It is the dry season. There is no sign of rain until September, so I am told. The soil is cracked and incredibly dry. Some areas are a beautiful burnt orange, bordering on the red more often seen in ominous sunsets. Neighboring tracts give way to an unusually dark brown. As if the grounds crew has just watered the infield at the end of the third inning. If only. Still other patches look like piles of thin dust swept together, waiting for a dustpan to move them to a more promising location. Anywhere else will do. I am told the soil is very poor and rocky. One look confirms this account. I’m not quite sure how anything is growing right now, but I bet this landscape is gorgeous during the rainy season, when all the dust has washed off of the leaves of the surrounding foliage. For now, skepticism rises within me that any of the plants I see will last until harvest. Unless harvest is tomorrow. I doubt that is the case.

I am reminded of how much we take water for granted. Summertime in the San Joaquin Valley or the Midwest? Triple digit temperatures? Just turn on the water pump and irrigate overnight. ‘Irrigation’ would be a euphemism for ‘river’ here. ‘River’ would be a euphemism for ‘glorified leak’. Unfortunately for the foundation of Burundian agriculture (‘agriculture’ being a euphemism for ‘life’), the foreman did an unbelievably effective job at sealing those off during this season. The conditions here make a mockery of all the “Congress Created Dustbowl” signs along the agricultural stretches of I-5 and Highway 99 in California.

But I digress. Umwumbati (cassava) turns to ibitoki (bananas). Ibitoki turn to inanasi (pineapples). Thousands upon thousands of inanasi. These are not your typical mildly-flavored-kleptocratic-Banana-Republic-harvested-three-weeks-before-they-should-be-so-they-can-be-shipped-to-the-U.S.-yearround-for-$2.99-apiece Dole or Del Monte inanasi. These are so fresh that I smell pineapple as I get out of the truck.

I am in the town of Musongati. The fields I look at are worked by a new federation of five distinct collective farming associations organized by Floresta Burundi. There are over three hundred people farming together here. On roughly five hectares. Barely twelve acres. For three hundred people. Each an agricultural ambassador from their family. The Burundian ‘nuclear’ family averages over seven children. Typical household membership hovers in the low double digits, as orphaned or distant relatives can surely not be denied shelter and care. Burundian hospitality runs deep. Even when that hospitality necessitates dividing your meager assets into smaller and smaller portions. How is five hectares supposed to feed nearly three thousand people? Where is Jesus when you need him? Can somebody book him to move back into the neighborhood? Surely feeding 3,000 is easier than 5,000 or 20,000, right? Surely, he could do this during his downtime, when he’s not busy blessing America or providing her motorists with parking spaces at the mall.

And to think that these five hectares have only recently been rented by the federation. These are five more hectares than these 300 farmers were exploiting (the preferred translation of my Burundian colleagues, which consistently makes me wince at the irony) at the beginning of this year. An upgrade. I thought scholars were exaggerating, miserable-izing the land conditions here when they write that the average post-war landholding per household is a whopping 0.18 hectares. Less than half of an acre. For a household. Whose means of survival is agriculture. Godspeed.

For now, I walk between pineapples on rented land, as the leaders of each association race around looking for ‘the perfect inanasi’ to offer me. Meanwhile, I ask questions. Playing the ‘researcher card’ helps me feel more comfortable interrogating the ins and outs of the nature of pineapple farming. The findings are nothing short of astonishing.

How long after planting does the inanasi produce fruit?

Two years.

No, no. Once you plant the pineapple, how long until you can harvest the fruit?

Two years.

So you have nothing for two years?! How do you ensure they grow?

Yes…we hope for rain.

Two years of waiting, with no harvest. Talk about start-up costs. But this is the cost of diversifying in a land of coffee, tea, bananas and cassava. The country is not saturated in pineapples. Yet. And I can see why. I inquire about the effort, and how it is ‘worth it’ to wait. After the two-year waiting period, a plant will produce fruit three times a year. Four if you’re lucky. I see plants with multiple fruits. Some with two, others three, some with shoots that look like they could produce even more. Perhaps this is a productive enterprise. I ask how many pineapples a plant will produce during a single harvest season. My question kicks off an eight-minute debate between federation leaders. I thought it was a fairly straightforward question. It turns out that each plant can produce four. Or ten. Or six. How do you predict how many? We can’t. It depends on the weather.

Two years of pure start-up cost, with no profit. The only gain appears to be the roots in the soil that prevent this hillside from eroding. And the hope of a harvest. The hope of ten pineapples per plant, when reality may bring four.

I ask if we can purchase the pineapples that they have picked, which lay at my feet in the most beautifully-smelling heap. I repeatedly pick them up and smell them. Everyone laughs. This mzungu keeps smelling the inanasi.

Their eyes tell me they are proud that I am enjoying them. They cannot stop smiling. They insist I take them for free.

I insist on paying. What is the market value of one inanasi?

Oh, the price is high now, because it is the dry season: 200 Burundian francs.

If you were to pay 17 cents for one, you would receive change with your purchase.

They have picked eight so far. 1600 Burundian francs worth. I have two bills on me: one is worth 1,000 francs. The other, a barely legible mess of fiber allegedly worth 5,000. I don’t want them to try to give me change. Give me 25 inanasi, I request. Machete-wielding men bound between plants. A mother’s worst nightmare waiting to happen.

Soon there are 25 pineapples dog-piling the floorboard behind the driver’s seat of the truck. The vehicle has never smelled so good, I am sure.

25 pineapples X 200 Burundian francs per pineapple = 5,000 francs. Divided by the most recent conversion rate I saw of 1,265 francs per $1 U.S…

I have just purchased more than two dozen of the freshest pineapples on the planet for $3.95. That will be put into a common pool. Supporting 300 farmers. And their families.

I fold the 1,000 franc note into the larger bill. A 20% tip. We say goodbye and drive off with our 25 inanasi, to be doled out (no pun intended) to the Floresta staff and to my stomach.

For less than 19 cents apiece.

Judging by the friends I have made, the national psyche is bruised and battered. No wonder so many of them want to leave to go study elsewhere. Amsterdam. Brussels. London. Portland, Maine. Alaska, even. Seriously, I met a Congo-born, Burundi-raised, Rwanda-educated pharmacist who now lives in Alaska, and was back visiting for his sister’s wedding this past weekend. And not your actual-responsibilities, Alaska, but somewhere-near-Point-Hope-as-far-as-I-can-get-from-Burundi, Alaska. The few that ‘make it’ here seem to either go into politics, or leave.

So we left. Bujumbura, that is, on the way to Rutana on the other side of the country. By other side of the country, I mean two and a half hours away, near the border with Tanzania. The drive out of Bujumbura leaves me in awe. All the photos I have Googled to try to make sense of the agricultural demographics and the land arrangements I have read about – they’re all true. And then some.

Our driver’s name is Sebastian. He wears a floppy hat with the drawstring pulled up under his chin, and a black checkered shirt tucked into his fairly tight jeans. He resembles what I would imagine is the closest thing to a Burundian cowboy. Yet instead of a horse he commands a Land Cruiser and drives like Mario Andretti (Google it). Sebastian races around the windy roads so fast that I think we’re going to fly off the embankments. I get nostalgic for the “safe” driving of Mumbai, Bangkok and Addis Ababa. As it turns out, the government used to close the main road into and out of Bujumbura at 4:00pm every day during the war, because various militias would set ambushes, halt cars, and set fire to them and their passengers if the inhabitants inside were found to be of the wrong ethnic group or political persuasion (two identities that often, but not always, went together). It is 3:36pm. Perhaps Sebastian is a creature of habit.

My apologies for the blurriness of the next few pictures. I wasn’t about to ask Sebastian to stop driving, and this is my attempt to capture how Burundians live out the back passenger window.

If I had a protractor with me, I would measure the angle of these hillsides. But I don’t, so I won’t. I will just say that they are steep. Incredibly steep. As in, every Burundian child should get a set of mountain climbing gear for their 10th birthday so they can “go to work” the following day and rappel down the hillsides safely. If there were truly a work-based free-market meritocracy, Burundian farmers would be gods. How do you harvest tea on hillside like this? Nothing is mechanized. Everything is tilled, planted, worked, harvested by hand. There is no cheap foreign labor to exploit. Your labor supply consists of landless neighbors desperate for work and your own children. So you make a choice with the latter – send them to school? Or make sure the family has enough to eat?

How desperate does one have to be to make this one’s farming home? I can see why the opportunity cost of joining rebel movements are so low – what are you risking by joining a movement that gives you a weapon and allows you to pillage what you want? It sure beats farming this every day, only to lug the surplus to the market where 374 other farmers with the exact same product will be selling their own wares right next to you.

I have no idea what the short-term solution is. I have long-term ideas. For now, how do you turn the pictures above into this?

It is Sunday morning in Bujumbura. Time for church. I am warned that I will not understand anything. That is ok. It will force me to observe and interpret. Hopefully I will not fall asleep. I have done that before.

In fitting fashion, we arrive late, which is also ok. But then, being the only white attendee and obvious visitor, I am ushered up to sit in the front of the church with the pastor and elders. When this happened in Ethiopian churches eight years ago, I wanted to crawl in a hole with embarrassment and a desire to avoid attention. I still don’t like being the center of attention, but I have learned how to better receive gifts of hospitality and recognition. I cannot deny my skin color, my privilege, my “otherness” here. Further, it would be an insult to deny the hospitality of my hosts. So, I sit in the front, facing perpendicular to the rest of the church, and smile at all of the faces looking at me.

I am introduced by the pastor, who says it is an honor to have an American worshipping with us today. It represents God’s love for all nations, an especially fitting image, being that today is Pentecost. Pentecost? I had completely forgotten that this past Sunday was Pentecost. Pseudo-Anglican fail. It is appropriate that I spend this day with Africans again. Last year I was listening to perhaps the single worst sermon/homily I have ever heard (and I have heard many bad sermons), given by an older white woman to a group of Sudanese refugees, with virtually no relevance to the context or story of the refugees in the pews. This year is a little different.

The pastor proceeds to say that the experience of Pentecost, of the giving of the Holy Spirit and spiritual empowerment to the fledgling and cowering Church would be “like this American suddenly being able to speak our Congolese language!” As this is translated, two thoughts crash through my brain. The first is, “Sweet Moses, what if they try to make me speak in a new language today?!” The second is, “Congolese?!”

During a break for announcements, my translator explains that this is a Congolese church, attended by refugees and Burundians alike. Many refugees here survived the massacre at Gatumba.

I have not heard of this massacre.

The story of Congolese refugees in Burundi is conflated to one statistic in my literature, generally reading, “There are an estimated 24,500 Congolese refugees living in Burundi” and then nothing more.

In 2004, a predominantly Hutu Burundian rebel group attacked a refugee camp a few kilometers from the border of the DRC. Between 150 and 180 Congolese Tutsi were killed, and many were injured.

My translator begins to point out people in the church who were there. People who survived. He points to one man in the front row. He tells me to look at the man’s head.

There is a scar.

It looks like a crack in a windshield of a car, a small web created by an intoxicated spider, a dermatological snowflake.

It is a bullet wound. From the massacre. The man survived, but is left with severe impairments to his mobility. I then notice his crutches.

And that he is standing, with the help of the elders of the church.

To worship.

There are no guitars here. No drums. Only two microphones, a keyboard and some speakers. I’m not sure I want to know how many days’ wages they would have cost the average parishioner. A keyboard player sets a back beat for the next song, a melody reminiscent of a terribly synthesized ‘80s pop song. The speakers pop and crackle.

The worship leader has a voice slightly better than mine. Which means it is somewhere between ‘The Wedding Singer’ and a dying rabbit. (I’ll leave you to decide which more closely resembles my own voice.) But she is passionate, and everybody joyfully follows. This isn’t your performance-oriented and professionalized US evangelical worship service.

Women in patterned dresses step side to side, their high heels kicking up clumps of dirt and mud on the church floor, further dusting their ankles and leaving small pock-marks in the soil.

Various men dance by jogging in place, their feet kicking up behind them in an exaggerated Jazzercize routine that would make Richard Simmons soil himself with glee. The men raise both hands above their heads, pushing them upwards and out, then retracting them, repeating this around the church in all directions, as if they are stocking retail boxes on a high shelf in a circular room. While running.

A steel blue and white chicken navigates the commotion, darting between chair legs and exercising feet. Its feathers are disheveled. Life in Burundi is hard, even for chickens. Paltry poultry.

The pastor begins to preach out of Ezekiel 37, about breathing life into dry bones. A beautiful and bizarre text in its own right. Downright chilling when you realize that Tutsi bones reside in churches a few hundred kilometers north of here, most famously in Ntarama, Rwanda. Commemorations of previous massacres, anxiously waiting for a breath of life 17 years later.

There are no spiritual platitudes here. At least there are none translated to me. What is present is a message of hope. That the Spirit who can breathe life into a valley of dry bones can breath life into refugees with sunken cheeks and hungry stomachs. Who can breathe life into a people whose families have been hunted down and killed, stalked at night even in a foreign land. Who can breathe life into people trapped between home and that place where there will be no more weeping, mourning or tears.

Because this is Pentecost. A foreshadowing of life to come.

This is Buyenzi.

Buyenzi is a “mixed” community, not like neighboring districts, which are populated almost exclusively by Hutu and Tutsi, respectively. Buyenzi is cohabited by Hutu and Tutsi. It is also cohabited by Christians and Muslims. It was also one of the most peaceful communities during the war, virtually untouched by violence.

Wait, what did you say? Before the war or after the war?

No, during the war.

All 12-15 years? (nobody can agree on whether the war [alternately just called “the crisis, as if it was some temporary, bounded event] ended in 2005 or 2008. I prefer the 2008 marker for a number of reasons, but I digress)

Yes. Actually, the Muslims hid persecuted Tutsis and Hutus in their homes during the conflict.

In their homes?

Yes, first in their mosque and then in their homes. Actually, in Rwanda the same thing happened during the genocide. Now, Muslim holy days are celebrated as Rwandan national holidays. Each year, at the national “commemoration” of the anniversary of the start of the genocide (April 6), a Muslim imam is granted special status to address the nation on the topic of peace.

[cue brain spinning and internal monologue…]

How much of a surplus of social capital does it take to withstand a wave of genocidal violence?

What makes somebody risk their life to embrace “the other” in a context where “the other” is synonymous with “the enemy whom I am told wants to eliminate me, my family and my people from the earth”?

Does it change things if such social capital is based in elite or impoverished circles? Urban or rural ones?

How many small conflicts must be painstakingly resolved without coercion in order to weave together a social fabric that has been so easily torn for so many generations?

Can such an environment be cultivated?

Repeated?

Replicated elsewhere?

How do I devote my life to this?

Somehow, it feels like everywhere you turn in Bujumbura leads you to Lake Tanganyika, which Burundians will proudly tell you is the second deepest lake in the world. I was asked if I was a geographer when I mentioned Lake Baikal, which evidently is a sore spot. Receiving the “Penultimate Deepest Lake Award” isn’t as flattering as one would think. Burundi can’t seem to be at the top of many lists, that is, save for current US Travel Warnings. Orakoze, al Shabaab. Despite the marine layer-like haze, Tanganyika is beautiful. Cloud formations form rapidly right in front of your eyes as wind whips over the lake and hits the mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which can barely be seen in this photo.

Adding to the glory that is Lake Tanganyika are the flavorful piscine delights that emerge it. Below is the unbelievably tasty Mekeke (Muh-kAy-kAy), indigenous only to Tanganyika.

When in Bujumbura…folks eat with their hands. I was challenged to “eat like a Burundian” by my new friends. Not a problem, I’ve eaten with my meathooks before. However, what made things interesting was not the utensil of choice, but the realization that napkins in Burundi appear to be less frequently employed in Bujumbura than young men. And that’s saying something. Oh, and I’m no ichthyologist, but my new-found professional experience tells me that the Mekeke has about a gazillion very small, opaque toothpick-like bones throughout. Very tasty toothpick-like bones, I do declare.

I was subsequently challenged to eat the Mekeke head. With the fried gizzards still on my mind from the previous evening, I deftly responded, “You show me how. I will follow.” Evidently such a response induces the Burundian equivalent of “Oh, snap!” among single young men, followed by the obligatory dares for a colleague to lead the way in showing this mzungu how to consume the cabeza of the mekeke. Fortunately for me, I had no role model for such an endeavor. The head likely remains a contested item in one of Bujumbura’s many public trash heaps.

It’s wonderful how food brings people together, especially people from ridiculously different backgrounds. Tasty food and good laughs are a great springboard for the cultivation of social capital among strangers. But how do you cultivate social capital between those historically in conflict with one another? How many mekeke lunches would it take (should they be affordable to the parties in question) to prevent an outbreak of violent conflict between neighbors? How much social capital must be invested by ordinary citizens to squelch the onset of collective violence in a nation that has seen far too much of it? What’s the necessary ratio, if there is any, of social capital to physical capital in one of the poorest countries on earth?

No answers here, only more questions and forthcoming blog posts, which will be roughly as follows:
*Cashing in on social capital in crisis
*Pentecost Sunday with Congolese refugees
*Journey to my summer home in Rutana
*Introducing my translator, Bertrand
*In their own words: sobering thoughts of Burundians on life

The side-street to my weekend hotel was an adventure in and of itself, with the pavement of one side of the road melting away into potholes and chasms so deep they could hide our 1971 Volkswagen Bug back home. It was as if an urban high tide slowly crept up and swallowed half of the street before receding into the darkness.

The accommodations here are pretty basic: bed, mosquito net, desk, bathroom. No trash can. No frills. But they do have pink toilet paper. After a vast survey of two bathrooms in Bujumbura (the other being at the airport), I have come to conclude that toilet paper in Burundi is pink. That is awesome. I kinda want to take some with me for proof, but I’m also guessing that the hotel doesn’t provide a new roll for each guest, and I would then be that elitist mzungu (white person) who perpetuated the rape of Africa down to…the pink toilet paper. So I’ll simply take a photo instead.

Oh, but the hotel has Internet, that bastion of connectivity that forms the lifeblood of graduate students. The only problem? There are no functional wall outlets that fit my international travel power adapter. The designated “internet room” – which is just a room with a bunch of tables and chairs has one, yes one, completely non-functional wall outlet. My personal room has two outlets that fit African plugs, but are “decorated” with such a thick external wall trim that my plug doesn’t fit. So I look around as my computer dies, I have no local cell phone, and I am not precisely sure when I am being picked up by my new boss for the summer, whom I’ve only communicated with through email. After scouring what seemed to be the entire hotel compound and my own room, my search leads me to the last place I’d think of, to the bathroom. There I find the most amazing discovery – roughly two meters up the wall is an electrical outlet. That fits my adapter. And has power. Hallelujah. So now I upload this post, the first of many this summer, from my Bujumbura office.

Kiribu.

For the impending summer, it will be converted into my own travel blog, as I venture off to do fieldwork in Burundi. Rutana, Burundi, to be specific.

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More to come, but for now I have to convince a professor in 12 pages or less that my research is feasible. Wish me luck.