The Sublime and the Haggis

I am a fan of Immanuel Kant, particularly his discussion of beauty and the sublime in his Critique of Judgment. While he describes both as a stimulation of the senses, he distinguishes between these two particular types of experience by describing beauty as inciting pure pleasure, and the sublime as a inciting a sense of awe—a mixture of aesthetic pleasure and terror. (An experience of seeing, say, a tidal wave or a tornado at a safe distance.)

That is how I would describe the view of the mountains of Eastern Congo rising up on the far side of Lake Tanganyika. In the rainy season the sky is quite clear (not dusty) and we can look across the lake at a large, spectacular range rising on the other side. It is gorgeous at sunset, but terrifying as well, in my mind. Eastern Congo remains as untamed as it was 100 years ago. As I read daily news reports of the wars fought and the blood shed for its myriad resources, I get a feeling that it is still the 'dark heart' of this continent. Its daunting landscape seems to give form to its brutal history, a sight majestic and terrifying to those of us who have the privilege of seeing it—from a distance.

We are just back from Kigali, Rwanda today. We drove up on Wednesday to meet with partners. We went as a family because we thought it would be nice to introduce our partners to David. If we had not gone together, I would have had to go alone. We left Wednesday after Oren’s school. (He was very pleased to find he would not have to go on Thursday and Friday.)

The trip took about 6 hours to get to Kigali and an hour once we got to the city, to crawl along with traffic to our guest house. We got there about 7 pm. The border was about as good as it can be with four foreigners and a car leaving one country and entering another. We did try to hurry things along by having David out when he began to cry. I think the sight of a family traveling with two little kids in tow did garner sympathy from the immigrations and customs officials. One Rwandan border guard plucked David out of Rebecca’s arms and proceeded to take several photos of herself with the mzungu baby on her cell phone. But it still takes time as they have to enter all of our information, individually in at least 3 separate books. (This is done by hand in pen and ink, no computers here yet.)

We stayed at the Africa New Life Missions guest house in Kigali, a place we like to stay because it is great for kids, AND has wireless internet in the house! (Hey, you all need to keep your Skypes on!)

Thursday morning we met with our partners at Friends Peace House. We had to go over their strategic plans for next year and the realities of our budget for next year. We felt a bit like the bearers of grim news as we are having to tell them just how tight funds are for next year, and they are already surviving on a shoestring.

They also told us that Rwanda has imposed, rather suddenly, a requirement that English, rather than French, become the official second language of the country. Immediately French study is ended in schools and all teachers who could not speak or teach English were fired. This has made our partners very nervous as they fear the NGOs will be next, with a requirement that all official correspondence be in English. They have asked us for assistance with language study.

We also did some interviews of kids who are part of one of the programs we support called Mwana N’shuti. It is a program that provides schooling and technical training to street kids and orphans. They receive education in reading, speaking English, peace and reconciliation, public health (AIDS prevention), as well as trades like sewing, hair cutting, and farming. Here is a picture of a sewing class. The interviews were very informative and also reminded me just how different our standards of living are. Many of these kids were living off of garbage in the streets for food before they came to the Mwana N’shuti program. (They are put into foster care and given full time care and education by the program.) They had no or only one parent (because of war or disease). When I asked them what they wanted to do when they finished, most said they wanted to get work using their skills in order to send money to their impoverished surviving parent or siblings. Some hope, beyond that, to be able to afford the tuition for secondary school (Grade 7-12).

Besides meeting partners, we also took an opportunity to shop at NAKUMATT, a large supermarket/department store where we are able to get many things we can’t get in Burundi. We bought long life light bulbs, dish soap, and less expensive DIAPERS among other things.

We also stopped and bought ice cream at least twice during our time there.

I am including some pictures to try to give an impression of Kigali. Here are some street shots—you can see it is a modern city.


These are taxis. (They do provide you with a helmet, but no insurance!)

The men dressed in pink are a fairly normal sight. They are work crews of Gucaca (guh-cha-cha) prisoners. These are people who have been put in prison as part of the post genocide attempt at restorative justice. Try to imagine putting on trial half the population of a country for crimes against humanity. How do you do it? What does justice look like? Primarily what survivors receive is an opportunity to face and accuse their assailants. Their stories are heard and a people’s court made up of community judges imposes a sentence based on whether the accused was a leader or a follower. Most of the sentences are a combination of prison and community service lasting 10-14 years. Also, many are part of these crews who are still, after 14 years, awaiting a time to have a trial. The process is slow because of the unbelievably large numbers of victims and perpetrators.

We left Saturday morning quite exhausted after many meetings over 2 days. The report on trying to do all of this together, with family in tow, is mixed. We did get some help with babysitting the first day, but other times David AND Oren were with us. Oren has some difficulty and needed a lot of attention. He had at least 2 tantrums at some inopportune moments there. We are definitely being schooled by him in 3-year-old parenting.

We were back Saturday afternoon in good time (4pm) but found when we arrived that our guard Gaspard looked really bad. Sure enough he was battling malaria. Sadly he had contracted it 3 days before we left and had already had a round of treatment that did not work. Often the malaria is resistant. So he has been very seriously ill for nearly a week. (I should add that the treatment is really almost as bad as the illness, with pretty devastating side-effects like nausea, headache and dizziness.) Please pray for him. I am sending him back to the doctor on Monday if he is not better tonight.

On the good side, we were back in time to go to a really unique event. The Carrs, a Scottish family who are part of our small group, were having a CEILIDH (A Scottish Country Dance night) in honor of Robert Burns day. We arrived at 7 and soon were joined by just about every expatriate in the mission/ NGO community and many Burundians from our church and related Christian organizations. We learned some Scottish country dances, did Scottish trivia, and even had a Scottish dinner featuring—you guessed it—HAGGIS. For those of you who don’t know what haggis is, it is a kind of porridge made with just about every part of an animal, but particularly the entrails, traditionally cooked inside of a sheep stomach—an acquired taste to be sure. Part of the ritual of eating haggis is a blessing upon it, known as “Addressing the Haggis,” a kind of ode to the haggis.

Fortunately we had just the man to do such a deed in a high Scottish brogue. It was Simon, one of our missionary friends. (His family—wife Lizzie, son Zack and daughter Grace are play partners for Oren). Simon, a compatriot of the UK was as Sco’ish as the day is long for the presentation (actually he’s English). I think it was funny, although I could barely understand a word of it. I thought the whole evening must have been highly peculiar to our Burundian friends. But everyone seemed to have a lot of fun.

The kids? They came with us. Oren loves to go there because the Carrs brought a trampoline with them from Scotland and have it set up in their garage. About 10 kids were on it simultaneously and when I peeked in it looked like a gladiator free for all. Miraculously no one got hurt. Oren had a great time and fell dead asleep in the car on the way home.

Last news flash: Oren now loves mangoes!