The temptation is to start this account of my days with the line that always comes to mind automatically, “Today’s been a strange day”! I guess after a while strange will become closer to normality although I imagine there will always be something that comes from left field.
Fils has continued to provide plenty of entertainment in the evenings. He has been under the influence of something for a total of four evenings so far. Tonight he was semi coherent in between moments when his eyes seemed to droop and he literally started snoring whilst trying to continue speaking! So we had a conversation about many different things, including Saddam, Osama Bin Laden and Bush, and which subjects he would like to study!
He’s so entertaining… I will have to video an evening some time because you just can’t capture him in words. Then in the middle of our conversation another boy turned up in a really emotional state having fled a man who was beating him. So the rest of the evening was consumed calming him down, checking out his injuries, discussing the circumstances and then sitting him down to watch a Jackie Chan film on to distract him!
More strange things are happening in Rwanda. People have been banned from cutting down trees, burning mud bricks and building roof structures with anything other than metal. Jeremy Lester, the European Ambassador, says the government’s negative impact on people’s daily lives is the worst he’s known in the four years he’s been here and he seriously believes something will happen within a year. I doubt it somehow. People just seem too brainwashed or frightened of speaking out. Fils even said tonight that Paul Kagame is good but he couldn’t say anything against him because someone would hear and he would be killed. He also said that the job I have is something that’s best done for a set period so there’s an end and a release from it’s pressures in sight. Wise words that bolster my plan to leave this for Canada after a year…
I called Sister Anne Beata to let her know Jeremy was going to give her a call to arrange for two free computers to be delivered to the school (finally – I arranged this months ago) and she just announced without emotion or hesitation that today she’d be very busy because they were having a big memorial service and re-burying the remains of lots of people who’s bodies were in the mass graves in Save. It’s amazing how you’ll just be going through your ‘normal’ day and out of the blue you’ll unsuspectingly be thrown violently back into the horrific past.
Here it’s the dry season for another month or two so the days are hot, the nights are cold, it’s dry and dusty, the skies are clear and the sunsets are superb every evening. I don’t think there’s been an evening here when I haven’t seen a beautiful sunset.
Fils has continued to provide plenty of entertainment in the evenings. He has been under the influence of something for a total of four evenings so far. Tonight he was semi coherent in between moments when his eyes seemed to droop and he literally started snoring whilst trying to continue speaking! So we had a conversation about many different things, including Saddam, Osama Bin Laden and Bush, and which subjects he would like to study!
He’s so entertaining… I will have to video an evening some time because you just can’t capture him in words. Then in the middle of our conversation another boy turned up in a really emotional state having fled a man who was beating him. So the rest of the evening was consumed calming him down, checking out his injuries, discussing the circumstances and then sitting him down to watch a Jackie Chan film on to distract him!
More strange things are happening in Rwanda. People have been banned from cutting down trees, burning mud bricks and building roof structures with anything other than metal. Jeremy Lester, the European Ambassador, says the government’s negative impact on people’s daily lives is the worst he’s known in the four years he’s been here and he seriously believes something will happen within a year. I doubt it somehow. People just seem too brainwashed or frightened of speaking out. Fils even said tonight that Paul Kagame is good but he couldn’t say anything against him because someone would hear and he would be killed. He also said that the job I have is something that’s best done for a set period so there’s an end and a release from it’s pressures in sight. Wise words that bolster my plan to leave this for Canada after a year…
I called Sister Anne Beata to let her know Jeremy was going to give her a call to arrange for two free computers to be delivered to the school (finally – I arranged this months ago) and she just announced without emotion or hesitation that today she’d be very busy because they were having a big memorial service and re-burying the remains of lots of people who’s bodies were in the mass graves in Save. It’s amazing how you’ll just be going through your ‘normal’ day and out of the blue you’ll unsuspectingly be thrown violently back into the horrific past.
Here it’s the dry season for another month or two so the days are hot, the nights are cold, it’s dry and dusty, the skies are clear and the sunsets are superb every evening. I don’t think there’s been an evening here when I haven’t seen a beautiful sunset.
No comments:
Post a Comment