Perspective

I try very hard to not engage in public self-pity and find myself not the most tolerant beast in the universe when I judge others to be doing it when they have absolutely nothing to be whining about. I was just sorting through the dep recesses of my inbox looking for a Richard Ford quote that Laura had used as a sig file and I ran across one of the emails from Kigali I mentioned in the last post. For a couple of reasons I'm not going to name the author but I am going to shake my finger, yet again, at American indulgence and commercialism. God our lives are easy compared to so much of the rest of the world. Read on. Please.

I'm in Kigali, and this e-mail will have to be short because I'm writing
from an Internet cafe (one of the few with a sufficient supply of American-style keyboards instead of the laughable French model) whose power may go out at any moment (power does here several times a day), and partly because I just came back from a village where I took part in the interview of a Tutsi woman who'd had her family slaughtered during the genocide and a Hutu neighbor who'd murdered two Tutsi children-- three if you include the fetus in the woman he'd killed.

We (I was with a Dutch journalist and alovely Rwandese translator and professor of languages, the only person I'veseen laugh out loud in the week I've been here) didn't inquire into the wet muck of the crimes. The real concern was how people with so much poison between them could bear to inhabit the same village.

Jeanne D'Arc, our hostess, says that she works in the field with a woman whose husband is in prison for crimes committed during the genocide because otherwise it would just be her and her kids and she feels she needs to stay on sufficiently friendly terms that someone would take her to the hospital in the event anything happened to her. Among the clothing I took with me [to Africa] is a Dixon Place tee shirt with a drawing of a waitress on it and the slogan "SERVES YOU RIGHT," but who can bear to wear such a thing in this country?