Voices Under Concrete

So quiet you almost forget to breathe

David liked to play football. He liked rice and beans and apparently smiled a lot. David was five- years-old when it all happened. The bottom of the plaque spells it out as simply as a math equation.

Cause of Death: Killed by a Machete.

I stare into the eyes of the blown up black and white print smiling down at me and I get a weird shiver, like meeting a ghost only to have it offer to buy you a beer and chat about a recent generic sporting event.

But that’s how David died, and now I stand in a room full of pictures just like his, each with a different name and little smiling face. Paul. Francoise. Benoit. Alex. Little particulars about them are listed: what they liked, where they lived, what made them happy. The place looks like a still-life playground full of fading smiles posing like hams in front of flashes and the rhythmic clicking of rotating camera film. It’s almost a serene place until you remember that all of them were slaughtered in cold blood before they even knew the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi.

Kigali’s Genocide Memorial Centre isn’t for the faint of heart. The memorial sits at the crest of one of the city’s rolling hills, a sightly stone building whose massive stature stands in stark contrast to the single-storey aluminum thatched residences that line nearby hills like polka dots on a curvy cocktail dress. It almost feels too pretty to be what it is, like Sauron’s looming black tower of evil would fit in a bit nicer with the general décor.

But the inside is a no nonsense snapshot that refuses to sugarcoat any of what happened in 1994. The facts unfold in front of you like a history book, presented like scenes from a dark chronology whether you already know the ending but decide to follow along anyway, hoping it might come out different. Maybe this time Roméo Dallaire and Don Cheadle fly in with a helicopter and hot cocoa at the last moment and save all those people.

But no, not here, not this time. Here, you get just what you didn’t pay for. They want you to know. They want you to see every nitty gritty detail for yourself, to see everything from their eyes. “This Happened,” the walls scream, shaking you violently by the shoulders. “Wake the fuck up.”

I’d been to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a few months earlier, a stone’s throw from the glass dome adorned Reichstag which houses the country’s parliament and paisley-tied politicians. The monument is a somber pseudo-cemetery with just under 3000 stone slabs of varying sizes that combine to create a wailing wave of tangible sorrow that screams a certain kind of retrospective remorse. But the tone and feeling you get as you cross the makeshift gravestones is one of apology rather than empathy. “This is what ‘A’ did to ‘B’” it whispers to passersby clever enough to listen. “This is what we did to them.”

The Rwandans don’t have that luxury. The drawback of a civil genocide is that there’s nowhere to point fingers, no one to blame and no one to scapegoat. Rwanda’s memorial grabs you by the scruff and screams “Look what we did to each other.” Their barebones, no bullshit historical Polaroid is an ironically living testament to man’s cruel indifference to his neighbour and the power of hate and history over humanity.

The pictures were tough enough, the smiling, breathing little scenes of life before the sky crashed onto Kigali. But the real kickers were the bare rooms filled with machete mutilated skulls or glass cases filled with empty outfits mounted like rows of lonely scarecrows after the nuclear apocalypse. One of the hollow shirts reads “I Heart Ottawa!” and I pause for a moment, wondering whether I want to smile or frown. I do neither, it seems easier.

The difference was that Ottawa didn’t send the love back. No one did actually. The world watched it all unfold behind low-resolution mid-90s television screens before switching the channel to watch Seinfeld. Like me, no one smiled, no one frowned, no one did anything and for 100 days neighbours hacked each other to bits and called it cockroach extermination while the UN debated whether anyone there was worth saving. Hey, it’s not your problem as long as you call it a “tribal conflict,” right? Your mandate is to deal with genocide only, which is especially convenient when you’re the ones that define it.

But the memorial doesn’t blame, it doesn’t offshoot and it doesn’t pan away. They want you to see the damned spot on the carpet they refuse to cover up to appease new houseguests. Halfway through you wind up feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, strapped to a chair, eyes wired open, screaming for it all to stop but knowing that this is exactly what you signed up for. You want to turn around and puke right there on the spot, spill your guts all over the rosy red carpet. It would be easy, only that you turn around and find yourself face to face with a looping video of a woman being savagely beaten by a group of men, or scenes from a grenaded church turned into a makeshift high-efficiency slaughterhouse. The whole place starts spinning around your head and you need to sit, go for a run, have a drink, do something, anything. But all you get to do is keep walking along the highlighted path, past the gift shop, following the little yellow-brick road that leads the way into hell’s funhouse. They offered a water fountain for me more faint of heart.

I leave the hall of children’s photos and cross into the courtyard where a sign informs me that over two hundred and fifty thousand people are buried in a mass grave covered with slabs of concrete, roses and wild Rwandan flowers, “Please respect the sanctity of their final resting place.” The bodies are mostly members of the Doe family, almost unrecognizable when they were scooped up from the streets once the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s military dust had settled. A local told me he couldn’t eat meat for years after ‘94.

Somewhere I hear David’s tiny voice, howling from under the concrete. “Hey! You there! Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here? What did you learn?”

David and I would have been about the same age today, and I wonder what I would say to him if we ever met. I stare at the enormous slabs of cement and wonder if he would hate me. If he’d look me up and down from my Converse to my coif and spit right in my face without a second thought. I’d probably let him and part of me wishes he would.

All I want to do is tell him what all dead men want to hear: that he changed something, that people all around the world heard him scream when the blade came down, that it was all worth something. I want to claw through the concrete, pull him out by the hand and show him a better world, a world that saw the writing on the wall and turned things around. I want to tell him we did all we could, that we made it better, that it wasn’t all for nothing.

But it’s hard to lie to the dead. Hell, it’s actually really hard to say anything at all, especially when you’re separated by three feet of concrete and the screaming of a thousand imaginary voices in your head.

Oh David, it all happened again, and again, and again, and again. The only difference is now we watch it in HD.

A family of Rwandans walks past the memorial on their way from Sunday mass

Originally published by Carleton University International Student Services Office and later by Speak Magazine.

Sandcastles in the Desert

Once upon a time, somewhere in the desert…sort of

“Well shit, that’s it then, isn’t it?” I whispered to my buddy as a nearby camel spit a wad of what I can only describe as phlegm an inch too close to my shoe.

I want to say it was a long journey, I want to say that we conquered a Lawrence of Arabia style mad dash through the desert over forty days and nights, nearly dying in the process. But the reality was that a cab took us there and was still waiting patiently, the driver chainsmoking somewhere behind the makeshift stone gate that cordoned us off from the beggars and self-employed illegal tour guides. But from where we were standing, there were no gift shops, no groups of rambunctious Ammurhrican tourists and nothing to look at but the three of them and their ever-vigilant, noseless guardian of the afterlife.

But there, meandering in front of the last standing wonder of the ancient world, something about the momumentality of it wanted to make me fall on my knees in humble appreciation. I mean, I didn’t do it; pulling a Platoon by the pyramids seemed a bit overdone, even for my taste. But there was something about being there, in front of this inconceivably massive testament to the persistence of memory that made you feel utterly insignificant and powerful beyond measure at the same time.

Staring at them was like finally meeting someone you’ve secretly creeped on Facebook; you know so much about them, you’ve seen a million photos, you’ve fantasize about your meeting or conversations you’ll have, but once you get there, once they’re real and right there in your face, you’ve got absolutely nothing to say.

I wondered if Caesar felt the same when he came to Egypt and stood here over two-thousand years ago, or whether Napoleon felt small and insignificant when he conquered the country for shits and stood triumphantly by the Sphinx. Probably not. Part of me likes to believe that Napoleon lit a smoke and hihihi-honhonhon’d his way onto something else while Caesar was busy staring at Cleopatra’s magnificent… nose. But then again, Napoleon died in exile on St-Helen’s and Caesar got the equivalent of a Roman Empire drive-by on his way into work one day. The pyramids? Those three just kept right on truckin’, I doubt they even noticed.

But I think that was it, wasn’t it? There we were and there they were, standing on the same ground, feeling the same blistering hot sun Egyptian sun beating on our peaks, but the reality was that one day I will die, and my children would die, and their children would die, but the big three would still be right here, forever unmoving, unchanged. Wars would be fought, plagues would ravage countrysides, and these three would watch it all happen and shed no tears for us doomed to decay.

I felt caught between worlds. Behind me was bustling Cairo, a concrete jungle of tooting horns and massive minarets while in front of me, the greatest structure ever built was backdropped against what looked like an endless wasteland of golden sand dunes.

It felt humbling, like being in the presence of someone great who will never remember you but you’ll always brag about meeting. You want to let the guys who built it know that what they did stood the test of time, but you can’t because they’re gone. You want to hang out and have a beer with the Pharaohs, congratulate them on a job well done, but they’ve all been graverobbed out of history. So all you can do is stand there and face the realities of a world where we occupy only a strangely conceivable sliver of time, but are therefore defined by what we chose do with it, nothing else.

“Those are some pretty big sandcastles there, huh’?” one buddy back home remarked when I showed him the picture.

“Yah,” I smiled. “Something like that.”

Three Conversations in Tanzania

Port of Stone Town

#1 -  There must be guys like Jimbab on every beach in the world. But here, miles away from anything, Jimbab was the best, the king, the cream of the crop, the salt of the sea. Jimbab was a fetcher, the kind of guy that could get you absolutely anything you needed, all you had to do was ask.

And if he didn’t have it? He knew a guy who did. There was always a guy.

I remember seeing him on the sand, a few hours after we’d arrived at the beachside hostel on the island of Zanzibar. The Baby Bush lodge was bare bones: a beach, a bed for your head and a bar for your belly – all for less than the price of a movie and popcorn in Canada.

“Hello my friend! Jambo Rafiki,” he said, strutting across the sand dunes the low tide had left. “What do you need my friend? Anything you need. You want to go sailing? We can go sailing. I have a sailboat. Good price my friend.”

Everyone was always your friend in Tanzania.

“How about fishing?” I asked, throwing my hands back and forth behind a shoulder in what I thought looked like a fishing motion.

“Oh yes my friend, we go fishing. I have a fishing boat, for deep sea fishing.”

So not only did this young guy wearing an old Heineken t-shirt and worn-out flip-flops own two boats, but he also served as the beach’s unofficial concierge in everything from entertainment to more personal kinds of recreation, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous island state just off the coast of Tanzania, a little slice of paradise that makes Havana look like Detroit. The place boasts epic fresh seafood grills, the UNESCO World Heritage city of Stone Town and holds the record for the shortest war in history, fought against the British in 1896, which lasted a whopping 38 minutes. You get one guess as to who won.

Jimbab was your classic Zanzibarian everyman who could do anything from wood carvings to sailing.  But at the same time, I started to wonder whether Jimbab’s jack-of-all-trades lifestyle was his own doing or proof of something else.

I remembered walking the streets of Stone Town and the place seemed deserted. We chalked it up to Ramadan, but then kept seeing large groups of men just sitting by the side of the road, groups who would immediately come and offer to take us on a private tour if we lingered too long in one spot or looked lost.

The island used to be one of the greatest slave ports in the world; essentially, if you had human booty to sell on Indian Ocean, Zanzi was your Vegas. Back in the day, this place was the shit; a beautiful, multicultural stone city built on the riches of free labour.

But today the place looks different.

When I first saw those groups of idle men, I thought to myself that this must be what glorious beach living is like, hanging out every day by the water and just watching the waves, not a care in the world. Then I was struck by the realities of an economy based entirely on tourism, in a place whose original purpose got swept away by the modern age (thankfully so, but still). These men weren’t leisured, they were unemployed, scrounging on the scraps left behind by throngs of obnoxious tourists who use their home as a getaway from the trudges of their own everyday lives.

“Wow, I could totally move here,” I heard one bleach blonde American exclaim as she passed absent mindedly by a group of beggars.

Jimbab was an everyman because he had to be, out of necessity rather than genuine desire. This was the reality of living in a place the world had all but forgotten; this beautiful paradise in the middle of the ocean.

Take a deep breath

#2 – We were walking along the water in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city and former capital, when we stopped to watch a group of street performers. They were taking turns doing this strange dance, moving to this weird beat while a woman in colourful clothing was semi-raping over the music and reading aloud from a book into a crackling microphone.

I’m pretty sure I discerned the word “Jesus” or some Swahili equivalent and gathered that this was supposed to be preaching. I’d never seen anything like it before and I’m not sure if Tanzanians ever had either because a small crowd had formed around them. They’d go back and forth, dancing then preaching and over again. The woman was tall, fit and flashed a huge smile as she recited whatever it was she was reciting.

Just then a guy next to me wearing a wool tuque in 30 degree weather smiled then turned to me and asked:

“What religion are you?”

This struck me as a weird question to ask someone on a first date, let alone as an intro line to a street conversation. Come on man, at least buy me a drink first. I decided to play along.

“Christian, I think. You?”

“Me, Muslim,” he smiled again, he was missing a few teeth but otherwise wasn’t a bad looking guy. “I am Mohammad, you my friend?”

“David,” I said. I guess I figured out why he hadn’t bought me a drink first, but the order of the questions still seemed a little rushed. I guess that’s how it works sometimes in Tanzania: religion first, then name.

We sat in semi-awkward silence for a few moments when he smiled broadly again.

“That woman, she’s very beautiful. Ha ha. Oh yes, I like her very much,” he said as he made the shape of an hourglass with his hands, clapped me on the shoulder and walked away.

Religion first, then name… but it’s nice to see that some other things are universal no matter what.

Seaside fish market in Dar es Salaam

#3 – Late one night back on the island of Zanzibar, I remember sitting on the beach drinking a beer with my roommate Evan. Because of where we were, the sky was lit up like I’d never seen it before. It was so bright, it almost illuminated the coastline. Almost.

Just then, a shadowy figure popped out of the foliage and Jimbab came and sat down with us. We talked about family, life, the universe and everything to the dizzying soundtrack of rhythmic waves.

Jimbab was twenty-one, he was married and had a three year-old child.

“Ha, idiot,” I quietly thought.

“And you?” he asked.

“No, no wife, no kids,” I laughed.

“Ha, idiot,” he must have thought right back at me.

Life moved at a different pace here, but I was starting to realize that the same fact applied to just about everywhere else I’d visited. Someone told me once that cultural relativism is a bullshit lie, that despite all the differences we have, some human principles are universal thus crushing the theory that we must learn to accept our differences without prejudice.

“In some places, they throw acid on women’s faces if they commit adultery Meffe, how can you say that’s culturally relative?”

He argued that no culture held stealing or killing as a virtue, which is true. This friend told me that because of this innate moral code alive in all humans, the West was therefore superior  and our lifestyle and freedoms would ultimately prevail over the forces of foreign barbarity.

Okay, I’m exaggerating but you see what he was getting at.

But here was Jimbab, married and tied down but really no different than me. We lived independent of each other, separated by hundreds of kilometers and vastly different cultures, but I realized that our lives weren’t perpendicular, they were parallel. Every morning Jimbab woke up, hustled to make a living, ate, shat, slept and did it all over again. Just like me, just like all of us really.

I looked up, the sky was brighter than I’d ever seen, the kind of crystal-clear HD view you only get in a place that’s miles from anything. We saw a shooting star streak across the sky and I cried out, explaining to Jimab that I’d only ever seen a handful in my life.

“Hey man, every night in Zanzibar,” he said, not bothering to take his eyes off the sky. “This is the island of shooting stars.”

I smiled silently, took a sip of my beer and tilted my head back.

I, Muzungu

How about that ride in? I guess that’s why they call it the Land of a Thousand Hills…

Oh god…the handshake thing.

It happens almost every day and every time it does, I can see it coming but I’m completely powerless to stop it. It’s like seeing the trajectory of a social trainwreck, but instead of being a hero and saving all those innocent bystanders, I freeze and get run over by the steel rail choo-chooing of cultural differences.

Rwandans, and East Africans in general I’m learning, have this thing with complex, convoluted handshakes with a loose choreography that was universally agreed on at some secret council meeting I wasn’t uninvited to.

It has a couple of steps…I think:

There’s the presentation, the wind up, the slap, the grip and the release. That I’ve got down, at least slightly.

But from there, the routine breaks off into a thousand variants that always leave me standing around looking like someone just asked me to recite the quadratic equation. The snap, the fist bump,  the grab, the pull, the switch, the linger, or one I like to call “The Awkward Pause” where you just kind of hold hands for an undesignated period of time.

Half the time I feel like Steve Urkell backstage at a Wu-Tang concert.

It’s weird, but there are some things here that you just start getting used to, things that back home would seem just wholly strange and inconceivable.

-          Some mornings, *ahem,* every morning, there is no running water in our neighborhood

-          Bathroom facets and shower heads have one direction: on. If you want hot water, boil it, or leave a bucket in the sun

-          I have over 10 roommates but only 3 actually pay the rent. Be warned, geckos are sneaky, treacherous and freeloading reptiles

-          Men casually walk down the street platonically holding hands

-          If you don’t properly set up your mosquito net before bed, you’ll wake up bumpier than Tommy Lee’s genitals

-          If you don’t properly tuck in said mosquito net, spiders will creep into your bed and bite you while you sleep. No superpowers yet. Fingers still crossed.

-          There are armed military guards on every street corner packing enough heat to kill everyone on the road in a moment

-          The price of absolutely everything is inflated because you don’t even have the option to play it cool and pretend you’re a local, although I’ve tried, with varying degrees of consistent failure

I’ve never really had the experience of feeling out of place before. I mean, I had the usual teenage angst ridden years of hormonally-induced self-deprecation like the rest of you, but I mean truly feeling like I was different, an outsider.

When I walk down the street I can almost feel them, eyes following me as I try to blend in with the crowd, the kind of consistent gazes that would give Sauron a run for his money in a staring competition. That gnawing, nail biting sense of self-awareness where all I want to do is sink into the woodwork like a flea but can’t, and just when I think that maybe I’ve finally got it, a kid will usually give me away.

“Muzungu! Muzungu!”

Yes, yes, here I am. They stick their arms towards me out and I fumble their tiny hands into what I play off as an acceptable handshake.

I’d always been given the choice to stand out or blend in, something that made my job much easier and also kind of made me feel like a ninja at times. But here, I always feel like a stranger, regardless of the fact that Rwandans have been indescribably welcoming. I’ve never felt unsafe, but I just can’t seem to get used to those gazes and the feeling of constantly being under a spotlight, lit up nice and bright for the world to see and stare.

I’m reminded of my first ride on a motorcycle taxi, desperately clinging to that little handle, terrified and exhilarated, holding on for dear life to the point where my hands felt as if they’d break off. Now I’m learning that I’d had it all wrong; the trick is not to use the Vulcan death grip, but to loosen your fingers just a little and sway with the motions of the moto; just to go with the flow.

It was all starting to make sense.

There’s this subtle art that I’m starting to learn, like wearing a giant middle finger on my forehead that only I can see, a big inside joke that only I’m in on. This effervescent kind of transcendental universally respected strut that exudes a kind of effortless self-assurance, regardless of what’s going on in my head.

I don’t meet eyes with anyone for longer than a second on the street, just a flashing smile, a wink then a stone faced demeanour that might as well be a brick wall.

I, Muzungu? No, no, you’ve got me all wrong, sir. Me? Just another freak, in the freak community. A man on the move, just sick enough to be totally confident.

Thompson, I think you may have had it right all along.

Stereotypical expat picture with an African child

Don’t Worry Rwanda, I Was An Awkward Teenager Too

I swear, six year-old Dave had a coronary when we stumbled on these guys

I was having a lot of fun to begin with, but when we saw the giraffes, life took a sharp right turn at ‘Surreal Avenue’ before blowing a tire and crashing into a streetlight on ‘Pinch Me I’m Fucking Dreaming Boulevard.’

Our safari guide had said the magic words and given us the green light to step out of the car, slowly, so as to not frighten off the tower (no, seriously, that’s what you call a group of giraffes.) As I stepped out and nervously fumbled with my lens cap, a group of nearby warthogs startled and ran off single file into the thick bush. I quickly pointed my camera in their direction then decided not to bother.

Because…well…giraffes, right?

The Akagera National Park surprised me in a lot of ways. This was the side of Africa I had learned about in textbooks and Discovery Channel specials; that seemingly endless expanse of massive lakes and thick bush booming with wild life. This was the kind of place where at any moment you’d expect Simba and Rafiki to stumble out of the bushes looking guilty, humming Hakuna Matata and mumbling something about White Castle.

But the park, as beautiful as it is, is a finely focused bubble that pops as soon as you realize exactly what it is. The jeep, the safari, the smiling khaki-clad guide, the throngs of loud Ammuhrican voluntourists each wearing a different T-shirt broadcasting their respective alma mater or hometown (just in case you were too shy to ask,) all of it was part of a guise, a weird illusion that gets solidified the moment you lay eyes on your first zebra.

This is not the Rwanda I had known thus far, but sadly I feel like this is the Rwanda most people see; distant, removed and passing quickly by the open window of a moving vehicle, doors locked.

Kigali itself has actually surprised me with its modernity. When you think of Eastern Africa, your mind is immediately overloaded with images of guilt-ridden World Vision famine commercials or flashing newsreels of people in faux military garb chopping each other’s arms off with machetes in the jungle.

But the reality of the city couldn’t be more opposite…something I’m actually very thankful for.

I remember a funny conversation I had with my mom the other day. After the usual Italian mother-hen diatribe about how I’m too skinny and the now expected reminder to not give my passport to strangers on the street, we got on the subject of how I get to work. Of course, I lied and said I take the bus, casually avoiding the topic of motorcycle taxis; she’d grab the next flight over just for the chance to throttle me. Stunned, she cried out, half laughing, almost as if she was covering her tracks just in case I was being sarcastic and she had missed the cue:

“There are buses?!?!?” she finally said.

Hell, I might as well have told her I teleport to the radio station.

“Well, sometimes. But other times they get caught up in elephant-related traffic jams in the jungle. In that case, I usually just string some banana leaves together, stand really still for a while, then rope together some exotic birds into a kind of floating mat, then I fly to work. It takes some practice, but it gets easier the more I do it.”

That time I was being sarcastic. That time, I think she got it.

Yes, Kigali has buses, and roads, and skyscrapers, and shops, and bars and cafés and just about everything else you’d expect from a city of over a million residents.

It’s strange, I get the same feeling in Kigali than I did in Istanbul, that feeling of being caught right in the middle of an urban identity crisis. Kigali is a pimply, greasy, awkward teenager with a crackling voice and bad facial hair, aware that he is no longer a boy but not yet sure how to be a man.

But the beauty is that the city doesn’t really seem to care and neither do its residents.

In every way, Kigali is the shining beacon of an African city in the midst of a social and economic shift, but other parts of the country seem stuck in that disadvantaged Lion King cultural clusterfuck that people envision when you whisper the word ‘Africa.’ Driving to the national park through hours of untouched sub-Saharan landscape and banana-thatched rural villages, Kigali seemed like half a world away.

Don’t worry Rwanda, we’ve all gone through awkward growing pains, but sooner or later you’re going to have to make up your mind and decide what you want to be: thriving, modern metropolitan African powerhouse or safari jungle adventure.

It works for now, but you can’t be both, at least not forever.

As seen in Kigali, never.

The Day the Motorcycle Took Me

Kigali’s answer to the cabbie

“This is it. I am going to die. I wish I had eaten lunch.”

Okay, it’s not a direct quote, more like stream of consciousness paraphrasing, but as I felt my grip slipping and my helmet slowly coming loose, going 70 km/h on the back of a taxi-motorcycle in Kigali, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it.

Okay, let’s backtrack a bit here.

The idea of blogging never really appealed to me much; it’s not like I have a philosophical problem with new media or anything, I’m just still wrapping my head around the idea that people would actually be interested in my deepest, innermost thoughts neatly laid out on a computer screen. Better yet, it always seemed to me as if these were things I shouldn’t be sharing so promptly with the world wide web; the ticking gears in my mind should be my soundtrack alone, right?

Then again, I guess in a way there has to be something said about where I’ve been and where I am these days. I’ve been travelling for months to places that most people put on ambition-soaked drunken bucket lists and forget about in the morning; moments relaxing at a Turkish bath in Budapest or beating down a mug of beer bigger than my head in Bavaria.

So, as my furiously sweating palms started to slip and the motorcycle driver took a mildly sharp downhill turn, I pretty much thought, “well, this has been nice, I’ve had a pretty good run, and if I’m going to go, this is as good a way as any really… Also, I still wish I had eaten lunch.”

Being here for so short a time, I’m not entirely sure what I’m feeling.

Sometimes I feel totally confident, almost laughing as I brush away culture shocks like Mike Tyson sparring with Betty White to settle a bar tab. Some moments I feel so sickeningly collected in this chaos that I worried I’m secretly being robbed in an alleyway and this illusion of security is just my mind’s way of coping and telling me it’s going to be okay.

Other times I’m Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole, like at any moment a doorknob might start talking to me and I’m worried I’ll get nervous, start stuttering and not know what to answer.

But realistically, if I have the option, I just can’t pass up the opportunity to ride a motorbike down Kigali’s rock and rolling hills. Regular cabs are for squares in this city; motorcycle taxis are half the price, twice as fast and also serve to double your heart rate, if you’re into that sort of thing. These things are everywhere in the city, zooming along dirt roads and leaving trails of red dust and coughing engine spatter behind them.

To be entirely honest, I’m flat-out lying when I say they’re motorcycles, because they’re not… not exactly. They look more like a Vespa and Harley had a few too many one night, lit some candles, threw on some Barry White and then got stuck with an unwanted motorized love child however many months later it takes vehicles to procreate. Then, just to be ironic, they gave it up for adoption in Africa.

But these little beasts pack a hell of a punch, and for just 1000 Rwandan Francs (give or take $1.70 CAD or 1.34 Euros)  you get to zoom and swerve through traffic as if the bike would rot if we stood still for more than 20 seconds.

When I got off, I was sweating, my hands were shaking and I swear I could see halfway down the road because my eyes were sticking out of my head like a Looney Tunes character. I might as well have just left a Tiesto concert as far as anyone on the street could tell.

As the bike pulled away, puffing a cloud of diesel in my face like a Wall Street fatcat at a dinner party, it finally hit me.

Toto, screw Kansas, I think we’re in Africa.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into Africa

I’ve always found the best time to write is while I’m in transit; planes, airports, trains, they’ve always provided me with a neutral ground and enough dead time to properly reflect on things passed, and more importantly, things still to come.

Yet, it’s hard to start reflecting on one journey when you’re not entirely sure you’ve made sense of another. I left snowy Trudeau airport in Canada five months ago to the date, and sometimes it all feels like one giant, drug-induced dream sequence. I’m always gripped with this terrifying feeling that I’m going to wake up one morning in my cramped room in Ottawa, sweating and raving about lunatic tales of a place called Europe. Sometimes it all hits me at once and I’m scared that it never happened at all. The people I’d met imaginary, the places I’d seen just part of some fantasy of the mind.

But despite a few patches of hazy memories, for reasons I’ll keep to myself, I think I can safely say that it did indeed happen, and after nearly 16 hours of non-stop travel, I’m just about halfway to Kigali. I’ve barely slept in days and I look like a rolled up newspaper that’s been dragged by children on the back of a bike through a dirt road.

As I sit in a crowded airport terminal in Qatar, smoking my last cigarette, the empty pack on my lap can’t help but remind me that “Roken is Dodelijk,” and I smile, thinking back on a few months ago when that might as well have been written in Korean for all I understood. It also makes me stop and wonder how long it will be before I find someone else who can read that, or share a laugh with me about Dutch weather or the majesty of stroopwafles.

So how do I look back on an experience like studying abroad and try to express it in a few words? How can I ever properly describe the feeling of listening to a folk band over howling winds on the Charles Bridge in Prague, or sipping Turkish coffee and smoking shisha in Istanbul as Arabic chants erupt from the towering minarets of a hundred nearby mosques?

How do I describe those hilarious little awkward linguistic or cultural gaffes that would send us into uproar as we sifted through cryptic, weathered, long-distance care packages filled with foreign foods?

Better yet, how do I describe the feeling as I left the international student residence yesterday morning, knowing that as the doors closed, I would never, in my life, see that same group of faces together again. In a way, despite the madness and sheer depravity that encompassed the period of my exchange, there is a certain poignant finality to it; none of those moments can be re-created or re-enacted, they exist only as themselves, now and forever unchangeable.

So in that regard, maybe I am ready for something new. Nietzsche once said that a true and good European should be stateless, homeless, with no real association to any crown or flag. The only problem with that is that I’m not European, despite being jokingly referred to more than once by my friends as “Euro-Trash.” So where do I fall now? I’m sure as hell not European, but I feel like I’ve lost a certain association with Canada. The patch I so proudly sewed on my overstuffed backpack before I left looks a little less shiny now, a little more torn, hidden behind a thousand low-budget airline and train tags I refuse to remove.

Maybe a time in Kigali might allow me to put all this into perspective. Who am I? Citizen of the world or man without a country to call my own?

Maybe a better idea is to get to Kigali first, and deal with the existentialism later. Sleep, after all, is the only universal evil I can’t seem to do without, at least for now.