Let me Learn from Where I have Been

Peace Corps is the most intense experience that I have ever had in my life. When I try to think of how I can explain it to another person that hasn’t been through it I feel like it can’t be done. When I get back to America people that I haven’t seen in two years and new people who I haven’t yet met are going to ask me questions like, “How was Peace Corps? How was Africa? How was Rwanda? Are you happy that you did it? Was it worth it? What are you going to do now? How have you changed? What did you learn?” Right now I still don’t know how to answer these questions. Maybe after being home for a few months the answers will come to me. An intense experience needs some time to recover from before blanket statements can be made about it.

A Christian is supposed to believe in ultimate judgment. That no matter what you do you can’t get to the point where you have won your salvation. God doesn’t allow anyone to get away with anything. Either Jesus takes the debt or you take the debt yourself. Christians are not idealists because then people are good and not at fault so we should give forgiveness to everyone without any need for judgment. Neither are they cynics who do their own judging and believe that people are where they are because they don’t work hard enough so they deserve to be poor. Christians also can’t think that life will be good because they are good. God does take care of his people, but Satan also goes after the same people.

Intellectually I can still say that I understand this concept and I want to live like I believe it, but my actions on a regular basis suggest otherwise. Being here has made me so cynical. I find myself thinking things like, “Why do these people have to stare so much? Why do the same people always ask me the same questions? Why can’t I be left alone?” I don’t have much empathy for the poor anymore. Today my neighbor sent her son over to ask for plantains and I reluctantly said yes before I found that I didn’t have any plantains and couldn’t give any to him. I was honestly a little happy that I didn’t have any because I didn’t want to give them to him anyways. Then I went to the market to buy some avocados and a beggar followed me back to my house where she started asking me for food. I couldn’t understand her because she was mumbling and speaking igikiga so I got Anualita to translate to Kinyarwanda for me. Neither of us knew her. She just followed me home because I am white and she thinks all white people are rich so I will give her some food. After the third time I told her to leave because I wasn’t going to give her anything I put my hand on her shoulder and pushed her along the path away from my house.

Events like my neighbor asking for something happen regularly and I have come to expect them even though I still don’t like it. Beggars targeting me are also normal and I treat them all the same now. I have given to beggars before but that is not my normal reaction. I am much more likely to ignore them. This is the first time I have had a beggar come knocking at my door though.

I know that she doesn’t want to be a beggar. I try to think about if I was in her situation. I would feel incredible shame to beg. I was lucky enough to be born into a life that more than likely I will never have to beg to anyone other than my parents whom I will be living with come January 15^th. I bought my ticket and that is when I will be back in Pittsburgh. My parents don’t get very much in return either, but they keep taking care of me. I can’t wait to go with them and my sister to Italy and France in December.

When I first got here lots of people were asking me to find them scholarships and sponsors, but that calmed down because they got to see me every day. Now that people know that I’m leaving it is picking back up. It is not the kids that I have gotten to know well either. It is the ones who didn’t take very much interest in me until they thought they could get something from me. The ones that I have gotten to know ask me for something to remember me by. Those are the only requests that I feel like I can take without being offended, but it still feels like they don’t realize that I already gave them a lot.

Right now my favorite song other than ‘Gangnam Style’ is ‘Below My Feet’ by Mumford and Sons. The song is like the prayer that I have been saying for the last two years. The chorus goes like this:

Keep the Earth below my feet,
From my sweat my blood runs weak.
Let me learn from where I have been.
Keep my eyes to serve, my hands to learn.

I think of myself as a humble person. Does that make me conceited? Hell Yes. I need to continue to be humbled. I need to be able to give more freely. Going back to the way life was before being here is going to be interesting. I don’t know how I will act. I will never be the same though. No one can be the same after doing Peace Corps. 

Kilimanjaro Killed Us

Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa. It is also the tallest free standing mountain in the world. All that means is that it isn’t part of a chain. I have learned a lot about geology since moving to Africa. There are several rifts that are pulling the continent apart. This has resulted in a few things: deep lakes with a lot of methane gas trapped under the water that could be freed with the right volcanic explosion killing everyone who lives near the shore (one of which, Kivu boarders Rwanda), tall Volcanoes throughout all of East Africa (including the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania), and the Rwenzori Mountain range in Uganada is formed from all of the land around it pulling away and it staying up. Kilimanjaro is the tallest one of the volcanoes so I wanted to climb it.

I climbed Kilimanjaro with my girlfriend Hope. We went with Zara Tours. Zara Tours is like most tour companies in Tanzania. They will climb Kilimanjaro and drive through the Serengeti, both of which get a lot of tourists. People come from all over the world to do these things. We saw people from America and Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia. There were plenty of people from Tanzania climbing it and a few from South Africa, but that’s all of the people from Africa that we met.

Because of Tanzania’s many attractions they are not strangers to tourists and this means that all of the prices for anything made for tourists are inflated. Although Hope and I were not your average tourists we were still thought of as rich tourist that can afford those crazy high prices, but since we are there at all I guess we are able to pay for the high price to climb Kili in the first place.

Kilimanjaro is a national park and the Tanzanian government charges everyone $200+ a day to be there. Then you have to pay your guide, a cook, the assistant guide, the three porters per person and a waiter. Hope and I thought that the waiter was the cook until the last day because we didn’t see the need for both. We did the seven day Rongai route therefore the cost of the trek was over than $1800. Considering that $1400+ goes to the Government and all of the people that we hired to take us up that is a good price. Zara is one of the cheaper companies. We were the only group that we saw that didn’t have a portable toilet with its own tent and porter that empties it daily, and had to use the latrines at the camp sites. These latrines were actually very nice compared to many I have seen in Rwanda and easily nicer than the one at my own house. I was overall very satisfied with Zara even without the toilet tents.

We spent the first five days climbing the mountain then on the sixth day we summited and descended the seventh. The first five days were extremely easy. The sixth day was really difficult. It’s a good thing that we took five days to climb it because on the third day Hope became violently ill.

Altitude sickness or as they call it at Kilimanjaro mountain sickness is caused by a lack of oxygen and the change in pressure. As you climb and stay at your camp you will have a headache. I think everyone gets at least that. You also will get short of breath from the walk to the toilet or even just lying in your tent. The headache is caused by the change pressure swells your brain, and that is made worse by exerting yourself your heart pumps more blood into your brain which swells it more. The headache leads to vomiting. Vomiting upsets your stomach and leads to diarrhea. Somehow you also get the chills and gas. To not get altitude sickness you want to drink a lot of water because dehydration also causes headaches and you spend extra time up in the higher altitude to acclimatize to the conditions. There is also medication for it called Diamox which neither of us had heard of before coming. Everyone there told us that Diamox makes you pee a lot and a couple from California said that studies have shown that ibuprofen works just as well.

Hope had all of the symptoms on the third night. She was telling me that she was worried about displaying “her grossness” to me when we were on Kilimanjaro before we started and then it all came out on the mountain in a way she that never imagined. I did my best to take care of her by doing stuff like finding medicine from other hikers and throwing out her vomit bag, at the same time telling her that she could still make it if she felt better in the morning. The guides were all telling us that she should go back though. It was of course her decision to make because had she gone down she would have felt better immediately but then she would be giving up her chance to make it to the top. If she had gone back I would have stayed and continued so I did remind her of her time limit to recover, we had agreed to this for either of us before we started so she would have had to just wait for me at the bottom.

Hope getting sick was in part my fault. I didn’t contaminate her with anything but I did convince her to go faster on the trail. Our guide’s name was Felix. He was a man in his fifties who had been doing this for more than 25 years. He kept telling us that we had to go pole pole (you say it pol eh pol eh) which means slowly in Swahili, but the pace was unbearably slow and I couldn’t handle it. The path that we were on was extremely gradual and easy and the porters had all of my things so I was really bored going slow. Before coming here Hope and I went on a nine day hike in Rwanda called the Congo Nile trail where we went at a much faster pace. I started going at a faster pace which made Felix very angry. Hope wanted to listen to him even though she agreed with me that we could handle a lot faster. After a lot of convincing Hope and I left the guide behind and hiked at our own pace. It felt like Felix was not able to keep up with us because of his age and he was carrying a large pack. I guess this makes me ageist, but at the end of the second day he came up to us and told us a story about how he was leading a mountaineer from Switzerland on Kilimanjaro who had climbed Mount Everest and wouldn’t listen to him. He told the mountaineer “Kili will kill you” and then he couldn’t make it to the top. “Kili killed him.” This story sounded made up to me and it felt like he was just trying to scare us. I understood later why he wanted us to slow down when Hope got sick but also because the guides are selected based on their statistics. The higher completion rate a guide has more the company will hire him and the better he will be paid. If you have people who want to run up the mountain and can’t summit it still looks bad for the guide.

Hope was still showing symptoms on day four so we stayed at that camp that day for her to recover. I did a short hike up to get a good view and then came back. Hope stayed in the tent all day only leaving to use the toilet. During the day I had to force her to eat some bread and soup but by that night she was doing better. We continued the next day going very slow and then at midnight that night we made our summit attempt. Right after dinner though Hope threw up a little but she was feeling better and she still wanted to go so we covered it up so no one would try to convince her not to go.

The summit climb was really difficult. It was almost straight up. We did a series of something like a hundred switchbacks and then right before the top we had to climb over rocks a bunch of rocks. It was freezing cold. Both of us got frostbite on our noses. The hand warmers that my mom sent me came in handy here, but I had way more than I needed. Once we reached Gilman’s point which is along the edge of the crater it was a lot easier but by that time I finally got my share of the altitude sickness. If it had been much higher I wouldn’t have made it. We slowly made our way around the edge of the crater to the highest point and got a picture at the sign that marks it. At the top it is snow covered and there are glaciers which are melting away, but when you are right next to them they look gigantic. It is no wonder you can see them from the bottom. We then turned back and along the way back down from the top I puked too. I was freezing for the rest of the day and it was Hope’s turn to take care of me. There wasn’t much time to slow down though because we were not permitted to camp where we were the night before so we had to make it to another campsite further down.

The next day we made it the rest of the way down the mountain and saw some monkeys along the way in the part that’s a jungle. We then spent the next day in Moshi and bought some souvenirs before heading back to Rwanda.

It was a great experience. It was amazing to be able to climb the tallest mountain in Africa, and to make it there with Hope after her sickness. She overcame adversity to get what she wanted. She said that she will tell this story at job interviews and I told her this was lame because I knew she was thinking this, but it is cool that she made it after being so sick.

Gorilla Trekking

A couple of weeks ago I went gorilla trekking in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. The Rwanda, Uganda, DRC area is the only place in the world to see mountain gorillas in the wild. For me since I live in Rwanda it cost $250 but for anyone who lives outside of the country it costs them $500. Still $250 is quite a lot for me considering that I get $260 a month for my living allowance. I also had to pay my share of the car that took us to the volcano from Musanze as well as the cost of food and travel. I probably paid around $300 for this experience. As a volunteer you have to be very aware about how you are spending your money because it goes very quickly. I was able get a lift out to Musanze with a friend who was heading that way and stay there for free too at another volunteer’s house. Still it was easily the most that I have spent on a weekend for sure in Africa and maybe in my life. I have heard a lot recently that they will be raising the price soon to $350 for residents and $750 for non-residents in June so I had to get this in before then. I heard that they are raising the cost for conservation purposes. Too many people are going to see them at the low cost of $500 per person and it’s having a bad effect on the jungle. The gorillas can get sick from close encounters with people.

Even with the high cost it was totally worth it. It was easily the best safari that I have been on. On the other safaris I have gone on are in Akagera and Queen Elizabeth I saw giraffes, zebra, buffalo, crocodiles, lots of birds, lions, leopards, hippopotamus, wart hogs, antelope and elephants. None of these animals really care that you are there looking at them and just do whatever they want. They were both really awesome, much better than a zoo, but you are in a car for most of the experience. We got out to look at giraffes and crocodiles from far away and lions from really far away, but that’s it. If you want good pictures of the animals from this kind of thing you are going to need a good camera with a good lens for it. I also went for a boat ride on the lake and watched the animals play in the water. That was cool too but still really far from the animals.

When you see the gorillas you have to hike through the jungle. There is a guy with you with a machete who is hacking away plants as you go and ants crawling up your pants and biting your legs. The trackers go out ahead of you and look for the gorillas that you will visit and then radio back to your guide telling you where to go. We waited for a while outside the park before the guide got directions. Then we jumped the wall and hiked for about 40 minutes to find the gorillas. The gorilla family’s name that we saw was Kwitonda. In English that means humble. I don’t know how humble the gorillas were but they were great to watch. We saw three silverbacks, a couple of babies and like another 13. My favorite were the adolescents because they were climbing on stuff and fighting. The silverbacks just sat around grunting and the guide would grunt back, which he said was them communicating with the other gorillas that we were not threatening. They tell you that you need to stay at least 7 meters away from the gorillas and you think that they will be strict about that, but you get really close. Once we were there we were never even 5 meters away. The silverback was at one point only 3 feet from me and another gorilla slapped Aaron another volunteer with me on the back as it ran by. You don’t need a fancy camera either because you are so close to them. You can take pictures that could be in National Geographic with your standard camera. We were with the gorillas for an hour before hiking back out, but it felt shorter.

If you are trying to choose a single experience in Africa I would suggest the gorilla trekking in Rwanda, but now that the price is going up you could go on maybe two or three other safaris instead of this one that would last longer. When I got home after the amazing experience the road was flooded and I had to wade through a foot of water on my way home. Everyone thought I was crazy and cheap for not taking a vehicle through the water, but its Peace Corps and pretty typical Rwanda.