Kigali Marathon for Peace

This weekend I participated in the 5th Annual International Peace Marathon in Kigali, sponsored by Soroptomist International, a European NGO whose mission is to end violence against women and children worldwide. The event drew thousands of Rwandans, ex-patriots and tourists to the main stadium in town, where the race began and ended. It started at 8AM with a 5K run for children, followed by the half marathon(21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) and the full marathon of 42 kilometers (26.2 miles). When I first arrived in Rwanda in January, I started running with my housemate Kate and our friend Els, a British citizen here with Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO). A few weeks into our runs Kate and Els informed me that they were planning on training for and running the half marathon in the spring, and that I should join them in the endeavor. I was initially opposed to the idea, rationalizing that I wasn’t a fan of running distances because it always got so boring; I’d never run more than 6 miles at a time in my life prior to this year, and usually ran about 3 miles at a time. I had completed a sprint triathlon in high school but doubted I could keep up with the training of Kate, who had run two half marathons and a full one while living in the US, and Els, who completed the Kigali half marathon last year. In any case, after about a month living in Rwanda and realizing that 1) the weather was good for running almost year round 2) I had enough time in my schedule to devote to training and 3) I had two great people to train with, I decided to go for it.

Some of you may remember my description of going for runs in Rwanda from one of my first blog entries in January. In short, most people in passing get very excited to see a muzungu or three jogging through the hillside or through town and will be quite vocal about it, shouting words of encouragement and sometimes joining in on the fun by running alongside or behind you for a time. Recently Kate and I started hearing a new phrase from villagers every time we would run, muzungu quiruhu. We were perplexed for a while and eventually asked a Rwandan friend for an explanation of what this phrase means. He started laughing A LOT and told us that it comes from a popular radio commercial in which a young child and his mother are picking out cabbages at the market, and the child sees a white person (muzungu) and points in surprise. The mother tells the boy that it is impolite to do that and explains that as the cabbage leaf is green, that person is only white on the outside, muzungu quiruhu. It may not make much sense without actually understanding the Kinyarwanda, but he explained to us that it probably means that those who say it know that we live in Nyamata just like them and we’re only white on the outside, i.e. we don’t lead extravagant lifestyles as they consider most whites living outside of Rwanda or just visiting the country to lead. It may sound strange, but learning this made us feel better about our standing here, as if all the staring and pointing and shouting of “muzungu!” seemed a little less bothersome.

In any case, with all of the training that we did in preparation for the half marathon, we had hoped that people in Nyamata and surrounding villages recognized us by now. We started doing the bulk of our training in early April by going for long runs each Saturday morning, increasing the distance by increments of 2K each time. I had become accustomed to running 6K regularly during the week and sometimes up to 8, but on weekends we trained by running 10, 12, 14, 16 and eventually 18K two weeks before the event. We also used these long distances to get to know the main road through Nyamata and surrounding villages even better. All of the paved main roads from Kigali have each kilometer marked; where our school is located is just at the 28K marker. We used that to our advantage to measure the distance of our runs, either toward Kigali (on our 16K run we made it all the way to the Kigali district boundary) or toward Burundi, in the other direction. We even kept up our training when we were out of town for the weekend, visiting lovely Kibuye or Gisenyi. In Kibuye, Kate and I did an intense 90 minute swim in Lake Kivu which ended up being a lot more difficult than we anticipated - the distance from one point to another and back looked much shorter from land than it actually was - and about three weeks before the race we did a 12K run from the town center in Gisenyi, another vacation spot on Lake Kivu, around the steepest and most rocky hillside I’ve ever traversed on foot, to the Primus factory and back. After that deceptively treacherous run, we knew we were prepared for the marathon.

The race itself was quite a challenge. I felt prepared physically and mentally, but the course was true to Rwandan landscape: relentlessly hilly and therefore arduous. We were fortunate to have a great base of fans there to cheer us on and hand us water at different spots along the route, including Andy and his mom, visiting from Kansas, two colleagues from our school and their friends, ex-pats we knew from Kigali and a huge group of VSO volunteers who had come in for the weekend from different parts of Rwanda to watch Els and other VSOs compete. Kate and I wore Maranyundo School tee-shirts and I was proud of myself for keeping close behind her the entire time, finishing the race just 8 minutes after she did. My final time was 2 hours and 17 minutes. Although I kept a moderate pace for most of the event, it was incredible to be in the same race as some of the fastest runners in world, Kenyan and Ethiopian men and women whose sleek, athletic bodies I admired as they whizzed past me in their quest to finish the full marathon in record time. Another inspiring contestant was a 30-something year old man with one leg, who completed the half marathon on his crutches in under two and a half hours. Seeing him finish the same distance as me in spite of his physical handicap helped me realize how lucky I am to be able to do so many things unobstructed.

There were several points during the race upon summiting a hill when I looked out over the sweeping cityscape ahead and a certain euphoria came over me. Living in Rwanda these past five months has given me so much to consider and think about with respect to human interaction and communication, Rwandan and European history and colonization, political systems and social and economic development, and working to find my role and responsibilities in this complex world. In a way, the months of training leading up to the marathon were a lot like the months I spent preparing to move to Rwanda. In both instances, not only did I have to think long and hard about whether I was ready to take on such a great endeavor, but I also had to make sacrifices of time and energy to enable me to go. Like the weekend and week day early mornings I spent running what seemed like obscene distances at times, in accepting my position as a language mentor and community volunteer at Maranyundo, I also committed to raising at least $5,000 for the school. Thanks to the support and financial assistance of so many of you, my family and friends, I was able to raise over $10,000 for the school, and remarkably so, at a time in history in which many Americans are struggling financially to make their own ends meet.

As I have shared with many of you in the past, it was not an easy decision to leave family, friends, work colleagues and a familiar way of life behind in Washington and in the States. But in my work and interactions here with small children, Maranyundo’s teenage students and the adults that I meet in the district I know that I made the right decision in coming. As with any major life change, there are growing pains, frustrations and unforeseen challenges on the horizon. But just because my legs (and lungs) hurt a lot after finishing the marathon doesn’t mean I regret any part of the process.