Farewell to Rwanda

Dear Guy,

It has been a tough decision but after several months of introspection and deliberation with partners and friends you made the decision to leave your beloved Rwanda.

Several reasons have influenced your decision. I only mention a few.

During your last visit in Europe you were confronted with a serious health problem. This has been fixed but it made you think about what, seen your age, could have happened or what can happen from now on.

At fifty we all think that we still have a lot of time to pursue goals and dreams. The above mentioned event made you realize that the time guarantee expired and that you are living in surplus now, already more than two years according to the doctors.

Your return to Rwanda was not that obvious but you made your objectives clear to everyone.

During those last few months you were able to finalize your proposals to professionalize the Rwandan dance field. You have produced a debate paper, a road map and a comprehensive proposal for a full time dance education. Those were based on an advanced insight since almost five years. Now it is up to the decision makers to implement fully or partially what has been proposed.

Seen your privileged contacts with decision makers, build trough the Rwandan Embassies in The Hague and Brussels and several dedicated local supporters, you are hopeful that those proposals will have a chance to succeed.

On the field you created with a few colleagues a local NGO and coupled thereto a dance creation and reflection center.

You should be happy that a few young dancers will continue the NGO and that your colleague Wesley Ruzibiza from AmizeroK and E.A.N.T Festival took over the studio campus. This guarantees that the activities you were developing within a professional dance environment can continue.

You were also running, together with E.A.N.T, a dance education pilot program in nine schools spread over the country and seen the positive reactions this program will continue.

You were able to work within existing companies to focus on the quality of movement. Your only regret is that you were not working more with dancers and companies instead of spending so much time relentless writing proposals.

Now the time has come to take some distance. You told your counterparts that if Rwanda calls you to implement your proposals you will certainly pick up the phone and engage yourself for a determined time. One always wants to see its’ own child growing up, is it not?

You told me lately that being born under the Flemish towers, thrown between rivers and the beaches of the windy North Sea, a kind of home sickness gradually nestled in your heart. We realize that once one leaves the cradle there is a continuing unrest in someone’s mind. You were torn between here and there but despite the climate change you said to need to re-experience the four seasons before it is too late and time catches up with you.

Rwanda has a fixed place in your heart and faithful as you are, people there will always be in that mind of you wherever you go. You will continue to find ways to support what you have built there to preserve the spirit of reconciliation and development of this little wonder in the middle of that huge Africa. No one will stop you from thinking that dance has a role in this. It is a Made in Rwanda product for export and internal consumption, you always said.

Guy, your and Rwanda’s ways are breaking up, perhaps temporarily but I know that you need to recharge your batteries in the hope you can continue and hopefully discover new horizons.

Shall I tell them?

With your love to them all, Rwanda farewell.

Guy.

That mild lemon light again.

Dear Guy,

And yet, there it is!  That ascending restlessness, concomitantly with physical distress, harbinger of an announced decampment.

You are the world champion in “When your doubts gradually prevail and translate into physical ailments”.

We both know the diagnosis. At the end, the experience counts!

Craving for different light, hills, waters and other earth. Yearning for unknown landscapes and known people, not necessarily in that order.

There is that moment when one realizes that Godot will never come. Meanwhile you have been into all the protagonists and you and I are like Vladimir and Estragon.

It is there, undeniable, when an abundance of space makes you anxious and your mind escapes in painted landscapes delimited by frames.

One can compare it with a seed; once planted….

Before, that means at previous occasions, that returning nervousness was not bothering you that significantly. At the contrary it was triggering you; a signal for undoubted change. Now your age is the perfect excuse for prudence. But do you believe it yourself?

I never noticed any fear about what the others could think but replace ‘fear’ with ‘important’. You see what I mean? The opinion of your beloved ones has always prevailed as the sum of their support has made that not so easy life of you possible. Taking their views into account has been an act of honor and your fidelity has no limits.

And your fidelity has no limits, go and tell them again and again.

Why is it, that for the first time you hesitate to ask for guidance, views, opinions?  You doubt about their intentions towards you? Are you anxious for disapprobation?

You have learnt so many times that being unsuccessful not necessarily means failure. Experience made you stronger; mmm, did it? But there is that weakness deep in you that only I and you are sharing, well that is what at least you prefer to think.  Leaving people behind is the hardest and we have defined it in a previous letter as unbearable. ‘Life goes on’ has been too many times a tragedy for you as you have never been able to mourn for that one person. Saying goodbye, cuts you in pieces over and over again and for the first time you have doubts that making a new start is not really a new beginning.

The coming period you will weigh it up.

Read your poetry, especially those words and sentences wherein you use variations on light and color; they have brought you consolation and strength. And when some phrases make you cry as much as when you wrote them it means that they comfort you, as tears are the most honest expression of your feelings.

http://desegregations.blogspot.com/2011/06/saul-bellows-mild-lemon-light-at-avenue.html

I wrote you this letter to ease your low back pain. I hope it cures, rather than the drugs.

Yours always,

Guy

___

In a hurry!

Dear Guy,

In several of our letters we have dug into your past, so I thought we could have a closer look into the present and how you could shape the future, or better, your future. I will not give up to write about what lays behind you but with this letter I want to increase the speed, because lately you said you were in a hurry.

So a quick reminder; since you were born you can’t complain about a dull life although I can imagine that on certain moments being more at ease would have been preferably comfortable.

Even when a ‘regular’ life was offered to you, albeit I’m not sure that happened, you were always looking for new challenges, new adventures, new friendships, new love, and new life. Most of the time this search for new experiences meant unrest and a lack of comfort but the latter was never bothering you as long you were able to master it.

One artist, we both know his name (*) once said that if he had not been an artist he probably would have been a gangster. Not sure that if you didn’t organize yourself as you did you would have reached both those states but you certainly did find a method to survive within this world.

The last two years you have suffered of a low quality of life, even you didn’t know it. Only after your last surgery you became aware that something had seriously been wrong, and this has a great impact on your actual viewpoints and beliefs.

I know that you don’t hesitate to change your opinions if strong irrefutable arguments are presented to you but you will never renounce to some fundamental values that you have acquired during all those years. This does not mean that you are flawless, far from it. But on those mistakes, you were always accountable and people can question you and condemn you while you will do everything to repair.

“Losing loved ones” because of your mistakes and wrong judgments is probably the worst experience you have faced and that is something that haunts you. You consider this disquieting torment a necessary penance here as you don’t believe in a hereafter. You are right, it is too easy to ask for pardon in a confessional as no one can pardon you but those you were harming.

“Losing loved ones” is unbearable and that has been a guideline throughout your life. It has been playing a role in all your decisions and shaped your behavior. While you were yearning for human warmth you were building an invisible border. Whomever was crossing the line was rejected, not to mention a few exceptions. You were a master in creating distance with those you loved the most, being afraid of losing them while your conduct was resulting into the same.

As you are in a hurry I will not dig deeper but maybe read those last phrases a second time.

During your flight to Rwanda this week you were thinking that being in a plane is probably the most vulnerable situation of dependence one can experience. You can stop and step out of a bike, a car, a bus, a train, even out of a boat but at a height of twelve kilometers you have to wait to leave the plane after it has reached its destination. One can have deep anxious feelings about that situation but one can also enjoy this out of control and go into a state of surrendering devotion. I know that you have the same state of mind when you are going into surgery and you always have something to smile about when they will stun you.

During this interlude between departure and arrival your life is organized by a third party, and you are welcoming this as an ultimate moment of rest, as for a while your life is on halt.

Traveling has become more tiring for you than before but at the same time it is a necessity for you to survive, a lifeline, a moment of dreaming and planning without being able to start to execute your plans immediately. And if those plans don’t survive the hours and days after the intermission they probably were not meant to be implemented.

Deep within you, you know that your Rwandan adventure is slowly coming to an end. It does not come from unrest, at the contrary, you have planned and implemented with a regularity that you have rarely showed before, but based on a lifelong experience. I remember that once you said you wouldn’t regret the decision to go to Rwanda but rather the one not to follow your instinct. You still not give up your dream but you are aware of the difficulties you still have to face to make the dream alive. Those who promised you that things would go smoothly didn’t fool you, neither then neither now, as otherwise others who are probably more experienced than you would have brought those plans to a higher level before you.

I understood that you are convinced being in a hurry. As a bucket list will only increase the idea of the state of emergency, you think you find yourself in, you have decided to face life day by day but with strict self-imposed deadlines.

The time of prophecies is over. You consider your future as being too short for endless contemplations, albeit yesterday was as long as whatever day next year and as dangerous as every day since you were born.

The last four months you were living like a nomad, more than ever before. Maybe not so much physically but in your thoughts, feelings and emotions.

I guess you are still in that state of mind.

I guess this is why you are in a hurry.

Although the unknown mattresses and hospitality were given to you unconditionally, sleeping in your own bed now feels like a deliverance, a return to a state of independence. Home is where your bed is, and you have always decided yourself about that place!

And when the unrest starts at the end of the night, when thinking overrules the sleep, your own bed is the place to plan and reorganize what is left.

As you feel some stories are not finished, you told me you need to break out, to visit some places and reconnect with people, revive experiences, seeing long forgotten landscapes, discover new ones and smell forgotten scents.

Everyday I’m asking myself, Guy, why are you in a hurry?

Is it because of a ghost haunting me here and now or just because I feel my time is limited?

If I find a beginning of an answer I will write you again.

Yours, always.

Guy.