2005-09-27
By the Way, I'm Cool
sah, ah'm tah'd of marking little ditties. aaand, I don't know how to cook brown rice. aand, is brown basmati rice the same as brown rice brown rice?
***
oh, maybe my rice would cook faster if I turned the stove back on after burning the rice and transferring the non-burned, also not cooked yet, rice to another pot with more water.
So not macrobiotic. I have so much to learn. Also, I was so hungry when I got home that I ate a cheese and sprouts and fake meat sandwich. Also very un-macrobiotic. I guess, I still smoke, too.
But if I do my meridian stretches tonight, then maybe that'll make up for it. And eat some riz brun. or, burn.
***
In other news, I went to see a documentary about Rwanda today. "Rwanda today" in that I went this very evening to see the documentary, and also in that the documentary is about the situation in Rwanda right now.
Like, after over 100,000 "perpetrators" (is the word the speakers used, to mean genocidal murderers) were in jail, rotting, getting gangrene and not really get processed, so they set up civil courts in the various towns, called 'gacaca [pron. gachacha] tribunes' where the perpetrators would go back to their home towns and people could bring up accusations against them. And if the specific accusations could be proved (like, "he killed my husband, I watched him do it" "yeah, I saw it too, and I also saw him and his son chop so and so up") then the person would either be sent back to jail, or be allowed to stay in the town to do reconciliation, i.e. try to make up with the people who you were trying to eliminate from the face of the earth 11 years ago.
Crazy crazy shit. All these people living right next door to the people who killed their families / whose families they killed. Whoof. There were interviews with women in the town who were Hutus but married to Tutsis, so their husbands and children were killed; it was so awful to hear them -- more, to watch them, their eyes when they talked about it.
There were interviews with high school kids in this town too. So many of them were so well-spoken and mature. And the speaker afterward pointed this out and said that that's because a lot of them have been heads of households since 1994. Like, since they were 12.
Phoof. 7 more documentaries about Africa in this series. One more about Rwanda, then one about Chad, and then moving away from the conflict focus and onto artists and intellectuals in Africa and what they are saying, doing. Pretty cool. I don't know anything about Africa -- I don't think I know anyone who really does. That always has struck me as strange.
Oh right and I forgot to add that there are still about 80,000 perpetrators in prison. This gacaca thing is pretty slow-moving. Also, did you know that Belgium had colonized Rwanda at one point? It was their idea that the Tutsis were racially superior to the Hutus and thus naturally the ruling class... because of the shape of their heads. So they made this "superiority" law. Idiot bastards. Nothing new, I know.
pansycline at 11:01 p.m.