Between a monkey and a hard place

It’s the “big rains” season now. The few months of beating sun and red dust on cracking roads didn’t last long. Everyday the clouds inch in and a dark, ominous gray hangs low over the city.  The wind tosses the trees back and forth, and the angry sky pours down for hours. The roads are slippery and soft. Life comes to a pause. People can’t go to work, appointments are missed. We’re caught inside; trapped behind a sea of water under leaky roofs. The power goes out every hour. Our laundry hanging on the line will never dry.

On Sunday morning, the monkeys come around. They hang on our wall beneath the papaya tree, glaring threatening glares as they thumb through the fruit. “Damn monkeys better not eat my tomatoes,” exclaims my British roommate, sure they understand.  One day, she tries to face them head on, brave and daring, waving a broomstick at their faces. “Go away monkeys! Get out of here!” we shout. All they do is show their teeth and move closer, completely unafraid. “Maybe we can get one of the men outside to scare it away.” “-But what kind of women are we? We can’t even scare away our own monkeys.” Eventually we’re defeated, we move inside clutching the pineapple and coffee. It seems we’ve lost the battle - we’re going to have to get used to our new neighbors. My German shepherd puppy, Mowgli, won’t go near them. Turns out she’s not a very good guard dog.

Work has been all consuming. Survivors Fund and Happy Kids are all I think about, breathe about, worry about. My friends have a good way of snapping me out of it – reminding me to drink a beer on our porch and watch the lights scattered over the hills across from us. As time has gone on, and the staff at Survivors Fund realized I’m not just a blond, child-sized intern, my responsibilities have gone up exponentially. Frustratingly, people still walk into the office and ask what I’m doing there. “What’s the 16 year old doing at a desk?” they ask. I scowl at them, explain that I am in fact an adult. I’ve come to realize that people will always underestimate me at first. But I suppose it’s okay, because they usually don’t underestimate me for very long.

So lately, in addition to monitoring and evaluating our widow’s projects, I’m also looking into new projects. I’m trying to find more innovative ways for the women in our programs to lift themselves out of poverty. I’ve bounced around in a 4X4 all around Rwanda, tumbling from side to side on paths that can’t be considered “roads”,  sure that the car was going to fall over. I’ve found kitchen gardens that can be constructed from a few sacks, dirt and manure, which can help to alleviate household malnutrition. Bunny rabbits that can be bred and sold to pay children’s school fees. Special ways of farming pineapple seedlings that can give rural women a place as producers in the supply chain. Unique water collection systems that free up hours typically spent fetching buckets of it.  

I’ve also been writing some big grants for a project that will create employment while addressing underlying issues of trauma for young genocide survivors. And as I was designing these projects I wondered if I’d be here to see them come to fruition. I knew I needed to be comfortable with instability, but I also desperately wanted to know exactly where it is I’d end up.  

And I do go back and forth. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have consistent running water. I imagine a world where people don’t show up to meetings 2 hours late. What if I lived in the same city as my friends, or stayed in one place long enough to actually establish deep relationships with people? What if I wasn’t hit on by literally every man I come across, both professionally and on the street? What if I was one of those normal people that lived in the country they were born in?

Mention the word “home” among my friends, and we don’t really know the answer. “Home” is in and of itself a strange concept to us. “Where’ve you been? Where are you going next?” seem questions better suited to us. It’s strange - we don’t fit in the places we came from anymore but we also don’t really fit in here. Because regardless of how long you stay here, you’re always going to be the weird looking muzungu walking down the street. Kids are always going to run up to you and ask for money or say, “give me chocolate.” Give you chocolate? Why don’t you give me some chocolate? Because I’d love some. 

It’s not easy financially either. I’m not one to complain – but I’ve been struggling here. In 6 months I’ve gone through every dime of savings I had, all but enough for a ticket to Ghana, which I won’t touch. By the 4^th week of the every month, I’m down to my last 10 dollars, and there’s no safety net. It’s beginning to set in that I’ve chosen a career where I’m always going to struggle financially. Even more ironic? Everyone in this country thinks I’m rich.

So I had a choice to make, and it was not an easy choice. But as frustrated as I can be working and living here, the ending punctuation on every question mark comes to the fact that of course I want to stay. Truthfully, every time I see expat friends here leaving, I do understand it. Eventually everyone goes back; at some point you want to settle in the land of functioning Internet and hot water. But while I understand it, I never envy it. In fact, I feel bad for them. I feel bad that they’re leaving this life – that they leave the adventure and intensity. I know they’ll miss the sound of pounding rain on a tin roof, radios blasting from a porch step, fireflies and the hiss of grasshoppers. If I left, all I would think about was getting back here. So when my boss offered me a promotion as Project Officer, and a contract for at least another year – I took it. I jumped up and down and high fived everyone I could on the walk home.

I am here to stay, at least for a while. I know how lucky I am to be so passionate and fascinated by my job, but it’s worth mentioning that missing the people I love will never go away. Where I’ll end up exactly? To be honest, I’m not sure. But I do know for now that I’m in the right place. Even so, I hope that you’ll continue to endure the time difference and awkwardly frozen skype calls, because having that support system is part of why I’m able to stay.