Again, I did three things today. Except this time all of them were at least a little bit new.
I went into town after lunch, and went to check out the Librairie Caritas, which appears to be the only bookstore in the neighborhood. The guidebook said it would be closed on a Saturday afternoon, but it wasn’t so I went in.
Yesterday in church, it occurred to me that it would be really helpful to have a Bible in Kinyarwanda, because I have one in English (at home as a book, and wherever I happen to be as an app). Reading extended texts in Kinyarwanda is something I really want to work on, and it is difficult to do without someone bilingual present because translation resources are so paltry. With the Bible, though, I will have a direct translation available, with each verse being indexed the same way.
I also think a Kinyarwanda Bible is just a cool thing to have, and if reading it familiarizes me with the Bible more, then all the better.
So I bought a Bible, for something like $10. I also bought Umutekano mu Muhanda, an illustrated book about traffic laws produced by a private publisher in conjunction with the Rwandan National Police. It’s actually kind of helpful to me because it has explanations of all their unintuitive street signs, but I bought it mainly for the novelty.
This store is pretty cool. It is somehow faith-based, but they are well-stocked with non-religious things too. They have a good collection of books about East African, and especially Rwandan, history, and a lot especially about the Genocide. It also must be one of only a few stores anywhere that stocks substantial numbers of books in Kinyarwanda.
I had fun just looking around for awhile, and marveling at the contrast between Kinyarwanda Christian motivational books on one shelf and Principles of Organic Chemistry on the next. They also had their fair share of sappy-looking American romance novels and outdated technology guides (Switching to Macintosh by David Pogue, ironic both because it looks about a decade old and also because I do not think you can buy Macs in this country).
After, I took a bus to Kicukiro, a district in the southern part of the city. It was a lengthy bus-ride to get there—about a half-hour, and a very expensive 200 francs. Upon arrival, I did not see much at first: kind of a standard assortment of shops, a bank, a soccer field and some government offices.
It only took a few hundred yards of walking, though, to find a market. That was interesting. I don’t want to pigeonhole it as what people think of as an “African market’; I even hesitate to call it a market for fear of inducing chief/hut/village/tribe syndrome, but I don’t think there is (a) a better way of describing it or (b) any really negative connotation of the term.
It was open-air: there was a roof, supported by wooden poles, but no walls. The construction looked kind of impromptu, but it was separated from the street by a solid wall and clearly had a space that it occupied pretty permanently. I would estimate that the roofed area’s proportions were about 100 yards by 700 yards, though you could find it on Google Maps (a search for “market near Kicukiro Center, Kigali, Rwanda” would probably do the trick) and get a better idea of its size.
It was broken into sections. What was I believe the western end had no furniture at all and appeared to be reserved for people with really big piles of plantains or bananas. Moving inward, about a third was devoted to selling all kinds of food. On one side, people set out their produce on counters, perhaps shelling their peas or pounding their cassava as they sat. On the other, there were rows of shelves set up that were intermittently occupied by salespeople with canned goods and various kinds of non-produce food.
The whole market was split down the middle, widthwise, by an aisle flanked by people tending to huge piles of powder: cassava, millet, corn, whatever else you can make powder out of. These piles started at about my rib-level and towered over my head; I was also surprised (and a little intimidated) to see that there were hundreds of bees hovering and crawling over the powder. I did not see a hive anywhere, and I would not have thought that there was much in cassava powder for a bee to be attracted to, but clearly there was something.
The eastern end of the complex was all divided into rows of shelves, in which people sold a staggering range of goods: some with very nice-looking selections of shoes, some with bags, some with canned foods, some with clothing, some sitting at sewing machines doing repairs.
I guess I shouldn’t be amazed at the range of things being sold, having been to an American supermarket before, but this was really something else. Somehow I trusted the produce I saw a lot more than I would have in a store. I felt like I was seeing a lot more of its life cycle than I would have otherwise. And the environment was so wonderfully entropic-yet-functional. I kept my hand on my wallet the whole time, not wanting to be too careful, but no one tried anything.
After wandering around for a bit, I said hello to a woman selling cassava-powder. I ended up talking to her and one of her colleagues for about a half-hour. She was Congolese, and because of where she was born (Bukavu?) she fluently spoke Kinyarwanda, Mashi, Kibembe, Lingala and Congolese Swahili. (My first thought was, “Wow, that must have been a really cool place to grow up!” It probably was, actually, but then I remembered the downsides.)
They wanted to know (in addition to the usual questions) about Congolese refugees in the United States, whether there were a lot of them, how they were doing economically, whether they wanted to return home. I answered as best I could; hopefully I didn’t give them too much misinformation.
That was a lot of fun. I might have liked to stay longer, but I left to get home before the sun went down. I might have liked to buy something (though I admittedly don’t know what I would have done with cassava powder), but I had spent most of my pocket-money on books. I’ll have to go back, say hello, take some pictures: my friends assure me that it’s O.K. to do that.
In the evening, we read Bible stories. Not from the Bible I bought, but from a book of children’s Bible stories, in English. A. was over and we were trying to teach the 3-year-old some of it, but that didn’t work. So we read together: A. would read a sentence; I would help her with pronunciation, and then try to translate the sentence into Kinyarwanda, and she would help with that. It was really helpful to both of us, I think. We got through the first story, about the creation of the world and stuff. Tomorrow, on to the Garden of Eden!
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