My host-father’s family is not originally from the city; I believe it is only this generation that moved there. His mother still lives in the family compound in Jabana, a small town that is administratively part of the City of Kigali, but completely rural. I spent Friday and Saturday staying there, along with three of his siblings.
It is about a half-hour drive north of the city, past Nyabugogo and Gatsata; shortly after turning off the main road, the pavement ends. The road becomes quite bumpy and the surroundings soon become farmland. The city is visible in the distance, especially at night, but in all other directions are rolling hills dotted with farms and houses.
There are a few blocks of buildings in Jabana that are a little bit commercial, but most of the area is very spread-out. I doubt there are more than 500 people living there. In a lot of ways, it was like the image I have of a small agrarian village in the United States, where everyone knows each other and nothing ever goes wrong.
There is poverty, but as my hosts pointed out, money is not happiness. Even the family I was staying with, which is quite well off by local standards, had no refrigerator, no indoor running water and no computers. The matriarch of the family lives there all the time with some friends/workers, but her children frequently come to visit for days at a time. It’s like a vacation for them, a time to get away from the business and obligations of the city. Unlike going to Cape Cod, though, the “simple life” for them includes working the compound: washing clothes, scrubbing floors, tending to the animals. I think that’s part of what they like about it; despite the work and the very defined gender roles, there is comfort in the community and the environment.
They have a lot of animals. There are several goats and a whole bunch of chickens that run around the compound. There is a beehive in one area, which might have bothered me except that the bees mostly kept to themselves. They also have a cow, and the cow has a calf. At our meals, we drank milk from the cow. This was all very exciting to me.
They also have quite a bit of land, growing corn, sorghum, cassava, bananas and who knows what else. I think almost all of the food we ate was produced very nearby, and much of it they grew themselves. This included wonderfully flavorful yellow chili peppers that we squeezed over our food, and the best papayas I have ever eaten.
Depending on how well you know me, you might know I really don’t like to be pampered. I like to either be self-sufficient or else impose as little as possible on the people who do things for me. Now, at this compound, everyone works hard—except for the elderly mother, and except for the guest. At my home in the city, there are two workers who really do more than they have to, and that is uncomfortable enough (I have to talk about that at some point here), but at least it’s their job. Here, there was something quite unsettling about being expected to relax while people whom I have come to think of as friends and equals worked all around me and did work for me. If I go back, maybe I will try to make helping out one of the conditions.
I probably don’t need to say it, but there are not too many foreigners around there. In fact, there are none at all. Heads definitely turned as I walked by, and when my friends took me to the local soccer-field for a game, I was literally mobbed by dozens of schoolchildren who dropped whatever they had been playing to touch my arms and say “Good morning.” (It was about 4:00 p.m.)
This led to some entertaining pictures, and I was dragged (literally being held by about ten people’s hands) to the school, where there was a volleyball court. This was fortunate, since volleyball is a sport I can actually play decently well; I was also playing with people half my age or less, so we did alright. There were rotating teams, and if I was not playing I was given little option other than to keep score. Admittedly, causing an unplanned public holiday is a little uncomfortable, but for so many people to be so happy to see me was kind of fun.
New Vocabulary Words for the Day
- gúcíiriirika: to make simple
- ivuubi: freaking terrifying huge wasp thing
- akayaga: breeze
- umúcyáari: rural area
- umuhaango: tradition, ceremony
- umucaânga: sand
- gupika: to sting
- gusuhuuza: to go and say hello
- agaseke: a kind of basket
- igituûrage: rural area (syn. umúcyáari)
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