Turashaka indigo

Hi everyone -

Happy Thanksgiving! We just finished our Thanksgiving Observed dinner. We decided not to have it on Thursday. Our neighbor, who is a great and eager cook, had to work on Thursday. And Clara has been insanely busy, on which more later, so she couldn't do it then either. In the time that that bought, our neighbor conspired with his neighbor to get a turkey. This was a major coup. Americans at the embassy had to order their turkeys a couple months ago to have them procured from South Africa. When our neighbor got one locally, he was told that they are considered 'game', and so while not protected they are hard to get a hold of. We later learned that this isn't true; there's a whole turkey market elsewhere in town, but still.

Our neighbor's name is Rob. He's a little bit more than a neighbor: we're in a duplex, and he shares it with us, and there's a passage between our two backyards. He's from South Africa and also just moved here. He is a brilliant cook. He's had us over twice and both times pulls this trick where he makes this amazing multi-dish meal, and then just as the praise is dying down he comes out with some other stunner. Today makes three times that we've been to his house, and he did it again.

My contribution was the stuffing, and it was so good that as we did the round of what everyone is thankful for, one person said they were thankful for the stuffing. Nice! The stuffing was in that nice bird, a good gravy, veggies, etc. Then, just as we were all getting tired of telling Rob how great the food was, he goes out to the kitchen and comes back with grilled chocolate-stuffed bananas. Do you want me to tell you what that was like, or do you just want to imagine it for yourselves? There were 12 of us, including a range from strangers to acquaintances to colleagues to good friends to our more-than-neighbors. One or two of each. It was really nice.

Now we're back and Clara is outside meeting with a group from her film-making class. She had been working insanely hard. She finished the two weeks of class time a week ago, and then last weekend started working with the six groups filming six short documentaries. Along with a couple other experienced people, she is mentoring all six groups through the planning, scouting, shooting, editing, etc. It's amazing. And they're working on such cool stuff. One about getting a hair weave; one about a famous firebrand journalist; one about the national women's handicap volleyball team's trip to their sport's world cup; one about a husband-and-wife team that educates people about gender violence; one about a street child; and ... another one. Some, apparently, are going better than others, due mostly to the level of enthusiasm of the film crews. But it seems like a few of them are going to be really good. Clara's really excited about them, anyway. In the meantime, our house is crawling with aspiring filmmakers.

An interesting side-note: a few students proposed to make a film about "community work", the mandatory local clean-up work that everyone (ehem) is supposed to do from 8-10:30 AM every Saturday. But they didn't, because the idea was too controversial. One team pitched an idea for a pro-community-work piece; another pitched an idea for an anti-community-work piece, and during the discussion people got really animated about it. Too animated. It turns out that street cleaning is a proxy for whether people do and should live in a dictatorship. Which also means that it might have been an amazing film to make. But it wasn't to happen.

My work is chugging ahead, although I am about at the point where I have to give up on finding a local partner. Why my project idea is too uninteresting/undesirable/untouchable/foreign/whatever for the human rights community here is a really interesting question that I guess I'll have to chew on while I go ahead with the work. We'll see.

Last weekend we went to Gihanga, a community I've been working in, as the guest of the regional head of the Bashingantahe association at the annual Bashingantahe festival. Bashingantahe are the traditional community leaders and problem-solvers. The civil war and the current political climate, in addition to modernity, I guess, has dented their standing. But they are still the village-level authorities of reference. In this community they resolve disputes of value up to and including a goat; cow problems, however, go to the courts. I've been working with a couple of guys who, as it turns out, are Bashingantahe. So they invited us to their day. They got together on a stage (only a few passer-by in front of the stage, but whatever), the head of their group wearing a certain kind of robe, many of them carrying sticks that are important rhetorical and symbolic instruments of their office. There were some speeches. A couple old guys got up and gave these animated, energetic discourses that, it turns out, are recitations of allegories passed down as an oral tradition. After self-congratulation all around, we went to the town bar for drinks. The whole thing was so utterly Masonic. Clara and I had a really nice time chatting with our two hosts. At one point, one of them asked Clara whether we have Bahsingantahe in the the United States. Clara said that yes, and that in fact my father Wayne is a Bashingantahe! They were amazed!

We also tried some homebrew banana beer, which was a mistake. We were pretty eager to try it, it seemed to be part of the day. Most other people were drinking it. As soon as we were finished our bits, we gestured to pass it on to our hosts, and they were like "No way! We don't touch that shit!" "You'll get terrible diarrhea!" they added, helpfully. As a point of fact, what we got was terrible constipation. The beer, plus super-delicious (because super-fatty) goat kebabs, paralyzed our innards. But, well, we got over it.

B