This afternoon, I had what was for me a rather stressful and intense conversation with my host-mother and host-father’s mother. In reality, it was about really benign things: my studying Kinyarwanda, the research I want to do, how nice it was that an American was studying Kinyarwanda. It was stressful because of how much I had to concentrate to understand what was going on.
Both women are really sweet, and very appreciative that I can speak the language a little. One speaks very limited English, and the other (as far as I can tell) none at all. The whole thing started at lunch when I sat down at the table and they started talking to me. I say they were talking to me because I was thinking really hard to understand what they said (and often ask them to repeat), and after that I usually didn’t have the energy to think of how to respond except by nodding. It helped that they were basically sustaining the conversation themselves.
Afterward it moved to the living room couches, and became a little less one-sided. I had to start answering their questions, rather than just understanding their statements. I explained the research permit application process (which I will explain here before too long), what I was studying at school and why on earth I wanted to study a language spoken only in this one little country.*
This was all really helpful. They were accommodating me a lot: they spoke slowly and didn’t use big words. There was one sentence (“If I have any money left over when I go back to America, I have to return it to the university.”) that they didn’t understand, so I had to supplement my flawed translation by saying it really slowly in English. Still, I was happy to see that I could kind of hold my own in a real conversation with real people.
I kind of thought that would be the post for the day, and then I went to the city again. So much for that.
The person I went with, one of the two I was with last time, is my host-father’s sister, which means that according to the style I’ve set out for myself she is my host-aunt. It feels really weird to say that, though, because she is basically my age (which is why I originally thought she was his niece—um, host-cousin?). Let’s just call her A.
So after A. finished studying for the day, we caught a minibus into town. I tried to explain how traffic is different in the U.S.; it was comforting to hear her acknowledge that, yes, drivers are crazy here, and—well, not comforting—that there are lots of accidents too.
A. seems to know a lot of people. I didn’t have much idea of what to do, of course (aside from buying tissues), so we just kind of walked around. A. may have chosen the route deliberately, but even so it seemed like we never walked more than two blocks between people she said hello to. There was the mild-mannered guy she played football with as a child, then the one we passed who she goes to church with, then more in between.
Finally we ran into a friend of hers from school, who was really impressed that I knew any Kinyarwanda, and kept saying how proud he was of me for it. For lots of foreigners, he said, it took months before they figured out how to say “good afternoon,” and yet here I was saying complicated things like “I know it” and “I will be here for eight weeks.” (Well, maybe I was doing a little better than that.)
He wanted to speak English, though. He was proud of his proficiency, and rightly so; he had studied very hard, and now he is really able to hold a conversation. I told him as much; the truth is, it at least as difficult for him as a Rwandan to learn English as it is for me to learn Kinyarwanda, I think, the difference being what is expected. Whenever I answered him in Kinyarwanda, though, it seemed to make him really happy. He even offered to come show me new places this weekend when he is off of work; he said something about a nature preserve. I am looking forward to it.
Cutting back to my observations, I noticed two memorable things during this period. First, Kigali’s main thoroughfares tend to wind along the edges of the many hills on which the city is built. This means that they are often on fairly steep inclines, and also that, in the right places, one can see kind of dramatic panoramic views of the rest of the city from the sidewalks.
Second, in the evening, the lines at the minibus stops get outrageously long; they often looked like about two standard long city blocks—so, comparable to free admission day at the Museum of Modern Art, except moving a lot more slowly! A. said that it can often take two hours to get to the front of the line, the reason being that so many people don’t have cars, and there just aren’t enough buses for everyone (contrary to my perception at other times of day, when they seem to be everywhere). Thankfully, my host-father/A.’s brother does have a car, and he saved us a lot of time by picking us up.
New Vocabulary Words for the Day**
- imanura: traffic accident
- agakiingirizo: condom
- imvuto: orphan
*I won’t pretend it is as useful internationally as French or Arabic, but I maintain that Kinyarwanda is not insignificant. The Bantu language family covers almost all of sub-Saharan Africa from Cameroon down, and (depending on how you count) Kinyarwanda has the largest native speaking population of any language in that family. (Swahili has more, but almost all speak it as a second language.) In better-known terms, Kinyarwanda has about as many speakers as Dutch or Greek.
**Often, it works out in such a way that the words I learn on a given day reflect what I did on that day. Today, this is emphatically not the case! Each of these came up separately in conversation.
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