Big Belly, Will Travel - to Israel and Palestine!

Live from Ramallah:  So I've actually left my two darling boys and their father in Burundi for 2.5 weeks so I can travel to Israel and Palestine to collect more stories for One Globe Kids.  I knew it would be tough being gone for so long, but it really wasn't until now that I understand how hard it is for my sister and parents to Skype with the boys and not be able to actually kiss them through the computer screen.  Plus, I'm around all these darling children and their siblings for work, making it that much harder!  

I arrived in Tel Aviv after an overnight trip from Bujumbura with stops in Nairobi and Addis and am very pleased to report that it IS possible to eat Ethiopian tibs and injera at the airport in Addis Abbebe.  (My baby needs meat, don't you know?)  I picked up a free Time Out Israel at the airport, bringing back memories of my own Time Out New York subscription of a year ago, and rolled my bags through customs without stopping, looking like the tired, pregnant lady that I am. 

A mere 5 hours after laying down, I reluctantly pulled myself out of bed the first morning to go out in search of a SIM card so I can make local calls using my own cellphone.  (Gotta love that SIM system – my phone can call Zambia, Rwanda, the Netherlands and now Israel depending on what card I put in.  Only bummer?  It won’t work in Wisconsin.  Sheesh.)

And wow, Tel Aviv is great!  The weather feels truly Mediterranean, sunny and dry, the streets busy, filled with bikers, buses, cars, walkers, and tons of people pushing strollers and playing with kids.  It feels remarkably like lower Manhattan but with less humidity, shorter buildings and fewer people in suits.  Oh, and a lot more hummus, believe it or not!  I found the card, called my friend Kari in Ramallah to tell her I’d arrived, and reconfirmed my appointment with the first family and child that I’m photographing – a funny, sweet 5-year old boy named Asher.

Here I am, heading out to meet Asher:

Traveling and working internationally while pregnant is actually way better than you’d expect – that big ball is the biggest door opener ever.  It seems that besides the 15 – 22 year-old age group, everyone wants to talk about kids.  Little girls on the street point, smile and giggle, old women and men tell you about their grandchildren, and parents are more than happy to talk about their own munchkins.  Last night, Munir, the 33-yr old Palestinian taxi driver who brought me from Jerusalem to Ramallah (via the famed Qalandia checkpoint) told me all about how long he and his wife waited before having kids, what he hopes they’ll study, how their behavior changes over time.  A potentially, slightly intimidating car ride from Israel into the West Bank was made quite entertaining and insightful due to my growing belly - it may be one of the greatest travel assets I’ve ever had.  

Tourist in Rwanda - during Genocide Memorial (Journal: April 2011)

Excerpt from my April 11, 2011 journal:

In about an hour Jonathan and I will be back on the road headed toward Bujumbura.  What a Rwanda tour this has been!  We’ve hiked through tea fields (who knew those bushes can grow up to chest height?!), seen a group of Colobus monkeys in the wild, including the cutest baby Colobus, all covered in white hair, eaten and shopped our way through Kigali and are now enjoying a lake/marshaland in south-easter Rwanda.  As I type, Jonathan is using binoculars to check out some big (3 feet tall) stork/pelican walking along the shore.  From a distance they seem majestic and graceful, and I suppose they are, but as soon as you get a closer view, they seem to have flown out a bad horror movie – their face is covered in warts and red blotches and their waddles (which are gigantic) are covered in short, coarse hair.  To cool off they stand still and spread their wings, about 5 feet across.

We’ve been in Rwanda for 5 days now, and all 5 have been official genocide memorial days.  I hadn’t planned to visit then, but neither had I actually looked to be sure when it was so we wouldn’t interrupt.  The airplane carrying the Preisdent of Rwanda and the President of Burundi was shot down around 8:30pm on April 6 and their 7-day memorial period starts April 7.  (Burundians memorialize the genocide on April 6 – not sure why there are different dates.)  During the whole week, everything is open in the morning but closed in the afternoon.  It seems like a very smart way to memorialize something of this magnitude – 1 day would never be enough, yet 7 days is significant.  But life can’t shut down – people still need to earn a living, buy food, work, so the lively mornings shows living resilience in contrast to all the death that occurred. 

Every where we’ve gone, from the Nyuwenge Forest to this remote lake, people where purple shirts, purple ribbons and hang purple banners to remember what happened – how 800,000 people were killed in 2 months.  Memorial sites dot the landscape. 

We visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali on Saturday, and I’m not sure what to write.  It’s like visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washignton, DC, where everyone is quiet and doesn’t know how to react appropriately because it’s all so horrific.  The Rwandan genocide occurred 18 years ago, so if you were 10 when it happened (definitely old enough to remember it all), you’d be 28 years old now.  The museum had video interviews with survivors and you realize that there are thousands of people who lost as much as those we heard.  A woman told how her parents were taken away, and she saw and heard her three sisters be thrown into a latrine, followed by large rocks until their screams were silent.   I wonder how many people we passed on the street, or spoke to in a gas station or a shop or a hotel, experienced something similar.  Thousands.  I won’t write more, because: 1) it’s so mind-blowing to be chased down by your neighbors, have so many people killed, and still the international community didn’t intervene; and 2) Rwanda is trying really hard to be more than the genocide and they are.

Last January I in Rwanda I met a couple from NYC who had flown in to go on a 12-day Rwanda tour.  It’s definitely on the radar and has amazing nature and culture to offer.  Our second day we had lunch and lounged at the Nyuwenge Forest Lodge, a private hotel with its own helipad and infinity pool over-looking the oldest prehistoric forest in the world.  It never completely froze over during the last ice age so there are many plants/animals that could have been here for literally millions of years.  The Igishigishigi plant is literally thought to have been food for dinosaurs!  The lodge is the kind of place that Brangelina would stay should they ever visit Rwanda – the location and decoration is absolutely stunning.  We saw a chandelier made of tea strainers since it’s located on a tea plantation next to the forest.

Rwanda is using tourism, for a large part, to dig it’s way out of poverty, and the government has a highly-centralized office of parks and recreation.  Their capacity to communicate what you can do and for how much money is not up to snuff, however.  Each “activity” is billed separately and costs a pretty penny.  For example, a hike to see the Colobus, Chimpanzees or “Primates” are all paid separately.  A plain “hike” is also paid separately from that.  We paid $70 (for Jonathan) / $50 (for me as an East African Community resident) to go on a hike to see the Colobus monkeys, which we saw largely in part to the tracking team that stays on the ground to direct visitors.  However, we were told we could see them near the guest house where we stayed and then also hike to find them from the other tourism office.  The neglected to tell us that if the monkeys moved too far away and wouldn’t be able to reach them and hike back before dark, that they wouldn’t even let us try and find them.  The guide (one of 7 guides sitting at the park reception park doing nothing) refused to let us enter the park since they had moved 2.5 hours away by 1pm.  Essentially we had hiked through the tea fields to find the smaller colony (a 2 hour trip) and were not allowed to enter the real forest to hike or try and find the monkeys again.  They explained that it is because we would have been “hiking,” instead of tracking Colobus, and that’s a different activity and would cost another $40 – 50.  They’re extremely proud of the 6,000 people who visited the park in 2010 and couldn’t have cared less that a new pricing system may give them more clients.  But oh, well!  We did see Colobus during our hike, Mountain monkeys (cute black monkeys with really puffy, white lamb chops on the side and bottom of their face) along the road, and Vervet monkeys on the guesthouse grounds.  Now I’ll now how to do it next time – pay for a 1-2 day hiking pass and get into the forest.  If you really want to see monkeys, pay for that separately. 

In Kigali, we ate at Mama Africa a large, open-air terraced restaurant with thatched roof, followed by drinks at Republika Café – how I would LOVE to decorate a place like that.  All bright African patterns and old wooden chairs and fixtures.  So cool.  We had coffee at La Galette, where I’ll definitely be bringing the boys for croissants and limitless rocking on the big rocking horses for children.  Lunch was, of course, at Khana Khazana, the Indian restaurant that used to have a sister restaurant in Burundi.  (Indian food in Africa is somehow some of the best in the world!). 

In a few minutes we’ll head back to the main road, giving the hotel manager a ride to a funeral before driving back to Bujumbura.  It’s 18 years after the genocide and bodies are still being found and services held.

Hunger on the Street (Journal: January 2011)

This is an excerpt from my January 2011 journal:

Lest my emails make it sound like Burundi is only fun and games (and good food and beaches) tonight’s email will bring us all back down to earth.  When I write about life here, I do not intentionally sugarcoat, just as I do not intentionally point out the hard, scary, bad things.  I figure that every place has things that make us nervous, bad situations, people who must make difficult choices, poverty.  Never once did it occur to me to tell people about the woman who lived (lives?) in the City Hall subway stop when they asked what it was like to live in NYC.  But a woman lived in the subway, near Pace University, and she slept on a cardboard box and did her business in a McDonald’s cup and I walked by her every time I went uptown on the 4/5/6. 

This afternoon my Dutch neighbor, Frederieke, and I went for a walk.  We’ve both been trying to exercise more and this is the third weekend that we got out for our power walk.  We only slightly modified our route today, heading down the mountain from the exclusive expat neighborhood of Kiriri into the equally exclusive next door neighborhood of Ruhero 1 for a lap at the public garden. 

Burundian’s are unique with their love of exercise, going to such extremes that each day of the week one of the government ministries (ministry of interior, health, security, finance, etc.) closes at 3pm so the employees can go exercise.  As of 3pm everyday, people are jogging, walking, doing calisthenics on the street.   Lots of people.  For a few hours at a time, exercise works like a great equalizer.  Young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, expat, Burundian – everyone is working out.  A smile, a thumbs up, and we’re all in it together.

I really like my walks with Frederieke.  Sometimes we talk about fluffy stuff like the various merits of Edward and Jake from the Twilight series and sometimes we talk about serious stuff, like what more can be done to stop the ongoing rape of Burundian and Congolese women in the countryside.  Today our walk took us to the public garden for the first time.

The jardin publique is just that.  A public garden, cut from the same concept as Central Park, but much, much, much smaller.  There’s a small playground, basketball courts, fields for Frisbee football, a pavilion where I’m hoping to go for step aerobics, and a track that runs around the outer edge.  Today there was a private wedding, attended by a government minister, and therefore many extra armed police standing around the perimeter. 

We finished our lap, enjoying the normalcy of walking in a city park, and had just headed back out to the street when she fell.  Eva? Francoise?  Euginie?  I don’t know her name but I saw her collapse on the street about 100 yards from where we walked.  My first reaction was puzzlement.  Did that woman really just fall down?  Why did she fall in the middle of the street?  Why is the security agent across the street from her not doing anything?  Frederieke and I hurried toward her, looking around to see who else had seen what had happened.  When I saw the little foot hanging from the side of her body, I broke into a run. 

A woman carrying a baby on her back had collapsed in the middle of the road about 200 yards from the entrance to the public garden.  She fell on her back, pinning the baby to the pavement.  When we reached her, I thought she was dead.  Her eyes and her mouth were wide open, unmoving, and she didn’t respond when we grabbed her arms and pulled her upright.  The baby was moving but did not make a sound.  We screamed for help as one passerby helped us pull her off the road.  Not knowing what to do in case of an emergency in Burundi, Frederieke stayed with her while I ran to find the police.

I stopped 2 passersby on the road, Burundians who had also come to exercise, explaining as quickly as I could what had happened and asking what we should do.  At one point I remember saying, “I’m a foreigner here.  What should we do in this type of situation?  Where do we get help?”  No one had a response.  The police wouldn’t leave their “posts,” where they hung out in a circle chatting.  By the time I got back to the woman, Frederieke had the baby in her arms and the woman was propped up by a tree, alive.  A group of onlookers had gathered, a gawker’s traffic jam as it may be called at home. 

I don’t know what we would have done if my friend Jasmin hadn’t pulled up in her car shortly thereafter.  Jasmin is Belgian and married to Boscoe, a Burundian.  They have two daughters the same ages as our boys and just moved to Burundi from Belgian so he could invest in his country.  The crowd that had gathered told us that the woman was hungry and Jasmin had several muffins in a box, which we fed her.  For the first time, I saw her child move to take the muffin away from his mother to feed himself. 

Collapsing from hunger is perhaps not as uncommon as we’d expect in the world.  What is shocking is to see it happen in front of you and to realize that NO ONE knows what should be done to help.  Until Boscoe arrived, no Burundian had made even any indication that he/she would take responsibility to find help.  There is absolutely no safety net at all in Burundi.  No 911 to call.  There are hospitals, but no ambulances and no treatment without money.  There’s no social security, no homeless shelters, no safe houses for women and children.  Even if the police would have reacted, they don’t have a protocol to follow, don’t know any first aid.  Besides driving her to a hospital, where she would be refused without payment, there isn’t anything they would or could have done.  Burundi has roads and restaurants and shops and people who exercise, but when a vulnerable woman collapses with her child due to hunger, there’s no net to catch her. 

Eventually she told us (in Kirundi) where she lives and Boscoe said he would give her a ride home and money for groceries.  Frederieke and I walked home, half stunned and half mad at it all.  How could this happen?  Why is it like this?  When will it change?  What will happen to that little boy?  Later I heard that she had fallen over again in the car so they took her to the hospital anyway.  The doctor said she had collapsed from hunger, not having eaten for over a day and with too much physical exertion.  While at the hospital, a nurse told Boscoe that it’s not a good idea for him to drive her home.  The neighborhood is too rough to take a car after dark and he could expect problems from her family and neighbors, who may accuse him of having harmed her.  Not wanting to get dragged into a situation he didn’t understand, he brought her to the bus stop, made sure she knew where she was headed and gave her money. 

And I sat on my couch and wrote about it on my MacBook Pro.  What chance does she, does her child have for a healthy life?  Could it have been an act?  A desperate step taken when she saw two white Mzungus walking toward her?  What could possibly be worse than intentionally falling to the ground, on top of your child, with the hopes that two strangers would be wiling to help?  No one with other options would do that.  No matter how I examine it, I am unsatisfied.  How quaint.  I’m unsatisfied and there’s a starving mother in Kanyosha trying to feed herself and her baby.