I have not written one of these in quite awhile; as most of my readership knows, I was writing on about a week’s delay, and I kind of hit a wall after the post one week before I left Rwanda. The reason, of course, is that I left Rwanda! I had to be on an airplane, and after getting home there were all sorts of adjustments to make, and blogging dropped off of my radar. Hopefully, over the next few days, I can set that straight and bring some closure to this record of my summer while the memories are still fresh.
I have to start with a correction: in my previous posts, I might have mixed up my days—or, at least, the way I wanted to blog about them. See, my really uneventful day was actually 23 July, which, you might notice, does not have a post about it. 21 July, on the other hand, did have a very notable event about which I forgot to blog. My post that is currently labeled 21 July should have been labeled 20 July, and encompasses events from 20 to 22 July (the data analysis and recording mentioned). The post for 22 July, then, which is not time-pegged, should be dated 23 July. This post, then, will be dated 21 July and will be all about an event that took place that day.
I returned from Butare to find my host-father’s mother staying over for some time. When I asked the reason, she said there was an event, called amákóraniro, being held in Nyamirambo. Amákóraniro means “a place where people work together,” or something like that, and as she went into more detail it sounded like she was describing a convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was interested, and I told her I would go on one of the days: it was a 3-day event.
So we walked over together this Sunday morning. It was not far to the location, which I think people were calling Remera Stadium (confusing because Remera is a neighborhood on the other side of the city), and we got there in about ten minutes. We found some other family-members, who guided us to some seats they had been saving.
The saved seats were really necessary. This multipurpose stadium (which could be used for soccer or a number of other sports) had several thousand seats in it, and it was packed. There was a shaded section, and then bleachers outside of it; people in the sun just brought umbrellas. Local street-vendors had picked up on the dense congregation (hehe) of people, and planted themselves near the entrance to sell candy and water and whatnot. It was quite a scene, and I have to wonder whether the stadium ever gets such attendance for sports matches.
Now that I am home, I can check my statistics a little bit; it turns out that, in 2011, there were only about 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Rwanda, forming just a fraction of one percent of the total population. It’s surprising to read that, given how many of the people I know are adherents, and the number of signs for Jehovah’s Witness churches I have seen in the places I have traveled. Seriously, it seems like they are everywhere; I guess this is a testament both to their determined publicity and to the effect that a specific circumstance can have on a person’s impression of a place.
I still can’t help but wonder whether the figure is underreported. If there are really only 20,000 of them, almost a quarter must have been present in that audience, all with their Bibles and their programs, all in their Sunday best for the third day in a row. In addition to the immediate strangeness of seeing so many well-dressed people in a stadium, it was odd that, while all of them were in a semi-circle of bleachers around one side of the field, the object of their collective attention was way on the other side of it. I guess it was necessary so everyone had an equal view, but it meant that no one had a good view and everyone had to squint to see the podium.
In front of the podium, huge letters spelling out Ijambo ry’Imana ni ukuri, “The Word of God is the truth,” had been cut out and mounted on tripods for all to see. At the podium, there was a succession of speakers who said, honestly, nothing extremely interesting. Part of it was that I couldn’t understand, but the general response seemed to be nodding.
The most interesting part was a white guy who got up and gave a speech. It was interesting because his speech was in Kinyarwanda. The audience was wicked impressed, watching in stunned silence as he spoke and then applauding wildly afterwards. I was impressed also; I had no idea that there were any Caucasians of his age (40s) who spoke more than a little Kinyarwanda, and this guy was speaking pretty fluidly. At one point, a Rwandan came up to share the stage and they had a conversation.
I don’t know whether it was the defensive or the linguistic instinct, but some part of me took comfort in noticing that his accent was pretty strong and he didn’t seem to be taking any notice of the tones on the words he was saying. There was certainly a part of me that felt like I had to be better than him, so I wanted to criticize this aspect of the language that he had ignored in his learning. The level-headed side of me chimed in, though, that it’s hard enough to learn any Kinyarwanda, and a lot of teachers would leave tone out of their curriculum entirely so that the student is blissfully ignorant of it by no fault of his own. And in the end, accent or no, the amount of time and effort he put into learning Kinyarwanda and becoming fluent in it is truly admirable, and I guess a testament to the strength of his religious conviction. The ability to communicate with Rwandans in their own language must also have immeasurably helped whatever cause he brought with him.
I confess I did not stay for the whole time. For two hours I strained as hard as I could to understand what was being said, with some success but not a whole lot, in between looking around and admiring the clothing I saw. Had I understood the messages better I probably would have had some objection to them, so maybe it was O.K.; as it was, I was getting kind of bored. My previous arrangement to meet a friend for lunch in Kimihurura gave me a good excuse to beg out at 11:00; I had sat through almost 2 hours of speeches, and I was ready for a change of pace.
That change of pace came in the form of lunch at Mr. Chips, an American-style fast-food place with decent hamburgers, then more data analysis. You’ve already ready about that, though.
