Archive for the ‘Rwanda’ Category
Murphy’s law meets Occum’s razor
For whatever reason, the cultural differences in dating practices have been coming up in many of my conversations recently. Today, it was Kenya. “So what’s dating like in Kenya?” I asked a new friend. “What’s it like?” she said, taking an incredulous puff of her cigarette. “The men cheat. The women cry.”
What do white people know about exotic plants, anyway?
That stuff in the garden I thought was bamboo? It’s sugar cane. This is just the latest in a long, long list of things I am ignorant about. Like lemons. They start out so small and round and green I thought the current object of my affection was a lime tree. My lesson in sugar [...]
Stamp your passport at my gate
Fifty percent of my current household is European. European men, to be exact. (Actually, with the exception of me, everyone who lives here at the moment is a man, and I am beginning to feel like something of the Central African Hostel Madame, if by ‘madame’ you understand ‘woman who cleans up the crumbs, puts [...]
A short, short, short story
A friend has a link on her blog to another interesting blog–this all sounds so incestuous–called Six Sentences. Just what it sounds: Stories, about anything, that are only six sentences long. I decided to try my hand at it, with words from a woman I met months ago, that have stuck with me… I also [...]
I’d like to change the topic, please
I still have lots to say about Monday evening, when I went to Butare to see how the students at the National University commemorated the anniversary of the start of the genocide. And I still think pretty much only about that when I look across my garden at the busy road leading up to the [...]
Missing signals that aren’t even cultural
Here’s a little intermission from my genocide memorial posts, which you can anticipate more of this week… For the record, I realize that with this, I’ll be fulfilling age-old gender stereotypes that smart women as far back as my grandmother have been fighting, but I’ve always preferred honesty to -isms, even the good ones. And [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [