On Kigali's Quiet

Kigali has diplomatic compounds like Geneva and bookstores with gridded French composition books. It feels like a Lego city. Smooth, smooth roads, streetlamps, reflectors between lanes. Perfectly poised police officers who, David told us, share English phrases like “I will punish you” and “I forgive you” if they pull you over. Since 2004, they’ve decreased traffic deaths by 32%. Visitors to Kigali from Nairobi or Kampala remark on how calm the city is, how quiet, how orderly.

The Kigali Genocide Memorial explains this order. Order is a coping mechanism for the worst disorder imaginable. At the Memorial, we read about the Belgian colonialists who decided one tribe was better than another, seeding violent resentment. About the way people turned this resentment into a careful plan to exterminate the other. About the small handful of international troops who escorted diplomats to safety when the extermination began, who instead would have been enough to stop it.

In the section of the Memorial for children, under a small, framed baby picture:

Francine (12)

Favorite sport: swimming

Favorite food: egg and chips

Favorite drinks: milk and Fanta

Favorite friend: Claudette

Death: hacked by machete.

Postscript, aka Publication

After spending most of my trip, it felt, pitching my research to various publications, I placed two articles with OZY, a new media outlet focused on the New and the Next. 

If you haven't already seen them, here they are. Thanks for reading. 

"Why the Keyword in Farming Startups is Regenerative," June 26:

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-the-keyword-in-farming-startups-is-regenerative/60722

"Going Wild on the Coast of Uruguay," July 24:

http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/going-wild-on-the-coast-of-uruguay/40940

Post-Script Table of Contents

In homage to the genre of Blog, the end of this first stage of Southern migrations probably calls for a Reflection. But I Reflected enough over the past few months to last me through at least a few weeks of not writing a single word, so I provide musings to you in the form of a pared-down selection of what I wrote:

1. Mari, on a wise woman and traveling back to Argentina six years after my first visit.

2. The Road to the Ranch, One and Two, from the week I spent in Wally and Pilar's home in Salto, Uruguay, watching them run ranch and family. 

3. On Language, in which I vent about feeling like a baby and hanging out with babies.

4. On the Road: Resistencia to Buenos Aires to Punta del Este, on hanging out with fifteen Paraguayan farmers in northern Argentina and pretending to be Martha Gellhorn.

5. 20 Lines on Solitude, because damn, I really did keep my own company on a lot of this trip, especially on the coast of Uruguay (except for a brief unfortunate date with a surfer who turned out to be nineteen years old and a believer in UFOs (oops)).

6. On Sidewalks and Walls, on learning Buenos Aires. 

7. Dining With Welders, an experience that reminded me that travel is often absurd. 

8. Maps, on Patagonia's pull and the Fenton family, who magnified that pull for me. 

9. Will Hamilton, because East of Eden is always relevant, especially when you are researching farmers and Benefit Corporations.

10. CrAzY dAYz in BA pt. II, on playing writer for a few weeks.

11. Two Buenos Aires Stories, because that city spun itself strong and pulled me in for a little while. 

12. Rio, on how bar-hopping may be one of the best ways to digest that complicated city.

13. Sunbathing, on America (of the 'Murica variety), from Mexico. 

Sunbathing

I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Cancun, on a beach under a sun that laughs at you for previously thinking you could tan. The book made sense there. Junot Diaz calls the places that speckle the Caribbean sea surreal, for their heat and their water and the true myths of their histories, and Cancun definitely fits the bill. It’s Disney surreal, not the dirt-floors-and-guns absurdity of countries under dictatorships, but still - you question the reality of the whole place. The sun that pulls sweat out of your pores and dulls your brain. The water that’s brighter blue than a blue raspberry Slurpee. The sand and the high-rise hotels that are blinding white; the fact that someone thought to line a thin strip of barrier shore with those high-rises in the first place; the fact that in high season every room in every one of them is occupied by people who are escaping their own reality, wherever in the world that may be. 

Maybe most surreal was the documentation of that escape. Everywhere we looked: phones out to capture arms reaching to the sky, hats at a jaunty angle, abs tightened. Props, I guess, to the numerous women I saw attempting the complicated mermaid-selfie maneuver: lounge in foamy surf in small string bikini, take selfie without drowning phone or self. 

So on this beach, drifting in and out of sleep, I was reading Oscar Wao, a story that’s basically about how real life can feel like a fable and dreams can infiltrate reality. The sentences of sneakily poetic slang, Dominican and American, went down like cool water because that’s how my brain feels, right now, a total mezcla. It’s running back towards sure-footed English but feeling like it’s picked up a few words in Spanish it doesn’t want to let go. 

I fell asleep on a page where Junior, our main guide through all this quilombo, is talking about his drives around Paterson and Camden and Perth Amboy. Place names and their peculiar gravity. These are the cities on the highway signs on my way home from the Newark airport. Like Oscar Wao’s Dominican grandmother La Inca is stringing their names together, incanting me home. 

Somewhere else, Yunior talks about “a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” but I woke up sunburnt on a surreal beach to the feeling that this time the longing is for places that are real, that are already there. 

Notebook Scraps from Mexico

//Time started here with oranges. On the way from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, when I was giddy with arrival, the bus driver stopped by the side of the road, bought a bag of oranges warm with sun. He passed me one. Its peel was scraped away, leaving a thin white spiral of pith like a planet’s rings. 

//I’m enjoying my newfound status as pure tourist. I wore flip flops in town yesterday and running shoes today. 

But I took photos in a place where they said not to take photos and all of a sudden it felt like I was taking it too far. It was in San Juan Chamula, a church near San Cristobal. The building is a Catholic church, built by the Spanish when they invaded, but its shell protects the beliefs and the rituals of the indigenous community. Inside, there are pine needles on the marble floor and a tree in the back corner by the shrine of the Virgin Mary. The entire perimeter of the church is lined with fire - hundreds of tall candles in glass jars, a tribute to the God of the sun. People kneel on the floor and sacrifice chickens to chase away spirits of sickness, swig from a bottle of clear alcohol, light thin colored candles that leave wax puddles on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out why I couldn’t just see it, why I had to try to take a piece of it away with me. 

//One day, we left at 5 am to drive in a white van with six other tourists to see waterfalls and Mayan ruins. The van stopped at 8 am at a roadside restaurant where the buffet served beans and rice, plantains, or pancakes to people who had emerged from about twenty other white vans. We rolled in a caravan, with a police escort, to the first waterfalls. We ate lunch facing the waterfall and had the bittersweet pleasure of watching people pose for photos that they'll show their coworkers or grandchildren next Monday. They used selfie sticks, drones, long arms, and/or an iPad on a stand in a bush. 

At the top of a temple in the Palenque, the Mayan ruins, a guy in a straw hat held up a black flag of the Harley Owner’s Group of some small town in France. 

The frogs, or the bugs, sound like the whine of an arriving UFO. Not too far from the realm of possibility, if you believe the Mayans built UFOs. 

//They grow coffee here, for Starbucks and Green Mountain coffee. There's no time for much subsistence farming when the coffee day is over, so many of these indigenous communities don't see a lot of vegetables. Beans, onion, tortillas; maybe some tomatoes. The chicken is all free range (on your house floor) and beef is almost non-existent. Kids drink soda, which is cheaper than bottled water and cleaner than well water. Sometimes, Ali said, she stayed with families who could only scrounge together cookies and coffee for dinner, before waking up in the morning to harvest the beans for Starbucks again. 

//On the night bus from Tuxtla to D.F., Mexico City, the driver played a movie about a prison uprising and the bus stopped two times so that federal police could check for drugs in the sides of the bus and in everyone’s backpacks. After the second stop, in the final scene of the violent prison movie, a baby in the front of the bus wouldn't stop crying.   

//Every street corner we’ve passed in D.F. smells like lime. There is so much food on the street in so many different colors. By the Palacio de Bellas Artes, there was a cart bursting with bouquets of fried snacks. Red, green, orange - the same color as the fruit they sell In cups, watermelon, lime, mango, all with a dusting of chili if you want. A woman fries black tortillas with orange filling, lets you ladle red or green sauce. 

//Flying into Mexico City from the flat Yucatan, you understand why Tenochtitlan was the first city of empire.  That Aztec city was made strong by mountains. Today, Mexico’s main city spits houses over hills like its ancestor did. Shafts of light strike the mountains;the clouds are the serpents’ wings.

Rio

My friend Catherine, a freelance journalist who has been living in Rio for three years, gives a walking tour of Rio’s city center and port zone that narrates disparate neighborhoods through food. She leads the walk through a company called Culinary Backstreets, and if you are going to Rio I HIGHLY suggest that you go on this walk. A few highlights - an aid, if you will, for digesting this complicated city: 

Rio was the seat of the Portuguese empire for thirteen years. The King had barely any idea what lay inside Brazil's borders, beyond jungle and potential slaves, but he did bring a European fondness for pastries that could be made with the new cash crop: sugar cane.

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Royal Portuguese Library): When the King of Portugal fled to Rio and moved the head of empire to his new city, he brought a boat full of first editions of Portuguese literature and built this church-like library to hold them. The collection also has a full archive of Brazilian newspapers. From an exhibit poster, a reproduced cartoon, circa late 1800s, as railroads were built across the country: “progress, but for whom?"

In 2013, as private contractors finished stadiums and hotels for the 2014 world cup, millions of Brazilians protested across the country because public transportation fares were too high and buses too slow. Down the street from the library, in the faculty of social sciences, so many people came for an open-mike grievance meeting that they pulled a heavy wood table from the red-curtained auditorium and held the meeting in the square. Thousands of people came, Catherine said, and for six hours took turns speaking for two minutes each about what needed to change as  Brazil went about growing. “Order and progress,” says the Brazilian flag. 

Catherine’s roommate recently wrote a story about Brazil’s guarantee of asylum for Syrian refugees. We drank coffee at this shop that was founded by the first wave of Syrian immigrants, in the early 20th century. The owners started out selling nargileh; now they sell cigars from Brazil’s Bahia region. 

This store, founded by another Syrian family, sells West African red palm oil, Middle Eastern olives, peanut butter, dried mango, pineapple, banana, and pastry supplies; in other words, a nice indicator of how diverse Brazil is. Outside the store, you can eat a middle eastern empanada, sprinkling on each bite a brand of African red pepper sauce that’s now produced in a suburb of Rio. There are five branches around the city.

Tapioca: This is the Brazilian hot dog, choripan, taco, your pick - the street food you grab on your way home from the office or after a late night out. It's made from manioc flour, which looks like little white pearls until it's been cooked in a pan of oil and turned into a crepe-like base for salty or sweet fillings. 

Neighborhood bars are a key social space. "We’re in a boteco and we can talk about whatever we want," Catherine said. We ate bolinhos de bacalao (codfish balls) and bolinhos de feijoada (beef stew, breaded and fried). Feijoada, like cachaca, the sugar cane alcohol, was once slave food - and is now one of the pillars of Brazilian cuisine. 

Also, there are 200 word for cachaca in Brazilian Portuguese. 

From Morro da Conceição, a hillside neighborhood that's becoming an artists' haunt, you can see abandoned buildings in Brazil's downtown. On the right, Catherine shows how the port zone fits into this hill neighborhood and the city center. 

Pedra do Sal, Little Africa: African slaves carved these stairs into this rock before slavery in Brazil was finally abolished in 1888. Their descendants carved out a neighborhood that's become a hub for Afro-Brazilian culture. Now, on Fridays, on this rock, there's a samba show here and so many people come you can't move as anything but part of the swaying crowd.

The view from the top of Morro da Providencia, Rio's first favela. 

Here, at the top of Morro da Providencia, in a square that used to be a public park before the city government built a cable car as a gentrifying gesture, a community pillar makes gnocchi with shrimp in a spicy coconut sauce. She learned to make gnocchi from the Italian woman in whose house she is a maid; the sauce is a speciality of the northeast of Brazil and uses West African red palm oil. "It's an amazing fusion dish," said a Turkish chef who did this food tour with Catherine a few weeks ago. 

Favelas are hillside neighborhoods of adaptation and resistance. People build houses with flat roofs so that they can add floors when the next generation comes along. This building here is covered with portraits of the Providencia residents who were evicted from their homes when the city government built the cable car. 

Dining with Welders

Other than tonight, I’ve shared all of my dinners at the ranch with two welders, Aldo and Dino, who work for the joint Argentine-Chilean venture building an oil and gas pipeline from Tierra del Fuego to Buenos Aires. (This is probably the last time you’ll find me linking to OffShore Engineer).

They both drank Diet Coke with gusto and complained about being bored with their lot down here. As far as I can tell, they get paid to check three times a day on a water tank that will take two weeks to fill. For the rest of their waking hours, they watch subtitled American TV on the small screen in the corner of the living room and pass around mate, that tea that I’ve written about in practically every post because it is like people’s second oxygen in this part of the world. Last night, Dino forked out extra tomatoes - grown here, in a greenhouse - from our shared salad dish. He stopped talking for a moment.

Che, que pasa? asked Aldo. What's up, dude? 

-Es que tienen otro sabor de los del super, said Dino, with his eyes closed. They’re just an entirely different species from what you get in the supermarket.

He went home yesterday morning for Easter so last night it was just Aldo and me at dinner eating carrot soup and lamb cutlets. We have an easy, friendly banter, which was facilitated by the fact that he’s Italian and loves America, and also probably because he’s a welder and his job is often to be in places where there is nothing to do but shoot the shit. 

He’s a big guy to begin with, and only once in 72 hours of living in the same house have I seen him without a heavy blue parka that magnifies this bulky presence. He wears a Dolce and Gabbana chain necklace and he has two tattoos on his arm. For some reason, I have the impression that he has braces, but I never confirmed. 

Because we had also had lunch together for the past three days, I had already heard about his job with the water tank and he had already heard everything about TFA, including the controversy it sparks in various regions of the US. Over our soup last night, we talked about romance. Do you have a boyfriend, there in the US? he asked. I made something up for the sake of conversation, which is an game of theatrics I feel iffy about but keep playing anyway, with cab drivers and welders, for example. 

My story’s funny, he said. I met my wife in Argentina, we were boyfriend and girlfriend for two months, and then we got married, and then two weeks later we moved to Italy together and had a son. It happened so fast but you know, you just know, when someone’s the one for you. 

Aldo will be 50 when he finishes his Level 3 Welders' Certificate, but it’s worth it, he says, you can get paid 3000 pesos just for signing a piece of paper, then, and you can work from home. He imagines a whole home entertainment room; he’s already bought the pool table and he wants to add a bar. 

He’s all about the career change-up. How can you know what you want your life to be like when you’re 18, he asked. [It should be noted that as a dual Argentine-Italian citizen, he's required by law to speak expressively with his hands]. He can’t believe how expensive school is in the US, and neither can I, when I mention it. He studied HR, advertising, and being an airline steward. He recognized how improbable that last one seemed, and laughed at my reaction. When a friend got him a job as a welder at a Fiat factory near Salerno, he knew that was it. 

We also talked about how it was easier, and better to live in Italy than in Argentina; how there are tons of immigrants in Italy, grandsons of Italians who immigrated elsewhere; what sort of work he’d most like to do; whether I’ll go to business school; how the economy of Argentina is shit; building wind turbines and solar panels; the blue dollar rate (if you’re in Buenos Aires, he’ll buy your dollars!); how his apartment in Buenos Aires got robbed; and how he’d like to move back to a small town like where he was living in Italy.

When he had finished his fruit salad, he looked at his Samsung and saw he had to go check the tank one last time before getting on a plane to Buenos Aires, to surprise his wife and kid for Easter. 

Maps

Geography is tangible here. When Ricardo picked me up on Thursday and drove me the 200 kilometers from Rio Gallegos to his family’s sheep ranch, Monte Dinero, he interrupted our conversation to narrate our coordinates. Now we’re going west, towards the border with Chile; now we’re going south; and now east, tracking the border again, which cuts across this land like a crack in a piece of terracotta. 

Understanding your cardinal position in the world must be important when you are reaching the extremes of a continent, or a planet. You feel a curve in the earth when you look at a map and see that here, we are at Mile 0 of Ruta 40, the road that runs all the way up Argentina’s long spine. We are at the end of continental America. (Ushuaia, the main city of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, the island that sits right below us, ups the ante: it’s “the end of the world”). These superlatives can be used to sell things. Monte Dinero plays its touristic cards well by calling its tea house “Al Fin y al Cabo” - “In the End,” a nice word play that also refers to the Cabo, the point that juts out into the Straits of Magellan. Ricardo and his wife Marcela have tried for years to start a public school on the ranch and finally succeeded this year, an election year, because regional politicians saw the benefit in funding “The Southernmost school in Argentina.”

Here more than anywhere I’ve been, I want to see where I am on a map. The land itself orients you but it’s almost like you need to remind yourself that the extremity is real. Yes, here I am, a dot on the edge. [Humans have impacted this area a lot more than this wild feeling would give away, but that’s another topic].

We drove far out into the ranch today to look for the dogs who guard Monte’s sheep. They are Maremma sheep dogs; maybe it was just our relative proximity to Antarctica, but seen through binoculars from the truck they looked like polar bears. They’re ferocious with most creatures other than the sheep they’re born with and the humans who train them. Ricardo, Joel, Jeremy and I stayed in the truck while Marcela said hello to them. When she had had her time, we turned the truck around and started the drive back to the house. We had to stop for a moment. Marcela went silent and the boys looked up from their cellphone video game because at the end of the sea of grass was the Atlantic Ocean bright blue and holding down the horizon. 

Fluff Post

Things I Should Have Packed:

1. A Charles Schwab debit card, which miraculously does not slap you with double fees when you withdraw money from foreign ATMs.

2. Duct tape, because flip-flops break and your budget is limited and you would rather spend money on wine than on new flip-flops. 

3. Emergen-C.

4. Ear plugs and one of those geeky sleep masks, for 5 am airplane rides where the lights stay on and the breakfast cart rattles up the aisle right after take-off to tempt you out of much-needed slumber with the smell of croissants.

5. Simple stationery to leave thank-you notes along the trail of incredible generosity. 

The Circus

You forgot that in Argentina, you probably didn't need to book a taxi online and ahead of to take you to the airport for a 5:25 am flight. At 4 am, taxis crawl the streets, a nocturnal rush hour. The drivers are wide awake - no hushed radio stations here. Your cab driver gestured so big with both hands when he spoke that he almost hit a bus. 

You forgot that in Argentina, life continues at 4 am as if it were lunch time. You drove by street corners where people sat at plastic tables and ate hamburgers under fluorescent lights. Groups spilled out of bars onto fractured sidewalks, clutching liter bottles of beer. There was a free concert in the Plaza Serrano and more people out than had been at 4 pm. Street lights and shadows are a reverse alarm clock. 

At 4 am, the airport, too, was busy. People seemed to ignore the time of day. A woman wore bright green eyeliner and leather pants; a family with a small child ate croissant and drank coffee

Today is the Memorial Day for the Malvinas/Falklands War, and Friday is Good Friday, and Sunday is Easter, so people are getting out of Buenos Aires to the mountains in the south and the vineyards in the north and they made the airport bustle with good-natured energy. 

Still, you can't get out of your head what you saw at an intersection near the airport in a sort of highway no-man's land: three scrawny guys wearing sweatshirts and faux Adidas shorts, taking turns juggling at red lights for the hope of a coin from these people on their way to vacation.

From the Archives

I bet there is a Borges quote or a Carlos Gardel tango line about how Buenos Aires is a city of nostalgia.

This piece has nothing to do with Buenos Aires, but my posting it here is an act of nostalgia. Right now, my working definition of nostalgia is "the feeling you get after you read 45 short pieces you wrote in your senior spring of college."

I just went through all the prompts from Daily Themes, a writing class I took two years ago, in order to find a few to play with here. Of course, this led me to what I wrote in response to them. 

***

8. Tuesday at the Lodges

 “Harry and Elenita got a new puppy,” she had said a few months ago. “Cache-cache. It means hide-and-seek in French, you know. The most delicious dog!”

At dinner at the Lodges Cache-cache sat under the white-clothed table and there were buttery baked tomatoes on our plates and the rain dripped under eave lights on the slate outside and Uncle Harry spoke in time with wine about Japanese art and the art of being a good doctor and over dessert they laughed about Nonna’s sweet tooth and the way she would regally demand to check her email on vacation and the rain kept dripping under eave lights on the slate outside the most horrendous weather and so and so and Cache-Cache under the table eating crumbs and so wine lights drip would, Laura would, remember? transform from a missing presence to a person who has died some time ago, now.