I didn’t realize the hostel was a prosthetic limb factory until I checked in and walked around the property. A firestorm of sparks rained from the building next to mine, while men wielding saws and operating welding equipment walked in and out of the concrete structure. Though this was late 2010, the workers were still constructing parts for the thousands of people who had been maimed by machetes in the 1994 genocide. On my way back to my room, I stumbled over a stray fake leg.
This was my first night in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and I was terrified.
I was paying $35 a night for a room that resembled a jail cell. Windowless concrete loomed about 25 feet high. There was a smaller stone wall that partitioned off the bathroom, which consisted of a shower head, a clogged drain and a seatless toilet that didn’t flush. For an extra $10 a night I could have upgraded to hot water, but I couldn’t indulge in such luxuries. The price of the room was already beyond my budget of $27 a day.
The room also contained a bed. Above that, it looked like the ceiling vomited out a mosquito net. Somebody before me had made sizable holes in the fabric. I covered the holes with pieces of duct tape to keep the bugs out.
This trip was inspired by a crisis of conscience. My mother, who put off her dreams in order to raise a family, was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. My job as a newspaper journalist had become routine and boring, and I no longer had the enthusiasm that carried me through the first 13 years of my career. Each day I wrote stories about other people — bright, talented people achieving things, traveling to far-flung places, making a difference in their communities — and wondered when it would be my turn.
I was traveling the same path as my mother, I realized, putting my own goals on hold and allowing experiences to float by. So I quit my job and concocted this crazy plan to backpack the world, creating footprints in places my mom was unable to go. With the support and encouragement of my husband, I said goodbye to him for a year and promised to send postcards.
That didn’t mean that travel came without difficulties. By the time I landed in Rwanda, I had already backpacked through seven countries in five months. I knew the first night in a new country was always overwhelming. The ear still needed to be tuned to new language and different dialects. There was money to be changed. And getting ripped off was inevitable — I couldn’t calculate the exchange rate fast enough and didn’t yet know how much a taxi should cost. This happened so regularly that I considered it a tourist tax.
In Kigali, I was flat broke and hungry. This hostel was far on the outskirts of town. Best as I could tell there was nothing within walking distance. The bus from Kampala, Uganda, arrived too late to find a bank and exchange any of my Ugandan shillings into Rwandan francs. The last of my U.S. dollars went to pay for two nights in this hostel. It was the rainy season. The air outside felt slick and unsettling.
There was a smashed, Bolivian granola bar, four months old, in the bottom of my pack. It tasted like oatmeal made of soot. While I chewed, I paced the concrete floor. I felt out of place, lonely, uncomfortable, and I couldn’t even complain to anyone because there was no internet or phone service. Just when I thought things couldn’t get more dispiriting, the one lightbulb in the room gave up and went dark, like it committed suicide.
I sat on the bed and wrapped the filmy mosquito net around me. Then I cried. I cried as the room remained frustrating and dark. I cried as mosquitos found fat holes in the net and stung my ears. I cried as the toilet spontaneously belched foul-smelling water onto the floor. I cried because maybe my family was right and I should have stayed at home where everything seemed safe and certain. Then I cried because I felt guilty for crying in a country that has known true horror.
I needed a severe dose of comfort. I needed the finest Lifetime film from the entire Nora Roberts collection. I needed Montana Sky.
My husband once said I never finish anything except a Lifetime movie.
He’s right. Our home is a shrine to failed hobbies and pastimes, books I meant to finish later, activities that never quite retained my attention.
But Lifetime movies? Some people call Lifetime movies a guilty pleasure, but I just call them a pleasure. They have this magnetic quality that captures the viewer from beginning to end, transporting me far beyond my daily troubles. They are like meditation, if meditation involved weeping women and domestic drama.
That said, I never realized how much I cherished Lifetime movies until I began packing for my trip around the world. My backpack was a high-tech thing with all kinds of zippers and hidden pockets, which I stuffed with all kinds of fancy and foreign-to-me gear — surprisingly expensive fleece clothing, a water sterilizer, solar chargers, first aid kits, a quick-dry towel. A smaller cross-body bag held all my essentials — passport, wallet, camera, lipgloss. I traded my high heels for a rugged pair of ugly sandals, and I was ready to hit the road.
During a last-minute panic, I realized that not only would I be traveling without any of my go-to comforts. No pints of Soy Delicious ice cream. No more cuddling with my dog and cat. And no Lifetime movies.
I chose to make this trip for many reasons — to shake off the banality of my everyday life, to do something spectacular and special, to honor my mother. And yes, part of my motivation was to see what happened when I was far from the comforts of home. However, in that moment of hysteria, I decided I couldn’t travel without Lifetime movies as a kind of lifeline. I downloaded 10 of them, just in case of emergency, everything from Amish Grace to I Do (But I Don’t). I stashed half of them on my iPod, the rest on an old iPhone. If one of my electronic devices got lost, stolen or ruined, I’d still have a backup.
For the first five months of travel, I didn’t watch any of the movies. Not when I lived with a collective of Hare Krishnas in rural Argentina. Not when I was attacked by a monkey in Bolivia. Not even in my lonesome hut on the Wild Coast of South Africa, where a rotting whale carcass washed up on the shore.
Then I got to Rwanda.
They call Rwanda “the land of one thousand hills,” but I couldn’t see any of them from inside that prosthetic limb factory/hostel. However, it was as good a place as any to see some Montana Sky.
Montana Sky is the story of multimillionaire cattle rancher Jack Mercy. At his funeral, his three daughters, all born to different women, meet for the first time. There they discover that all three sisters must live on the farm together for one year before they can receive their inheritance.
By the time actress Kimberly Williams found love in the most unexpected place — rival rancher John Corbett — I was finally relaxed enough to sleep.
The next day in Kigali was better. I had Rwandan money in my pocket and a belly full of delicious sweet potatoes, beans and cassava. Still I felt restless. Sure, I was taking the trip my mother never could. But what difference was I making by wandering around Rwanda? What purpose did I serve?
My companion for the night was Angels Fall, in which Heather Locklear plays Reese Gilmore, also a stranger in a strange land. To escape the traumatic memories of a gunman’s attack, chef Reese travels to Wyoming and begins a new life. When she becomes involved with a mystery writer, the memories begin to haunt her again.
A couple weeks passed. I moved out of the prosthetic limb factory and into a youth hostel closer to downtown Kigali. My new neighborhood was filled with embassies, and snipers lined nearby rooftops. In addition to a place to live, I also found a real reason to be there, volunteering in a trade school for adult women. All of them had became prostitutes after the genocide. Now they came to the school to learn skills like jewelry making, weaving and sewing. My job was to teach them practical English, just enough phrases to help them sell their homemade goods to tourists.
My students taught me that question in Rwanda requires a follow-up. I could never just ask “Do you have brothers and sisters?” without following with “Did you have brothers and sisters?” All time was separated into pre- and post-genocide.
Is it any wonder I retreated into another Lifetime movie? I spent each day surrounded by women my age who already knew what it felt like to fight. At the same time they were surviving a genocide, I was selecting dyed-to-match shoes for prom. They had seen what machetes and hatred could do. Me, I watched danger on TV.
I must have watched Carolina Moon a dozen times. Claire Forlani plays Tori Bodeen, a psychic who returns to her hometown to make peace with her troubled past. She also hopes to finally put to rest the ghost of her best friend, who was brutally murdered when they were children. As she hunts down her friend’s killer, Tori finds both danger and love.
It’s strange. Lifetime stories are known for being outlandish, drawing inspiration from the very worst sins and the most heinous true crimes. But I was discovering they were never as troubling as reality. This actual lifetime.
Claudine was one of my students at the adult school. When her Hutu neighbors came for her Tutsi family during the genocide, she hid underneath her bed while they beat her father until he was broken and unable to move. A neighbor dragged the girl into the room and handed her the machete. Only 16 years old, forced to make the final blow that killed her own dad.
When Claudine tried to run, the same machete was used to slice the Achilles tendon on her right foot. The men laughed as she crawled for help. That’s when she blacked out. She doesn’t remember what happened next or how she survived.
In the Lifetime version, Claudine would have found love with a dashing UN soldier as he swept her away to safety.
In real life, the genocide began when she was an HIV-free child with a family. By the time it ended she was an HIV-positive woman, alone.
I memorized the word to express sympathy, Wihangane. It never felt like enough.
I never experienced pain as hefty as Claudine’s, but I found myself comparing up our lives anyway.
My own Lifetime story happened when I was 22. My boyfriend was a raging alcoholic with a quick, blazing temper. During my birthday dinner he drank so much he violently vomited strands of pasta from his nose. When I tried to clean him up, he put a fist through my birthday cake. He swung our upright vacuum cleaner at my head and missed, putting a hole through the living room wall instead. He knocked me to the ground and picked me back up by the throat. He held me up against the wall, and said, “You’ve always wanted something to cry about.” I wriggled free, grabbed the car keys and drove to a pay phone to call the cops.
By the time I returned to my apartment with a policeman, the boyfriend had broken all our dishes, spilled juice on the floor. He also lined up my childhood stuffed animals, one by one, on the bar that divided the kitchen from the living room, and he sawed off their faces with a steak knife. There were tufts of stuffing everywhere.
A Lifetime movie would have ended with justice being served. The bad boyfriend would have ended up in jail, at rehab, or floating facedown in a creek.
In my real lifetime: The responding policeman asked what I did wrong, why I made my boyfriend so mad. I begged to have the boyfriend arrested. After some reluctance, the policeman relented.
My boyfriend was released after just a few hours. He ditched town before his court date and never had to pay for my nightmares or therapy sessions. He also slashed three tires on my car. Many years have passed, but I still see him now and then on Facebook, where he pops up occasionally as a suggested friend.
In a Lifetime movie, the bad guy always loses, the pure heart always wins. The cheating bastard ends up alone. The kidnapped baby is found. The cowgirl and the rival rancher fall in love. Everything ends the way it is supposed to end. The way we want it to end.
One month after I left Rwanda, I squeezed onto a crowded, long-haul bus traveling from Cairo to the Sinai Peninsula. I didn’t have an itinerary on this trip to Egypt — my only plan had been to meet up with my husband in Cairo for Christmas.
With the holidays over and my husband back in California, I headed to a small beach community where I could hunker down and write for a while. Just one day earlier, my dad e-mailed me to say my mom’s body was beginning to shut down. That’s the thing about Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s not just that the brain lets names and memories slip by, it actually forgets everything. At this point my mother was rejecting food; her throat no longer remembered how to swallow.
Next to me was an Egyptian passenger with rotten teeth. He was very interested in me, and he pressed one flabby thigh against my body. He curled his head toward me, his breath hot and wet against my neck, and murmured in low Arabic,. The more I inched away from him, the more forward he became, until his hand was in my crotch. I called out to the people around me and finally caught the attention of a man who spoke a little bit of English, who was willing to swap seats with me.
After a rest stop, the rotten teeth guy exchanged seats so he could be paired with me again. This time he had me pinned against the window. I yelled to the bus driver, about 10 aisles ahead, but the driver only puffed at his cigarette and waved away my protests. I punched the man in the arm, which only inspired him to push harder.
As a last resort, I unrolled my sleeping bag and zipped it around my body like a nylon cocoon. I slid the iPhone out of my bag, put on my headphones and pressed play on a Lifetime movie. It was Saving Sarah Cain, the story of a self-centered newspaper reporter who suddenly gains custody of her dead sister’s five Amish children. As the wee butter-churners learn about cars, denim and rap music, Sarah Cain gets a lesson too — in love and kindness.
I felt helpless. It was the bad boyfriend and the policeman who didn’t want to help, only this time it was a bus full of people who turned away. Worse, I felt cowardly.
Outside an almond-colored landscape slid by the bus windows. Dunes gave way to rocky outcroppings and barren plains. Next to me, a man with teeth like fallen timbers pawed at several layers of rip-stop fabric and synthetic goose down. On the tiny screen before me, a young Caleb said, “We’re not in Lancaster County anymore.” That was for damn sure.
In a yellow room in Dayton, Ohio, my mother was wheeled into hospice.
There were other movies: Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? Homeless to Harvard. Fifteen and Pregnant. Amish Grace. The Babysitter’s Seduction. I don’t remember now where I watched them all, only that I did. Some of them I watched more than once. I passed through a total of 19 countries on my trip, and there were a lot of lonely and dismal nights.
The Lifetime movies were comforting in how little their stories resembled my own. No matter how weary I became, no matter how dispirited I felt, at least I didn’t have to hold my child hostage in order to get my husband to stop boning the babysitter, like in Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear. I only had a mother to mourn. That should be easy.
My mom died soon after I settled down in Dahab, that Egyptian beach community. Even though my mom had been dying of Alzheimer’s for 10 years, it still felt like a terrible surprise, like when you knowingly walk into a cold pool and wait for your limbs to regain feeling. I flew home for the funeral but left my backpack in Egypt — insurance that I would return to the road and channel the grief into my journey.
Lifetime movies ask the questions we’re too scared to examine in our own lives: What happens when love fails us? How do we recover from betrayal? How much horror can a person survive? Also: What happens when John Stamos is a small-town pastor who is accused of murder? Related: Will he find love with the investigating detective?
The other thing about Lifetime movies is that they always have a satisfying resolution, and we, as humans, long for that. As much as we stumble into beginnings, it’s closure that we deliberately seek. We want to regain feeling.
I arrived in Cambodia three days before Prince William married Kate Middleton in London. And it took three long visits to the Blue Pumpkin cafe in Siem Reap before I had enough of a wifi connection to download all of William & Kate, the brand-new Lifetime movie inspired by the real-life royal courtship.
I stayed with a friend in Siem Reap. My friend was American but moved to Southeast Asia to start a landmine clearing NGO. His house was a large property on the outskirts of town, about 30 minutes from Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temples. He shared the house with a tuk-tuk driver, Sao, and Sao’s family. On the day of the royal wedding, we surrounded the TV console and watched the horse-drawn carriages, the pomp, the inconceivable wealth. Outside the air was brutally hot, so the drapes were drawn to keep the house cool.
Sao’s sister-in-law sat next to me on the couch, her left arm wrapped in a towel, hoisted up to her chest in a sling made of rags. While Kate Middleton made her way up the aisle, the towel fell away from the woman on the couch. Her fingers were as long as kielbasa, attached to a plump, diseased hand. The skin was swollen and thick to the point where it no longer resembled anything human. She blushed and grabbed for the wrap. This time she secured it with a pin.
The woman gestured to the TV with her unaffected arm, directing the conversation back to William and Kate.
“These people. Are they important?” she said.
I shook my head no.
“Not as important as you,” I said, and the woman giggled.
Later I found out the woman was scheduled to have the lower segment of her arm amputated, but the elephantiasis had already crept up to her shoulder. Now she might lose the entire limb. The doctor said there was no way to tell if the tentacles of the disease had already spread to other parts of her body. No telling if she would ever be able to work again. No telling what her future might be.
She put her good hand on my shoulder as the beautiful couple exchanged vows.
“It’s nice,” she said.
I did not stay in touch with Sao’s sister-in-law. I don’t even remember her name. But her face and her arm and this pivotal moment of her life are seared into my memory. I didn’t really know her, and I never really will — but for a short period of time, I saw her. I felt her. And she felt me too. I made the kind of human connection that I previously found only in my Lifetime stash.
It took me a couple weeks before I finally watched William & Kate. When I did, curled inside a small bed in Phnom Penh, I decided the story of a woman waiting to nab a prince wasn’t so compelling after all.
I never even made it to the fairytale ending.
Photo taken by the author.
