21 Nyákáanga 2013—Amákóraniro

I have not written one of these in quite awhile; as most of my readership knows, I was writing on about a week’s delay, and I kind of hit a wall after the post one week before I left Rwanda. The reason, of course, is that I left Rwanda! I had to be on an airplane, and after getting home there were all sorts of adjustments to make, and blogging dropped off of my radar. Hopefully, over the next few days, I can set that straight and bring some closure to this record of my summer while the memories are still fresh.

I have to start with a correction: in my previous posts, I might have mixed up my days—or, at least, the way I wanted to blog about them. See, my really uneventful day was actually 23 July, which, you might notice, does not have a post about it. 21 July, on the other hand, did have a very notable event about which I forgot to blog. My post that is currently labeled 21 July should have been labeled 20 July, and encompasses events from 20 to 22 July (the data analysis and recording mentioned). The post for 22 July, then, which is not time-pegged, should be dated 23 July. This post, then, will be dated 21 July and will be all about an event that took place that day.

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I returned from Butare to find my host-father’s mother staying over for some time. When I asked the reason, she said there was an event, called amákóraniro, being held in Nyamirambo. Amákóraniro means “a place where people work together,” or something like that, and as she went into more detail it sounded like she was describing a convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was interested, and I told her I would go on one of the days: it was a 3-day event.

So we walked over together this Sunday morning. It was not far to the location, which I think people were calling Remera Stadium (confusing because Remera is a neighborhood on the other side of the city), and we got there in about ten minutes. We found some other family-members, who guided us to some seats they had been saving.

The saved seats were really necessary. This multipurpose stadium (which could be used for soccer or a number of other sports) had several thousand seats in it, and it was packed. There was a shaded section, and then bleachers outside of it; people in the sun just brought umbrellas. Local street-vendors had picked up on the dense congregation (hehe) of people, and planted themselves near the entrance to sell candy and water and whatnot. It was quite a scene, and I have to wonder whether the stadium ever gets such attendance for sports matches.

Now that I am home, I can check my statistics a little bit; it turns out that, in 2011, there were only about 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Rwanda, forming just a fraction of one percent of the total population. It’s surprising to read that, given how many of the people I know are adherents, and the number of signs for Jehovah’s Witness churches I have seen in the places I have traveled. Seriously, it seems like they are everywhere; I guess this is a testament both to their determined publicity and to the effect that a specific circumstance can have on a person’s impression of a place.

I still can’t help but wonder whether the figure is underreported. If there are really only 20,000 of them, almost a quarter must have been present in that audience, all with their Bibles and their programs, all in their Sunday best for the third day in a row. In addition to the immediate strangeness of seeing so many well-dressed people in a stadium, it was odd that, while all of them were in a semi-circle of bleachers around one side of the field, the object of their collective attention was way on the other side of it. I guess it was necessary so everyone had an equal view, but it meant that no one had a good view and everyone had to squint to see the podium.

In front of the podium, huge letters spelling out Ijambo ry’Imana ni ukuri, “The Word of God is the truth,” had been cut out and mounted on tripods for all to see. At the podium, there was a succession of speakers who said, honestly, nothing extremely interesting. Part of it was that I couldn’t understand, but the general response seemed to be nodding.

The most interesting part was a white guy who got up and gave a speech. It was interesting because his speech was in Kinyarwanda. The audience was wicked impressed, watching in stunned silence as he spoke and then applauding wildly afterwards. I was impressed also; I had no idea that there were any Caucasians of his age (40s) who spoke more than a little Kinyarwanda, and this guy was speaking pretty fluidly. At one point, a Rwandan came up to share the stage and they had a conversation.

I don’t know whether it was the defensive or the linguistic instinct, but some part of me took comfort in noticing that his accent was pretty strong and he didn’t seem to be taking any notice of the tones on the words he was saying. There was certainly a part of me that felt like I had to be better than him, so I wanted to criticize this aspect of the language that he had ignored in his learning. The level-headed side of me chimed in, though, that it’s hard enough to learn any Kinyarwanda, and a lot of teachers would leave tone out of their curriculum entirely so that the student is blissfully ignorant of it by no fault of his own. And in the end, accent or no, the amount of time and effort he put into learning Kinyarwanda and becoming fluent in it is truly admirable, and I guess a testament to the strength of his religious conviction. The ability to communicate with Rwandans in their own language must also have immeasurably helped whatever cause he brought with him.

I confess I did not stay for the whole time. For two hours I strained as hard as I could to understand what was being said, with some success but not a whole lot, in between looking around and admiring the clothing I saw. Had I understood the messages better I probably would have had some objection to them, so maybe it was O.K.; as it was, I was getting kind of bored. My previous arrangement to meet a friend for lunch in Kimihurura gave me a good excuse to beg out at 11:00; I had sat through almost 2 hours of speeches, and I was ready for a change of pace.

That change of pace came in the form of lunch at Mr. Chips, an American-style fast-food place with decent hamburgers, then more data analysis. You’ve already ready about that, though.

24 Nyákáanga 2013—A.S.Y.V.

Today I did something I had been wanting to do for a really long time. During and after high school, I interned with an organization called the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village: what is kind of a private boarding school for Rwandan orphans. When it began operating in 2007, it primarily served genocide orphans, who made up about 15% of the population at the time; as that generation reaches college age, it is maintaining the general goal but broadening its criteria a little bit.

It has received a decent amount of media attention and gained acclaim for the quality of the service it provides, the talent of its staff and the positive impact it has had on the community. Extensive counseling is available both for psychological issues and relating to careers and university, and the philosophy of tikkun olam—healing yourself by healing the world, a Jewish principle in an otherwise secular organization—has motivated a lot of service work in the surrounding community.

Agahozo is a Kinyarwanda word prosaically translated as “a place to dry your tears” and shalom is, well, shalom. The founder and many of the administrative workers are Jewish, and though their is nothing religious about the workings of the village it was built upon the successful model of kibbutzim, and specifically youth villages, in Israel: cooperative settlements for Holocaust survivors, where everyone contributed to the well-being of the community and matured as one big family. Like that, students at Agahozo-Shalom do not only live and study together; they grow food, play music, create artwork and do community service as a family. A.S.Y.V. is notable for being the first test-case of this model for serving vulnerable youth in Central Africa, and six years in it appears to be extremely successful.

The work I did for the Village, in its New York office, was largely administrative: I worked a lot with their donor database and helped research grants. I also notably rewrote their handbook for long-term volunteers. As a result, I probably ended up with more knowledge of the way the Village worked than almost anyone who had not been there. Naturally, when I came to Rwanda for very distantly related reasons, I wanted to come visit.

Wednesday was recommended to me as a good day to come, so I followed the directions I had written in the guide three years ago: take a bus toward Rwamagana, but get off in Ntunga, then take a moto the rest of the way. Things have changed a little in the meantime: as the Village has become more established, for example, bus-drivers have begun announcing it when they stop in Ntunga, and as soon as I got off a moto-driver asked whether that was where I was going.

A.S.Y.V. is located in Rubona Sector, Rwamagana District, Eastern Province, on a hill overlooking Lake Mugesera. Getting there from Ntunga took about 20 minutes on a pretty smooth dirt road.

At the gate, after telling the guard I had called ahead, I was met by a student tour-guide in the hospitality and management program. She was quite pleasant and spoke very good English, and she gave a very nice tour. Classes have ended and exams are coming up, so I toured through an empty school building; this was not so bad, though, as I was able to look into the classrooms a bit more than I could have otherwise.

I arrived in time to have lunch with students; I had fun surprising them by knowing the Kinyarwanda names of the foods we were eating, and then surprising them more by being able to put a sentence together. It might have been a good thing that they did not test me too much: the Village strongly encourages the use of English, even forbidding Kinyarwanda in some settings. I have some objections to this from a linguistic perspective, but I understand that there is good reason to want people to be able to communicate well in an English-speaking environment.

After lunch, I saw student housing, which looked very nice: students live with “families” of twelve in a house, which stay constant through their four years at the Village. The houses do not have running water, but they do have boreholes, and they look about as solidly constructed as any dormitories I have ever seen. I was also shown the Science Center and Arts Center, where students can make artwork, use computers and record in a studio. Really very nice.

When the tour finished, we went to see an annual event, Tikkun Olam Day, that was being held in the late afternoon. It was an exciting time for students because musicians had been brought in from outside, including the headliner King James (or maybe King David, I forget) who is a pretty prominent Rwandan artist.

The event was a celebration of and reflection on the Tikkun Olam philosophy and the impact it has had on the Village and surrounding communities. There were students and beneficiaries of service projects who came and spoke about it. There was also a lot of music, which appeared to be mostly unrelated.

The musical performances I saw were all by current and former students at the Village, and they were really quite good. I had to leave around 5:00 p.m. in the interest of getting home before dark, but the event was going to go on for quite awhile. It was a really happy thing: students and visitors filled the 1000-seat amphitheater, applauded wildly and often got up and danced.

Through the whole visit, part of me kept looking for something wrong with it all, figuring it cannot possibly be perfect, there must be a catch somewhere. I did not really find anything, though. I guess that, as soon as students leave A.S.Y.V., they will no longer have access to the services it provides, instead being dropped back into the difficult (though buoyant) economy that is Rwanda, and in many cases likely quite poor. That is just the nature of the situation, though; the Village chose that demographic as its target, and the amount that it is doing to ameliorate it is really admirable.

22 Nyákáanga 2013—Amasákû Arakomeye

Kinyarwanda is a fascinating language. There is a book I am reading, called A Tonal Grammar of Kinyarwanda, by a professor at one of the schools in the University of California system, which attempts to give a full description of the tone system in Kinyarwanda. To give an idea of just how complex tones in Kinyarwanda are, consider that this linguist took an entire 400-page book to describe how they work, not even dealing with other aspects of the language’s already-complicated grammar.

They are not complex in their number: it is just high and low. And it is not extremely often that entirely different words are distinguished solely by their tone, though it does happen. What makes them fascinating, and terrifying, is how completely they are integrated into the language’s morphology and grammar.

Some words get a high tone only when they are in the middle of sentences. Many verb tenses are distinguished only by tone. Some verb tenses flatten the tones that would have existed on the verb, some add new ones and some leave them untouched—and after having stared at them for quite awhile now, I cannot find a visible pattern to explain why.

That was what I spent the day doing (and what I have spent a fair number of hours doing since). I just read the chapter of the book called “The Assignment of Grammatical Tone,” which dealt with how tones are assigned in different verb tenses (what I briefly described in the last paragraph). It took 30 pages to get through all of them, and I even think he missed a few.

Even if we ignore the presence of tones in the language, the sheer number of ways verbs are distinguished is confounding. Kinyarwanda verbs distinguish not just tense (far past, recent past, present, future), but also mood (indicative, subjunctive, participial, conditional), aspect (imperfective, perfective) and often focus (whether or not a verb has some kind of complement appearing after it). And each tense appears differently depending on whether it is in a main or relative clause, and affirmative and negative verbs are different in a not-quite-consistent way. Plus, there are certain forms (still, not anymore, a narrative form) that might be considered tenses or moods, but do not quite fit into the other patterns.

Lots of languages make these distinctions; most of them even appear in English. What is really interesting about Kinyarwanda is that all of them involve prefixing, suffixing or mutating a single word. If you count up all of the options above, it comes out to about 100 or 120, which becomes even more overwhelming when you remember that the primary distinguishing feature is often a single high tone. Then, multiply that number by 16 possible subjects, several “verbal extensions” and then 16 objects that can appear multiple times depending on the nature of the verb, a single root can take literally thousands of different forms. There are certainly patterns to help out, but nevertheless it seems nearly impossible to keep a handle on all of them.

It’s times like this I cannot help but thinking, you know, I could have just learned French.

Speaking of which, French would be really useful, and I think I might well try to learn it. English is rapidly eclipsing it as the language of business in Rwanda and also in the world generally, but it would still be good to know. For one thing, any Rwandan over the age of 20—except those returning from Uganda—still speaks much better French than English. Also, most of the really good histories and academic works on Rwanda and on much of Africa are written in French, and that will take longer to change.

This extends to linguistic works as well. As I found very quickly looking in the Harvard Library, the number of English-language scholarly works on Kinyarwanda is approximately three, three of which are by the same author. As I learned talking to a Rwandan academic, these are not even that good relative to others. The really high-quality, comprehensive descriptions of the Kinyarwanda language, its grammar and its dialects are in French. (Increasingly, they are also in Kinyarwanda, which I think is pretty cool, but I am already working hard on that one.)

Perhaps I will make learning French a background project this year, in addition to all the other things I want to do—I know a good amount of the grammar already, and my Spanish is pretty good so hopefully it will come easily. Good thing I don’t have anything else planned for the coming year!

21 Nyákáanga 2013—Gúfáta Amájwî no Kúyúumva

The day after I got back from Butare, I did not do all that much; I went into town to get tissues and candy, and I spent some time at home listening to the recordings I had made. I will have to analyze them in more detail when I get home, but I noticed a couple of things on the first listen:

One of my subjects was born in Burundi, which might make her irrelevant to my study or might mean she provides an interesting counterpoint—or both. Kirundi, the language spoken in Burundi, is mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda, and the two are really dialects of the same language; the major difference is in the tones, which I will examine later. I did notice that this individual lenited all of her bilabial plosives; that is, b came out as a [β], like a v but with both lips, and p came out as [ɸ], like an f but with both lips. Kinyarwanda has the same rule, but it only works on the b and not on the p; I thought that was interesting.

The other subject—yep, thanks for reminding me I only have two—was born around Butare, and what I noticed most about his speech was the deletion of nasals before fricatives. I don’t expect most people to understand this with so little explanation, but here goes: Historically, Kinyarwanda lost nasal consonants before fricatives, so *inshami became ishami, *imfí became ifí, etc., and this led to some grammatical reinterpretation. Generally, that rule is no longer productive. Another rule, which is still productive, deaffricates affricates after nasals, so incuti is pronounced inshuti, impfíizi as imfíizi, etc. This rule historically would have counterfed the previous one. In my subject here, though, both appeared to still be productive, but in the opposite order, so he pronounced incuti as ishuti, impfíizi as ifíizi, etc.

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On Sunday, I got some of people around where I am staying to read my wordlist. (By some, I mean three.) One of them was born in Kigali, one in rural Kigali province and the third in Mugambazi, Northern Province. (I do not think there is any reason not to share that, as long as I do not give more information about them.) So, though my sample-size is currently minuscule, I have managed to get five people born in five substantially different places, and representing both genders and a good range of ages. (Now I’m going to stop parenthesizing every other sentence.)

Examining the data, I did not notice anything really out of the ordinary. If I try to continue this research in the future, I think I will adjust my wordlist to better illustrate different possible tone-patterns in Kinyarwanda. It does the job now, but it could be a lot better: I have phonetics software that can detect and graph pitch in speech, but only through sonorant sounds like vowels and nasal consonants. So áméenyo is a great word to illustrate tones, and the software shows a beautiful, continuous line; ínshííshî, however, gives a graph that is broken during the two fricative sh segments, and thus does not return as enlightening a representation of the overall melody.

I have not listened extremely carefully to, well, any of my interviews, but I think these three were not too out of the ordinary: administrative Kigali City and the nearer parts of the Northern Province are well within the range of the standard dialect of Kinyarwanda. I am hoping to get another couple of locations sampled in the coming days, but time is short and trips take planning!

19 Nyákáanga 2013—Kamínúuza n’Indaangamurage

Before I get into what I did on this day (sneak-preview: National University and National Museum), I should explain—in case anyone was wondering—why the town I am in has two names. After the Genocide, one of the many reconciliation strategies the government of Rwanda adopted was changing the way the country’s map looked. I talked in a previous post about the redrawing of administrative boundaries; the names of Rwanda’s nine largest cities, not counting Kigali, were also changed.

The reasoning was that many of these names evoked strong memories of things that happened there; large population centers were often places where victims congregated looking for protection, and thus they were the sights of some of the largest massacres. Kigali was deemed too entrenched, I guess, but others were renamed after nearby landmarks: Butare became Huye, after nearby Mt. Huye; Ruhengeri became Musanze after the Musanze Caves, and so on. Cyangugu is now Rusizi, Gisenyi is Rubavu, Gikongoro is Nyamagabe, Gitarama is Muhanga, Byumba is Gicumbi, Kibuye is Karongi. (I am missing one, but the guidebook is back in Kigali and I am drawing a blank.)

This reminds me of the Africanization of names that has happened in a few other African countries recently, but the motivation is subtly different. Rhodesia and its capital, Salisbury, became Zimbabwe and Harare because of bad memories, yes, but the old names were distinctly European-sounding, whereas there was nothing especially ethnic about the old (or new) Rwandan names. South Africa, also, completely redrew its administrative map and renamed some cities (Pretoria to Tshwane, Pietersburg to Polokwane, and some others) in the name of reconciliation, but that was again more intended to reinstate the names that existed before and also to provide balance. The transformation that made Congo, Léopoldville and Stanleyville into Zaïre, Kinshasa and Kisangani (Lubumbashi?) was a somewhat more militant Africanization, and the insanity of its main proponent (Mobutu Sese Seko) somehow played in as well!

I enjoy digressions like that, but they have to end at some point. Anyway, what is interesting in Rwanda is that in every case, the old names are still used almost exclusively. It’s not exactly unexpected: people grew up using these names, and it will take a long time to break the habit—generations, perhaps, as they continue to teach them to their children. I think it is interesting, though, that all of the Rwandans I meet, who I am sure are both Hutu and Tutsi, use the old names; perhaps there are bad memories, but it seems like they are not so much connected to the place-names in the way that might have been predicted. Even government publications slip up: most of the Rwandan Development Board’s tourist maps have some mixture of old and new. At the Nyabugogo bus terminal, the signs all use the new names, often with old ones parenthesized; my ticket said I was going to Huye, but if you asked the driver he would say we were on the way to Butare.

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Well, that was fun. Actually, another brief digression: there have been several places where I have noticed, in retrospect, certain factual errors I have made in writing posts for this blog. They are not usually really big ones, but they happen sometimes: Gereza is a word that means “prison,” for example, and the prison at which the minibuses stop does still exist. It is not obsolete, as I implied in a previous post. And I am sure some of the vocabulary I have included is not totally correct. If I give off an air of authority, I am flattered, but keep in mind that this blog is a place where I record and reflect on what I am doing here; I do not intend it to be a reference. I make a concerted effort to give information that is interesting and accurate, but without a steady Internet connection I cannot check my facts as I would otherwise.

On a similar note, thanks to my attentive and detail-oriented grandfather for sending the following statistics, relevant to yesterday’s post:

	Area	Population	Density
Maryland	12,407 sq. mi.	5,884,563	596/sq. mi.
Rwanda	10,169 sq. mi.	11,689,696	1,087/sq. mi.

So there!

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Now, finally, what I did today. I had to return to Kigali in the evening, and there was a lot I had not done, so I decided to give up the researching for the moment and be a tourist for the day. I started by walking to the University, which is a fair distance down the main road from town.

The National University of Rwanda is one of, I believe, seven public institutions of higher education in the country, and it is the most prestigious if only by name-recognition. Other prominent universities that I believe are public (though I do not know) include the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, the Kigali Institute of Education and the Free University of Kigali. I would guess that most private Rwandan universities are religious: I know the Adventist University of Central Africa is here, the Catholic University of Rwanda is in Butare and I have friends who go to St. Joseph’s Integrated Technical College in Nyamirambo.

There is a poorly publicized plan, which has actually almost reached completion, to combine all of Rwanda’s public universities into one. All of them, including the National University, will cease to exist this coming September and become different campuses of an integrated University of Rwanda. At lunch (after my tour, actually) I met a group of American and European academics who have been contracted by the Ministry of Education to oversee the transition; they had some very interesting things to say about the challenges faced, administratively, organizationally and academically. Notably, the government wants to make this a leading African research university, and there are serious pedagogical and language-related problems to address before that can happen.

(Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, is currently the best in East Africa by a long-shot. For all the things Uganda does not do so well, they have made a wise decision to really invest in their education. Otherwise, almost all African universities—except in South Africa, where a number of very good universities are one positive legacy of colonization—are struggling institutions, restricted in terms of funding, availability of qualified staff and preparation of students by already-inadequate secondary schools.)

So I walked up to the entrance of the University. I got the feeling people don’t often just come here on a whim with the intention of looking around. A security guard asked me what I was doing, and after a brief conversation he called somebody on the phone and told me to wait over there until this guy came. (I couldn’t help but remember the last time that happened, but this time the Presidential Guard wasn’t involved!)

The guy, from some equivalent of a public relations office, came a few minutes later, and he agreed to give me a tour. He saw that I spoke Kinyarwanda, so he gave his tour in Kinyarwanda, except for a few untranslatable phrases like “Albertine Forest.” (Adjacent to the university’s main campus is an arboretum, once used to test the soil’s ability to grow different kinds of trees.) I was happy with myself that I was able to understand most of it.

The university looked mostly like a university, with all of the buildings I would expect one to have. The architectural style was different, and perhaps it was more spread-out than I expected, but otherwise it wasn’t too much out of the ordinary. The surrounding forest does a lot to make it feel enclosed and peaceful. I saw a gymnasium with people doing dance practice inside—Rwandan dance, with drums and everything. It was pretty cool. We walked past the dining hall, some student housing and some administrative offices. Our specific path did not take us past many lecture halls, but I believe we saw the faculty of business or management or something, and that was quite nice.

Afterward, I was directed across the street to a different section of the university, where I did not need any kind of guide or clearance to enter, on the promise that there were monkeys to be seen there. I did not find the monkeys, but I did see the faculty of medicine, and I was hungry (and shy) enough that I decided to give up my half-hearted monkey-search in favor of some lunch at the nearby Barthos Hotel. In retrospect, I am glad I did so, because the people (aforementioned) whom I met at lunch were really interesting.

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Ooh, another digression! Adjacent to and affiliated with the N.U.R. faculty of medicine is the University Teaching Hospital of Butare: Centre Hôpitalaire Universitaire de Butare (or something close to that), abbreviated C.H.U.B. It’s a great opportunity for an acronym, except I think they just say the abbreviation in French, so what sounds to me like “Say Ash Ba,” to parallel “Say Ash Ka,” its analogue in Kigali.

It is actually quite out of character for Rwandans to miss out on an opportunity for an outrageous-sounding acronym. Maybe this is the Belgian legacy, or maybe it’s East African, I don’t know, but they have to win some kind of prize for these:

• The Ministry of Sport and Culture, commonly known as Minispoc
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (app. Ministère d’Affaires Étrangeres), Minaffet
• Brasseries et Limonaderies du Rwanda, Bralirwa
• Société Nationale d’Assurances, Sonarwa

My all-time favorite, though, is one that I saw on the walk to the University: the Cooperative of Taxi-Motos of Huye, abbreviated—you guessed it—Cottamohu! Note the up-to-date town name; presumably it used to be Cottamobu. I was really confused the first few times I saw this on moto-drivers’ vests; it sounds to me like something Elmer Fudd would say after having too much to drink.

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In the afternoon, then, I went to the National Museum of Rwanda, which is a truly impressive place. It is pretty sizable, albeit not comparable to any of the Smithsonians, but the amount of cultural information they fit in there is pretty staggering nonetheless. It is set on a nicely maintained plot of land on the main road, maybe a mile away from the town center in the opposite direction from the university.

Much like the National University, the National Museum has actually been restructured as the headquarters of the Institute of National Museums of Rwanda, which also includes the restored former royal palace, an environmental museum in Kibuye and some others. The specific institution I visited is now referred to as the “ethnographic museum,” which is really an appropriate designation: its exhibits do not say much about Rwanda’s history, but they do extensively document its culture prior to colonization.

So there were a whole bunch of exhibits illustrating different parts of Rwandan culture: eating, hunting, agriculture, architecture, basketry, ceramics, music and more. I really wish they had allowed photography: there was so much that I wish I could have recorded somehow so I could remember it later.

The linguist in me had a lot of fun trying to read along with the trilingual captions to each item, and could have spent all day doing just that if the bus home were not so soon. I enjoyed seeing how very arcane scientific vocabulary was translated into Kinyarwanda: sometimes the technical term was left untouched, and sometimes an actually helpful explanation was given. Often, the scientific concept was better explained with real Kinyarwanda words, and seeing the invented, Latinate French one just would not have been useful.

I also liked seeing how so many of the artifacts on display—very specifically designed utensils, traps, baskets, etc.—took five or six words to identify in English, but all had distinct, single-word Kinyarwanda names. That kind of vocabulary is interesting to me, partially because I do not know it but also because I would really like to know about its etymology: old words like those, which many young Rwandans likely do not know, may well be key bits of information for someone trying to reconstruct languages no longer spoken.

It also interested me because modern standard Kinyarwanda has one word, ícyúuma, which refers to almost any non-mechanical metal tool, including knives. This is pretty annoying for me, but apparently it works for them. Anyway, I saw lots of non-mechanical metal tools there, and they all had different names, including the ones that were essentially knives. It is a little puzzling to think that, even though knives certainly existed in Rwanda before European contact, European-style knives came to be referred to as generic tools.

The sections about weaving and embroidery were really fascinating, and I wished I could have stayed longer and focused better to absorb them. (Earlier that day, a mosquito had somehow gotten in my sock and left three bites on my left foot, which itched quite a lot, especially after walking substantial distances.) A lot of the work in making baskets and curtain-like separators was really very fine, and each pattern and model of basket seemed to have its own special name, which made me happy.

One of the coolest things was a traditional noble’s house, which had been uprooted from its compound and transplanted into the museum. It was all made of grass and bamboo and flimsy wood, but bundled together tightly enough so as to make a solid structure. The interior was small (which makes sense, considering that this was but one building in a very large compound, maybe analogous to a bedroom), but looked quite comfortable. I could not help but think how there was no protection against the mosquitoes, but I guess that was just something people lived with.

I had not known that the oldest archaeological evidence of metallurgy in sub-Saharan Africa was found in Rwanda. That was cool. It was also fun to see all of the different musical instruments they had: stringed, wind and percussion, mostly, which I guess would be most music everywhere except for brass in Europe and electronic in the past few decades. I wrote down that Rwandan music exhibits “anhemitonic pentatonism,” though someone will have to explain to me what that means—and I wish I had had more time to understand the role of tone and meter in Rwandan epic poetry, but I was getting toward the end and I had a bus-ticket to buy.

The bus left at 5:30 p.m.; I was late buying a ticket, and ended up having an hour to kill in an Internet café beforehand. I got home at about 9:00, including the moto-ride from Nyabugogo. I was happy to see the familiar environment and familiar people, and also happy to get some anti-itch cream on my bites! Also, Fr. 5,000 did not buy as comfortable a bed as my hosts’. Suffice it to say it was a relaxing night.

18 Nyákáanga 2013—Gútáangira Ubushaakashaatsi

I decided today was going to be a research day. I started bright and early: after having breakfast in town and returning to the guesthouse, I promptly said hello to someone nearby. They were so excited to hear a foreigner speaking Kinyarwanda that they offered to help me with whatever I was doing before I even mentioned research. So that person and a friend were my first two research subjects; I think there’s a confidentiality-related reason that I shouldn’t say too much more about them.

The interviewing itself was pretty fun, actually. The research I want to do is about dialectal variation in Kinyarwanda, so I have a list of about 75 words for people to read into a microphone and then a couple of very basic demographic questions. It is about as uninvolved, unimposing and uncontroversial as research could be, steering far clear of sensitive issues and not taking more than about ten minutes. Moreover, provided the subject can read, all I have to do is hand them the sheet of paper and hold the mic. (If they can’t read, I have pictures to help, but that has not happened yet.)

These two subjects were very willing, and I had really been hoping that being white and Kinyarwanda-speaking would be the grabber I needed. See, I get really self-conscious about approaching people and asking them for things that seem like they would impose, even a little bit; my strategy, then, was to find people who did not look busy and put myself in a position of being offered help, and only then say that I was researching.

If this does not strike you as a sound strategy for finding a representative sample of subjects, you are right. I walked around town for a few hours that day looking for people who did not appear to be busy, but I never actually approached anyone. This is even though I knew that the worst they could do was say they were busy, and that saying they were busy would not have been a judgment of me. Shyness overcame nonetheless.

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There were other reasons I did not find any subjects, and one of the main ones leads into another thing I want to talk about. I mentioned yesterday that good tourist destinations are not always great for the kind of research I want to be doing. I explained a little bit, but I want to elaborate more and continue the discussion further.

Butare is a good tourist destination because it has a lot of institutions that are worth visiting. It is the home of the National University of Rwanda, the National Museum of Rwanda and the largest church in Rwanda, all of which are there because it was historically the country’s most prominent town.

So if we accept that tourist destinations are often located in towns, the next thing to realize is that in Rwanda, towns—at least those I have been to—are not really places where people live. They are commercial centers that provide goods and services to the less developed areas around them. Thus—and this is true of the commercial parts of Kigali as well—anyone who is in the center of town is there for a reason, usually to do some kind of business. This generally means that they are not in the mood to give up their time to a foreign researcher.

(At least, they don’t look like they would be. Remember, I’m shy.)

So a city functions to provide commerce and also infrastructure. What is extraordinary about Butare is just the sheer proportion of it that consists of infrastructure, broadly interpreted. In addition to the cathedral, the museum and the university, there are also a series of other churches, multiple hospitals, another university (the Catholic University of Rwanda), a whole bunch of hotels and several government offices.

This is in a city whose municipal boundaries include a population of about 60,000 (those of you with Internet connections, forgive my memory). The city center consists of about a five-block length on the national road, with a subsidiary that branches off at one point and then loops back. Then there is a district of nice-looking houses and offices converted from houses, and a small area of development around the university a couple of miles down the road. The most urban-looking area might be more active than the business district of my native suburb, but not hugely so, and it pales in comparison with nearby small cities.

It is odd to think that way, considering that Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. There are 12 million people in this country the size of Maryland. (Actually, that might be comparable to the number of people in Maryland; someone please check that.) In any case, I think Rwandans are a heck of a lot more evenly spread than Marylanders, or Americans generally. Kigali is a legitimately big city, with over a million residents in a broad but still densely packed, urbanized area; Gitarama (Muhanga), though, is a distant second, with fewer than 90,000 at the last census. If you continue down the list, I think you get to average American suburb-size after about the tenth spot.

So a large majority of Rwandans live in small towns, or less. Actually, as I learned at the museum—um, tomorrow—the historical settlement structure in Rwanda was not in towns (and certainly not cities), but rather in compounds where extended families lived together; these would be surrounded by farmland. More densely populated areas did exist—all of Rwanda’s major towns, with the notable exception of Kigali, were there before European contact—but they did not play quite the role that cities in Europe did at the time.

This structure is changing as Rwanda develops; the presence of national and regional economies is causing growth in cities generally, and I am sure their role is quickly evolving in other ways too. Furthermore, one of the government’s main reconciliation initiatives has been encouraging people to live in towns (imidugudu), rather than family compounds. I have not done much reading about the motivations behind this, and it sounds like a strategy with a variety of economic benefits, but I suspect that a primary reason was to encourage integration of ethnicities: family compounds do not sound like the most demographically diverse communities.

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Well, hopefully that came out as a bit more meaningful than just a long, drawn-out excuse! I should mention that the two guys who told me to call them today at 5:00 p.m. gave me fake phone numbers. Ah well. I came to this country for a whole variety of reasons, research being only one; moreover, this is all kind of just practice for future work (hopefully), a time to sort of test the waters and make mistakes.

So I would not by any means say that I reached my target in terms of researching here; tomorrow, I have to do tourist things before returning in the afternoon, so I will return with a total of two interviews in three days. But… eh. I have still used my time well, and there will be more time to iron out the methodology in the future.

I ate dinner at the Ibis again. When I ordered the “avocat vinaigrette” off of the salad menu, I kind of thought it would be a salad with avocado and vinaigrette in it. What I was not expecting was a half an avocado with vinaigrette where the pit used to be. There was some bread too. Maybe this is a thing people eat normally. Maybe there is also some correct way of eating it, but I just mashed up the meat of the fruit, mixed it with the vinaigrette and ate it, spreading on the bread until that ran out. It was actually really good.

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As the blog editor loads, I am going to mention—briefly—how slow the connection is here. Like, the post-editing window took about three minutes to load up to the point where the “loading” notice appeared. It has been about that long since then, and it is still chugging along at… 19.70 kbps!

Still loading.

I actually might not have talked about my Internet situation here yet. Wi-Fi is nonexistent, so I have been using a modem that my host had, which has consistently terrible connection speeds and also charges per unit of data.

Oh, it’s loaded now. More on that later!

10.95 kbps, by the way!

17 Nyákáanga 2013—I Butare

Today I began my first independent travel in my time here. I began with a grand plan of traveling from one town to the next over four days, passing through Gitarama (Muhanga) and Ruhango before ending up in Butare (Huye), and taking a day-trip to Kibeho. I would spend about one day in each, splitting my time between researching and touring.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

My hosts recommended that I take a bus directly to Butare, so I did that. I realized soon after getting there that there was more tourism there alone than could be done in a day, so I altered my plans: just stay there until I feel like I’m done.

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One of my great fallacies in planning my trip to Rwanda as a whole was that “this country is only the size of Maryland, it can’t possibly take too long to get anywhere!” As the crow flies, I think Kigali and Butare are about as far apart as Boston and Providence, but the bus ride between them takes close to three hours. And this is even on good, paved roads. (Other main highways are not paved, so getting to Gisenyi or Cyangugu can be a seven-hour ordeal.)

The reason for the length of time is that it is simply impossible to build really straight roads in most parts of this country. Rwanda is called the Land of a Thousand Hills, and for all the ways those hills make the country extraordinary, they are not so kind to its transportation infrastructure. The road-builders could try to build straight roads, but this would mean so much change in elevation that driving would be really unpleasant, and unkind to engines in this country where automatic transmission is unheard-of. The alternative they seem to choose is skirting the edges of the hills, which avoids the changes in elevation but does mean that the steering wheel is almost never in its default position.

The other consequence is that, at almost every moment, one can look out the window of the bus and see really dramatic views of rolling hills, valleys and farmland. The terracing of the hillside cultivation, mixed with forests and interspersed with houses, is kind of stunning.

My bus, which left Kigali at 10:30 a.m., got to Butare some time after 1:00 p.m. Transportation from Kigali, despite the very loud and entropic feel of the Nyabugogo bus terminal, is very well organized, and buses can be found connecting the capital with all major Rwandan towns as well as Kampala, Bujumbura, Goma and more. I did not even have to ask anyone: I just paused looking vaguely confused for a few seconds, and a man approached me to ask where I was going. He led me first to the ticket-vendor and then to the bus. Granted, he was an employee of a private bus company, but that’s great customer-service. The ticket, with Sotra Tours, cost 2,500 francs (about $4) one-way, which strikes me as very reasonable given the length.

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So the ride proceeded without a hitch. The bus made stops in major towns along the way, and at each one vendors ran up to the windows, eager to sell us food. In a confusing exchange, I told a vendor that I didn’t have a 100-franc coin for a donut-thing (íríindazi), so he took 500 and plopped a whole bag in my lap. I mean, they were good, but I couldn’t eat most of them!

Upon arriving in Butare, I took advice from a friend of a friend and got a room at the guesthouse of the Anglican church there, just down the road from the town center. A single room was 5,000 francs per night, which was far less than I was anticipating paying! (I could have gotten away with 4,000, but I coughed up extra for the not-shared bathroom.) Granted, this was not a hotel: minus the bathroom, it was probably about 60 square feet, there was no hot water and the floor was warped in such a way that lots of things could come in under the door if they so chose. Still, the room was clean, it had a mosquito-net and there was consistent running water (an amenity I have not experienced in quite awhile). All in all, I’d say $7.50 a night was a bit of a steal.

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By the time I had settled in, it was late afternoon. I had not had lunch, aside from my two ámáandazi, so I randomly chose a place in town and got some brochettes. In the spirit of conquering my shyness, I sat down with two random Rwandan guys, started talking and asked them to participate in my research, which I explained in detail. “Sure,” they said, “when we have time.” They gave me their phone numbers and said to call at 5:00 p.m. the next day. Then they had to go. I felt satisfied. I ate my brochettes and then I headed out too.

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The second problem with my grand plan of going from one town to the next (the first being the abundance of tourist activities) was that, as I realized, good tourist places are not always good research places. Butare is, by Rwandan standards, a big commercial town, but as in Kigali no one actually lives in the city center. Everyone who goes there is doing some kind of business: buying, selling, eating, whatever. The result is that they all at least look busy, and they don’t seem like they would be willing to spare a few minutes to read a list of words for a foreign researcher.

So, in my half-hearted search for research subjects that essentially turned into a self-guided tour of the town, I did get a decent feel for the place. I think I will save the detailed description for tomorrow’s post, but my basic impression was that it was a nice, laid-back town, surprisingly relaxed for a place where there was clearly a lot of commercial activity going on.

My dinner was at the Hotel Ibis, which I am told is a stalwart institution here. There are not a whole lot of formal restaurants, and most covered in the guidebook are affiliated with hotels. My meal was quite reasonably priced, I thought, given that I ate two very nice and filling courses, though it is funny to think that it cost as much as my accommodation for the night!

16 Nyákáanga 2013—A Cautionary Tale

The Crimson (the student newspaper for which I am a designer) sent out a solicitation in May for “summer postcards” from staff-members doing interesting things: short vignettes to be published on the website. I signed on to write three. Both that I have submitted so far are adaptations of posts on this blog; you can find them by going to thecrimson.com and searching for my name. The relevant one here was a shortening of the “uruunturuuntu” post from mid-June.

The guidelines for the postcards said that they should not be longer than 500 words, and the shorter the better. Shortening that post meant removing a lot of detail, mostly in the background for the sake of keeping the core discussion intact.

Soon after it was published, I found out that a certain Facebook user (another Harvard student) had read it, thought it was racist and posted a very sarcastic criticism of it, which got a bunch of likes and started a debate in its comment thread.

I think the complaint was somewhat exaggerated, though in retrospect I see some places where what I wrote might be misread as patronizing. This is specifically in the first two sentences, which were condensed down from several paragraphs. From one perspective, they might seem like blanket statements about a society, whereas the original piece phrased them unambiguously as raw impressions of a few individuals’ actions. Further, they might even lend the rest of the discussion a distasteful tone.

So evidently it is possible to read that vignette as meaning (wording exaggerated) that I was surprised to find that Rwanda was not a place full of evil, and that I rather decided it was full of noble savages right out of a nineteenth-century ethnography.

It is also certainly possible not to read it in this way (as several people have confirmed for me). And it’s all resolved, at least as far as that comment thread is concerned. We agreed (I think) that I am neither a raging colonialist nor a well-meaning-but-subtly-prejudiced gawker. It was nevertheless quite a surprise to be so accused: I think that having mature perspectives, especially on Africa, is very important, and I much more often notice insensitive statements in others’ writing.

So there is a whole series of lessons to extract from this:

First and foremost, when publishing a piece of writing, one has to expect that people will read it from a very wide range of perspectives, and that some of those perspectives may lead to quite divergent impressions: in this case, those who find it racist or those who see it as subtle affirmation of a problematic view they already had.

So from that, I can think of three points to remember in the future about the risks of writing on the Internet. (a) Be prepared for the consequences of writing, or at least aware that there may be some. (b) Understanding that misinterpretations can happen, try to minimize the opportunities for misreading. The writer’s goal should be that no one misreads his work, even and especially those who will trumpet it on social media. (c) When writing on a very sensitive topic—like the Rwandan Genocide, or an entire society of humans—take extra care not to misrepresent!

That is not all, though. Showing me an insensitive vignette is one of the easier ways to get me worked up about something. This post about me was not unlike others I have seen on Facebook, liked and even commented on.

The first thing I realize is that the portion of the personality that a short vignette disseminates is minuscule. I now cannot help but think how many of those whose writing I have criticized might have just miscommunicated themselves. Moreover, even if their views were reprehensible, they were almost certainly complex, interesting human beings nonetheless. Internet commenters can be harsh, and there is potential for personal damage without accountability in a way that even truly flawed writers probably do not deserve.

(I do not feel damaged; as far as personal attacks, I can handle a lot worse. It is still educational, though, to see the discussion from the opposite perspective.)

Next, a lot of the discussion dealt with how the privilege of the platform (in this case, The Crimson) brought with it the responsibility to treat one’s subjects carefully and respectfully, especially if those subjects do not have the opportunity to speak for themselves. That’s true, but it gradually occurred to me that I was not the only one with a powerful podium: Facebook enabled my critic to make inflammatory claims about me and my character, with direct access to several hundred members of our shared college community and, at least at first, no opportunity for me to defend myself.

This unexpected parallel arises only because the two of us happen to share a distinct social community. It is not that uncommon, though, for this sort of thing to happen: The Crimson publishes lots of opinion pieces that students generally agree are half-baked or worse. The next time I see such a discussion proceeding on Facebook, I will approach it from a different perspective.

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When I came to Rwanda, I knew I would find new things, and I did not quite know what those things would be. Almost everything I have experienced so far has been new and fulfilling in some way, but I find that, every so often, some event is just so far out of the range of what I could have expected that I have to scratch my head for a few minutes once it is all over. This is the most recent addition to that ill-enumerated list, which I think is three items deep now. Along with the others, it stands out as one of the less comfortable things that has happened to me here, but also among the most memorable and educational. The others haven’t actually been blogged about, for one reason or another, but I’ll touch on them at some point.

Tomorrow I travel for a few days, to see some of the country and hopefully get a little research in!

15 Nyákáanga 2013—Impapuro

The permit! It’s here!

The person to whom I gave my research permit application estimated it would take a week to process, and said I would get an e-mail when it was ready. A friend who had been through the process said to check by phone if it was not ready after a week. My hosts reminded me that in Rwanda, bureaucracy is often more responsive to pressure than time.

All that said, I don’t like confrontation, and I wanted to let them take their week before I did anything unconventional. After a week, I had not heard anything. Now, I submitted my application on Tuesday, but one component (the photos) came in Wednesday, and the person processing applications was out of the office at that time, and Thursday was a holiday, so I decided it was possible they had not started working on it until Friday.

The next Friday rolled around, and I had gotten no e-mail. So I called. No answer, perhaps because I was too close to lunchtime. I really meant to call back later in the afternoon, but I kept forgetting until it was too late. I was disappointed, because I had kind of been hoping to travel on the weekend, but it was really my fault for not following up.

On Monday, there was still no e-mail, so I called again. This time, I did get an answer, and was informed that the permit was ready and that I could go pick it up at the office. I did so immediately, and I was actually amazed at how easy this part was: walk in, ask for it, walk out. There were no forms to sign, no fees to pay, no identification to show.

The permit itself is just a single-page letter to be presented to anyone who asks, saying that I have got permission to be doing this project and whatnot. My photograph is stapled to it, and it is nice and official-looking with a cool stamp on it. (Side-note: Every government institution I have been to here has its own special stamp, and the stamp is considered very important as a mark of official sanction. They are actually all about the same—the country’s coat of arms, with the name of the specific institution inscribed around the outside—but it seriously seems like a lot of this country’s budget must go toward getting these stamps.) Paper-clipped to that was a letter addressed to me, congratulating me and wishing me luck.

It was on this second sheet that I noticed a potential factor in the delay: the e-mail address listed below my name at the top of the page was off by one letter. So they must have sent something there, then thrown up their arms in confusion when it bounced. (I’m still giving them the benefit of the doubt here; the responsible thing to do would have been to check the address and make sure it was right.)

I went straight home and started planning my travel. Six weeks later, and I was finally authorized to do what I kind of came here to do.

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The lesson in this, by the way, is clear: I should have called sooner. I do not know when the permit was actually ready, but I probably could have gotten my hands on it at least a few days earlier, and maybe even sped up the process. And as long as I was not mean about it, I do not think I would have been running any risk of alienating myself either. Something to remember in the future.

14 Nyákáanga 2013—Kúrwáara Giripe

There are a couple of health-related things that I have noticed seem to be foreign to Rwandans I meet. I don’t mean this in the sense that these people are unhygienic or don’t wash their hands enough—many probably are, but much more out of necessity than choice. There are just certain conditions that are commonplace for me as an American but are evidently not issues here.

The first is acne. I have some, and it comes and goes—mostly going, with medication, but living in a sweaty and dusty environment it occasionally comes back. At first, my hosts thought it was the sun; that is not unreasonable, really, and it is even possible that the more direct sun did contribute. (I am not very informed about the causes of acne, and frankly I am content to stay that way.) Since, the most common suspicion people have had is that my mosquito-net has a hole in it and I am being bitten during the night. It is kind of annoying to not be able to describe what the problem actually is: there is no Kinyarwanda word for it, and I also do not really understand it enough to describe it, even in English, as anything more than “a thing that happens to white teenagers.”

The other big one is allergies. I know that allergies are, at least in a large part, a result of being raised in an overly sanitized environment, and in that sense I should expect that they would not be very prevalent here. Once again, though, it is annoying to not really be able to explain to people why I am sneezing. (Something here, probably dust, has frequently been setting off my allergies when I am indoors.) Many times, I have been asked whether I have a cold, and responded only “no, maybe it’s the dust…” I have tried saying allergie with a French flourish, but that does not help much either.

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Now, at long last, I actually do have a cold. It was really only a matter of time: I am living in a densely populated area and making it my business to go out and talk to lots of people, so lots of handshaking. And yes, I have not been washing my hands as much as perhaps I should, and I have a feeling many of the hands I am shaking have not either. (On both ends, this is at least partially because of intermittently available sanitation.)

It is not a terrible affliction, though I am going through tissues really fast. I took two naps today and, to briefly stop pretending it is still Sunday, slept about ten hours the following night. It is just a little bit bothersome to know that my time here is so valuable and I actually have things I want to do, but for the sake of recovering quickly I should just stay inside.

It is also a near-certainty that I will get someone else sick in the house, and then someone else, and it would be pretty lucky (I think) if anyone came out without a cold. I guess I can take some comfort in knowing that it is, after all, just a cold.

13 Nyákáanga 2013—Abacuraanzi

This past week’s Quiz Night featured a series of questions about KigaliUP, a Rwandan folk music festival to be held this weekend. I had not known what KigaliUP was beforehand, but I came away knowing lots about it! For example, it is modeled after a Canadian folk musical festival. And it would feature a performance by an African musician once called “possibly the most famous singer alive” (or something to that effect) by Rolling Stone, who is also his country’s minister of tourism and culture. (I guessed that this was Youssou N’Dour, but I am pretty sure he was not on the program at the festival, so I don’t know what was going on with that.)

In any case, I went with a friend from Harvard to the first of two nights of music. My hosts did not know that the festival was happening, which I suppose should have prepared me for arriving and seeing a crowd that was substantially (though not exclusively) composed of foreigners. This is to be expected, perhaps: the entry fee of 2,000 francs would be restrictive for many, and perhaps a little too much of the advertising was done online. (Or maybe my hosts just don’t listen to the radio!)

One thing struck me as soon as I got off of the moto. A kid approached me and offered me a wristband ticket. I might have been suspicious, but the price he gave was the right one (as I had read online), and for all I knew he was being paid to sell tickets. Once I tried to buy it, I was immediately surrounded by a whole crowd of kids. I am a little bit O.K. if this happens because they are curious about the foreigner, but here I had the distinct impression that they were looking to take advantage of me. As we worked out the change, I felt several hands successively reach into my pockets; I was ready for it, and they did not get anything, but I was nonetheless a bit put off. This had not happened before.

It’s really unfortunate that some children here feel like that is an O.K. thing to do. Even living on an unpaved road, it is easy to see the orderliness of this city and forget that there is real poverty too. I do not know any of these children’s specific circumstances, but they likely have very little money and non-desirable living situations, as well as very little ability to advance in society, so picking pockets appears to be the most promising way forward. I guess this is the source of many kinds of crime, and addressing it is really difficult regardless of the perspective I try to adopt: that of the disadvantaged, that of the law enforcement, that of the administration.

It was also possible to buy tickets at the gate, from the guy checking tickets at the gate. I have no way of knowing how much official permission my vendor had to be so vending, but I came away with an authentic ticket and the full contents of my pockets so I can’t complain too much.

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The music was good, I suppose. I was there less to see music performed, though, than to do something with a friend and experience a new environment. I would have liked to see the headliner of the night, Habib Koité, but he came on at 9:45 (by which point I had to be home). We saw a few Rwandan acts, which were enjoyable, though sometimes very loud. There was also an American, Joey Blake, who performed some nice jazz pieces before beginning to do joint performances with Rwandan musicians.

I noticed some things about the environment that I thought were interesting. For one, this was the first time I had seen substantial numbers of Rwandans smoking cigarettes. This is logical. The people here were probably reasonably well-off, and tobacco—even without American-style taxes—is probably more expensive than most can afford. It was also a live concert, where such things are just going to happen. Finally, the Rwandan government has been very responsible about restricting the ability of international tobacco corporations to advertise, so this country is developing as a place where such things just aren’t too much of an issue.

I also saw one pre-teen being escorted out of the concert pretty forcefully by a policeman. Perhaps he snuck in, or perhaps he was caught doing something else. I can’t really blame an officer for doing his job, but in light of what I had been thinking before I kind of hope he wasn’t too rough.

My other impression was kind of one of confusion: this event was held at Amahoro Stadium, the largest in the city. I had never been there before, so I was curious to see the inside… except that the concert was not held inside. There were two stages set up kind of in the yard on either side of the entryway to the stadium. I have certain associations I make with concerts that are held at sports venues, but I guess these organizers had something else in mind. To their credit, there were not really enough people there to fill a stadium, and to put one of the two stages inside would have created a vast and maybe unmerited hierarchy between the two.

Anyway, the music and company were good, and the food—supplied by various local restaurants—was very nice as well. I am really getting to like brochettes, at least as prepared here. I might find myself trying to seek out similar things more often at home.

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I headed out at about 9:00, to allow for the 30- or 40-minute ride home from Kimironko. The moto-ride gave me a chance to test another question I have been pondering, which relates to being taken advantage of by moto/taxi-drivers.

If we assume that I want to get a fair price out of a driver, not to high and also not too low, my question was whether I should speak to him in English or in Kinyarwanda. The argument for Kinyarwanda is simple: hopefully he will respect that I can speak, or at least try to speak, and not instinctively give me the muzuûngu rate. On the other hand, if I am talking to someone with an objective to accomplish, might it be better to address him using a language in which he is less comfortable, so that I can have the advantage in the negotiations?

The latter is certainly the more pessimistic view: it assumes, to some extent, that I will likely be overcharged regardless and that I should be the arbiter of what I pay at the exclusion of the driver. But it occurred to me nonetheless.

My memory is not perfect, but I believe I arranged the price with this driver in English. As it happened, he misinterpreted the location I gave. (There are two places in Kigali called Nyakabanda; I am actually surprised this has not happened more often.) I redirected him, no problem, but when he arrived he mentioned that the price should have been higher. He said it in a kind of resigned voice, sticking with the unwritten rule that the agreed-upon price must be honored. But immediately after, he started asking me about my Kinyarwanda. We had a pleasant, short conversation, and he did not mention the price again.

This is not conclusive. I do not know pricing standards well enough yet to judge. What I hope is that I was given the white rate for the first destination, which ended up being the standard rate for the second. I do hope I didn’t rip him off—he was a nice guy, and the only moto-driver I have ever really talked to.

(For reference, if memory serves, this was 1,200 francs that I paid to get from Kimironko to Nyakabanda, the one near Kimisagara. The ride took 30 or 40 minutes, and I thought this was a reasonable-sounding price, though I’ll grant the possibility that it should have been higher.)

12 Nyákáanga 2013—Memrise

Wow, I am behind on these. I did not do all too much on Friday. I had hoped to go pick up my research permit, but it wasn’t ready yet. So I went to an Internet café. I have been noticing more and more that I am able to fulfill all of my basic needs by just walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo and going to small businesses—rather than walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo, catching a taxi into Town and going to large businesses.

My previous default for Internet had been to go to Bourbon Coffee in U.T.C. (in Town), buying a scoop of ice cream for 1200 francs and enjoying the free Wi-Fi. However, I can also go to an Internet café in Nyamirambo and pay 100 francs for every twelve minutes. I still usually go to Simba Supermarket (in Town) for my candy and tissues and other food needs, but I could also go to one of the dozens of Alimentation shops much closer to home. And there is a place to be SIM card refills there too.

The other thing I am noticing is that I no longer have a whole lot of new places I want to see in Kigali. I don’t want to say I am bored of it, but unless I plan something specific I might find myself just cycling through my regular errands: using the Internet, buying candy, changing money. What that means, I think, is just that I am about ready to start doing research that takes me other places!

Anyway, one thing I found at the Internet café was that there is a mobile Memrise application available, which I had not known. This was exciting: Memrise is a very useful online tool that is built on algorithms designed to develop memories. It is especially useful for language-learning: it teaches words (or other items) by encouraging users to create mnemonics for them, and then tests on those words at increasing intervals until the memory is deemed to be secure. I created my own lesson plan with all of the words I have learned in Kinyarwanda in two years, and I have found it to be very effective.

The down-side is that it is web-based and fairly data-intensive. There is a little bit of irony in that I was solidly learning dozens of new Kinyarwanda vocabulary words every day before coming here, and upon arrival I slowed to maybe one or two because of the lack of Internet connection.

So I was happy to see a mobile app, and moreover one that could download courses to be used offline. I downloaded the app and my Kinyarwanda course (which took about 40 minutes on the African connection), and started back up. I had over 500 memories to “water” (according to the software’s terminology, which compares memories to plants) because I had been away for so long. I would gradually complete this task over the following days.

What I noticed, unfortunately, was that my course was flawed. I have done a lot of reading about Kinyarwanda since coming here, especially about its tones, and on returning to the course it became clear just how lacking I was in that area. Some words had the tones marked, but most did not, meaning that the memories I had been carefully planting and watering were missing very important pieces of information.

A definite reason for this is that there is no published reference that reliably gives the tones for words in Kinyarwanda. One can ask a native speaker, sure, but that becomes less plausible when trying to update a list of several hundred words. And I had not quite understood the important role that tones play in this language when I was compiling the list from my class notes; I included them where I could, but if a word did not have any marked I didn’t omit it. I figured it was better to know a word incompletely than not at all.

Now, however, I do have a good reference. It is an unpublished dictionary that I think I mentioned in a post awhile ago; I have it on loan, and it does mark the tones in the right way. So I have been spending much of my free time going through and updating the tones on the words in my list. It is a big job, with a list of over 1,000 words, but it is coming along.

I want to keep using Memrise: like I said, it is a very useful tool. I just have to think, now, about the best way to move forward. What I have tentatively decided is as follows: (a) stop “planting” new memories with the course I already have, as its tone information is incomplete; (b) make a new course for words whose definitions I do not know, and for those make sure the tones are correct so I learn them from the start; and (c) for words whose definitions I know but whose tones I do not know, make another course in which the sequence of tones is the only thing to be learned with each word.

That last one, especially, will take some thought, just because of the way Memrise is set up and the way it asks its questions. It’s doable, though—and, hopefully, I will have some long bus-rides ahead of me in which to think about it!

11 Nyákáanga 2013—Guteembera muri Nyamirambo

Kigali is not easy to photograph. I mentioned this before, a little bit, in the post about Nyabugogo. People do not always like to be photographed, for whatever reason, and that kind of restricts the things I feel comfortable brazenly pointing a camera at.

This is also a city where there is not really a lot in the way of tourist attractions. There are a couple of memorials, one other museum that I know of and precious few public parks or monuments.

So the things that are worth photographing in Kigali—and there are a lot of them—usually relate to the culture of the city, and the frame invariably includes the people who make that culture what it is!

A great case-in-point is the market, a wonderful environment that is exquisitely different from anything I have experienced elsewhere. I want to take pictures to remember it by, and to show my friends and family. People are sometimes reluctant to be in the pictures, and after being so turned down once I’m often too timid to walk a bit and immediately ask again. And a photograph of the interior of, say, Nyabugogo Market without people in it is not only implausible—the guidebook aptly describes it as “frenetic”—but would also fail to adequately portray that environment.

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I was thinking about this today because of a walk I took. I live in Nyakabanda, but to catch minibus taxis I usually walk to Nyamirambo, another district the boundary with which is only a few blocks away. I then take one of several minibus lines that run the length of Nyamirambo and drop off in the city.

Nyamirambo is an area that is distinctive for a variety of reasons. I read that it is the oldest inhabited part of present-day Kigali, which was not founded as an urban area until 1907. It is now home to the highest concentration of Muslims in Rwanda. It is also one of the livelier parts of the city: full of small shops and music and diverse backgrounds, and one of not very many places here where people can be found walking the streets after 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.

I have seen Nyamirambo go by from the windows of many different kinds of vehicles now—it is almost every day that I go in the direction of Town for at least a little while, and that inevitably means driving the length of the Boulevard de Nyamirambo. I have noticed the things passing by, often with great interest, but I realized that I had never actually seen them up-close.

So I decided to explore on foot. It is not a long walk, and once I got past the areas I had walked around before there was something interesting on every corner. A length of a dozen blocks or so of the Boulevard de Nyamirambo, and a couple of blocks on either side, are packed with small shops: almost all one story, many just one small room. Lots of them are colorfully painted on the outside, and clever names are common—my favorite is probably Shalom Saloon, but I should really write some of the others down.

The more I walked, the more it seemed like the stores actually repeated themselves. It actually reminded me of a video-game environment where a few templates for shops had been designed and then drawn from to randomly fill a huge number of spots. The proportion of stores that were papeteries (stationery), video stores/studios, hair salons, butchers, Internet cafés, alimentations (deli-ish things), bijouteries (clothing?) and quincailleries (no idea on this one) was probably upwards of 90%. Then again, I did not go into many of them, and I am sure there is more variety than is apparent. What is interesting is to think that these are the archetypes of things that the community needs to survive, and apparently they are sufficient for it.

The neighborhood does feel livelier than other places I have been: certainly more so than Town, and its competition comes mainly from the markets at Nyabugogo and Kicukiro. It also feels substantially less orderly, though not much less secure. I walked around for about an hour and never felt uncomfortable. The only things that made me feel the tiniest bit antsy were the people staring at me, and that happens everywhere (though admittedly more here, because there are more people in the street).

This gets me back to the earlier point. The environment in this place, to me at least, is very much worth taking pictures of. In addition to being interesting on its own, it represents an interesting contrast between the general orderliness of this city and the lively African feel of this particular neighborhood. But a key factor there is the presence of people—not huge crowds like in Times Square, but enough that any well-framed shot would feature several at least walking on the sidewalk and several more sitting outside shops. And they might not all take kindly to being subjects.

I should really just try pointing the camera and see who reacts. Or maybe ask permission. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe I could even shoot out the window of a minibus. Whatever my strategy, I do plan to go back to Nyamirambo on foot and get to know some of the stores I just walked past: I bought some candy and popped into a video store briefly, but I didn’t stick around much anywhere for the sake of getting home before sundown.

10 Nyákáanga 2013—Úrwíibutso n’Ifilimi

It could be argued that there is really only one important thing to see in this city, and it had been bothering me for awhile that I had not seen it. I’m talking about the Kigali Genocide Memorial, opened in 2004 in Gisozi, on the site of a mass grave of 250,000 people.*

So I went to Gisozi this afternoon; it gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with a new minibus line (for Kinamba and Université Libre de Kigali). I actually got off the minibus early because I thought I was at the right place, but ended up walking for about fifteen minutes instead. This was fine: the truth is, I could have walked the whole distance from town in a half-hour or so, and I do enjoy exploring on foot.

“Town” is on one hill, and Gisozi (which means “Hill”) on another, to its north. To get between the two, one descends into a valley and then reascends. There is a small river to cross, with a sizable basin filled with papyrus swamps on either side; this is interesting to see, given that beyond the marsh on both sides is city.

The memorial is not far up the hill in Gisozi. It is maintained by the Aegis Trust, a British N.G.O. that developed it, I believe, in conjunction with the Kigali City Council. It includes a series of exhibits, a gravesite, an archive and a café.

The exhibits are dedicated primarily to telling the story of the Genocide. Having read many different versions of this story, it is always interesting to see how another entity tells it. Very little can possibly be objective, and several pieces—ethnicity in precolonial Rwanda, the role of the Belgians and the final casualty count, among others—are especially sticky.

Perhaps I am prescribing more than I should, but what I read—a rendition that told of harmony prior to colonization, an ethnic hierarchy largely invented by colonists and a death-toll of over a million—seems consistent with a government that wants to emphasize the scale of the tragedy and promote unity among its people. I cannot say there is another version of the story that is better, or that I would rather have seen, but it is thought-provoking to see a story that so necessarily displays the interests of the storyteller.

It was well told, too: there were lots of images and several films. I have a lot of respect for the decision to put the English and French translations in small print below the main Kinyarwanda text. It is a little bit annoying for the foreigners who make up a substantial portion of the Memorial’s visitors, but it shows respect for the Rwandans for whom the center was built.

After the storytelling section, there were some other exhibits. There was a room with some bones and personal effects of victims. There was a room with hundreds of photographs of victims, put up by family members. There were some quotes in big plaques on the walls. There was a section with displays about other genocides.

I have to say that, having read so much about this already, I was not as upset as I thought I would be. I knew what was coming, so to speak, and my mind had prepared itself; the photographs were often not easy to look at, but somehow the bones did not hugely affect me.

One part was really hard, though. The second floor had a Children’s Room, which I thought going in would try to describe genocide in a way accessible to children. No. It was about young victims of the Genocide; there were big pictures on the wall of the kids, happy and alive, accompanied by plaques that gave parents’ descriptions of them, along with their cause of death. Reading about a toddler who liked pasta, ran around rambunctiously and played with her sister, and was smashed against a wall until dead, that was very powerful.

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In the evening, for a change of pace, I met friends in the city to see a movie. At the time my guidebook was printed, there were no movie theaters in Kigali—except a couple that would play whatever movie you brought, provided their speakers were working. In the past couple of months, though, one has opened in the Kigali City Tower, and it is functionally like an American theater (except smaller and cheaper).

We saw “Man of Steel”; the screen was smaller than most in theaters back home, but the tickets were Fr. 4,000 ($6) including 3-D glasses, so I couldn’t complain. I can complain about the film, though, so I will now digress a couple of paragraphs to share my thoughts:

I have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit: What they are working with is a story of a superhero who cannot be harmed except by the remains of his former home planet. There are only so many times Lex Luthor can sabotage some Kryptonite and actually pose a threat to Superman, so we have to resort to ever more absurd plots.

The premise for this film was a military coup on Krypton, just before its demise, whose perpetrators were imprisoned in space but freed by the planet’s destruction. They then spent years gathering arms from Krypton’s former colonies before tracking down its only other living citizen: Clark Kent, living in America, in whose genes was encoded the blueprint for rebuilding Krypton—which former Emperor Zod** wanted to do on earth. And they had this thing called a world-engine that was going to alter earth to make it more like Krypton.

Huh?

As contrived as it was, the plot was remarkably free of substance! A solid majority of the film was taken up by sequence after bewildering sequence in which Superman fought against his Kryptonian pursuers, never accomplishing anything (of course, because none of them could be harmed) except collateral damage. The scale kept rising, and the scale of the carnage was outrageous. (Multiple office-buildings collapsed spectacularly; it actually seemed in poor taste for the film to show those events, which inevitably would have caused loss of life on a huge scale, while maintaining the feel of a fun action movie.) Additionally, the dialogue was often bad and there was not much room for character development between all of the explosions.

By the way, I remain confused about how the conscience of dead Jor-El was housed in multiple Kryptonian ships, how he was able to walk around like a person there and interact with people, how the plan he proposed to reimprison the invaders made any sense at all, and how Superman ultimately killed the final villain. I don’t feel much of a desire to know, either.

The film had its redeeming features. I liked the lead actors, and I thought the story of Superman’s childhood was told well—that is, with subtlety and emotion, two factors missing from the rest of it!

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* I am not quite clear on how those 250,000 people got to the location, or how precise the number is: that number far exceeds the number of Tutsis who could have been living in Kigali before 1994, and even by the most liberal casualty estimates represents a huge proportion of the total dead. Though I know there are many human remains there, I wonder whether it might also be a symbolic grave for the rest.

** Not to be confused with Emperor Zog, who actually ruled Albania in the early 20th century

9 Nyákáanga 2013—Guhiinduka

My only real activity today was to go into town for a short time, use the Wi-Fi at U.T.C., acquire my first two samples of Kenyan money—I will have to write a post about currency at some point—and then return. It was a day to catch up on writing and eat dinner at home, two things I had not done much recently. (I am noticing, quite predictably, that the amount of money I spend on things increases dramatically when I pay for my own food!)

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Something occurred to me on the way back. I am kind of getting to know the way minibuses work in Kigali. From home, I know where I can catch them to get to Town and to Nyabugogo, and from Town I know at least some parts of the routes that go to Nyamirambo, Kimironko, Remera, Kacyiru and Kicukiro. This is just a small fraction of all of the lines that minibuses cover, though.

There is no map showing all of these lines. This is partially because there are so many of them that adequately showing all of the detail would be a daunting task (doable, though, I am sure—the way transit maps are made is really interesting, but that’s another story). Another reason, I think, is that they change so frequently. Finally, frankly, it all works and people here have more important things to do.

The result, though, which I think is fascinating, is that all of the nuance of Kigali’s transit infrastructure is recorded only in the collective conscience of its operators and passengers. Any given person will know a small part of it well, as I know the routes that connect Town with Nyamirambo, and have some familiarity with several other pieces. Due to detail and practicality, though, I doubt there is anyone who has an in-depth knowledge of the entire machine.

This is really interesting to me. Coming from the document-oriented United States, it is enough of a wonder to just watch it all work without being mapped or scheduled. Then I start to think of the implication that, as the routes evolve to match the demands of their passengers, the knowledge of that previous state is overwritten and, within a short period of time, disappears.

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The state of any community is ephemeral, I suppose: never perfectly recorded, always changing. I am repeatedly struck, though, by just how much this is true of Kigali. It is developing so rapidly that a student returning after a year or two abroad can barely recognize the city center. Few bother to make maps, as they are inevitably out-of-date by the time they are printed. My guidebook was published in 2012, but already much of its information is not timely.

History is often very visible in this place, and painfully so: the homeless man with no limbs, the street salesman with a dent in his head. This legacy is one Rwandans are determined never to forget. With time, though, the rest is fading away: Old landmarks are still recognized, but slowly superseded by names that are more meaningful in the present. A minibus in Nyamirambo announces its route as “Gereza–ETO–Rubangura–Surufo”; the first two stops are named for sites no longer in existence, the third a very new shopping center and the last an industrial warehouse. It’s unlikely that that route was so delineated two years ago, and two years in the future it will probably have changed again. Today’s Kigali is different from yesterday’s, and it will be different again tomorrow.

Part of me wants to lament the information that lost to oblivion, but another is just content to sit back and be a spectator to this society’s development. Maybe this is just what progress looks like—and here, of all places, there is a lot to move past.

8 Nyákáanga 2013—Mu Isókô ryáá Nyabugogo

Yesterday, I inadvertently reenacted a previous year’s A.L.P. Theater Night skit with my comical moto-ride to the wedding ceremony. Today, more intentionally, I experienced another one: this past spring’s, about an American visitor who goes to Nyabugogo Market in Kigali with his Rwandan friends.

Once again, there were some discrepancies in plot: the skit involved an argument between clothing-vendors and, ultimately, a call to the police. While this would have been entertaining, I was also just fine with all of the sellers getting along with each other.

So I met a friend there, and we walked around a bit. Unlike me, she had actually come to shop, so while she was trying on clothes I got to wander a bit. I did buy two things: a stupid American T-shirt with “PLAYER ONE” written on it in Galaga targets (Fr. 4,000/$6) and a Red Sox cap (Fr. 2,000/$3). I wanted these as novelties: American clothing that made its way all the way to Africa, and will now come back. I had neither the interest nor the room in my suitcase to seriously shop for clothing.

So I got to explore: my companion was buying clothing, so I did not want to wander too far from there. She later told me that this kind of behavior raises eyebrows: for someone to walk around in a market setting without buying anything is seen as suspicious. I do not get the reasoning, but she said people were commenting about it.

I did not notice any of that. Lots of vendors did try to sell me their stocks, and many asked what I was looking for. This seemed like expected, behavior; they were trying to be helpful, I thought, and I didn’t get the suspicion vibe. Similarly, I have gotten quite used to being stared at wherever I go in Rwanda, so that did not set off any alarm bells either. I guess these are the advantages of exploring with a Rwandan.

I could understand being a little bit confused. I did not want to rush the fitting process, so I tried to radiate out from my current location, seeing what was for sale and then moving on, then radiating back every few minutes. Once I found what looked like logical boundaries, I did not go farther in those directions—I did not want to get lost, after all, or stray too far. The result was that, on a couple of occasions, I did circle back along the same routes several times.

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The Market at Nyabugogo is a maze. It is also enormous. The facility itself is a repurposed prison, which explains a lot about the layout: solid brick walls on the outside; a dank interior lit through the holes in the corrugated metal roof; several distinct blocks of stalls connected by a small number of corridors; small stalls, situated along aisles, which with that knowledge really do look like cells without doors.

I really wanted to take pictures, but people were quite reluctant to be photographed. The guidebook had warned about this, and when I gestured that I wanted to photograph people tended to wave their fingers. J. (the friend) explained that there is a silly belief that tourists will somehow try to sell the photos they take, and many people feel they are being wronged if they do not share in the profit. I have to wonder where that impression comes from, but it is apparently very prevalent.

(Funny story: At one point a guy saw I was carrying a camera and asked how much it was worth, and then he actually tried to buy it from me. I explained, a little bit confused, that I was not, in fact, selling it. Then I tried to take his picture. Oya, said his finger.)

We only saw a small portion of the whole market, which is several block-lengths long and several more wide. I was astonished by the range of materials I saw on display just in that area, though: bags, shoes, clothing and bedding, all in just about every variety imaginable. Other parts of the market have food, crafts, spare parts, raw materials, toys, furniture and all manner of other things. I had the strong feeling, walking around, that one could find literally anything in that market with enough determination. I guess I’ll just have to go back!

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If my morning was filled with a pretty African experience, my evening was quite the opposite: it was trivia night at Sol e Luna, an Italian restaurant near the Rwanda Development Board at the western edge of Remera. I met my friends from Harvard and we competed, as a team of six, with over a dozen other teams—of which maybe two included someone of African descent.

The enormous expat population has nourished a number of muzuûngu-oriented restaurants in Kigali, which usually serve high-quality, expensive foreign cuisine. This was my first visit to one—in the name of breadth of experience, perhaps—but, given that trivia nights happen every Monday, it likely will not be my last.

The structure is as follows: there is a trivia quiz of about 50 questions, developed by the winners of the previous week’s competition. Teams may compete with up to six people. This begins with a “fun round,” a printed sheet given to each time with matching-columns or fill-in-the-blank questions in a few categories. The remainder of the questions are read out by a quizmaster, and answers are written on the back of the aforementioned sheet.

There were some good questions. I was happy to see that one of the fun-round categories was “match the Virunga volcano with its literal Kinyarwanda meaning.” (I killed it.) Many of the items in the “match the uncommon word with its definition” were absurd: only three of the ten appear on Dictionary.com, and the linguist in me couldn’t help but point out that if a word does not exist in anyone’s lexicon it cannot really be classified as such. (Case-in-point: I highly doubt any English speaker has ever non-sarcastically used the word “sgiomlaireached” in conversation.) Nevertheless, I like things like that because they are an opportunity to guess at etymologies, which is fun.

I was disappointed that I did not know the expanded form of Bralirwa: Brasseries et Limonaderies du Rwanda (which I subsequently looked up in time to include in yesterday’s post), though I was happy when I guessed that imbangukiragutabara (given the explanation that it is a compound whose components mean “rush” and “help”) was Kinyarwanda for “ambulance.” In fact, the next day I saw an ambulance drive by with that exact word stretching from one end to the other on both sides (the first ambulance I have seen here, I might add).

Our team did not win, but we were somewhere in the top third. I think it would be really cool to write those questions, but just the experience of a trivia night with friends was enough fun that I will probably be back there next Monday too!