This will be a short post, I think. I spent a little bit of time in the afternoon walking around town going about some things I had wanted to do: I convinced several more foreign exchange bureaux that I was crazy (but got two new bills from Burundi and one from Uganda out of it), mailed some postcards and went back to the bookstore, where I bought a book called Isokomurage y’Ururimi rw’Ikinyarwanda.
I cannot completely translate the title: the first word is a problematic compound, the first part of which means “source” or “fountain” and the other part of which I don’t know. I think it is a book about idiomatic usage of Kinyarwanda: there is a section of proverbs from old Kinyarwanda and rural dialects, then a dictionary-ish section that appears to focus on idioms, then a section on vocabulary relating to animal-husbandry. This last section includes a fantastic image of 36 body-parts illustrated on a cow.
(Cows are big in Rwandan culture. When Tutsi pastoralists migrated into the Great Lakes Region several centuries ago—so the accepted history goes—they brought with them cows from Ethiopia, which quickly became the main symbols of wealth in Rwanda relative to which the values of other commodities were measured. As a result, Kinyarwanda has developed an extensive vocabulary relating to husbandry. There are lots of words for different kinds of cows, and a whole set of color words that can only apply to cows. One polite Kinyarwanda greeting translates as “Have cows!”, and an exclamation akin to “Jesus Christ!” more directly means “He gave me a cow!”)
But I digress. The other interesting thing that happened that afternoon was that I saw a guy wearing a polyester Harvard jacket, speaking Kinyarwanda to a friend. I asked him whether he went to Harvard; “I don’t know,” he responded. I explained, in a bit more detail, that I studied at this university in the United States. “Oh,” he said, “I just bought it at the market.” Admittedly he did not look like he was from the Class of 1947.
I also took a walk in the morning; there is a side-street, unpaved, that departs from the street I live on and goes uphill from there; it is not on any roadmap I have seen, so I decided to check it out. This road quickly stopped looking anything like a road: grass started appearing, and rocks, and it kept getting thinner. I thought it would have to end soon, so I kept going, and kept being amazed at the ability of this path to keep devolving: I must have walked about a quarter-mile. It got to a point where it was only about 3 feet across, between corrugated metal walls, and paved with sandbags—and then it opened out abruptly onto another paved road.
I saw some interesting things on the way. First, really modest dwellings. On my street, the houses aren’t mansions by any means: most of them are single-story, and not much larger than the two-bedroom apartment where I live in the U.S. They do, however, all have walls or hedges surrounding their property, and they are built in a way that reminds me of a house. Getting farther from the paved road, though, I started seeing houses closer in size to my dorm-room last year, some improvised from sheet-metal, some of clay that was cracking in the dry weather. The pleasantness of the people I saw was a constant, but the living situations really did change. One cluster of houses I saw had a plot of cassava growing outside of it; it was actually kind of beautiful, in a secluded kind of way.
Also, I saw a few kids playing by a church at the end of the road. “Good morning!”, they all shouted pleasantly. “How are you?” I have taken to responding in Kinyarwanda whenever I feel comfortable, so I answered “Ni meêza!” Then they corrected me: “Oya, vuga ngo, ‘I’m fine!’ ” I must admit that caught me off-guard.
Well, so much for a short post. I guess things did happen today!
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