Sorry for Leaving You Hanging

     I didn't intend to fall off the face of the earth.  I didn't intend to raise all kinds of questions and then not answer them.  I didn't intend on April unfolding the way it has.

     This year's trip to Rwanda was challenging, difficult, wonderful, eye-opening, unsettling, life-affirming and life-changing.  I'm already looking forward to my next trip to the Land of a Thousand Hills.  And that astounds me.  Two years ago, I would never have imagined that I'd actually be going to Africa.  That I've since been twice and even my family assumes that I'll be returning again?  Simply amazing to me.

     I don't know why I haven't posted in over a month.  While I was still in Rwanda, I was definitely up against time and technology constraints.  I had the Global Citizens blog to keep up, and a weekly column for my local newspaper to submit. Since I've been home, I have sat down to write several times.  This morning I deleted multiple draft blog posts that just fell flat.

     Perhaps I've just been jet lagged.  Perhaps I have been unable to articulate what I've experienced and felt.  Perhaps writing about a student trip halfway around the world while the Boston Marathon bombing drama is unfolding here at home feels inappropriate.  Perhaps the world spins just a bit too quickly and there are already new, more current things I feel like I should be writing about.

     Whatever the reason, I'm back now.  Time for me to put some thoughts to the page.

 

Questions from Africa

On the flight from Washington, DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia I read the journal entries I made last year when I first came to Rwanda.  There were events and observations I noted that made me grin—like my impressions of the utter glee the preschoolers at Good Samaritan School demonstrated.  And the utter glee I felt being there with them.  There were several things that I had forgotten about.  For instance, at the start of the trip, I felt like a fifth wheel, as I wasn’t a teacher and I wasn’t a student.  It took me a few days to figure out where I belonged and what my role was to be.  The students did a wonderful job helping me figure it out.  And being reminded of that warmed my heart.

It is notable to me that there was so little about genocide in my journal.  Actually, in several places I say that I was not ready to write about what I experienced.   It was also notable that there was so much about things that had absolutely nothing to do with Rwanda at all.  It was as if traveling halfway around the world and experiencing an environment, culture, and way of life complete different than mine forced me to examine myself.

There were so many questions I raised in my journal entries.  Some broad questions about the nature of humanity:  How does anyone forgive something like genocide?  How do we prevent genocide from ever happening again?  And some very pointed questions about my own nature:  What angers and injuries am I hanging onto?  How do I forgive?  What do I believe in?  How do I demonstrate that faith?

A year later, here I am back in Rwanda. I still don’t have answers to all of the questions Africa asked me.  And Rwanda has already started asking me more. 

Just this morning, I was woken by the sound of local people singing their hallelujahs in Kinyarwanda as they attended 6:30 AM mass at the Jesuit center we are staying at.  I wondered, again, how can Rwandans still have such faith after the horrors of the genocide?  And added to that was this:  Knowing that churches became places of mutilation and death instead of refuge, how can they return to worship?  What do they know that I don’t? 

For weeks now, I’ve been unsettled.  Leading up to the trip, I was anxious about all the final preparations and all of the unknowns.  My fears are unfounded.  I didn’t forget anything.  My family was ready for me to go.  Our travel to Rwanda has been uneventful.  The other two women chaperoning the trip are competent, organized, and truly great company. The young people we’re traveling with are remarkable.  I have the highest level of confidence in our tour leader, Alexis and his wife Gyslaine.  And still I’m unsettled.  I cannot quite articulate what it is, beyond that it is something within me.  The overarching question Rwanda seems to be asking me must be, “What’s the matter with you?”  I honestly don’t know.

I do know that I am supposed to be here in Rwanda. I'm hoping Rwanda will help me answer her questions.

Ready or Not, Here I Come

     I leave for Rwanda on Saturday.  Well, actually, I leave for Washington, DC on Saturday.  After a whirlwind tour of our nation's capital, including several gut-wrenching hours at the US Holocaust Memorial Saturday, we fly first to Ethiopia, then onto Rwanda on Easter Sunday.

     I. Am. Not. Ready.

I'm close.  I really am.  But not quite close enough.  The big stuff is done.  I think.
Done enough.  I guess.

     I have the airline tickets in hand. Our itinerary is set and the ground expenses paid for.  I checked in with my doctor and got my antimalarial drugs.  I've made sure our state Senator's people and the US State Department and the US Embassy in Rwanda know when we're arriving and where we'll be when and such.  I've answered as many of the parents' questions as I can.  I've collected donations and purchased gifts for the friends I've made over there.  I've sent my boss approximately 1,942 emails about what work I've done up ahead, what work can wait until I come back, and what to do about the work that is neither done nor can wait.  I've made piles of things to pack--which the dogs have knocked over on a daily basis.  I've re-piled things to pack.    I got a really nifty new backpack, because last year, Rwanda did my old backpack in.  I put together the super duper first aid kit that covers everything from a stomach ache to boy trouble. (True story, I packed hard candy and gum to help treat cases of the weepies. It's in between the triple antibiotic ointment and the pepto in my medical case.  This was a hard-learned lesson from traveling with NINETEEN teenage girls last year.)  I've rescheduled a dentist appointment.  I've paid for the Evil Genius' school lunches for the next month. And basically, I've been moving non-stop and talking in one never-ending run-on sentence for the past two weeks.

Exhale.

     Truth is, if our flight were leaving today, I'd be ready enough with the actual trip prep.  It's the mental preparation that I've fallen behind on.  When I say that Rwanda captured a bit of my soul last year, I'm not being melodramatic.  I absolutely cannot wait to get back there.  Except for the part of me that is dragging my feet. See, there is no separating the lush landscape and beautiful people of Rwanda from the ghastly, unspeakable horror of the genocide.  I expected the visits to the genocide memorials to be difficult.  I could not have imagined how deeply affected by it I would be.  It was impossible to process all of that emotion during the short time that I was there.  It has been a year, though, and I realize that I have actively avoided going back and working through it at all.  And now I'm returning.  During April.  The month that the Rwandan government has set aside for national days of remembrance. And I am not ready.

    It's selfish.  I know.  I don't want to allow myself to feel that pain, and I definitely don't want it to force me to address the almost meaningless comparisons that pain brings up for me.  I feel guilty about that.  Every Rwandan has their own story of enduring the absolutely unbearable during the genocide. And here I am avoiding even thinking about it in the abstract, because it will be painful?  That the closest experience I have in comparison is that I struggle to forgive my father for not being the kind of father I wanted to have?  I'm ashamed. 

     I've had a year to reflect.  I've had a year to deal with what I've experienced.  I've had a year to be a better woman.  And if I am being honest with myself, I've squandered that time.  But I'm getting on an airplane and going back there in just over three days.  I'm traveling with a group of some of the kindest,  most compassionate people I've ever known.  They are so young--still in high school--and they are going to look to me for support or at least an example.  So, today I stop stalling.  The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, right?  Well, then I guess I've taken a step in the right direction.  

Hiking Mt. Whelm

    Sometime a week or so ago, I went over the edge.  I'm overwhelmed.  Like every woman I know, I spend almost all of my time at the very edge of "whelm."  My toes dangle right there at the crest. Lately, I've found myself hanging over the rock face by one hand.  I've been sick.  I've been worried about my children.  There are inflexible deadlines at work coming at me and they seem to be speeding up. There's volunteer work I'm responsible for and not quite pulling off, it seems.  There's family stuff that is messy and complicated like everyone's family stuff is.  There's this cocker spaniel puppy that keeps forgetting he's housebroken.  I leave for Rwanda in three weeks.  I'm not even close to ready.  My house looks like a fraternity house on a Sunday morning after the big party.  It's all become too much for me.

BUT

     The view here is breathtaking.  It would have to be, otherwise, why would intelligent women spend so much time here?  It's all about the view.

     See, at the peak of Mt. Whelm is where we can see the possibilities of made beds, clean bathrooms, and all the laundry being folded and put away.  They are just over that next ridge.

We get a birds' eye view of those work projects totally rocked out.

Just across the valley we can see our children's successes--making the honor roll, hitting the curve ball, beasting that audition for the wind ensemble.  Here, above the tree line, our marriages are joyful and romantic and sexy.

     Of course, it's dangerous at the precipice.  The weather is unpredictable.  It gets really cold at night.  The snow remains year round.  There is always the threat of an avalanche.  The air is thinner, up here, too.  Sometimes, it's hard to breathe.  Sometimes, our packs are too heavy or our footing unsure and we go over the edge.

Photo courtesy of Bangor Daily News

But that view.

     

Beauty is Only Skin Deep

     I'm one of those fortunate women who has good skin.  Even when I was a teenager, acne was not an issue for me.  Don't worry, I had--okay, have-- as many body-image issues as any good American girl.  They are just related to my baby-fine, thin, hopeless hair and my weight, which has roller-coastered pretty wildly since I was in high school.  My skin, though, has always been lovely. 

     So, when I got a pimple next to my nose a month ago, I thought nothing of it.  I kept it clean.  Concealed it with make-up when I was at work.  Went back to fussing over my hair that now sports a skunk stripe of grey, right down my part.  Because, I don't have bad hair days.  I have bad hair decades.  Lucky for me, my cousin married a magician of a hairdresser.  She keeps my hair and my concern about it in line. 

     The spot didn't go away.  It got bigger. And a new cluster of pimples joined it.  I started washing my face with the "blemish fighting face wash"  belonging to one of the household's adolescents.  Then, this past weekend, my face erupted.  Swelling, oozing.  It. Was. Horrifying.  I looked like the Elephant Man--if he were a middle-aged woman.  I went to the doctor's.  She proclaimed it to be "some sort of nasty staph infection," and put me on two different kinds of anti-biotics.  Six days into the ten day course of medication and I'm finally starting to see some improvement.

    For this past week, though, I've lived through a brand new experience for me:  acute self-consciousness about my appearance.  I have to say, I didn't care for it at all.  It was pretty dreadful.    I cringed when people asked, "What happened to your face?"  I found myself actively avoiding socal interactions.  As much as I could, I stuck to my cubicle-of-doom.  I didn't have lunch in the breakroom.  I blew off exercise at the Y.  I even bowed out of a party at the home of one of my closest friends. (I'm sorry Kate.  I was hideous company--both because of my mood and my face.)

     My teenage years were as angst-filled as anybody's.  As an adult, I've been in plenty of challenging situations that I could have obsessed over.  I have never felt this terrible about myself before, though.  Intellectually, I know that this is a temporary condition that will pass.  I know it doesn't change the awesomeness of who I am.  It still feels awful. 

    I have long been an advocate of "true beauty" in women.  I'm really good at pointing it out to my sisterfriends, to my daughter, to the young women I mentor.  I guess I never really understood the depth of feeling--terrible feeling--that they have about themselves.  I underestimated the power of a negative self-image.  Now I understand it.  It's formidable. 

    
     I don't know how to combat it, yet.  I mean, the infection is healing and I can expect that my skin will clear up.  How do I make sure that I don't allow myself to feel that way again, though?  More importantly, how do I help the women I love stop feeling that way?
    

Snow Day!

     I have lived in New England my entire life.  For 3-4 months out of the year, I have to deal with cold temperatures and snow.  My Fab. Fam. rather enjoys it.  Thanks to the wonders of technology AND my world travels, I have friends who live in places that don't get snow.  So here is a brief explanation of New England winter weather to answer those questions that have been coming at me over the past few days, since Nor'easter Nemo blew into the region.

     For starters, what's a Nor'easter?  A Nor'easter is basically a storm that circulates around a low pressure system off the northern Atlantic coast. It's similar to a tropical storm or hurricane (cyclone to my friends in the southern hemisphere).  It gets its name from the direction the winds come from--the northeast.  They usually occur between October and April corresponding to the Atlantic hurricane season.  They typically happen in a range from the east coast of Canada to about New York.   However, they could happen any time of year, and occasionally occur as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.  As the storm rotates, it picks up moisture from the Atlantic.  Because of the winter temperatures, instead of dropping heavy rains on the land, Nor'easters typically drop lots of snow.  Like its tropical counterparts, there are varying degrees of strength. 

     This particular storm is very large--large enough and strong enough that it became a "named storm,"  like a hurricane would be.  It is moving slowly, so it's been snowing for over 24 hours here.  Right now, we have over 2 1/2 feet (nearly a meter) of heavy, wet snow in our yard.  Not all snow is the same. Sometimes, snow is light and fluffy.  Other times it's dry and powdery.  Sometimes it is icy crystals.

    This storm also has had strong, sustained winds--30-50 mph/48-80 kmph.  When the winds are that high, the snow blows around,  diminishing visibility like a sandstorm does.  When that happens, then the "snow storm" becomes classified as a "blizzard."   Last night, we even had thundersnow. Thundersnow is the Evil Genius' favorite kind of weather.  It's a thunderstorm with snow instead of rain.  It's pretty spectacular. 

Picture Courtesy of the National Weather Service

 

 





     Most of our snowstorms are not this severe.  This is a once-in-a-while treat. (I have friends who would disagree with me on the "treat" bit.)  My folks live about an hour from here, right on the coast.  Because of the weight of the snow causing trees and electric poles to fall, they don't have power, and the news reports flooding in parts of their city from the extra high storm tide.  According to the news, there are over 400,000 households in Massachusetts without electricity right now.  There's another 150,000 in Rhode Island without power. The other New England states also have considerable power outages.  It's part of life in the northeast.  Here at the old homestead, though, we haven't lost any trees.  Our power is up.  The fire is roaring in our pellet stove (a fire place insert that burns compressed wood pellets for more efficient heating). 

  When the weather is this severe, we get what is called a "Snow Day." That means school and work are cancelled for folks who don't need to be out on the roads. Driving on a lot of snow is very much like driving on icy mud. Vehicles get stuck, they spin out, they slide and crash into other things. It's dangerous. So, yesterday The Evil Genius had no school. Thing 1 , Thing 2, and I didn't have to go to work.

      Even folks who don't care for the snow enjoy a Snow Day. It's like an unscheduled holiday. I spent my Snow Day cooking, reading magazines, and watching dumb television shows with the Evil Genius. I played cards. I spent WAY too much time on the computer, along with a whole bunch of other folks enjoying their Snow Day.  I checked in with my extended family. Everyone is fine. We're hardy folks in the northeast.

      Because my husband is in charge of food services at a university, where the students live, he didn't get a Snow Day. In fact, he was quite busy, working with the university leadership to make sure that there were places on campus for his staff to sleep over last night. It's very rare, but yesterday the governor called a "driving ban." Nobody but emergency workers have been allowed to drive on the roads. So my Personal Chef needed to make sure his staff was safe AND that the students could get fed today. He arranged for meals for the other emergency work crews--campus police, facilities maintenance staff, infirmary staff--that were staying on campus. He even developed plans for the highly possible event that there was a major power outage. He still made it home before the storm got too severe, though.  

 

      Right now, my boys and dogs are having a ball.  They have already got us cleared out.  Thing 2 and his best pals (twenty-year-olds, mind you) have plans for an epic snow fort.  No surprise, they have recruited My Personal Chef, the biggest kid of them all, to help.

 

 

 

 

    Not wanting to be left out, the dogs are loving it, too. Our chocolate lab is leaping into snow banks and rolling around in it. The cocker spaniel tries to keep up. He's way too small though, and just gets buried in the drifts.

     So that is what it is like when it REALLY snows.  Now, excuse me while I put on another pot of coffee and whip up something warm for my boys to eat.
    
 

The Laundry Room Blues

     It's Sunday afternoon at the old homestead.  At the moment, the entire downstairs looks like a twister touched down inside a small appliance repair shop.  Our state-of-the-art washing machine--the one that promised everything from stain fighting to high speed to quiet operation to germ killing--has a blown bearing.  I know this because My Personal Chef has watched hours of how-to-fix-the-washing-machine videos and taken the whole thing apart and gone to two different hardware stores for expert advice and parts.  The pretty boys on the videos and the older guys in the plaid, flannel shirts at the stores all agree.  The bearing's gone. 
     It can be fixed.  Only thing is, even if my extraordinarily competent husband does it himself, it will be exorbitantly expensive.  This is the second major failure of this washing machine in the past year.  Last spring the big rubber gasket had to be replaced.  It cost hundreds of dollars, took weeks  for the part to come in, and then a technician had to come in to install it, because apparently it required some sort of magic tool made especially for this manufacturer's products.
     We haven't had the machine more than two years.  Although, it turns out that the washer was a model made about 6 years ago that apparently sat around in in a shipping crate in some port for a while.  At any rate, the manufacturer has discontinued the model, making the parts ridiculously pricey to get.  It really isn't cost-effective to repair the machine.  That bothers us.
     Call us old fashioned, but we take care of our things.  We teach our children to take care of their things.  (Just don't look at their bedrooms for any signs of our teaching taking root.)  We work hard at not being wasteful.  We take pride in learning the skills to repair things.   Okay my Personal Chef prides himself in knowing how to fix things, and I take pride in bragging about hitching my wagon to him. 
     Effective stewardship of our resources--our finances, our material goods, and our time--matters to us.  At one time, it was a widespread value, shared by most of our culture.  Today, though, we are encouraged to continuously replace our cheap things, rather than maintaining them.  Go ahead and try to name one thing that you own today that you purchased new that you don't expect to replace in the near future.  Unless you inherited it from your ancestors or found it at an antique sale or commissioned Amish artisans to create it for you, it's probably built with self-destruction and replacement in mind.  Clothing, furniture, electronics, tools, household goods...  all cheap.  All designed to be replaced with next season's colors, features, or styles.
     It bums me out. I don't WANT to shop for a new washing machine.  On the other hand, now that the laundry room is torn apart, maybe I can get that Man-o-Mine to replace the floor and put in a shower stall?  Now where did I put those color swatches?