Falling in love with Rwanda

July 6, 2008

I’ve been here almost a week. Technically, I arrived on Wednesday the 2nd, around 1 a.m. Those first few days were so hard. I started right in with NAR and met with the Executive Director, Dr. Joseph, and he took me out to the offices. I came back to the inn with one of the interns; we had dinner and a couple of beers in the dining room, and then I came back to my room and tried to gather myself.

Here are a few notes from my handwritten journal written during those first few days:

…yesterday, which unexpectedly became a work day, I felt diaphanous, like someone could pull a needle and thread right through me and stitch me to anything or anyone—or everyone….

…when I was walking back to the hotel with Wilma [an intern], I stumbled off a curb, almost falling, but nothing drastic. But some young men—maybe teenagers—who were passing by in a car started saying, “Sorry! Sorry!” I smiled and called out that I was okay—all in the space of a second or two. It was nice in a way, to feel so connected, something like belonging, but of course I don’t belong here. But I also felt like I didn’t belong to myself, probably because of the lack of sleep….

Please, brain, forget Spanish for awhile. Remember French. Please.

Blogging here, again: It is hard to describe how overwhelming those first few days were. I was totally on sensory overload: there were too many smells (people, the smoke-filled air), too many sounds (I’m guessing that when a person doesn’t know a language, immersion in that language sounds like noise, at least for me) and too many people and signs and buildings and and and ….

I’m beginning to understand how difficult life is with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Luckily, I’ve been able to adjust my sensibilities, although I still get overwhelmed occasionally; I want to stay open to everything going on around me, but need to be able to function, too.

The other thing that I’m really struggling with is understanding African English. It is basically British English, but with the most beautiful accent. I don’t know whether the accent throws me, or whether I’m getting hard of hearing, or maybe just hard of understanding. Surely, though, it will become easier. Right now, “Excuse me?” and “I’m sorry?” are the phrases I seem to say most often. Most everyone has been very patient with me.

Now, Sunday evening, I’ve seen a few of the districts of Kigali, been able to negotiate getting to places on my own, and have begun to feel more like myself. And I’m falling hard and fast for this place.

It is so much fun to walk the few blocks up the hill to the “rond-poin,” the center of the center city and to pass children on the sidewalk. Often their mothers will say “------- ------ ------- muzungu ------!” which I think means something like “there’s a white person; say ‘hi!’” and the child puts out a hand in greeting. If older children are alone, they will often say, “good morning” in crisp English or, more often, “bon jour!” and I can’t help but smile at them. Sometimes they will take gentle hold of my arm, or thunk the water bottle I carry around with me. The gentleness is very apparent, though.

I’m happy to say that touching babies seems okay here. There was one in particular in the Kimironko Market sitting with his mother or grandmother and I couldn’t help but cradle his head in my hand for a moment. Apparently cooing is universal, because I have yet to get the phrase “beautiful baby” in my limited Kinyarwandan repertoire.
It’s the people, then, that draw me in.

I expected Rwandans to be more downtrodden, I suppose, maybe more grim, especially in these last few weeks of the anniversary of those horrific hundred days. But the Rwandans here are pretty normal, maybe even more animated than Americans. There is so much laughing, so much calling out to others and smiling. The street vendors smile, of course, but I think the mental pictures of my expectations were based on Ciudad Juárez in the 1970s, just across the río from my home town. There are some similarities that the barrios have to the lowest housing here, but the people in that time and in that border city were grim. I can’t remember much smiling at all. Not at the city market, not in the barrios where we dropped off our live-in maid for her weekends at home.

What I’m not sensing here in Rwanda and that was very apparent in Juárez was desperation. This very evident desperation in Mexico shaped my sense of what it means to be American, and to be human, for the first twenty years of my life. I suppose there’s a sort of guilt about relative affluence and opportunity, but it’s too easy to forget that being born one of the 300 million in America is entirely by chance. Odds are greater that we could have been born elsewhere, with less opportunity, and more danger. It’s so easy to forget, to take it all for granted.

So, before I get off my soap box, I think American do have a responsibility to not forget, to not hog up resources, and to be good world citizens.

Okay, I’m off the box.

I do want to travel to other parts of Rwanda, other cities, and a few villages. I especially want to be able to learn more about women in Rwanda; I haven’t interacted with women here yet, at least in direct and structured ways.

I have so many questions, especially about how Rwandans see the future of their country. The Rwanda doctor, Dan, I sat with at Dr. Joseph’s civil ceremony reception, talked about how genocide could not possibly happen here again. He said that with “Ingango,” the social enculturation that almost all Rwandan youth must go through, with the increasing economic opportunities for Rwandans, and with the Genocide planners either in prison or in exile/hiding, genocide won’t happen again.

This hope is also what really gets me. Not only are Rwandans not desperate, but they are hopeful.