Reflections by Jeff M.

Jeff Monsma
Education 2 -- Kamembe District, Southern Province
fun fact: Jeff lives the farthest and hottest part of Rwanda near the Congo border. We see once in a blue moon.

Muzungu! Muzungu! The high pitched cries float through the air and dust off my shoulders, mixing with the other debris in our moto’s wake. The driver and I laugh, as this is the fourth time children have braved the murky morning air to call attention to my already obvious presence. What the driver doesn’t know is that this is a step up for me when it comes to the oblivious prejudice of the pint-sized. I have been visiting another volunteer over the school break and am just beginning the trek back to oz. There, in my town and surrounding area, due to exposure to visiting Chinese factory workers throughout the years, any patch of white skin is greeted with a disharmonic chorus of umushinwa! (Chinese person!) And while I hold nothing against anyone with Far Asian ancestry, my decidedly Aryan looks have roots just a few degrees closer to the Prime Meridian. Despite my best efforts over the past sixteen months, children still scream at, and some grown men still greet—in Chinese, which they cannot possibly speak—the 6’4”, blond, long-faced Asian walking towards them. A friend and I have joked that if a pandemic of open-mindedness ever breaks out, some of the children in our areas will be invaluable in concocting the antidote.

            My brain calls my mind back to the task at hand as the driver picks his way through a patch of puddles. Successfully navigated, we continue on, blurring banana trees, mud houses, bush fences, and eucalyptus trunks into an ever-moving earthen stew. The sun continues to rise, bringing the mists with it, as we head down into the valley. Climbing up the other side, a small town slides by and the driver acknowledges some acquaintances. I join in the drive-by greeting and a few more muzungu calls fly out of young mouths. I respond to them, as I usually do while on the ephemeral social experience that is a moto ride, with a wave and as ridiculous a face as I can make. This often results in fear, delight, or some combination of the two. The wheels roll on and my mind turns with them.

            Unbidden, an image of Louis Armstrong pops into my head, eyes and smile wide, frighteningly similar to my own facial expression a few minutes earlier, and minutes before that. Am I some sort of warped, twenty-first century, international Uncle Tom? The idea smacks the wind in its face and stills the rushing air. True, there is no extended 400 year history of pain and racial polarization behind my actions, but there is still history, negative and racial. Well, what history is not negative from some angle? Glory does not, can not, exist in a vacuum. There is, I hope, no highly unbalanced power relationship between myself and the Rwandans I meet, but are my actions some sort of power play? No, I decide, as Billie Holiday’s perspective on Satchemo joins the image of Armstrong’s tomming, “Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart.” In any other situation, I would act the same, and have made the same faces to countless American children of various races. I haven’t put on any face that is not my own, have put on no chalky powder in some sort of minstrelsy nightmare. Hell, I didn’t even put on sunscreen. And yet, perception is a reality held in the eye of the beholder. We control others’ perceptions of ourselves insofar as we display the parts of ourselves that we want them to see. Once that image leaves our consciousness and enters theirs, it becomes something else entirely, and begins to catalogue itself in the mind of the observer. It gets kicked around by their own past experiences—direct and indirect, real and imagined—prejudices, and biases—both positive and negative. This social hardware, which enables all of us to navigate the human world around us efficiently and intelligently, immediately goes to work and churns out the appropriate response in milliseconds. Yep, fear, delight, or some combination of the two.

            We reach the main road, tracing fading fingers of mud on the asphalt. Considering the conditions, brought on by a downpour that pounded out a bebop tempo on the roof a few hours before, the ride went smoothly. We only stopped once, to clean the mud trapped under the front fender. My friend’s moto flags down a passing bus and we make a seamless transition in transportation, leaving two thousand francs and our thanks behind. We board the bus and grab the two empty seats in the back. Ironic.

            I actually like the back seats, and not out of any retrospective Rosa Parks solidarity. You can sometimes eek out an extra centimeter of leg room, and you can watch everyone else in the bus, a welcome inversion to always being watched. In a few high school and college classrooms, we used to toss around the phrase “a credit to the race.” I understood the concept, the implications, the reasons why the NAACP chose its champions carefully (Ms. Parks wasn’t the first black, nor the first black woman, to stand up and sit down). I knew, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m beginning to realize that knowledge and knowing are not the same thing, barely even synonyms. Looking back on my Peace Corps interview, I see it more and more as a selection of the “credits to the country,” choosing people who will, to the best of their ability, continually put their best face forward. It’s our job to be the best people we can be, from the minute my thirteen-year-old surrogate son knocks on the door and wakes me up at 6:00 in the morning to the last goodbye given to my favorite family, after they’ve accompanied me on the twenty minute walk back to my house, sometimes as late as ten o’clock at night. I can tell you right now, I’ve failed. I’ve had off days, slipped here and there, I’m human. But hopefully in that failure, there’s success. I’m not a poster, picture, or character in a movie. I’m here and I’m alive. And I’m me, from the heart, goofy-faced, loud-laughed, and all. And yes, I have a never before seen amount of arm hair.

            As my time here increases, I realize that the credit I lend extends to the various corners of my identity: country, race, gender. Gender. I hope I’m a credit to my gender, more than any of my other facets. As a male, I know I only have a second hand experience, an understanding, of the true nature of gender relations here. I catch glimpses, observe, but I don’t have a living knowledge of the imbalance of power. Still, I do what little things I can (along with some more overt measures. The boys’ team was less than pleased about being kicked off the court for girls’ basketball practice.) I’ll continue to cook and clean my own house, and when a random soldier passing by comes to the door, puts his fists to his chest in a vomit-inducing approximation of breasts, and says, “when you have a wife, you won’t do this anymore,” I tell him that I will, in fact, continue to do all of it. When another passerby catches wind that I have a sister and immediately asks that I give her to him in marriage, I (get a little angry and) tell them she’s not mine to give and the fact that you think she is means you have no shot. A friend and I continually discuss how great, and unattainable, fluency in Kinyarwanda would be, but I hope these men still come away with some understanding of their own. When I’m out in my community, or anyone else’s, I do my best to genuinely greet women, and use their names if I know them, if only to see their face light up in a split-second reflection of my own sincerity. I have bad days in this area too, but that’s all the more reason to pile on as many good ones as I can before I leave.

            Four wheels spin under us now, singing at a slightly different pitch, which will continue to vary as the road rises and falls, twists and moves. In another ten hours, I’ll be home, in that tiny corner that is not a foreign country, and I am not (always) a foreigner, where the kids run toward me, stopping their legs only when their arms are wrapped around my knees, screaming my name.