Day 9: Butare, Lessons in the Ethnogram

Day 9. Started with hands-on science, passed through some of the heaviest subject matter of the trip, and ended in what might be the nicest hotel room I've ever stayed in. The range of this trip continues to surprise me.

Learning the Ethogram

Morning kicked off with a wildlife observation session led by Dr. Rundus. Subject: vervet monkeys. Goal: learning how to document animal behavior using an ethogram — a catalog of precisely defined behaviors that researchers use when observing animals in the field.

We sat and watched the vervets for about 30-45 minutes, practicing how to record observations in a systematic way. Sounds simple. There's a real discipline to it. You have to separate what the animal is actually doing from what you think it's doing. You have to use precise terminology. Track timing, context, interactions. Dr. Rundus walked us through the process and corrected us when we were being too vague or too interpretive. Good exercise, and a preview of the kind of fieldwork coming later in the trip.

The Campus Genocide Memorial

After the ethogram session, we visited the genocide memorial on the university campus. It honors the students and faculty killed in 1994. Photographs of the victims. Graves on the grounds.

What makes a memorial like this one particularly difficult is the intimacy of the setting. These weren't anonymous victims in a distant province. These were people who walked the same paths we were walking, who sat in the same classrooms, who studied and taught on this exact campus. And then, in a matter of weeks, they were gone. Murdered by neighbors, colleagues, sometimes by people they had taught. University life was continuing around us as we stood there — students moving between buildings, ordinary afternoon sounds — and the contrast was hard to sit with.

Shopping and the Drive South

Time to shop at a local co-op, then a three-hour drive through the mountains to our next accommodation. Rwanda's hills are relentless. The road curves and climbs and drops, and just when you think you've reached the top of something another ridge appears. Beautiful and exhausting in equal measure.

The Presidential Suite

Arrived at the hotel and was shown to my room. Except it wasn't a room. It was a suite — specifically, the suite usually held for presidential visits. No idea how that happened. Not about to question it. After days of cramped bathrooms and modest accommodations, I was suddenly standing in a space four times larger than anywhere I'd slept so far on this trip. Settled in quickly.

An Unexpected Gesture

Before the day ended, one of the Rwandan students did something I wasn't prepared for. He told me he'd dedicated his undergraduate thesis to me. Just me — Mike. We'd spent a relatively short time together, but the connections on this trip clearly ran deeper than I'd realized. Didn't know how to respond. Still don't, really. It was humbling in a way I wasn't ready for.

Turned in early. Five a.m. departure for chimpanzee tracking. Needed every minute of rest available.