I also came across this on our camera, a photo that captures really the essential nature of clara's nutella brownies, which I was eating at the time. Werner Herzog said that a poet said that the best description of hunger is a depiction of bread. These brownies would have blown that poet's taste buds out the back of his head.
In other news. We've had two holidays in two weeks. Last week was the anniversary of the assassination of Burundi's father of independence, Prince Rwagasore (in terra cotta, in the background). Tomorrow is the anniversary of the assassination of the president elected in 1993. An occasional observation reported in reports on this kind of thing is that nobody has ever been held responsible for the 1993 killing. How can the society achieve peace when there isn't a shared understanding of the ways that social imbalances led to war in the past? The other night I went off on a tangent about why we aren't more aware of who killed MLK and JFK -- I mean, who really killed them -- and Clara was very humoring of the whole thing.
I contacted Chris to ask if he could send a file of his book, which I could translate into Kindle format and read out here. He schooled me on the difference between books (which he writes) and texts (which I read). Chris has written a book qua book -- no so much illustrated as illuminated, it seems. I am better off not even reading it if I can't appreciate the layout, illustrations, and fonts that he chose and designed. I quivered to ask whether an iPad might be an adequate medium for his message. Joking! of course! -- I can't wait to read the book, and read it as it was intended to be read. But it'll have to wait.
Some interesting little research topics have been presenting themselves. One involves a situation similar to the one I researched in Mali in January. The Belgians set up a state plantation in the 30s where people were allowed to temporarily use land but never to own it. It's been nearly a century, but the same people living there are still forbidden from doing things like building houses more than 60 square meters, lest they get too comfortable. Once in a while government (or para-statal - not sure yet) officials come along and tell them what they have to grow. And once in a while the state gives concessions to companies who kick people off the land. People refer vaguely to regulations or old conventions signed by grandparents, but so far nobody -- residents, government officials, judges -- have been able to point me to the sources of law that supposedly restrict use of the land. And yet everyone keeps going along with it. It's extreme disempowerment maintained deliberately by the state. It might be interesting.
Another iron in the fire is working, perhaps, with an organization here called Global Rights. That project involves scoping out possibilities for strategic litigation (finding cases that might succeed in changing existing law if they are appealed to higher levels of the court system) in the areas of land rights and gender-based violence. I'm not sure if this will go ahead, and I have sort of mixed feelings about it. For several years I have had this inkling that I've been going about things all the wrong way. I've been working at a sort of institutional level -- international NGOs, USAID, law school -- while in fact everything worth doing happens through collective action of people trying to improve their own lives. That was one of the takeaways from the little project in January: attempts to improve land tenure security through institutional means just end up screwing people over in new ways; the only people actively improving their lives were the ones taking political action within their communities. Anyway, I keep hoping to correct my bias for business cards, so to speak. I thought that working with Global Rights, who has been doing community legal services in Burundi for a decade, might be an opportunity to do that. And so I was sort of surprised/disappointed when the Global Rights director told me that they got out of the legal services activity in favor of change at a more systemic level. But, but! I thought systemic change never happens from within the system! Doesn't 'systemic change' just reinforce the primacy of the system? I keep coming back to these things. Whatever. There's probably some elegant synthesis to this micro-dillemma. Something like: at some point I'll have to accept who I am and just get good at it, rather than trying to change it. But, you know what: I'm not so sure.
Clara and I have both started language courses this week. I'm doing Swahili; Clara, who already gets by in Swahili and collects languages like Carnegie collected smelters, started learning Kirundi.
In fact, Clara just came back from her lesson and, it turns out, from a trip to the Chinese store. Bujumbura is not really lacking for anything. But some things are sort of hard to get. Extension cords, for example, are sort of stuffed in back shelfs of a few cluttered little hardware stores and they aren't cheap. After a few weeks of finding where to get most things, if we're willing to pay for them, we stumbled across "T2000" - a store run by some Chinese family that has EVERYTHING, and it's all cheap. It's all from China. I would love to know how they stock -- do they handpick each item from different factories, or is there like a basic container-box of stuff that gets sent out to all the Chinese stores out there? Anyway, they have tons of extension cords, all different kinds, and they are cheap. Clara stopped by this evening and got tennis rackets for $10 a piece. They are, like, real rackets! Sent all the way from China! For only 10$. That whole situation is just amazing. She also got tennis balls that are so bad we won't possibly be able to use them.
Well, blame my rambling on Clara's absence, a situation that is now remedied.
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