Byers Without Borders

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Airport Schooling

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Travel days are not ideal for homeschooling. The kids are excited and distracted, the WiFi is typically spotty, and their teacher’s preflight Bloody Mary can easily lead to a second round (if inflight cocktails are complementary, the kids might even get a snow-day). But we often spend multiple days getting to our destination, so en route schooling is necessary. We must adapt during these times.

  • Recess at JFK passenger drop off Terminal 5
  • Multiplying and dividing to find the variable
  • Lines of symmetry
Journal time in Doha

Typical homeschooling days Jen takes the kids to a public library. But yesterday began a three day journey to Hanoi.  So after a short flight from Charlotte, the kids settled into their classroom, JFK’s terminal 5. With good solid WiFi, we were able to log them into their normal online curriculum, Time4Learning. This is the second curriculum we’ve used, and it allows us to schedule their modules to fit our travel calendar. On a travel day with good internet, math and language arts are the focus. As we get farther off the grid, analog backups in the form of Brain Quest workbooks make sure when the wifi quits school work doesn’t. And of course everything their social studies modules get a big supplement in learning about the local countries/cultures we are visiting. In fact this year Jen assigned each kid a country from our current trip to research. Heads up friends and family, expect some PowerPoint presentations this holiday season.

The 12 hour flight to Qatar was a school free zone. A free-for-all of movies and sleep, while our favorite carrier (Qatar Airways) transported us to our favorite airport, Hamad International in Doha. Just 5 years old, spacious, clean, modern, and with big brass sculpture/playgrounds throughout, I do not know an airport in North America that rivals Doha. The concourse is reminiscent of Gattaca, sleek minimalism and high wooden ceilings cut through with thin rectangular sky lights. A ten hour layover might sound horrible, but at HIA it is a respite. It gives us a chance to stretch out, run around a bit and get a little more schooling in before our final push to Hanoi. 

  • Sculpture/Playground Doha
  • Recess at HIA
  • Sculpture/Playground Doha

Escape Velocity

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Our little Stella can get motion sick just by watching Deadliest Catch. She’s thrown up on every flight we’ve ever taken to Bhutan, twice on Jen. She’s puked in vans from Big Bend to Lombok. Her record for one car trip is four times (Rwanda). Once when riding in my lap, she threw up on me, which I promptly repaid by throwing up on her (Bhutan). We’ve tried every conceivable treatment; pharmaceutical (benadryl, dramamine, scopolamine, zofran), eastern (activating an acupressure point with Sea-Bands), behavioralism (stare at the horizon), I’ve even stuffed a tissue into only one ear (a trick I first saw on a chicken bus in Guatemala). Our latest stratagem, anti-motion sickness glasses. They’re the orthopedic shoes of eyewear, but hopefully by giving her an artificial horizon in her periphery, they’ll be the breakthrough. And they arrived just in time, on the day we left Santa Fe.

Stella’s new glasses

Getting these glasses was just one of a long list of tasks and chores that precedes our big trips. Warn the credit cards of our travel, place a hold on the cell phones, organize homeschool supplies (digital with analog back ups), vaccinations and teeth cleanings, haircuts and state department registration, buy the tiny toothpastes and shampoos, and check the passports.

This last one was especially stressful. Jen’s passport renewal had not been processed as of a week before our launch from New Mexico. So add to our list of tasks, a 10 hour drive to the consulate in Dallas for a 15 minute meeting. Ten hours back to Santa Fe, and then continue with the lists.

New passport collected from the consulate just 6 days before departure!

For three weeks we’ve been wading through leaf-piles of post it notes and lists, reminders to get visa pictures, renew work contracts and mail service subscriptions, buy an extra umbrella (rain jackets are too sweaty in the tropics), and pack the Elf On A Shelf. We’ve packed and unpacked the bags at least three times. It feels like death by 1000 cuts. But with each little chore completed we move forward, build a little momentum, and get closer to our departure. 

And that momentum has been building since leaving Santa Fe. Amarillo, Dallas, Jackson, Atlanta. Over a week of driving, and yet we still haven’t left. But our route has allowed us to see friends and family along the way, gaining energy and polishing off those last to-do’s. Today we are in Charlotte, tomorrow we finally board our flights east. It finally feels like we’ve accomplished enough to break free of the gravity of our “normal life”. That we have collected enough impetus and thrust to reach escape velocity.

  • First iteration
  • Packing 2.0
  • Ready for launch

Smell Ya Later

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I guess I never really thought much about what the southwest would smell like. Certainly if asked prior to our time here, I would not have expected there to be a varied palate in that specific sense department. Pictures of dry arroyos, sun-baked adobe and gravel yards adorned with cacti did not prepare me for the exquisite experience of standing in a field of sage after a September thunderstorm. Or the almost boozy vanilla scent when you dare to put your nose to the bark of a ponderosa pine. The familiar Christmas smell of the spruce-fir forests higher up the mountains was really no surprise, but who knew spring in town would bring a sticky-sweet perfume as apricot trees bloomed ripened and dropped their fruit all along my bike route to work. And now as summer segues into fall, the smell of roasting chilis dominates. It is as exotic to me as my first whiff of fish sauce or sandalwood. A mixed smell of brushfire and grilled veg, it is a dark odor that nibbles the back of the throat. 

Twenty-pound sacks of fresh green chilis are available at the grocery, and roasting vendors are set up in parking lots throughout the city. So much for the SW being barren. 

Supposedly smell is the oldest sense and the one most likely to trigger memories. As we head east, away from Santa Fe, I’m happy to think back on the many unique and new smells here, and the memories waiting to be triggered. 

Smell you later, Santa Fe. 

Bus Burrow

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Living five people in a 250 square foot bus, it is safe to say Byers Without Borders is not taking up too much room. In fact, it often feels like we’re training the kids for a future in the submarine corps or as the next occupants of the space station. They even refer to their bunks as sleep pods. Hey NASA how about a couple of space camp scholarships? Or some T-shirts? Just none of that flavored styrofoam you’re calling dehydrated ice cream, please.

What’s it like living like this? If you look to the internet to understand life in a skoolie you’ll mostly find Kondo-inspired posts shaming you out of your collection of concert T’s or countless blogs devoted to making your tiny home look like an IKEA fallout shelter. According to the web, living in a bus will make your life a series #nofilter-moments taking you ever closer to parental nirvana.

The truth is you’ll likely arrive at every destination reeking of exhaust, there will always be a line of people at the shoe cabinet, during winter the walls will weep with condensation and during the summer you’ll roast in your tin-box house. These websites never mention that “free-wifi” means sharing a trickle of bandwidth with foil-hat alien enthusiasts trying to upload their latest online seminar about the panspermic roots of octopus intelligence.

The blogs never mention that your sex life will revert back all the way to high school and those hushed, under-the-blanket encounters when your pants acted as a pair of ankle cuffs. With little headroom and no stabilizers, skoolie sex is like a diabetic dessert, a reminder of how much you miss the real thing.

Life in a skoolie is hard!

But it is also one of our most fun and exciting adventure-experiments yet. The tiny space can be a source of frustration, but oddly it is also one of the bonuses of the bus. Our bus has become a cozy little burrow. Maybe its an evolutionary remnant buried in our limbic systems. But don’t we feel more at ease, comfortable and safe in small cozy spaces? Has there ever been a refrigerator box that didn’t spend the week of glory as a kids plaything? Animals make dens, kids build forts, and Byers Without Borders burrow in a bus.  

Watch a typical Saturday morning on the bus.

https://youtu.be/G7xo8kGOLXw

Hope in Rwanda

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Unmarked grave

In the spring of 1994, over the course of 100 days, one million Rwandans were murdered. 10,000 people a day were killed by militias encouraged and supported by the government. Most North Americans only know this story through a handful of news reports and Don Cheadle’s movie. So it is understandable that our plan to travel to Rwanda was met with much disbelief and concern from our friends and family. Why on earth would we choose to take our young family to such a horrific place?

The history is indeed horrific. One in eight Rwandans were slaughtered that spring. There is a grave in Kigali that holds the remains of 250,000 victims. Toddlers were bludgeoned to death. Churches were bulldozed while victims sought shelter within. Machete wielding militias left corpses littering the streets. The history is horrific.

But the place, the country is not. Rwanda is not the genocide. Rwanda is a survivor of the genocide. The entire country is a victim of trauma, and to witness how it has chosen to heal is inspiring.

How these people can overcome the desire for revenge astonishes me. I doubt I could. When questioned on the topic our safari driver (who was made an orphan at the 10 by the militias) responded “We have no choice, we can not tolerate more killings, more death”.

Every April there is a week of national mourning, citizens attend Kwibuka sessions in their villages where they discuss and share their genocide stories, trying to heal. Tribal identity is no longer recognized; no Tutsi, no Hutu only Rwandans.

We did not take the kids into the memorial. Because of the graphic nature of the exhibits, children under 12 are not admitted. But of course they had questions, “What does genocide mean? How does something like that happen”?

Genocide is the horrible end of an ethos of “the other”. The mindset of Us versus Them. The scapegoating of all of your problems on a marginalized group. Of slowly demonizing that group until they’re not even human, then trying to get rid of them with the hope that your problems will go away too. It’s so much easier to hate a disenfranchised group than a broken system. Rwanda’s genocide is a lesson in how this mindset fails everyone and Rwanda’s recovery is a lesson in how unity is the only real hope.

That’s why we took our kids to Rwanda. I hope they learned the lesson. I hope we all can.

Faces of Rwanda

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Colorful Women of Nyangwe

We hold certain cultural norms inviolate, assuming that the entire of humanity must believe as we do. The taboo against staring is one of these. I first ran across this cultural difference decades ago in India. A long hard stare at something or someone is not considered impolite or aggressive. In fact, staring at something that strikes your interest sounds pretty reasonable on the surface. But when you’re the object of that gaze, and you’ve grown up in our western society, these hard looks can make one twitchy.

Rwanda is turning out to be one such culture. Here the hard stare is coupled with another phenomenon, smile rationing. History has taught Rwandans to be wary. Smiles are not handed out willy-nilly to all-comers who happen to catch your eye on the street. The people of Rwanda do smile, but those smiles must be earned. Stella sharing polaroids with her subjects, my stumbling attempts to speak Kinyarwanda, Jen bargaining for an avocado, these have earned us happy faces and smiles.

Curious faces

So our first weeks, as we nervously learned to negotiate Kigali, was a time of hard stares and uncomfortable walks through the city. But now we’ve learned the secret. With just a word or two, Muraho, Amakuru, the stares dissolve and the faces open up, curious, friendly, proud. It’s then that we see the true faces of Rwanda.

Newfound friends

Retching Record

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We’ve been doing this sort of thing for decades, Jen and I. We’ve negotiated transport and driver countless times. You think by now we would have learned to ask if the road is paved the entire way. I guess we’re slow learners.

This weekend’s excursion was to Rwanda’s western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unlike the flat savannahs of the east, western Rwanda is mountainous. So our five hour, partially-paved trip was overflowing with twists, switchbacks, and hairpin turns. Stella beat her Bhutan record and threw up four times during the ride. What a trooper, she collects airsickness bags from all our flights, knowing that we’re likely going to force some nausea inducing adventure on her.

Not helping matters was our driver’s aggressive acceleration-braking, characteristic of those who drive with two feet. Perhaps a technique for our zealous driver to more effectively overtake and pass every bicycle, car, minibus, and lorry that had the affrontery to occupy the road ahead of us. Through a complex semaphore of horn-honking and turn-signal flashing, he would communicate to the other motorists his desire to pass at the next convenient blind curve. Fatalistic drivers like this one always earn me a seat as shotgun. Jen knows that my life insurance has the higher payout. So instead of watching our driver attempt to squeeze three abreast, between an endless succession of buses and oncoming dump trucks, I focused out the side window, at the passing mountains of western Rwanda.

Around 5000 feet, the topography of western Rwanda reminds me a lot of Appalachia. However, being situated on the equator the curvature of these hills are clothed in a very different flora. In place of the mixed temperate forests of NC or VA, these mountains play host to a more tropical variety. Immediately outside of the capital, the land is parceled in an endless quiltwork of gardens, and small subsistence farms. Broad leaved-banana trees surround homes and run up to plots of corn, peas, sweet potato, melons, cassava. There are stands of bamboo, avocado trees, passion fruit vines. The valley floors are all sectioned into rectangled rice paddies. If any naked earth shows it is the red dirt of my childhood in GA. Shades of green and red are the dominant palate of these hills.

After a while I notice something missing. I’ve not seen any draft animals in Rwanda. There are no oxen tilling those paddies, no donkeys pulling carts of produce. I guess it makes sense. Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated country. Labor here is cheap. We’re constantly passing bicycles laden down with small mountains of plantains, sweating men and boys pushing them to market.

Tea Plantation

As we get closer to our destination, the patchwork of gardens gives way to industrial-scale tea plantations. The waist high shrubs are so tightly packed, they make entire hillsides into bright green topiary. The only break, the occasional blue-grey stand of eucalyptus, identifiable by its scent as much as its silvery leaves. The plantations are community co-ops. In addition to a source of local income, these fields form natural barriers around Nyungwe Forest National Park.

Colobus Monkey

Nyungwe is Rwanda’s most important area of biodiversity. 1000 plant species, 13 species of primates including chimpanzee and colobus monkeys, 275 species of birds, 120 different types of butterfly. When we cross into the park we enter a world of nature left to its own business. Now the hills are obscured by curtains of green wild rainforest jungle. Blue monkeys eye us from the roadside and hornbills glide along the valleys. There is so much green it makes a racket for the eyes.

Rwandan soldiers also watch us from the roadside. In body armor, with an impressive array of machine guns, they are a reminder that we are on the border of the DRC. From our hotel room, we can look across Lake Kivu and into that no man’s land of civil war and Ebola. It’s like looking into North Korea, Syria, South Sudan, Yemen. Like standing at the edge of the grand canyon or the top of the Sears tower. It gives you the willies. Some travelers (with a poor sense of self-preservation) actually cross that border tracking gorilla, looking for adventure, hits of adrenalin.

For Byers Without Borders, the hotel buffet was adventure enough. Lily and I spent the majority of Monday prostrate on the cool tile floor of our bathroom in Kigali.

Kigali Transport

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Kigali is a city of 1 million spread out over a handful of steep hills. Unlike some of our other homes abroad, it is not feasible to navigate the city on foot. As such we’ve been forced to educate ourselves on the varied modes of Kigali city transport.

At 5000 Rwandan Francs (RWF) for a cross-town ride, taxis occupy the top spot in the food chain of transport. No real difference from those at home, assuming your stateside taxi has mirrors held on by zip ties and worn springs that bottom the car out on every bump. Jen normally takes the front seat because of her superior French, however, most of the drivers only speak Kinyarwanda, so the ride often devolves into frustrated pointing at a phone map.

If 5000 RWF is too much the moto-taxi is an exhilarating option. For 1000 RWF (helmet included) you can hop on the back of one of these motorcycle taxis and zip across town, weaving in and out of traffic, in an affront to local traffic laws and every nuanced clause of your travel insurance policy. Arriving at your destination vibrating from adrenaline and itching from the community helmet are just part of the experience.

Cheap, scenic and likely a bit more safe than Moto-taxis are the bicycle taxis. It’s just what it sounds like, a padded seat behind your driver pumping the pedals. By far these are my favorite because no one can look serious riding shotgun on the back of a bike, legs held out to the sides in a tin-man pose. It’s like trying to look mad while sipping out of a straw.

Finally, there is the city bus. At 100-200 RWF, this is the cheapest way to get across town. Overcrowded, smelly, with cryptic routes and stops that change like the stairs of Hogwarts, the kids refuse to take the bus with me. The rugby scrum getting on and off is intimidating.

 

Plus, a family motorcycle race across town is loads more fun.