Baking Cakes in Kigali

Our library is more than a bit unreal and feels like a Spanish country club. I am always subconsciously concerned that someone is going to ask me to prove membership.

If the library rented rooms, I think Ben and I would live here.

Seriously, how can this place be free?

Sometimes I use the private study rooms as meeting places for work. The other day, I drove away from a work meeting and nearly stomped on the brakes from the sudden realization that I had not checked out the library book I selected. I pawed through my laptop bag and indeed found the tome tucked away. Turns out that I had unthinkingly swept away all of the items from the work surface and unwittingly deflected the library scanners from detecting my theft by placing the book next to the electric signal of my laptop. The book that I successfully lifted from the library?

Yes. How to Buy a Love of Reading. Sigh. Three generations of library employees just shuddered.

I also like studying here and roaming the aisles looking for books that have NOTHING TO DO WITH TRAUMA. Between social work classes and human trafficking research, my brain is pretty full up on tragedy. Unfortunately, the only "fairy tale" element of the last book I picked up from the fantasy section ended up being a coping mechanism of the main character who lived in death row. He poetically narrated a story filled with horrifically cruel child abuse, sexual assault, murder, torture, and perversion of justice. It was like "Shawshank Redemption" meets Ted Bundy. The Dungeon turned out to be the solitary confinement wing, the Lady was a private investigator of death row cases, the guilty Priest was a prison chaplain with a sordid past and so on. Yikes. 

I say all of that to preface a pretty fun read I found that you can buy for only $4 (including shipping) on Amazon. (Or, you know, borrow from your local Spanish country club.) The main character is a middle-aged woman who runs a cake-making business in Rwanda. She had a soft heart and a practical mind and always ends up kindly fiddling in the lives of her clients. What I enjoyed about this book was that it managed to touch on some pretty tough themes (poverty, aids, sexual assault, genocide, orphans, prostitution, stigma, first world interference, etc.) while highlighting the strength and joy that are also a part of life. Instead of crying, I ended up laughing aloud so many times that I convinced my husband to read it too. We have both traveled and were amused by the author's ability to relay the humor of cross-cultural interactions. Unlike my other blog posts, I'm not urging you to change the world through this one, but you might change a little if you read it and enjoy yourself in the process.

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin