June 1, 11:41 pm-Kigali Rwanda, NGO House (as I am calling it)

What I have learned so far.

Kigali is a hot bed of NGO work. That means something to me. Not just that the need is so high for the work to be done, but there are those amongst us for whom the need is so high to DO the work. My thoughts drift to the necessary balance of life. We can not have elation without suffering, we can alleviate pain if there is none. There is an appropriateness for the world to be always askew. I do not know if we are working to set it right or working to stop it from going further askew or working simply because we love the work (some swirling intermix of all three and more, I suppose).

The problems here, like all places, are endless. But there is an energy and hopefulness here-the age of the workers-younger than me. The optimism in the country, very high...

I was talking with one of the NGO folks I am am staying with today. He was saying how the response to the Rwandan genocide is very different than to Holocaust. He felt that the Holocaust was a genocide hidden and kept to the inner lives of the survivors. And, once it was over, it was over, people left Germany and lives were rebuilt-slowly ever so slowly-but somewhere else. In Rwanda, people want to share the genocide so they feel that are not alone. They want to share their experiences with the rest of the world for themselves and for us. For Rwandans, they attend the same churches, live in the sane towns and have the same neighbors as before 1994. It is a different ballgame. 1994 also was not the first major genocide in the same way Holocaust was (or so it feels)

For most of us today, we remember it happening. When Jacquette comes to speak about her genocide experiences with high school kids, she is a beautiful, 25 year old woman. The kids see her as a peer of theirs and respond in kind. The struggle to stay in relationship with those who once hurt you is a;love and well here in Rwanda,

But so is so much more. New schools, orphanages, infastructure, community, language, education, arts...now with Paul Kagame in power there is an optimism and a slowly growing financial base to build hope upon.

New neighborhoods are being built, uprooting the old (and the people who live there) creating, instead of disparate houses scattered on the country-side, small communities like little villages. And those who are losing their homes seem to be getting new ones. I asked my NGO friend if this was going well because the potential for disaster and exploitation seems high. He said that there are values we have they they do not because relative to how it was, this is so much better. Freedom of speech? Feh, we have houses and roads and water...

That makes me nervous

Time will tell

This is it for the cogent thoughts for tonight...there may be more but it will have to happen tomorrow