Consulting day. We spend the morning into the early afternoon consulting with the Friend's Peace House about a counseling center they want to open. Their plans look quite good, but need a fair amount of editing for grammar and wording if they want to apply for grants or get support from the English speaking world. I found it challenging to wordsmith a document that required rewriting of whole paragraphs while maintaining the feel and voice of the original author – challenging but fun.
For the afternoon we went to a church where ten thousand Tutsis were slaughtered. It has been converted into a museum that is almost overwhelming to go through. When you enter the church you see piles of clothes sitting on benches that were the clothes warn by the victims. Behind the church are crypts that we entered. Inside is shelf after shelf of skulls, bones, and coffins of the thousands killed there. The skulls told a chilling story of how people were killed. The four methods of killing were hand grenade, gunshot, machete, and club. It was not difficult to tell which method of death many skulls suffered. The visit left us rather somber.
Of course the solution to overwhelming grief is rampant materialism…so we went shopping. No ordinary shopping experience will do after such a sobering tour so we went to the "Artisans Village."
The Artisans Village is a parking lot surrounded by approximately 40 stores. My non-scientific survey of the dozen or more shops I visited revealed that they all carry essentially the same crap. Nothing has a price tag, because they need to size you up and see how much they can take you for. All of this would be tolerable if were not for two facts.
1. The shop owners stand outside their shops and beg you, with the fervor of a starving child, to enter their shop with promises of better prices and better selection than the other stores. Hollow promises indeed. I suspect that most of the stuff is imported from China.
2. The members of our group of the female persuasion bought the lies. They found it necessary to enter every shop, inspect all the goods which were identical to the last store that the left, barter over items, leave the store, discover all the other places had the same "goods," then return to the ordinal store to restart the haggling. Then there is Judi's woven basket obsession. Her eye is able to discern 18 different shades of blue and apparently all 18 shades were represented in the shops and need to be compared. I would be retrieved from my post in the parking lot to offer my opinion. I would stand dumbfounded before the two baskets on which I was to pass judgment. In my mind all I could think was "These look exactly like the ones I made a decision abut 20 minutes ago…and the other day. In fact didn't we already buy these baskets? Maybe this whole process is one of the marital quizzes to see how well I am paying attention. But if I don't take this comparison seriously I fail the "you don't care about the things that are important to me test." It's not worth the risk." I furrow my brow in deep concentration, allow the tension to build for a moment, and then announce with conviction and confidence (this is no time for half measures) "The one on the left! Definitely!" I hear, "I think so too," and get out of the shop as quickly as possible breathing a sigh of relief.
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