06-MAR-A-5
LAUNCH THE “MISSION TO RWANDA-06”
FROM DERWOOD TO DULLES, GATHERING THE GANG AND
EXTENSIVE BAGGAGE CHECKED THROUGH TO KIGALI AND
TAKEOFF: THROUGH LONG LAYOVERS IN AMSTERDAM AND NAIROBI FOR KIGALI, RWANDA—WITH
A TEAM OF VERY BUZZED PARTICIPANTS AND EXCITED
RWANDAN RECEPTION
Mar 4—6, 2006
And, we are off! All of us have arrived at Dulles and after we
awaited several stragglers with the suitcases that had been packed up at the
Packing Party, we went into the queue and checked in, each of us with two bags
each, some with two MAP packs duct taped together, when we could find a pair
that together would give the exact limit of the weight allowed for airline
check-in. We had one Salvation Army
suitcase that was so large we found out that it was too large just by dimensions
alone to be allowed in checked baggage, so with a scramble facilitated by Julie
and her friend Michael who had shuttled from the Green Lot where he had parked,
the big bag was emptied and repacked in two extra suitcases left as
standby. That meant with seventeen of us
at the gate, including several being met for the first time, we succeeded in
getting thirty four bags checked all the way through the three flights to Kigali, and all of us are now
scattered in seats on this A-330 Airbus.
The newcomers not present at the
packing party included Joe Toplon, who took the train down from Pittsburgh yesterday, where he is a college student at Drew University,
and stayed with a Rugby Buddy and got out here to Dulles with backpack, so we
could add a bag under his name. He is very grateful for the opportunity to be joining
us, and is eager to work in this dream he had and can still not believe it is
coming true. Next is David Metnick,
paramedic and Amy’s friend, who is eager to do what he has seen in so many of
the pictures and heard n so many of the stories she has told him and then she
actually did as he is now doing for the first time when I took her to Eritrea
last August on her first trip. Stephen
Katz came in with his sister and brother-in-law, carrying a single bag with all
of his heavy duty photographic gear, so we added a box of meds to his Kigali check-in. He is packing the plaques for the Rwandan
government officials who are going to be present and officially thanking us in
the reception planned with all the royal trappings of the African post-colonial
hospitality of a proud independent people.
Many members of the four-denomination church in Virginia that are
involved with the Susan Fellows, Kathy Kelly and Joanne Bell-Huyser contingent
came to see us off. Only one more is to
be met enroute, and that is Tim Harrison the flight nurse who is in Boston and today has spent the day with a sister in London, to rendezvous with us in Nairobi.
The videographers are coming in to Kigali on a separate schedule, and
will be with us a week until they get the filing of our work in the Millennium
Village Project at Mayange as well as the clinic in the school to be set up at
Kigali. They will leave before we are in
Gisenyi. All of that was the way it was
on the agenda pre-planed, but again, quoting Rosamond Halsey Carr and any
number of confirming folk around her “In all my years in
Africa, nothing has ever gone precisely as planned.” And here we go. The pans have taken a dramatic turn, since we
now are in a the position to greet and be thanked by no less a personage than
the Rwandan President and his cabinet, who are coming in for a “Two-fer” the
dedication of the new school on March 15 and an official reception for the
mission and thanks expressed to us all.
That way they can be officially congratulated for a project for which
they had nothing to do and only learned of it after it was put together—which
is what politicians anywhere do best, since taking credit for something either
inevitable or already done is what a good Pol does for a living and we are here
to make them look even better—on film and photos since we have an abundance of
photographic professional firepower in
our first week and our won coverage at the time of the presidential receptions
in the second week when we will have both our own Dennis Steinaur (whose father
comes from “Steinaur Nebraska”) and Stephen Katz our PFP photographer who is
from the Norfolk Pilot and who did such a superb job in the Eritrea photo
shoot. So, our own team will be both the
actors and the coverage in the official reception, whereas we will have the
additional coverage of two professional videographers when we do the Mayange Village
of the MVP and the Kigali
clinics.
We will certainly have enough
stuff! I had taken about a quarter of my
basement “Mission Control Room’s” supplies to Sudan last year, and form that
stock carried by four of us into Old Fangak, Sudan on the banks of the Blue
Nile, we set up a full medical-surgical mission that continues to this day with
the left over kit we helped them use and understand. Now, there will be a second opportunity to do
this with enhanced facilities, since a ceiling has been installed in the old
jail I had used as my “multi-table OR” then and that will decrease the amount
of bat urine raining down on us as we operate.
When we return via Toledo, we will attend the MMHOF ceremonies and also
meet with Rick Hodes from Addis Ababa and set up the future return to Ethiopia,
and especially Jill Seaman, with whom we are meting to set up the Sudan mission
return for our next mission there to use the facilities in the clinic we
planted in Old Fangak. In each of these
venues it will only be a question of “when” not “whether” we get back and do
the next mission in these sites already started. And, so it goes, with Malawi, the Horn of Africa, and now Rwanda in Africa, as many of the sites, such as
multiple venues in the Philippines
are also expecting many return trips to do our best to institutionalize the
mission partnerships.
The excitement is palpable in the
Dulles gathering with many expressing sleepless nights getting ready for this
experience. Joanne Bell-Huyser is a
special case in point, since she is getting near to her ordination in the United Methodist
Church which is
sponsoring her, and it is something very powerful for an African American woman
making a return trip after generations from the ancestral one way trip. I have far more African experience than
almost any African-American person, and am every bit as much a descendant of Africa as are they, but at a much more pre-historic
remove. So that when the African American goes with me to Africa, they
experience all the problems and powerful emotions of “Hybridity” in which they
may seem genetically closer to the peoples visited, but may be even more
American than I, who, at this moment, happens to be winging his way toward the
“Old Country” –a place in Europe where I can identifiably be form if only a
matter of three generations ago—about the length of some slave trade
descendents.
The stewardess comes by as a
brisk efficient Dutch professional and I notice her name “Huitema.” I ask if it is her name or her
husband’s? It is hers. So, I say “It is a good Frisian name!” but get no further in the genetic swapping of
a common culture as I am being elbowed by Virginia who is uncomfortable for my
expressing a familiarity with he stewardess beyond the average passenger being served
a drink by an unknown stranger. Perhaps we should visit Ireland to see
if it is similar. In the sense of familiarity at the level of the genes,
whatever interval of generations has added veneers of cultural differences to
identify with a “New World” mentality of
identity. We re just passing through,
heading from one Old World, to a much Older World, form which we all
originated, whether acknowledged or not, but some of us carry more markers than
others depending on how recent that
transition has been. In many respects, my own ethos is a closer, more direct
linkage, since I am a Hunter-Gatherer related in spirit to those who explore
the world as foragers rather then cultivators and settled agro-industrialists. I may have a Northern European skin hue, but
I feel more at home in the savannah than most urban Africans. I sat very briefly in the Game Room in the
final flurry of re-packing things brought for the multiple purposes of this
trip, as I buttoned dup Derwood to be absent for a few weeks. The sun was streaming through the skylights
and filtered through the vegetations in bud, as the spring new life is trying
to pop out as soon as the cold grip of winter is subsiding—probably about the
time I return. I looked up at the trophy
heads of African game, product of many hunts in African environments, now quite
foreign to the kinds of Africans I now go to serve, since it is expensive to
see the raw beauty of Africa—whereas it is quite cheap to get a first hand view
of Mutaiga, the large central slum of Nairobi, the second stop along our way in
this series of three flights (Into Africa” to our Rwanda destination
travel.
Virginia and I took a stroll
through the Derwood woods this morning in lieu of going running. The run we might have done was interdicted by
a busy week of preparation that led to a late morning breakfast; Joe, with whom
we might have run, called as we were on our way to the GWU drop off and pick up
toward Dulles, and we swapped good wishes as he knew I would be coming back through
Toledo where he had last been in the induction ceremony of last year’s
MMHOF. The sense of place reminded me of
a note I had read in the culture, of the ELDP study of organizational culture. “Culture must ‘take place’” and my place, now
probably even reflecting who I am is Derwood.
That is why I am now ready to show it off, since it is me, and I might
even be proud to share a few features of it, and me. Now, we are going to spend the better part of
a day walking about Amsterdam, a place in Europe I know relatively well, and I might show it off as
part of me, borrowed from parentage, but separated by several generations. When we return through Nairobi, however, is
when I will probably be most called upon and proudest of a heritage, since I
often have taken Africans through the Africa they no longer believed existed,
to see species that they had thought had all been killed off in order that
anything that crawls, swims, flies or runs away, is only there to feed the
single dominant species on planet earth.
I remembered Ahuka Longombe (“Alberto”) saying when I had toured him through
Nairobi National
Park before we went in to the Congo: “I never thin I ever see a ‘Beefalo’ and now
I see not only a “’ Beefalo” you brought back, but a ‘Lion!” How frightening!”
I am an Africanist.
Yes, I am going to Amsterdam, and I have a
Dutch name. I even know the old city
her, reclaimed form the Nord Zee. But,
my genes reflect an earlier, perhaps stronger heritage from the veldt, the
forests, the jungles and the scraps of the rift-torn African continent, a
primitive piece of geology that resides in a primitive part of my genome to
which I respond with a “Homecoming Fervor.”
Come on along, since you –as well as eighteen others---are going along
with me on a homecoming reunion, to the Africa
I appreciate.