Centre Christus

I traveled to Kigali to go to my friend Evas' wedding to Elijah. Beautiful and a story that needs to be told in itself.

And also. The next day.

Evas' pre-married home is a few blocks from where I usually stay when I visit Kigali, a Jesuit retreat center called Center Christus. Located close to the airport. It's where the first killing in the genocide happened. 17 religious men and women.

OK. I'm a little shy to tell this story. I went to Center Christus on Sunday for mass because their mass has beautiful music. I came late and people were standing outside the windows or had lined up chairs outside the doors. I sat in a free chair on the cement pathway outside the door and a small boy in a batman t-shirt put ripped pieces of a green and yellow leaf in my hand. The bits of language I could hear I couldn't understand, French. I think French. But the rhythm I know, in a quiet way. The boy returns with more leaves to hold.

It's quiet here. And I notice myself wishing for a way into this quiet or that I knew the names for things here. I notice I wish I could find someone to teach me. I remember noticing this as a surprise, like opening a box of once-favorite clothes you forgot owning. Maybe.

Unnerved. I wander the city, new cobble stoned. Clean. Vistas. Reminds me of Prague. Or Vermont, but I'm not sure why that one. I drink grape soda and write about a Clair Denis film I watched last week about globalization where a makeshift family of people who share an apartment building can't come together and also can't get out and they close the store Anthropology because it isn't of use to anyone anymore. It reminds me of the work of cultural exchange because of this myth of leaving the world as you know it to have some kind of unique and precious experience, but really there is no leaving the world.

And I find myself back in Center Christus in a round no-wall hut near the genocide memorial and an insistently living tree. And I sit with this - I wish I had a teacher - for a few hours. And the other things that come up. The sadness of the loss of life that remains underneath the spectacle of violence. What to give Evas for her wedding? What is peace?

When I got out of the shower yesterday, there was a Jehova's Witness from America having tea in the sitting room. Evas' sisters let her in because they thought she was a guest for the wedding. Her name was Abigail and she traveled with a Ugandan woman who had braces. So Evas' sisters, brother and uncle and I and the Jehovah's Witnesses squeezed into the living room and drank tea. I nervously tour apart and ate bananas. Abigail asked us to read a passage of the bible that promises a future of peace, of "exquisite delight in the abundance of peace". And I'm trying not to imagine that it's my job to save people from evangelism, but I find myself asking, but what is peace?

The thin wood of a bench bolted to the hut. What does peace look like and how is it enacted? The sound of traffic. Why this narrative of peace made visible in the image of someone dying? An airplane lands. I am spending time with my desire for a teacher. An uproar from the soccer match at Amahoro stadium washes down the hill.

When it is five o clock, I return to Evas' former home because we are going to visit her new home. We have 10 minutes, you should rest. I sit by the bookshelf. There is a book for GMAT. There is a book on weddings. And then there is a book of small plays about saints by the playwright I used to travel with here.

I am reading. Water on the floor. About the intent towards a structure of writing that is continuously opening to wonder, about closure as idolatry. Peace shaped as metaphor, metaphor as space of and between multiples, decenters the individual. Maybe I am praying for idolatry, not guidance. Something to rest in, not rest.

To the taxi bus. Up hill. High walled side of the road. Evas in a yellow dress. Pieces of wedding cake. We can't get the TV to work. Visitors. Peas. Black sofas. Outside, the cool dark. Red cement. The size of a new life.