Hailstones on the Equator

Oh yes, the rainy season was announcing itself in fine style. The rapid downpour which had trapped me in the staff canteen, was turning into a full scale hail storm. A hail storm wasn’t exactly an unheard of event, but not one I’d seen often either. Some students braved the wet to collect a sample of hail…probably the nearest any one of them will get to snow. In Rwanda you can tell with 100% accuracy what the weather will be in 30mins, you can see it coming over the hills…the clouds or the clear patches. You know when the rain will fall in bucketloads and wash everything down the hills…Rwanda is slowly flowing out its borders, I often wonder where it ends up.

Perhaps I am a true product of the West of Ireland, I can never stop myself watching rain. There’s something about watching rain that I find calming. It allows my mind to wander and think about things in a pleasantly detached manner. Finding detachment from things was becoming a rare prize these days. I thought I was recovering from my recent meltdown but every little setback seemed to unbalance me completely. Had I lost my ability to cope? Was it just that my patience was wearing thin? Was some kind of cumulative stress disorder? Was I just going crazy? I didn’t know. I knew something needed to change but I didn’t know what. I had recently been offered a job in Asia and I was going to take it, it was the first in a long list of potential “moves” that felt right at some fundamental level. But then the funding fell through and so a thread of my life was erased by a brushstroke in Brussels.

I’m tired, so tired I can’t even make the decision to get out and do something that will make me less tired. I tried to define exactly what it was that was tiring me. I remember talking to a BBC journalist about a project I worked on and when he asked me how it went, I said “it could so easily have been alright”. He laughed hard at the idea of aspiring to achieve mediocrity. But I wasn’t laughing anymore. Professional life here is like watching a slow motion car crash over and over and over again. You can see all the variables, you know the outcome, you’ve pointed out that everyone should be wearing seat belts, but there they go again…bodies out the window, blood on the road…so you get your sweeping brush out and pitch in with the clean up. You start by shouting about things and end by mumbling and failing to be surprised when no one pays any attention. You become just a little bit odd.

That didn’t matter in the old days, Kigali was one of those edgy places that attracted people who stayed in nightclubs every night till 5am just to have other people to drink with…hell, your idiosyncrasies were accepted as normal. If everyone is weird, then no one is - I think this is the basic principal of mental hospitals too! But even in my short time here, things are noticably changing – its now a nice town to bring up a family, it has hordes of nice embassy wives and people who make polite conversation in whose company I feel slightly scruffy and/or threatening. The oddballs are becoming odd again…a few times I jokingly referred to my circle of friends as the “lunatic fringe of Kigali expats”, I may have been more right than I intended!

Hailstones on the equator…just one of the many incongruences of life down here…large shiny cars running over the poor people they are supposed to be helping…the careful planning of the donor organisations upset by the realities they are surrounded by…the fierce dedication and enthusiasm of many well educated western liberals set against the relative apathy of the hordes of working stiffs in the industry…a reflection of the conflicts within me: the still-alive wish to improve things against the quiet despair of thinking nothing will ever really be achieved…the wish to have people to relate to and my lifelong tendency towards the cult of the outsider.