rwanda 2014

Rwanda, Part 6: Carved In Stone

Rwanda, Part 6: Carved In Stone

I don’t notice the scars.

I don’t notice the scars because I never notice things like that. This woman has been showing us the country all week, bumping along dirt roads in sweaty buses, and I never see them until someone else mentions it to me. But there they are, sharp lines that could only be from a dull machete, marked on this woman’s neck. Remnants of a time I don’t dare bring up. Maybe she doesn’t even see them anymore when she looks in the mirror. Maybe she’s forgotten they’re there.

She can’t have forgotten. But maybe she’s trying to forget.

Rwanda Part One: An Introduction

Rwanda Part One: An Introduction

I thought sleeping under a mosquito net would feel different than this.

There’s something… survivalist about a mosquito net. A thin bit of webbing that keeps you from disease and death. In countries like Rwanda, they can be made from anything, from chicken wire to wedding veils, but the one I’m under is a standard-issue bit of gauzy white fabric. It drapes around me on the bed like a poorly assembled canopy, and I feel less like David Livingston and more like I’m sleeping in the bed of a nine-year old girl.

John has taken to calling it my “princess bed.” He cavalierly leaves his net knotted on the ceiling above him and smirks at me from his bunk as we get ready for bed.

I tell John, not for the first time, that I hope he gets malaria.