Another fun conversation today. This one took place on the porch, mostly with my, um, host-grandmother, who shows really wonderful patience and willingness to talk to me. She says I am the only white person she has ever been able to have a conversation with in Kinyarwanda (or perhaps in any language).
Today, I showed her a map, in my guidebook, of our area. What I wanted to figure out was where the house was—I thought I had some idea, but it took awhile to get to that because she was so interested in the map itself. The two workers came over—there are two workers who maintain the property—and all three of them looked at it intently for several minutes. They clearly knew how to read it, but I got the feeling that they had not ever seen a map of the neighborhood before.
It took the three of them another few minutes to decide where the house was, which was pretty hard because it is on a dirt road that may or may not be properly represented on maps. The result they came up with was different from what I had decided. When my host-mother and -father came home for lunch, they both had a look at it, and they put us in yet a different place (as well as pointing out that the map was flawed and that several landmarks were no longer there). Walking around with that map and figuring out for sure where we are is something I have to do in the near future!
After the map business wrapped itself up, I couldn’t think of much new to talk about, so I asked the grandmother and the worker sitting next to her to teach me a new word. They interpreted that loosely, and started telling me about farms and things people grow on them, and there were some good words that came out of that. Then, without provocation, they began to talk about their family members who were no longer around.
Without going into too much detail, almost everyone here has lost family members. I had noticed that most of the people I was meeting were women, though I didn’t think too much about it until then. True, I have spent most of my time in or near a home, so most I would meet more women than men anyway, but there is another reason. The rough estimate I have heard is that, after the Genocide, only 30% of Rwanda’s population was male. 80% of children had experienced death in the family. 15–20% of the whole population was made up of minors who had lost a parent.
For a variety of reasons, I never like to think about how broad-scale statistics apply to individuals, and especially not to people I know. I am usually thinking about that in terms of SAT scores or health data, though; that numbers like those might include the wonderfully warm and welcoming people I have come to know here is hard to wrap my head around.
Rwanda is a forward-thinking, rapidly growing and optimistic country, but that is a memory that I think lies just below the surface for almost everyone. They are saddened at the losses they endured; they are shocked and ashamed that they and their countrymen could have allowed such a thing to happen; and, though it is extremely uncomfortable to remember, they are determined never to let themselves forget.
And, just like that, it was lunchtime. The topic changed to my family, and food, and we went about the rest of our days.
New Vocabulary Words for the Day
- iriindamibu: mosquito-net
- agashikirano: small-talk, conversation
- gushikirana: to make conversation
- insina: stand of banana-trees
- kwaandura: to have good manners
- igitúrage: village, neighborhood
Vowels with an acute accent (e.g. á) have a phonetic high tone. Vowels with a circumflex (e.g. â) have a phonetic falling tone. Vowels with no accent have a low tone. Vowels that are doubled are long.
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