And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Notes from a Summer in Burundi
“But as we went out the door, the barkeeper, still glaring, called after us: ‘You’ve got scabs on your nose, see!’
I have seen much of the world since then, journeyed among strange lands and new peoples, opened many books, sat in many lecture-halls; but to this day, though I have pondered long and deep, I have been unable to divine the meaning in the cryptic utterance of that barkeeper in Evanston, Wyoming. Our noses were all right.”
— Jack London, The Road (1907)
“Philip travels constantly… and like all good travelers he’s tireless, relentlessly curious, without fear or prejudice.”
— Anthony Bourdain, Myanmar (2013)
“Anchored to earth at last, he was hit suddenly by the whole cumulation of sight and movement, of eating, drinking, and acting that had gathered in him for two months. The limitless land, wood, field, hill, prairie, desert, mountain, the coast rushing away below his eyes, the ground that swam before his eyes at stations, the remembered ghosts of gumbo, oysters, huge Frisco seasteaks, tropical fruits swarmed with the infinite life, the ceaseless pullulation of the sea. Here only, in his unreal-reality, this unnatural vision of what he had known for twenty years, did life lose its movement, change, color.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel! (1929)
The summer months were rich and beautiful in Bujumbura this year. Nearly every morning the city rested under a blanket of pale blue light, shiftless and perfectly quiet, until the sun crept over the hills and briefly washed everything in gold. A few moments later it would be high and hot and finger-waving at the foreigners to stay inside. I always slid open the window and looked first over towards Ruvubu, to the northeast, where there were usually a few clouds drifting innocently in the half-light that would ignite into a flaring clot of citrus and saffron promptly at 6AM. Then slowly, patiently, the sounds of morning crept in too. There was a little shared kitchen below my apartment that started to rattle around at sunrise, and a gentle pulsing fragrance of the country’s famous coffee whispered through the vines and climbed the walls, just as the songbirds were getting in tune and the ravens started dancing and stomping on the tin rooftops. Mornings in Burundi — especially the first few — were bright, sharp-cut, consistent. I had been thinking of what’s next, where to, how to get there, and that first weekend I taped a map on the bathroom wall for decoration and everything was suddenly real and new again.
Those same hills that vault the sun over Bujumbura at dawn press it snug against the lake. A city spills across the landscape until it meets the coast of Tanganyika, thick with mud and seemingly endless, it stretches down into Tanzania, Zambia, and the DRC. Guesthouses on l’Avenue de la Plage and Cercle Nautique host visitors and dip their tails in the lake, carefully though, so as to not disturb the man-eaters and hippos lurching through the high grass along the shore. The Itombwe mountains on Congo’s side of the water are all lambent glittering brilliance in the daylight, but after dark they loom over the lake with grim magnificence, staring back towards Bujumbura like great brooding giants of the night. On some evenings the sun would detonate into Itombwe with a symmetrical riot of color as dawn but often a wall of heavy clouds would just swallow everything up instead. Those mountains are beautiful, but they remind me, like all bewitching summits, that I am pretty far from home.
The water that they watch over, Tanganyika, is an ancient inland lake that behaves like a sea. In the morning it is very calm but in the evening strong winds sweep across the water and whistle through the lakeside palms, drowning sunset-watchers with the sounds of loud churning water and howling wind. So no one really swims here (except for, right now, a group of carefree little kids), and cocktail hour at the Club du Lac looks like it is taking place behind a jet engine. This is a different lake than the one as seen from a hillside garden twelve blocks away, all subtropical twilights and golden breezes, it is a more violent sort of place where if you get too close the wind will knock you down, the waves will swallow you up, and some refractory hippo might try to have you for dinner.
The Havila Hotel Residence is a few minutes from the water on a bumpy road of rocks and loose yellow dirt, which stirs up into your eyes as a rasping taxi, white Toyota, or pick-up truck filled with heavily-armed soldiers bounces past. There were two rooms on the building’s third floor, where I lived for the past few months, and the other one was empty most nights. All summer I used a mosquito spray with a scent called “Mango Lavender Moonlight,” which I thought was a very lyrical choice, but besides those three words the label was scattered with Chinese characters. If I ever chance across that smell again I’m sure I’ll immediately tumble back to the third floor at Havila.
Occasionally a passing neighbor joined me on the shared balcony between 301 and 302 throughout the summer: the surgeon from Kenya, the girls on holiday from Tanzania, the Great World Traveler Taka from Japan, the Burundian living in Canada who just wrapped up a 40-hour journey from Edmonton, a handful of roving UN staffers. Certain themes loomed under those conversations, under the heavy lakeside air and that spooky yellow porchlight that splashed a tawny glow across the scene, usually themes like movement, travel, dislocation. They lended some evenings a brief but exciting, say-everything type of edge — where you’re coming from, what you’re doing here, where you’re going, who you’re going to see, and sometimes, why. Or maybe something in the back of my brain was steering everything in that direction. Those kinds of themes were on my mind this summer. But for travelers who found themselves in Bujumbura, in Havila room 302, there were always interesting answers to those questions.
On the final night of May, a UN driver from the up-country told me about his work taking small car loads of Congolese refugees (the rare ones, who had been cleared for repatriation to the US, Europe, or Australia) from distant rural settlements towards the international airport to be hurtled into new lives in faraway places. Under a hot blood-orange twilight in early August, over lukewarm beers and a couple of hours, a charismatic personal trainer from Uganda picked my brain about America. Halfway through the conversation Buja’s power cut out, so on that lightless balcony he shared his struggles trying to secure an American visa, and everything said was sharpened in the total darkness, cut by the sudden pauses to take a sip of Primus — his voice absorbed a tone of yearning magic when he spoke of New York City. A Ukrainian man in his mid-sixties told me about his career working aboard cargo freighters, rambling the world’s oceans and stopping in port cities like Hong Kong and Singapore and Suez and Seattle for brief and raucous landbound parties with other ambulant mariners. Acquaintances were made, drinks and stories were shared, bonds were formed, and then ways were parted, oftentimes forever. He Googled a quote that he had always liked, on the strange beauty of long-distance sea travel, written by a not-yet-famous Winston Churchill on his way to Cape Town from England:
“Even monotony is not without its secret joy… For a time we drop out of the larger world, with its interests and its obligations, and become the independent citizens of a tiny state — a Utopian State where few toil and none go hungry — bounded on all sides by the sea and vassal only to the wind and waves. Here during a period which is too long while it lasts, too short when it is over, we may placidly reflect on the busy world that lies behind and the tumult that is before us.”
— Winston Churchill, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900)
After decades of peregrinations Denys had seen a lot of the world and planned to settle down in Odesa. But while he had many fleeting friends in faraway lands, there were not as many at home. When war came to his country it was decided that a quiet retirement was not his fate, so he walked across the border and took a flight to Africa.
Those were good nights at the Havila. But the anecdotes are anchored to a balcony in the neighborhood of Kinindo, where the beautiful beginnings and endings of days are easy to write about, where the conversations are kept fresh by the fact that home is a hotel, and where the edges of the handsome streets are framed by lemongrass hedges and banana trees, decadent palms and high walls. In Kinindo, the vines hang low like old green spiderwebs and thickets of bougainvillea crawl around in their thorny purple thousands. Tall pretty spires of tropical columnars tip gently in the wind. Beautiful plant life riots all around and heaves out of the diplomat’s gardens in a thick and tangled charm. And all of this can almost, but not quite, cover up the barbed wire coiling on top the walls, which keeps everyone moving along.
Elsewhere in town, things are different. The plant life is still rich but not as well-tended and usually covered in thick soot from the roads. Urban Bujumbura is dense and low. The confused streets, besides two or three pristine boulevards, are spotted with axel-shattering potholes and big rocks. A particularly deep crevice in the middle of the Rue des Etats-Unis that could ruin a car or kill a cyclist has a little lime green fern sticking out of it for caution. And the generally slow pace of Burundian life is transformed when someone gets in a vehicle, when haste takes completely over and anxious malcontents can be expressed. Trucks seethe and slide violently across roads to avoid the obstacles, half-dead cars are pushed to their limits as they boomerang the roundabouts and hiss at one another in the swarming babel of a downtown intersection. No one has agreed whether left-side drive or right-side drive vehicles should be the national standard, so both are used, which creates many distressing opportunities for breathless gambles and unpleasant games of chicken on the freeways, as drivers nudge their cars into the oncoming lane with blind nerve at high speeds and trust their passengers to tell them whether its safe enough to overtake that diesel trailer up ahead. If it’s not, they consider with impatience the chances that a pass on the outside might result in any severed limbs for that man pushing his banana cart up the hill. Mere suggestions of a trip to Bugarama are enough to race the pulse. And every week, the government shares a public service announcement that details recent traffic-related deaths and injuries. The number is always very high.
“I will take you to see the real Bujumbura!” Elvis, the receptionist at Havila, told me once. And he did. We spent a summer Saturday afternoon in the tangled neighborhoods of the city away from the lakefront, in local bars and lunch buffets, in friend’s kitchens and tiny yards. People were, as the locals do, speaking in long beautiful paragraphs of Kirundi and filling the gaps with French or Swahili, emphasizing every thought as if in performance, to the nods and affirmations of their audience. So most of the conversation buzzed past my ears like mosquitos that day as I sat and ate my goat brochette, drank my Primus, and observed, occasionally being handed a baby to look after for awhile or take pictures with. Some locals became interested in the mzungu intruding on their weekend and some seemed not to care at all. That day I got mostly the same immediate reactions from people as everywhere else in Burundi. Toddlers were completely flummoxed by my existence, possibly one of the only such outsiders they’ve ever seen, their eyes would go wide and jaws hang low and they’d tug at their parents for reassurance. Slightly older kids lost any sense of reserve, coming over to play and talk about soccer, rippling into silver laughter at every sound or move I made. The teens were the most reticent, sometimes sending across a sharp look that very fairly asked: what are you doing here? And the older men and women would often just quietly shake my hand and ask simple and interesting questions. But for the visiting mzungu in Bujumbura, there is no urbane anonymity, like you might enjoy in New York, taking walks through new neighborhoods while no one really knows what you’re up to, no matter how innocent. It was difficult to reach the Casino Supermarché — just two lefts and a right from Havila — to pick up some avocados on a weeknight without at least 10 kids following behind.
There are a few main roads that lead away from Bujumbura. The first goes west, along the top of the lake, and dissolves into wet earth after the splashy entrance to the Club du Lac. From there it goes past Fishing Town and crosses the Rusizi River to reach the border and towering mountains beyond. This province, Gatumba, is always changing. It floods heavily and is the first foreign point of flat refuge for many people fleeing violence in Eastern Congo. The border is porous, and the headcounts in Gatumba’s resettlement sites are in constant flux as people make fateful decisions to continue east into new lands or turn around and go home towards volatile familiarities.
The second road goes south, almost disappearing completely at the city limit and turning into a trail, it winds its way to southern Burundi, zagging and dipping and briefly drowning where the frantic evening waves of upper Tanganyika have fretted away the shore.
The third goes northeast, a wild twisting road that uncoils up the hills like a serpent slithering into the hinterlands, up the hills where the warm miasma of Bujumbura is left behind and the air picks up a little more bite and clarity. After reaching the top and turning the corner at Bugarama, the temperature drops ten degrees and the country unfolds into wide rolling vales ablaze with lime green tea leaves and banana trees. In the mornings, acrid smoke from big trucks puffs up and looks for a second like cold clean breath on a blue dawn. Those trucks are headed to different countries but have to climb that steep route before leaving Burundi, and people hitchhike in any way possible to catch a ride out of town. Rows of men on bicycles hang onto fenders, shifting back and forth with the rhythm of the truck, and the bravest jump right on the back, sides, or top, grabbing anything they can for a free ride up the hill. Motorcycles made for two bend wearily underneath families of six. A lot of cars literally gasp their last breaths and expire on the way up that road. And if that happens, the resolute passengers calmly step off, grab their things, and wave down another ride. Once I took a battered matatu called the Polar Express up to Bugarama, it was painted with images of Queen Elizabeth and Tupac and at one point died for five minutes. And once on a rainy Sunday evening in early June, a beer truck rolled over on its way down the hill and both lanes immediately filled with eager cars for miles behind it in both directions. Hopeless and stuck, a couple of new friends and I tried to laugh off that our seven hour journey was about to turn to twelve. With no extra space on a road tacked to the side of a mountain, that conundrum took a long time to to fix, but some local drivers, never letting motor vehicle operation get in the way of a beer, shrugged off the delay and enjoyed a few rogue Amstels that were sent spilling down the hills.
Bujumbura does not have the same incipient convenience as Kigali, Rwanda’s capital a few hours north. In fact going to Kigali for the first time, after living in Bujumbura, raises some immediate questions. Why do these places feel so different? How come I can buy a coffee with a credit card in Kigali, or call a mototaxi from a cell phone, but the banks and roads barely function in Buja? Why does Burundi seem to be left behind other developmental progress in the region? Kenya is classified by the World Bank as a lower-middle-income country, and it is racing breathlessly towards the next highest level, to erase any mention of “lower” in its economic titles. There are skyscrapers in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The Kenyan owner of a resort in Burundi, who runs hotels in both countries, shared his opinion that the long-term forces are actually very simple: Nairobi has sent an open invitation to the world to come invest its money or expand its businesses there, while in Bujumbura the red tape and corruption is still suffocating.
But Rwanda and Burundi are more closely tied — culturally, linguistically, geographically, historically. They are two landlocked countries the size of Massachusetts nestled in Africa’s Great Lakes, the “lands of a thousand hills,” the “sister states of the interlacustrine.” At one point, venomous monarchies from far away decided that in fact they should be a single territory, Ruanda-Urundi. Today, plenty of locals have family and close friends in their neighbor country, and can easily speak both Kirundi and Kinyarwanda. Yet many people, certainly many Americans, have heard of one but never the other. As far as the economists are concerned, Rwanda and Burundi are both lower-income, but on certain street corners in Kigali, everything glittering clean and calm and modern all around, you might as well be in Singapore (which tracks, as it turns out, considering that President Paul Kagame is a dedicated scholar of the developmental grandmaster Lee Kuan Yew). There aren’t any corners like that in Bujumbura.
In the decades following the 1994 genocide, Rwanda became something of a favorite for global donors, and the embassies in Kacyiru are well-staffed and well-versed at filtering dollars or euros into local projects. President Kagame is a deeply controversial figure but has managed to secure money from abroad and put it to use within his tiny inland country, building roads, public health capacities, hotels, and business connections. On a first road trip from Bujumbura to Kigali, a well-traveled Genevese colleague urged that we get to the border post before dark — we wouldn’t want to be driving in Burundi during late hours, but “Rwanda is safer than Switzerland.” We reached the crossing that night as the sun was dipping, and at that very point, the spine-rattling roads of Kirundo province tightened into straight, neatly paved, well-lit streets, carrying travelers into the center of Kigali with comfortable celerity. Another passenger in our car, after getting his visa stamped, was promptly admonished and nearly arrested for brushing some Pringles crumbs from the back seat of the Probox, six yards into Rwanda.
The new Rwanda has advertised itself onto the world stage of people interested in adventures to Africa that retain, for them, certain vestiges of familiar amenity. It cleverly competes with its more developed neighbors for wealthy international tourists. You can get to the country easily and directly from Paris, London, Dubai, or Johannesburg, and after spending a few manicured days in Kigali’s coffeeshops, art galleries, or cosmopolitan hotels, be whisked away to the national parks in a westbound helicopter to safely see the gorillas. The wilderness lodges over there operate at the most eminent levels of the entire hotel world, full-board, luxe, isolated, unique, completely lovely, and sometimes well over one thousand dollars per day. And everything can be neatly booked from computers far away. Many Americans that have traveled to Africa only once or twice — with the exception of a European-based sortie to Morocco, a wine-drenched honeymoon to Cape Town, or a trip to see the Pyramids — have probably been lured towards safaris, big mountains, and comfortable seclusion in East Africa.
But Burundi does not draw many of them. Bujumbura’s Melchior Ndadaye International Airport can be reached directly by Kigoma, Kigali, Entebbe, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa. Flights are relatively infrequent and expensive. A bartender in the departures cafe and a wilted sign in the bathroom say that there is also a plane to Brussels, an antique artery of colonial times that still takes off every Wednesday morning, but I have not met anyone who has been on it more recently than a decade ago. You won’t reach Burundi directly from Dubai. And you won’t find deep reserves of restaurant reviews or international hotel brands opening up lodges.
Like any place, anywhere on Earth, for any traveler, your true grasp of a place can only deepen the further you get from your hotel. “On the road, percipience must be earned,” agrees a strange and archaic British travel flyer at a tourist museum in Kigoma. On the way to Bujumbura for the very first time, bright-eyed and animated by the ancient spirits of early-summer adventure far from home, I shared a breakfast table with a Londoner in Addis Ababa who was making his way back to an expat life in Nairobi. He told me, under the enervating fog of coffee, incense, and cigarette smoke that hangs perpetually in the Addis departures terminal, that he had been to Buja once and did not particularly envy my upcoming experience of living there for a few months. “Spent a weekend at the Club du Lac, taking it easy. Yes? Not much to do besides that.”
Of course, I now know, that there are things to enjoy in Burundi, many of which are not likely to appear on the good gentleman from Middle England’s radar. But even so, the country does not have a Serengeti, a Maasai Mara, a Zanzibar, a white sand beach without warning signs of immediate reptilian danger, or populations of gorillas in locations where Foreign Offices will allow their citizens to go. In Bujumbura you can find le musée vivant, the living museum, where crocodiles and snakes lurk around a derelict garden that does not feel particularly safe. Burundi does not have glitzy safari camps that show up on the search results of people far away searching for where to spend their Big African Adventure. It is very poor, by many measures the poorest country in the world, and any drive outside of Bujumbura will reveal certain realities of what that level of poverty really looks like. The thin single roads through its two national parks are the most dangerous in the country according to the State Department (mostly because of animals, not people, but still any diplomatic vehicle driving those routes requires fully-armed escorts).
The southernmost source of the Nile is here, still controversial two centuries after its search captivated distant western audiences who were obsessed with tales of overseas adventure — it is a small stone pyramid that spits out water and has the modest words source du Nil printed on its base. It doesn’t look like much, but if you kick your overheated imagination into overdrive you might just picture the romance of that trickle gaining a little power, washing through the hill countries, pouring into Lake Victoria, swirling past the Al-Nilein in Khartoum where the White Nile meets the Blue, all the way through through Egypt, and finally spilling into the Mediterranean, in sight of Alexandria. Burundi also has a statue of the famous reunion between the Nile searchers David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, depicting the very moment when those allegorical Victorian words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” were spoken, even though, as the monument openly admits, the meeting actually happened 100 miles south, in Tanzania.
While the country’s highest point, Mount Heha, might not quite conjure the same magnetic romanticism as other nearby mountains — like Kilimanjaro, The Mountains of the Moon, or Virunga — you’d think it might occasionally make it on the itineraries of international adventurers who come to bag peaks in East Africa. But it rarely does, and one of only a few Google reviews, penned a few years ago by someone who maybe was just there at the wrong time but clearly still chuffed with the experience, tells us that “we had a grenade shell thrown at us but the view was soo nice.” I was met with doubting stares after asking some local friends about the climb. This was an active group that hiked every Saturday morning, but had never really considered trekking Heha. We eventually climbed it together in four hours on a scorching weekend morning in July. The sun beat down on the summit, we left a little note at the top, and on the way back stopped at a village kitchen where the flames from a stove in the corner were leaping madly and we ate a heroic breakfast of beef samosas, fried eggs, assorted heavy starches, and violently strong coffee.
One well-traveled Burundian that I met on a bus shook his head at his country’s tourism situation, complaining that Lake Tanganyika should be filled with sailboats on the weekends (“fuck the hippos, look how beautiful this place is man…”) Another local, met during that rambling summer day in Bujumbura’s back neighborhoods, who was far less-traveled, likes things just the way they are. And a UN director with a long career shuttling between field offices around the world shared that before all of the recent regional conflict, Bujumbura used to be something of a hidden gem in certain diplomatic circles, even bearing one of those ridiculous “the [European City] of the [continent that isn’t Europe]” monikers — it was the Brussels of Central Africa, where people on foreign salaries could go live like unbothered royals and speak French in the tropics for a few years.
Today, after a turbulent few decades filled with sanctions, travel bans, and bad publicity, the embassies seem to be filling up again too. Embassy Bujumbura is an American fortress on the edge of town and a strange experience to walk inside. One moment you are in a battered taxi crawling back and forth along the Avenue des Etats Unies, avoiding deadly potholes and making eye contact with a few people walking slowly along the dirt road into town, and the next you have cleared security and are now inside the high walls, inside some subtropical iteration of Kalorama Heights, complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, lush gardens, and conversations about the next Senate hearings or the opening box office numbers for Barbie. I went to a town hall in July where sweaty men in suits, channelling all the high powers of the U.S. government, spoke to their citizenry living in Burundi. There were about twenty Americans in the crowd that day, mostly Christian missionaries and itinerant francophone humanitarians, and back at the refreshments table where Samosas skewered with American flag toothpicks were served we made small talk about just what we were all doing in this forgotten country far from home.
By August, the city’s power and gas situations had devolved and long metal threads of cars were queuing for kilometers outside of the thirsty petrol stations, spindling off main roads and into quiet neighborhoods. By then the lights flickered incessantly if they were on at all, and the beers went bad after a few days as the little fridge turned on and off with the blackouts. By then I was taking ice cold showers in the warm pitch black and thinking a little more about elsewhere. By then the map on my bathroom wall had withered and peeled and rotted into an ugly unnatural ochre, maybe it was trying to tell me something, maybe it was time to go home.
But there will be plenty to miss about Bujumbura. I will miss the standard weeknights, sitting outside in the thick wind accompanied by a book, a Primus, and a glowing sea of insect coils, the yellow lights flickering on the pages while mosquitos danced and tapped at the windows. I’ll miss those special dawns too. After the quiet of a Sunday morning was shattered by rapturous gospel music and the praise eventually turned into prayer, I’ll miss how the streets of Kinindo were totally quiet and empty for the rest of the day except for a thousand kaleidoscopic dragonflies spiraling around in the hot air. I’ll miss the avocados, which are bigger than your feet and spread like fresh butter. I’ll miss the beach in Rumonge, in the south, where the wildlife stays away and you can jump in the cold blue lake. I’ll miss Elvis, Eric, and French, the hardworking operateurs of the Havila Hotel Residence, who all held adamantine beliefs that high quantities of Primus beer makes you stronger. I’ll miss the way Eric referred to tiny Burundi in geographic extremes when talking about a wedding he just came back from in the High North, the Deep South, or the Far East.
I’ll miss BujaCafe, and its little communal bookshelf in the garden, where I think I was sneakily exchanging books with someone else all summer. I never saw them, but if I did I would thank them for parting ways with their Joan Didion collection and the righteous copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I will miss the place called simply Asian Restaurant, a tasty North Indian eatery that is also a salon, where one can get a haircut and a chana masala without switching chairs. I will miss the Flamengo Supermarché, which is a miracle of supply on the edge of downtown and one of the only places in Bujumbura where you could find random victuals from distant lands. I took a taxi there a few times for frozen Reese’s cups and other chaotic provisions.
I’ll miss and always cherish the genuine, effusive hospitality of the Burundians that I met, who could have easily ignored another transient expat that would only be in their city for a summer, but instead invited me to travel, socialize, and eat with them and their families. In particular I’ll miss that Sunday when some new friends tried to teach me how to make ugali during a thunderstorm and we sat sheltered along the water sipping cocktails, listening to Tanganyika drink up the rain.
I will miss all of the interlacustrine travel that I was lucky to do, and I will remember the face of the American immigration man back in Washington, who raised an eyebrow and stared at me with puzzled intrigue as he flipped through a passport that had been recently obliterated by rare and colorful central African visas.
I’ll miss the more ridiculous events, seared into memory like hot wax, which are sometimes great and sometimes wreck the nerves and make you feel completely out of place, but can only really happen while leaning into new adventures far away, like sharing a deadpan laugh with a local doctor after being jolted back to Earth by his malaria medicine on a Wednesday afternoon (a day when I found myself ricocheting between cold chills and hot flashes at the local hospital, drowning in lassitude while a pack of hyenas gnawed on my brain, that kind man gently inserted a syringe the size of a small firearm into each thigh. ‘No problems,’ said the young doctor as he pulled those life-giving but deeply unsettling things out of the sweating freezer and smiled. ‘No problems.’) Or the conversational insanity of sharing the single dinner table at a very rural travelers hotel in Rutana province with a group of hilarious Australian conservationists, savagely hard-drinking Chinese construction managers, adventurous French undergraduates on summer break, and annoyed members of Burundian parliament.
I’ll miss that last morning in Burundi, a long, quiet time spent on Tanganyika’s northern shore. The place was calm and warm at six o’clock on a Friday, the sky clear, the lake mostly veiled in low white fog but shimmering purple brilliance at the edges. I saw a single, blaring orange star in the distance and told myself it was Jupiter. A couple of fisherman on wooden canoes floated by stealthily, returning from their night on the water with big nets of fish. Two kids went zigzagging down the street carrying a bucket of fresh nectarines, laughing the whole way, and as soon as their infectious giggles cleared the air, a Toyota full of soldiers came roaring by.
Then the quiet returned to that spot next to the lake, and when suddenly I realized it was really time to go, the tone of everything changed. It felt a little haunted by the mountains and the spooky belching hippos in the distance. Thirty hours later I’d be back in a living room in middle America, trying to process the strange experience of moving to a very new place on very short notice, meeting new and wonderful people, then being pulled back into familiar routines in household settings far away. I hope to remember that morning, the ending to a good summer, the last act before shaking the dust of Buja off my feet for awhile, but what can you really do? I took a breath, wrote a few things down, and went to catch a bus, to start another long and winding journey that would eventually slouch towards home.
/S
Pennsylvania, August 2023
