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.
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.
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.
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!
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