When familiar is strange.

Wise friends told me that even though I’m going back to Rwanda, I will never really go back because it will never be the same. And they’re right. It’s not the same. Everything that was once strange, is now familiar. I used to be familiar with strange, and now it’s strange to feel familiar.

Some things have changed in Kigali. The skyline is longer and taller with new buildings and hotels. The Marriot moved in. New roads are built, confusing this already out of place muzungu. 

My favorite things have not. Hearing church drums on a Thursday morning for hours building in intensity and repetition. Friends being so busy with work, and still they let me distract them when the power goes out in the office and I want to hear their thoughts on reconciliation. Radio mixing music of Rwandan pop, Whitney Houston, Justin Bieber, and African rap.  Greetings of every person who walks in a room—regardless if you know them, you greet them.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever change. Mixing Kinyarwanda with broken French and awkward English. Slipping on steep hills. Always wanting more coffee.

But then, I wonder how could I feel so different from the last time? Feeling free to be myself, laughing so loud a friend lovingly told me I “shout laugh,” sleeping in and eating fruit and avocado till I think I’m going to burst, talking for hours when it feels like minutes. Sharing my fears, my hurts, my questions, my needs, my wants, my passions with friends who will sometimes never fully understand, and other times are right there with me. 

It took going back to move forward.

I have even less clarity of why I came back. Personal vacation, internal determination, communal affirmation, it’s really everything and nothing all at once.

I think that’s what I love most. Here, I’m free to live the contradictions. I’m free to do nothing and to be tired, to have needs and to satisfy my wants, to question doubts and to live in faith, to be insufficient and to feel whole.

In other words, without “doing,” I’m free to just be. 

When a picture is more than a thousand words

"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think a lot about stories. I think about assumptions that we hold within them. I think about the way we tell our stories, and sometimes more importantly, how we tell the stories for others. 

This week, I went to a conference where the key note speaker used art history to train people (most notably the NYPD, Navy Seals, doctors and now...non-profit fundraisers?) to learn the skill of observation and the power of perception. It boils down to this: training how you see the world allows you to reconsider how you perceive the world. 

You maybe be thinking, ...what? Cause I was too. Let's try an example:

What do you see here? I'll give you a hint: it's a four legged animal.  

See it? I didn't. I thought maybe a kitten in the top right. Now look at this version:

I still didn't see it, although a few people will. Now here's the outline:

It's a cow. Now I see it. And now I can't UN-see it. I needed someone to help me guide my eyes, direct my focus and give me context to see what is really going on in this picture. While my brain was desperately trying to make sense of it, I still needed someone else outside of my gaze to point out what was staring me in the face. 

Let's try another one:

What do you see?

When I took this photo, I saw a photogenic moment of a Rwandan man inspecting a random tree while he led a group of people on a meaningless path. 

But thankfully, a friend helped me see beyond that, a friend who actually understood the language, knew the context, and was familiar with this man's story. My friend redirected my focus and told me what I had actually just captured in one photo: 

Twenty years prior, this man was a genocide perpetrator and participated in the killings of his neighbors, friends, and fellow church members. One of those survivors was the woman whose land we were standing on, and who stood behind my right shoulder as I took the photo.

As I slowly processed the story of these two individuals, the weight of their journey hit me. I thought of the shame, guilt, trauma, and sleepless nights that both the man and the woman had felt for years. I thought of the anxiety of the first time they were under the same roof in a trauma-healing workshop, and the fear they had to approach each other again. I thought of the power of the moment he asked for her forgiveness and the emotions that must have evoked for her. I thought of the continued battle of mistrust, doubt, and trepidation both parties felt as they began to build a relationship that once was defined by death. 

And then, in that moment, I saw the freedom, the joy and the friendship standing before me; he with the dignity of a reconciled leader taking us to the home of the woman he once persecuted, she with the dependency of a friend as he took care of her land. 

Stories have power, and because of that, I have held these stories close for the past 2 years. But each story was shared with me with the expressed desire to be told to the world. They knew that the world needs a different story to change our framework of understanding. A story of hope and reconciliation. They knew that we (the rest of the world) need someone to point out the dang cow staring us in the face. (Is it a coincidence that the example was a cow and I studied a program revolving around cows? I think not.) 

They knew that once the world sees hope in the midst of evil and reconciliation in the midst of brokenness, we would never un-see it again. 

In 10 days, I'm going back to the breathtaking country of a thousand hills. Two years ago I went with only one goal - to learn from these stories. And now, I'm going back for an already-too-short visit. But it is so worth it, because now my only plan in Rwanda is to be with the people who daily live and teach me these stories. 

And I cannot wait.