No time to breathe...

It’s all a little blurry but I don’t think I’ve written to you all for several weeks. Days and weeks don’t seem to be distinct anymore – they run into another without any break.

Things are working well so far. The kids living in haven’t caused me any problems, bar one incident of smoking, another of stealing and another of fighting. They are in a good routine of packing up their blankets in the morning, cleaning their room and corridor, tidying outside and cleaning the toilet and shower room. All essential given they have no shoes and the inside hall space is a mud floor because we haven’t money to concrete it so they walk dirt all around the house.

Teaching is going well. Three kids have dropped out of the programme. One had stolen from the centre twice so was banned till September but my social worker hasn’t been able to check up on him and apparently he’s run off to Kigali. Another boy borrowed money from someone and lost it gambling in the local card game so has run away to Kigali to escape reprisal.

Another attacked someone with a machete so is in the central prison. That was an interesting day. Just after dawn I found a blood soaked boy on my doorstep explaining how Hinya had attacked him with a machete in a drunken and crazed rage. So I took him off to the hospital where we sat together in the operating room as the wounds to his arm and neck were cleaned and stitched up, without anaesthetic, and I tried to be supportive rather than faint! Me, the pathetic person who loses feeling in his arms whenever he even thinks about blood and injections. But we both made it through.

That’s just one example of how the days rarely go as planned or expected but there are so many more examples.

The outreach to the girls has stumbled because my community outreach worker has been recalled by IRC for a couple of weeks to prepare Gacaca witnesses for testifying about their rape and sexual violation during the genocide. Hopefully she’ll be back soon.

The road construction company have agreed provisionally to help us lay a hard surface in the garden for sports activities if we could level it. Sounded great until we discovered there was a ’94 genocide victim buried right in the middle.

I have no work visa because we can’t get work visas until SACCA is registered at ministerial level but that can’t happen until the constitution is finalised and approved by IRC. Conventional wisdom would have you form an association, write a constitution, register yourself, apply for funding and then start. We’re doing it all in reverse. Which means I have had to apply for a tourist visa for three months as my current work visa runs out tomorrow. Then in three months time I’ll have to leave the country and return on a new tourist visa. And in the meantime also keep my head low. Which means no repeats of last month’s hairy arrest by the police for driving an uninsured and unregistered donated Congolese 4x4 (we’re on the brink of war with Congo) looking like a mercenary with my new shaved head!

Fils, the boy I had highest hopes for in terms of response to some love, attention and support has gone down hill and now rarely attends lessons. Robo, another genocide orphan, who I had the biggest concerns about because he behaves as though he is crazy and has a furious, really violent temper, has been remarkable since we sat down and had a long discussion about his behaviour before he moved in.

But then there are always the odd things that do go as planned or expected. Take for instance the church opposite which rain or shine always wakes me at 5am with the start of its boisterous, rowdy, thumping services which send reverberations around the centre. You also wouldn’t bet against me not getting more accounts to work on. Or on me spending much of the remainder of each day disciplining children for smoking dope in the garden, refusing to take orders from a woman, fighting etc. Or my workers being harassed and threatened by the military patrols at night when they go to check up on the kids living out.

Another thing that seems to be happening on an increasingly frequent basis is me acting like I have a death wish, confronting, searching and dragging a Local Defence Force man humiliatingly through the market to the police after he’d mugged one of my kids, and having some very interesting and inflamed confrontations with my thieving neighbour in his house after his son stole three times in one weekend and stoned the kids from his house. It’s fair to say Rwanda and a job like this brings out your extremes, extremes you often didn’t know you had.

Anyway, there are many more stories but I’ll spare you for now!