I'm waiting to be surprised how easy it is to forget.

The film was Hotel Rwanda. My friends and I went to a screening of it tonight at the American Cultural Center in Cotonou. Not particularly because we wanted to see the movie again, but because it was something to do at an unfamiliar place in a city with which we were trying to become more familiar.

My first interaction with Hotel Rwanda was, like most people who lived in the western world in 1994, one of guilt. And this was in my living room in the United States. In a room full of Beninese, it was more familiar. 

There is a scene when all of the western citizens are being evacuated from the hotel, and the staff has just realized that no one is coming to help them and the thousand refugees staying at the hotel. A British cameraman is ashamed at his ability to leave and the Rwandans’ inability to do so. It is raining, and as he turns to walk out on the people he has just lived with for the last week with the knowledge that they may not survive after he goes, a hotel porter opens an umbrella and walks him to the bus.  The cameraman scoffs at the porter and sends him back under the awning, out of the rain.

It is with this feeling that I’ve become more familiar in the past year.

The respect with which I am treated in this country I have done little to earn. And is so much more than the respect given to a woman who was born into this society. I can work as hard as I can to empower those women for the next 12 months and teach those women about how they deserve what they want and how these unspoken rules about what they accept as an acceptable form of treatment are false. But one day (and it’s a day that is approaching faster and faster) I am going to disappear into the rain and back to a country that recognizes equality between the sexes and has seen waves of feminism and the unspoken rules that run the society allow for women to be unsatisfied with what they have been given. Where I can go back to pretending that the rest of the world must also be like this.