Emma’s boyfriend is here from the states for the next two weeks. We spent some time yesterday walking around town and it’s interesting to see this place through the eyes of someone that just got here. It brings back a lot of things that I noticed when I first arrived, but hardly think about anymore. Ben’s never been to Africa, and he hasn’t flown anywhere since he was 17. I suspect the reactions he’s having would be similar to how a lot of my friends and family would react.
1.The men hold hands just like the women. This was one of the first things that Ben commented on, and it’s something that I hardly notice anymore. It’s never a gay thing. Rwandese are pretty religious and with that comes a predictable conservativism. A gay sub-culture may exist but no one talks about it, and no one flaunts it if they do consider themselves homosexual. In Uganda they only recently outlawed homosexuality as a crime punishable by death—and while Rwanda doesn’t have a law like that, they are probably just as conservative about the issue.
When the men hold hands here, culturally, you understand that they are best-friends or related. It did throw me off at first because at home you don’t do that kind of thing without wanting to draw attention or make a point about your sexuality. The men dance with each other too. It is definitely an interesting sight to see.
2.Motos are scary as hell. I’d never been on a motorcycle before coming to Rwanda, and it took me nearly a month to feel comfortable using them as a means of transportation. Ben has told Emma that he’s only getting on one if there’s an emergency, a ‘let’s get out of Rwanda as fast as we can because we’re going to die if we don’t’ kind of emergency not an ‘oh it’s about to rain and I don’t want to get wet’ kind of emergency. Mostly, I use them when I don’t know where I’m going. In Kigali this is particularly useful. If I know the name of the restaurant everyone is eating at, I can simply tell the moto driver and he can take me there.
3.The part of Rwanda I live in looks nothing like the picture you have of Africa in your head. There are no blistering deserts or arid grasslands. You won’t ever see a giraffe or a lion or an elephant here. It rains all the time, it’s very green, and sometimes I need a sweatshirt to keep warm at night. The volcanoes enclose the landscape and the hills will kill you if you aren’t in shape. Probably not how you picture central or southern Africa.
4.You won’t understand anything anyone is saying, sometimes even when they’re speaking English, but that’s okay because few people will understand you either. It’s a little stressful at first when you’re on a crowded bus and you only understand a few words from any given conversation going on around you. I don’t mind it now. Actually I rather enjoy hearing the Rwandese conversations flow smoothly from Kinyarwanda to French to English with a little Swahili mixed in and back again. Most of the educated people are at least bilingual and many are trilingual (Kinyarwanda, French, and English). It comes out of a necessity to communicate with the world and I wish it was something that America would adopt.
We always joke about going back and forth between our fluent –English voice and our ESL-voice. Ben has already complained that we don’t have to talk slow, leave out contractions and idioms, or say things five times in different ways for him. It’s just difficult going back and forth sometimes. It’s really exhausting to have to do it all day long, too.
5.Paying more than 5 dollars for a meal is expensive and we’re going to complain. We eat at this Indian restaurant in Kigali sometimes, but it’s so expensive for what we’re used to. I usually end up paying around 8,000 RWF for my meal and a drink, and that’s about 15 dollars. In Musanze, I can get a buffet that will keep me full all day for 1000 RWF and a drink for 300 RWF. That’s just about two dollars altogether. There’s a big difference. Especially when I’m not making a ton of money in the first place.
6.The power goes out at random intervals. It could be bright and sunny outside, but it doesn’t matter. The power goes out for at least an hour every other day.
And some other random things that happened this week:We were eating rabbit at this restaurant in Musanze that we’d never been to before. The rabbit was actually pretty good, not gamy like it can be sometimes. It was great until Kim picked up a piece, bit into it and it was blood red. She put it down on her plate and asked us if we thought it was undercooked. Emma’s eyes kind of went wide and I was kind of like, ‘eh yeah, not cooked. Don’t eat it.’ Then Emma turned Kim’s plate around and said, ‘no, Jenn. That’s not the worst part’. And I looked, curious now—and the rabbit was suddenly staring at me. Kim had bitten into the head, teeth, eyeballs and all.
Kim didn’t want us to tell her what was wrong because it wasn’t all that obvious that it was the head unless you look at it at the right angle. She wasn’t all that worried about it once we did tell her. Pascal, our Rwandese friend, sort of scolded the waitress for giving it to us and the waitress shrugged and said something like ‘some people like the head,’ but she was smiling. She knew that she’d just given it to westerners and we weren’t likely to think that it was a good idea to eat the head.
Emma accidently registered to drive in Rwanda the other day. Well, okay. It was an accident in the way that she didn’t know what she was actually doing until right before she did it. Pascal, our Rwandese friend, claimed he needed help registering. There was apparently a long line at the DMV, people were waiting for hours, but since he brought Emma he was able to go right to the front of the line. Yes, you understood correctly. Because Emma is Muzungu (white) she was able to cut the line and no one who was waiting really had a problem with it. Pascal knew this and used her to get his own name on the list quicker. He simply called it a ‘trick’. Mostly, we all thought it was hilarious and Pascal didn’t mean anything by it, he just simply didn’t want to wait in line.
