Waking Up

Last night, when the horns and screams overwhelmed the barriers of my city windows and I finally tore myself away from the television, I went downstairs to see what was going on, and caught sight of something I’d never quite seen before, my children.

I had my twins after 9/11. It seemed an incredibly selfish thing to do - to actively seek to bring children into a world I no longer trusted. The notion that I was ever safe or secure was always an illusion, but it was a pretty convincing one for someone with no personal memory of the war in Vietnam and no first-hand experience living in a nation at war until Desert Storm. For almost six years now, I have been raising children under the surreal haze of George Bush. I have been trying to nurture values of honesty, kindness, open-mindedness and fairness. I have placed a premium on creativity, cooperation, thoughtful behavior and the ability to listen. I have tried desperately to maintain my own sense of hope, faith and dignity. To do this, has basically required a complete disassociation from reality. Until last night.

When Barak Obama was declared the president-elect of the United States, a friend who was watching with me said, “I feel like I’m waking up from a dream.” And so it was. When I opened the front door for the first time, at 12:00 am, I was in my pajamas. My neighbor screamed to me from across the street and I went running into the road, barefoot, to hug her. When I opened the door a second time, at 1:00 am, I saw things I’ve never seen before. The most incredible sight was a group of young, african-american women shouting with glee, and giving the thumbs up to an officer inside a police car who was leaning out the window to return the elated gesture. Both parties were laughing, with cell-phones clicking to capture the moment.

This desire to be outside and to find a way to express the overwhelming emotion of having elected Obama president, was responsible for the curious site, a block away, of crowds gathered on four corners of a busy intersection with no purpose, it seemed, but to cheer and take pictures of one another. Countless automobiles, taxis, garbage trucks and police cars drove by honking their horns and everyone roared some more. My husband said it was as if we all needed to go outside and howl at the moon.

That is why my sleeping children looked so very different to me when I descended the staircase. I had put them to bed in one world, but I knew they were going to wake up in another. The haze had lifted. The world looked much more like the one I had hoped to bring them into: a complete mess, yes, but a place I wanted to live in.

I'll take sugar with that, please.

Bourbon Coffee is the brainchild of Arthur Karuletwa. Karuletwa has an unusual dream – he wants to use his product to re-brand an entire nation. Bourbon, which is in the midst of opening stores on three continents, showcases regional coffee products from the hills of Karuletwa’s native land, Rwanda. I just finished editing three pieces about Rwanda and I can be included in the category (very large I imagine) of people who have one, and only one association with Rwanda: genocide. My grasp of the subject could have been summed up as “A distant memory of something horrible - Hutus and Tutsis and machetes.” The genocide took place fourteen years ago and until I started this job, I knew nothing else of Rwanda. My image of the place was frozen in 1994, its memory roused only by the events in Yugoslavia and Sudan - nations whose unraveling caused the international community to quibble over the term genocide.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself working on a story not of despair, but of hope. Rwanda has undergone a remarkable transformation. It is a country striving, against enormous odds, to bring itself into the middle class. The change is being led, in many cases, by a generation of returnees - the children of Tutsis targeted in previous waves of genocide in the 1950's and 1960's - who have come back to rebuild their country. Many of them have chosen the path of creating socially responsible businesses that will raise the standard of living for all Rwandans. Arthur Karuletwa is one of them. He grew up in Uganda, went to work in the west, married an American and then came back to Rwanda to try and find a way to bridge the terrible ethnic divisions that ripped his nation apart. Arthur is a Tutsi but ninety percent of the farmers who work for him at Bourbon Coffee, are Hutus. His coffee chain, which helps Rwandan farmers switch from producing commodity coffee to specialty coffee, is creating a measurable difference in their lives.

Editing these pieces changed my view of journalism. It clarified that we have a moral imperative to report when human nature succeeds with the rigor and intensity that we report when it fails. If our knowledge of Rwanda ends with the genocide, where is the imperative to help in Darfur? How can we care about Africa when the tale always ends the same way – not because it has to, but because we lose interest once the familiar narrative of desperation has reached its climax? The story in Rwanda is just beginning – but who would know? It isn’t splashed across our screens or our papers. It is lost in a cynical notion of what makes news. We live in a bombastic culture which floods us so completely with accounts and images of our failures that we have come to accept this as practically the only criteria for good journalism – to expose corruption, to bear witness to violence and to doubt success. People have a right to be deluged with images of cooperation, determination, inspiration and salvation. Without this, I believe that editors and journalists are complicit in the actual making of the terrible events they think they’re only reporting.

***To see the pieces I edited, which were produced by Janet Tobias for Frontline World, follow the link below*****

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2008/10/rwanda_after_th.html

Arthur’s story is titled: Rwanda’s High End Hopes for Coffee and clicking the title will take you to the video. There are two other wonderful stories titled: Protecting Rwanda’s Gorillas, and Rwanda: Millennium Village. Click their titles to see the videos and read more online.