while shooting. We weren’t thinking about it in terms of careers.”

Writing in Variety, the critic Robert Koehler called “Munyurangabo” the discovery of the Un Certain Regard section. The film is still without a United States distributor, but it has since played at more than a dozen festivals, including those in Toronto and Berlin and at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles (where it won the top prize), and it will screen in New York this week as part of the New Directors/New Films series, which begins on Wednesday. ( It is showing at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday and at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday.)

On paper the production of “Munyurangabo” — the title is the name of one of the characters and of an ancient Rwandan warrior — would seem to have been facing a thicket of cultural and linguistic barriers, but the filmmakers made the most of the situation by soliciting the input of the cast. “We had to leave it very open,” said Mr. Anderson, who was in Rwanda for the filming. “Sometimes we would just ask: ‘Does this seem realistic?’ ‘What would someone do in this situation?’ It helped that our translator had a great ear for the subtleties of language.”

Mr. Chung also served as cinematographer and editor. He shot with an old mechanical camera on super-16-millimeter film, “for aesthetic reasons” but also because of concerns over the erratic power supply in Rwanda, which would make lighting and working with a digital camera difficult. This made for a harrowing return trip, since airport security “kept trying to put the film through the X-ray machine,” he said. On the set the biggest glitch came midway through the shooting when one of the actors shaved his head, forcing the production to take a five-day break while his hair grew back.

Unlike the bigger-budget Rwanda-themed films of recent years — “Hotel Rwanda,” “Sometimes in April,” “Beyond the Gates” — “Munyurangabo” does not explicitly revisit the 1994 slaughter of Tutsis by extremist Hutus. It is instead a quiet accounting of the aftermath, tracing the ripple effects as they are felt among friends and within households, setting the thirst for vengeance against the possibility of reconciliation.

And unlike most movies set in strife-torn faraway lands and made by American or European directors, “Munyurangabo” declines to provide the requisite surrogate figure — usually a noble do-gooder — for the Western audience. The desire to remove the presence, and even the perspective, of the outsider-observer was “partially a test,” Mr. Chung said, “to see if we could bridge gaps between cultures.”

"RWANDA IS SPECTACULAR to behold. Throughout its center a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. On the theme of hills, Rwanda produces countless variations: jagged rain forests, round shouldered buttes, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks sharp as filed teeth. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightening flickers through the nights and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvarying haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of Akagera Park wildlife blackens the hills."

Philip Gourevitch, a NYer journalist, would go driving when he got depressed in Rwanda. He had come shortly after the genocide, to collect information for his book. When Gourevitch told his driver that he thought the country was beautiful, the Rwandan driver mumbled that it might be an okay place of the people weren't so bad.

The more I learn, the more Rwanda seems to be a land of contradictions. On one hand, reconciliation, development and economic growth has been amazing. In some organizations, people who had been fighting each other 14 years ago, are working side by side. Through the Gacaca court system (do read about these...they're fascinating), communities have become involved in trying genocide prisoners with lesser charges. This ancient system of justice has helped communities work toward reorienting these people into community.

On the other hand, a gal that worked in the refuge camps a year or so after the genocide told me, in Rwanda nothing is a it seems; you never know were you are with people. [Edit out response Grace quipped.] Not everything about the way the genocide ended and how the refuge camps were emptied seems quite above board. Given the role extremist radio played in the '94 genocide, the current government has a vested interest in moderating the press. Amnesty International has questioned whether the government has gone too far.

Reconciliation and forgiveness is never easy. It has been 14 years. I'm guessing people on both sides have been hurt. Healing is a slow process...and this type of healing probably needs more than just time behind it. [In fact, strictly speaking, I don't think TIME has anything to do with healing.]

At this point, my thoughts are based entirely on what other people have shared. I leave the US July 28th and arrive in Rwanda July 29th, after my longest travel day yet.

The Urban Frontier

Morning Edition (Yes...I'm an NPR junky. Without TV and with many responsibilities at work, I get all my news either while I'm getting ready in the morning or on my drive too work. DC's paper, the Washington Post, has such a reputation for fair and intelligent reporting. Every year, I think I should make a new years resolution to read the Washington Post. I guess I should start by making new year's resolutions or overcoming my normal resolution...I resolve not to have new years resolutions. Watch...I'll just read the style section, world section and the comics...and anything real estate related.)

Rabbit trail aside, Morning Edition is doing a series on "The Urban Frontier" which I have found fascinating. The reports address socioeconomic and ecological concerns surrounding these epicenters of real estate development.

Today's story was about Khartoum, Sudan.

In brief: Sudan's burgeoning capital city, Khartoum, is a microcosm of the nation. Locals migrate to this desert oasis from every region of the country. It's a cosmopolitan city, like London, and it is Sudan's center for jobs and infrastructure. But Khartoum is also soaking up precious resources that are needed in places like Darfur and in southern and eastern Sudan.

Yesterday's story, about Mumbai, kept me in the car for a few more minutes before I headed into the office:

In brief: Mumbai, or Bombay as many Indians still call it, is India's largest city, one of the world's greatest commercial centers and home to the vast, vibrant Bollywood film industry.
Some of the richest people on the planet live within its boundaries. But so does a multitude of poor. Half of Mumbai's population lives in slums.