Motorcycle Club

I believe sometime ago one or two of brothers had asked that I post a picture of me riding to work on the motorcycle.  Well, with less than two weeks left in Rwanda here they are. 

It has been interesting to me that riding a motorcycle nearly everyday went from the one reason I might not want to take a placement as a methodology trainer in Rwanda to one of my favorite parts of any day.  While riding a motorcycle over unpaved roads for sometimes nearly two hours one way can be physically taxing, it is never boring.  Rather it is like a free documentary movie on Rwanda every time I hop on to ride.  During these documentary style rides I have laughed, had my breath taken away, been awed, saddened, intrigued, and seen some of most pure displays of human and natural beauty in my life.  All fleeting, all brightly lit, in three D, and with surround sound.

While I still hang on with both hands, the reason has changed.  Initially I was hanging on with a full vice death grip because I felt uncomfortable; fearing, I guess, that I was going to fall off at any moment or somehow go flying off into the ditch with the slightest bump or swerve.  I now know that this is very unlikely to happen and I hang on with both hands as I like to look around (I am no longer trying to drive the moto with my eyes), relax, lean back on my arms, and enjoy the scenery.  It also does help for those occasional quick stop or series of bumps that even the best of drivers cannot avoid.

I suppose that there are many volunteers around the world who use this mode of transportation who have several humorous stories to tell about their adventures.  I do not, although I got a fairly good chuckle, rightly or wrongly, out of a young lad wearing a surfer’s wet suit as his-going-to-market attire today. (No, you really don’t need to wonder where all your donated clothes go-they go to places like here, but that is another story.)  I suppose others have tales of woe, flat tires, and mud soaked adventure as they too ply the back or busy roads. For the most part I do not, although I did have one disturbing walk in the middle of nowhere after a flat tire for which I was escorted by someone suffering from mental illness and carrying a sharpened sickle, but that too is another story.  Instead my moto riding has been a series of brief and gorgeous glimpses into the life of Rwandans living outside of any city center or town; people going about their daily lives without fanfare or expectations of sudden changes.

Most of the roads that I take go through the heavily farmed land of Bugesera District,  therefore, I have had the privilege of watching the many subsistence farmers go about their business in this land of field to mouth living.   I have watched them plant and harvest their crops in a variety and succession that would make many an American farmer’s market farmer envious.  I have seen them pick each coffee bean as it ripens, use the patience of a Buddhist monk to willow and clean the tiny sorghum grains, slowly and methodically turn a field that had gone to seed into a field ready for planting with the use of only a hoe, and I have seen an entire human-labored rice harvest in the converted marshes of the Akagere River.

I have watched what it means to truly, without much choice, live off the land using every available natural resource to its best advantage.  As such I have seen people build homes from the sun dried bricks they shaped from the soil on their small plot of land.  I have seen them cut and carry wood for cooking, tools, and homes.  I have seen them collect grasses from the swamps for weaving baskets or as larder for the goats.  I have also seen people collect and carry their water on a daily basis where sometimes the easiest source is the muddy puddle left behind from a rain storm.   Usually it is a small child we swerve around who is using this source, scoop after muddy red scoop filling his yellow jeri can with precious water.

I have laughed as the smallest of child waves, dances, claps and shouts out, “Komera Muzungu!”  their cheers of, “be strong,” helping me to get through some of my difficult moments of being a Muzungu here.  I have been saddened to see children too poor to go to school dressed in dun colored rags, often with the distended stomach of malnutrition, watching their peers on their way to school, elderly people still flogging their body into work to survive, and one too many men drinking local beer out of recycled yellow cooking oil jugs in front of their local brewer’s home in the early morning hours.  I have been charmed by the attire of some of the older men in their Woody Allen spectacles, suit coat, dress shirt, and fedora, the antics of goats, and the packs of students getting themselves to school from great distances including the smallest of the small; usually running, usually carrying water or sticks to contribute to the school lunch efforts, and almost always smiling.

I have observed pure beauty on these moto rides and often wished I could stop and tell the people who have given me these moments of their beauty.  I wish I could stop and tell them that for at least one person at one moment in time they were perfect.  If I could do this I would tell the old woman riding a bike taxi side saddle dressed in her finest clothes, head wrap, glittery shawl, and sunglasses that no one ever looked more self assured, beautiful, or chill.  I would tell the women who stop their monotonous work in the fields that when their faces break into a smile as they return my wave that they possess beauty women of means have cut and injected their own faces for in the pursuit to attain a fraction of this beauty.  I would tell the new mother with her baby strapped to her back holding a colorful umbrella overhead as she walks down the red dirt road to the market that both she and her child are a stunning picture I wish I could keep and capture.  I would tell the young boy running down the steep hill in graceful abandon that he is perfect in his youthful, loping athleticism.  Perhaps, if I am brave, I will still find the time to tell the old man in suit and tie, out sewing in front of his pale blue home every morning with gold rimmed glasses on, tape measure slung over his shoulders, that he is still the most handsome of men.  Perhaps…

I will miss these rides through the beautiful countryside of Rwanda; red dirt beneath green banana trees, rolling hills and flowering trees.  How can I not?

P.S. Thanks to Reverien for all the safe rides!