Visiting Mary

Mary invited us to go to her home outside of Arusha for lunch.  She asked me to see how many girls wanted to come so she could prepare a lunch for all of us. There ended up being a lot of girls so I was worried that it might be overwhelming for her but she was just excited to see everyone.  Mary called a taxi for us all and when we arrived she promptly handed me her little girl, Nargis. Nargis is named after a flower and Mary calls her Nagy for short. She was all wrapped up in her winter clothes and Mary and her cook/nanny were already started preparing the lunch. Mary lived in a small apartment that was attached to a few other apartments in a fenced off garden area. She put a blanket outside the kitchen and we all sat on it and talked while she prepared the meal. She asked me to cut cucumber and carrots for her, which was mildly embarrassing. The cook was ten times faster with her vegetables but I told her I just needed more practice. Nargis played with all of us but she couldn’t go too long without seeing her mom or she would start slowly putting her lip out and silent tears would stream down her cheek. Nargis is only eight months old so she was pretty overwhelmed with all of our attention.

Mary showed us how to make chapatti too! Chapatti is like a softer tortilla but not as soft as the Ethiopian sponge like bread though they are used at dinner in the same way (almost as utensils.)  The food she cooked was amazing. The best Tanzanian food we have had. There was beef, rice, vegetables (chopped perfectly of course,) beans, and chapatti. We were all stuffed within minutes and laying on her couch motionless. Mary coaxed us to go on a walk after around the neighborhood. She let me carry Nagy too. When we got out of the gate she told me it would be easier if we wrapped Nagy in a conga on my back.  Mary helped me wrap her tightly to my back and laughed at me as she stood back and admired her work.

“Your are a real African woman now!”

I really did look the part. It was such a good feeling to make a friend here that trusted me so much. She was so sweet and truly wanted to share her life with me. I really hope one day I can return the favor or come back and see her. She told me if I brought my mother she would teach her how to like bananas. Mary is always teaching me new things about Tanzania and friendship in general.  I will really miss her.

The Interpreter

Friday was our last day of classes. I man who was an interpreter at the ICTR came a talked to us.  He ended up being my favorite of all of the speakers we had during the program.

“It was hard at first but we got use to it... hearings sixteen hours long…witnesses are faulty answering one question one way and another question another way.”

Here are some of his stories. They are very disturbing so not everyone might want to read them. The reality of the genocide was never clearer than when spoken in his broken English. It is still hard to believe it is all real.

I translated for a witness, a woman with seven children. A man comes to her home and kills six of her children. The seventh is a baby that is resting on her back.  She begs the man to spare the baby. He says no he cannot because the baby has Tutsi blood. He takes the baby and throws it against a wall.

They throw children down wells and the mothers tell me they hear the screams everyday for the rest of their lives.

There is a priest on trail who said God wanted those seeking refuge in his church to die. This priest told a driver to bulldoze the church, which he knew was hiding at least 2,000 people. The first driver he asked refused the second believed it was God’s will.  This priest received fifteen years in prison.

Im not sure how to finish writing this I feel like it needs a lot of time which I don’t have right now.

Aatsa Atogho ICTR, Interpreter

Roland our program director

The diagram of the interpreters booths in the ICTR courtroom

K is Kinyarwanda (Official language of Rwanda)

F is the French and E is English The circle is the witness, the square is the prosecutor or defendant and the dots are the judges 

Mary

Deo, Trevor, Robert, and Emily

Trevor, Robert, and Emily

Deo

Robert

Trevor

Arusha National Park

After the home-stay we went on  safari in Arusha National Park, my first game drive in Africa!
It was pretty exciting seeing all the animals. I felt like a little kid. Every time one of us would spot something we would all gasp and point. We learned quickly that this wasnt the best tactic after the first few animals ran away but after some practice we were almost down to one or two gasps per animal.

Colobus Monkey

Some kind of deer and Pumba 

Dik-Dik

Baby baboons on their parents backs 

First close giraffe encounter 

Warthog giraffe zebras and gazelles together 

baboon

Home-Stay Camping?

Without classes since Wednesday it has been a pretty slow week. Charles, our professor, left Wednesday afternoon and gave us our essays back as he was walking out the door. (I got an 19.5 out of 20 thanks to my sister helping me understand the ups and downs of writing a proposal.) Charles wants me to pursue my project idea and try to implement it. He thinks it might make a decent start to a Fulbright proposal. I don't think I'm ready to be thinking about that for a long time.
Thursday we had our exams. It was five essay questions and you picked three to actually do. We were all going to kill each other by the time the day was done. I was five coffees deep and getting tired of using the phrase "cultural realization." I ended up working from twelve to six and then six to nine and had seven pages full of rambling international law theory from a nineteen year-old perspective. (The start to the most useless novel ever written, not including Madame Bovary.)
When Friday finally came we were all ready to run out of the house to go on our camping trip and safari. We went in two green land rovers that were waiting outside of the gate. After the camel safari I was very excited not to be in a van off roading again. We went to the grocery store and got al the food we were going to need. My debit card wouldn't work at the ATM for some reason so I had to borrow money from Emily. I haven't been able to use my card at any ATM except this one particular bank. It makes me a little nervous every time this happens but I am just going to stick with the same ATM and keep being cheap.  After we got the food for the camping trip we got back in the cars and prepared ourselves for a long drive....
Twenty minutes later the cars pulled up to a house. We were in the next neighborhood over from our house basically. There had been some kind of misunderstanding and instead of staying closer to the park we were just in a home-stay in a small village outside of where our regular house was.
Well we just kind of laughed it off and decided to make the best of it and explore the new neighborhood.
There was a camp fire which was a bonus and the family was really friendly. It ended up being a good night and adventure. They family had set up the home-stay to make extra money. They cooked us an amazing dinner. The soup tasted amazing and they showed us the squash they scooped out to make it.  That night we gave the children their first smores and they showed us how to grill fresh corn in an open fire. The whole family was really sweet. The power was out the whole time so it was alot like camping after all. I really enjoy home-stays, meeting the family was such a different experience than I had had before. A few pictures from the morning before we left.