I’m suffering from Butare bellyache

There is something about Butare that really gets a brother down Maybe it’s the incessant rain and cold wind that chills the bones and tightens the skin, or maybe it’s the fact that its seems to be the town that history forgot. I really can’t put my finger on the thing that makes me feel uneasy as soon as I see the National Museum appear in the distance but, all I can say, is that I leave my cheery self on the Nyabarongo bridge. However, I still have to live in Butare for a few more days because of my debt to the National University. No, I don’t owe them any money, but I owe them a publication. Let me tell you guys something; the next person who asks me, “when are you finishing your memoir”, shouldn’t be surprised when I burst into tears! I’m having a very hard time of it, I’ll have you know. I can sit on a computer and type out an article of any length without breaking out a sweat…however; a memoir is an altogether different animal. You have to read textbooks you’d rather not look at. Instead of going to Facebook website or Soccernet I have to suffer with Google Books. Instead of sleeping at ten o’clock, I’m going to bed after midnight…and then dreaming about an obscure law that I might have forgotten to mention in chapter two. Like I said earlier, things aren’t as easy as I would like. The kind of stress that I’ve been going through made me feel like a balloon that was just about to burst. So, instead of going crazy and doing harm to myself or someone else, I decided to do something to de-stress myself. Butare isn’t exactly party central. This town is strange; even if you have money in your pocket, it’s impossible to spend it. More especially if you’ve already eaten and don’t want to drink yourself silly (even if I wanted to…I’d have no company to give me morale). Luckily, it was Friday and that meant that MeloTwist was open. If you don’t know, MeloTwist is Butare’s nightclub of choice (Club Sauna is sooo out of fashion; we left it to the houseboys and girls of the town). So, after a visit to the bank to raid my account, I hit the club with a serious urge to dance, make merry and forget my worries…at least for a few hours anyway. After paying a grand to get in, I hit the dance floor. That was the idea anyway. But there was a small problem; the place looked like a funeral wake, albeit with disco lights and music pumping. There was no one inside other than the DJ, a bored-looking bartender, a woman who looked suspiciously like a lady of the night, and the OB. Hmm…it was what I like to call, a ‘hard paper’. But, what the hell, I’d come to have a good time and I was going to have one…even if it killed me. I went to the bar and ordered a Petit Mutzig. Then another, and another, and another….and by the time I’d returned to the floor, lo, the place was packed with dancing bodies OF MEN! I went to an all-boys secondary school and we had this thing we called a Bull Dance. Well, a few years down the road, and in a different country, I was in another Bull Dance. But I didn’t have much choice, and with one shot of Waragi to fortify me, I hit the floor. But these guys were dancing like it was a competition. Moves from the early Nineties were the flavour of the day; I used to like dancing like MC Hammer back in those days, but I’ve aged rather ungracefully, and my poor sinews couldn’t handle. So, here I am, suffering from not only the usual stress and boredom…but I think I pulled a stomach muscle trying to keep up with ‘Can’t Touch This’. Contact: madogz2002@yahoo.ca