28 June 2014: Umugaánda

Of course I knew that the last Saturday of every month was Umugaánda. It’s one of the coolest things about this country. It really crept up on my this month, though!

For those just tuning in, Umugaánda is a monthly national public service effort. Rwandans in every town get together to do some kind of work to improve their communities. I think it’s very often picking up trash and cleaning out gutters, but I’ve seen them also plant trees and resurface roads. On that Saturday morning of each month, no vehicles (with certain exemptions) are allowed on the road, and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

I was kind of excited to help. As it turned out, though, the project for the week was cleaning around the home, and our home was pretty clean already. So my hosts stayed in and watched the World Cup. (There were actually some people smoothing out the gutter and pulling weeds outside; I would have helped if I had known.)

After the work is finished, at 10:00 (or maybe 11:00) a.m., there is a meeting that happens in each umudugúdu (“village,” roughly—the lowest-level administrative division in Rwanda) where those who did work come to a designated location and discuss what they have done. As I remember from last year, there is one moderator who may or may not be affiliated with the local government, who gives a speech about some aspect of patriotism or government policy.

This week it was about the government’s platform known as Ndi Umunyarwaanda “I Am Rwandan,” the idea of which is that one’s specific heritage, whether ethnic or regional, is immaterial because everyone is a Rwandan. Corollaries to that central point include the idea that national gain is personal gain, and that being Rwandan should be a point of pride.

Now, Ndi Umunyarwaanda is not a new program: it started about a year ago, and I remember reading news articles about it this past school year. The meeting, seemed to consist primarily of a description of the policy, which made me wonder whether they actually said different things every month.

I asked a guy afterward who said, well, not really… they consider this policy really important, so they want to put emphasis on it so that citizens also understand its relevance. I think they put a different spin on it at different meetings, at least.

Anyway, the guy moderating spoke pretty well. I understood what he said, for the most part (at least the main ideas, which made me very happy), and he sounded like a reasonable man. People were evidently listening, and answered questions now and then—though this crowd could still have taken a leaf from the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ book in terms of audience participation!

At one point, the moderator took a phone call. He kept sitting in his seat, with all in attendance listening to his conversation. I wondered whether this was socially acceptable. It turned out to be an important call, informing him that an official from the sector-level (umureenge—that is, above cell and village, but below district and province) government wanted to speak to constituents.

So we all walked about a half-mile over to the designated place, where a bunch of people were gathered, and waited until this guy showed up. He spoke in a sunny area on a plot of undeveloped land, and there were a fair few people standing and sitting to listen.

I was behind a bunch of standers, so I couldn’t get what he was saying, but people nearby explained there was something about protecting the forest on the slopes of Mount Kigali (just above where we were then) and an encouragement to pay security fees. He even humorously named some constituents who had not paid those fees.

He spoke for quite awhile, and then took questions for awhile longer. It was kind of hard to stay interested, especially since my view was blocked and he was speaking too fast for me to follow. It was about noon by the time we got back to the house.

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The one little addendum to add is about the avocado prices. The consensus is that Fr. 200 (29¢) is a normal price, and that reflects how expensive a fruit an avocado is. But Fr. 250 (36¢) is too much, and if I buy a few I should be able to talk them down to Fr. 150 (22¢). I also asked about mangoes; this is a really expensive fruit, which costs about Fr. 200 in season, but about now might be up to Fr. 500 (72¢)!

This reminds me of an internal debate I was having last year, about whether I should pay the best price I can get for something, or what it is worth to me. Because really, I think an avocado is worth, well, about a dollar (Fr. 700); I would be satisfied to pay that or a little more at home, so shouldn’t I be satisfied to pay that here?

I would be giving additional support to people who do actually need it: I tend to think opportunistic pricing by vendors is mostly resourceful rather than offensive, especially when it results in prices that foreign tourists would be happy paying anyway!

My thinking right now is that, as long as I know what the right price is, I’ll be willing to pay a bit more if someone proposes it, for things like transportation or postcards. I should apply this standard evenly to fruits too, but frankly the prospect of getting more fruit for the same amount of money is pretty enticing.

27 June 2014: Kimironko Market

Of the things on my list from yesterday, most weren’t accomplished, but I did get to the Kimironko Market. It is really far away. Like, an hour’s commute. Kimironko is about as far to the northeast as urban Kigali goes, whereas Nyakabanda, where I live, is pretty nearly the far southwest. The map in the guidebook doesn’t even go that far, and the best it does is a half-hearted arrow of the right edge saying the market is somewhere over that way.

I had been nearby there last year, at the Kigali Institute of Education (where I will be returning on Monday)—or, at least, I thought this was nearby, so I got off of the minibus at that stop, or a little before. And then I walked in the direction of the arrow, thinking I didn’t want to miss it. I walked for about 20 minutes, with no sign of a market. Ultimately, I asked someone, who informed me that I had passed it a block earlier!¹

Last year I visited the markets in Kicukiro and Nyabugogo. What they had in common was a semi-open-air, and a wide variety of goods being sold; the latter was certainly larger, and I think Kimironko compared favorably in size.

It seems odd to call places like Food Emporium supermarkets, as though they are any larger, more varied or more expansive than these venues that have not been granted such a prefix. Perhaps the markets on which they are based were just substantially less impressive. There is definitely a difference in environment, and one has to appreciate the ease with which new American superstores can be built. Nevertheless, only the most truly massive Shaw’s or Stop&Shop really appears to outdo Kigali’s markets in size.

Kimironko Market takes up a whole large city block. The whole complex is under a massive, corrugated-metal roof supported by tall, wooden stakes that are evenly spaced several yards apart. It appears to be entirely naturally lit. “Inside,” one very large section is taken up by food vendors. Big platforms are set up in a grid, and almost all of them are piled high with produce.

It really seemed to be everything imaginable; one big area was all starches and powders, in huge, precarious piles, with salespeople sitting next to them ready with bags and scoops. Sometimes it was hard to walk in aisles because someone had almost blocked the way with a pile of potatoes; I squeezed past one woman, sitting against the wall, who looked like she had been there peeling turnips for hours if not years.

Most of the market was other things, though. People sold processed foods, tools, various supplies, artwork, souvenirs and clothing. In these areas, 20-foot-high wooden racks are set up, creating partial enclosures and a musty, dark feeling even in broad daylight. The racks are not reachable by hand, but vendors sit back on raise platforms within their enclosures and reach high targets with long sticks.

One of the more memorable parts, as I also remember seeing in Nyabugogo, was the multiple transverse aisles lined with women at sewing machines. They repaired clothing, and also made it from scratch, from cloth that was being sold just a few yards away. I had heard about this from a number of people, but I kind of thought they only made dresses. (I see lots of women wearing lovely, clearly-not-mass-produced garments all over the place here, and I know some Americans who have gotten themselves some too.) Someone told me they could do other things, too—which makes a lot of sense, you know—and offered ties as an option.

I thought that sounded cool, so I bought two big pieces of cloth, and asked a woman to use part of one of them to make me a tie. This experience made me realize that I really don’t know how to make decisions about these things; I tried to think which pattern would look good, and it wasn’t really coming… I hope the one I picked doesn’t come out looking too bad! She said to come pick it up on Monday.

Through all of this, I had a guide: a young man who approached me on the way in and asked where I wanted to go. He was wearing a green vest, so I think he worked there. It seemed I was expected to give him a tip, which was fine. And he did know his way around, which saved me a lot of time (albeit time I would have enjoyed getting myself lost). I told him I would explore on my own after awhile, and though I didn’t mean to buy anything, the avocado saleswoman did not have to do much convincing!

I bought two, at Fr. 250 each. That’s less than a third of the average price of an avocado in the U.S.,² and I was pretty excited, so I bought two of them. (My bag quickly became quite heavy.) Upon telling my host mother about this, she was surprised; she said they should have been 100 or 150, and that I had been overcharged because I was white. Her husband disagreed, saying it was actually more like 200.

Either way, I suppose it’s always slightly embarrassing to be profiled like that—but on the other hand, the implication is that I can get even cheaper avocados, so I am quite happy!³

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¹ I realize now that there is actually a bus terminal adjacent to the market, so I could have just taken the minibus to the end of the line.

² At current exchange rates, it’s about 36¢, whereas the Hass Avocado Board (whose website’s color scheme is wonderful) reports that the average price in the U.S. was $1.17 as of April.

³ The next day (Saturday), I ate one at lunch and one at dinner… ah well, guess I’ll just have to buy more!

27 June 2014: Miscellany

I have been slipping in the frequency of my posts! I have not been idle, per se, but perhaps not doing things that merit blogging about. For the moment I will post some miscellaneous things, and some things I want to do in the near future:

Well, really just one miscellaneous thing. I was thinking about the cost of Internet here, and whether it was actually worth it for me to be using the modem I have, as opposed to going to an Internet café whenever I needed to get online. Internet cafés cost about Fr. 500 per hour, whereas the modem costs Fr. 800 per day plus an initial investment of Fr. 10,000. It’s classic middle-school algebra, which I haven’t done in several years! So to find the point at which it becomes overall cheaper to use the modem, we can make the following handy formula:

500 · h · d = 10000 + 800 · d

where h is the number of hours every day I will spend online, and d is the number of days I go on the Internet. (Functionally, d will also equal the number of days I am in Rwanda.) We can isolate the variables either of the following ways, depending on which direction we want to go:

h = (20 ÷ d) + 1.6
d = 20 ÷ (h − 1.6)

Since I will be here a total of 42 days, the second formula informs me that I must use the Internet for an average of just more than 2 hours per day to make the modem worthwhile. (I am pretty sure I am doing that!) The second tells me that, if I were to be online for 3 hours per day (which I might be), the modem is a good investment after two weeks (and a couple of hours).

Of course, there is also the convenience factor of not having to walk to the Internet café, and not being restricted by its hours of operation. For me, since I like to do things in the afternoon and then go online in the evening, that’s a pretty big point in its favor. Nevertheless, it is good to know that the math backs me up anyway!

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Things to Do Today (or Soon)

1. Send some postcards, and buy some more. (Today I will send my last family postcards, and then move on to friends.)
2. Do a little bit of foreign exchanging. South Africa has released banknotes newer than the ones in my collection, and I hear the Congo has some new ones this year, though the exchange bureaus tend not to stock those as consistently.
3. Refill my modem.
4. Check out Kimironko Market. I hear it’s impressive, with cool textile things, and I did not get over there last year.
5. Take a look at the Genocide-era documents I have been analyzing, and try to figure out where some of those things happened. Then take some time to go check them out, provided they are accessible.
6. Walk around town taking pictures of new developments. (Generally, also, take pictures, because the only photos on my camera’s memory card now are of bugs I have killed in my room!)
7. Go to the couple of bookstores I know, to see whether there is anything useful I did not see last year.
8. Plan some travel outside of Kigali. There are lots of places to go!

24–25 June 2014: Kinyarwanda and Computer Science, Part 1

Kinyarwanda and computer science, as subjects of study, appear to be at opposite ends of a spectrum. Knowing computer science is a pathway to a comfortable job in software development or I.T.; knowing Kinyarwanda might prepare one to be a missionary, or an aid worker. C.S. is the realm of the quantitatively minded, and languages are pretty far toward the mushy end of the humanities.

Of course, nothing is so simple, and none of the above statements are completely true. From three years of studying linguistics, I know that human language can in fact be described and justified in very precise, scientific ways, and that language education benefits from the same precision. And after two years of computer science, I have learned that even the most technical pursuits in programming and engineering are guided by the same qualitative design principles that I follow when I lay out a newspaper.¹

One of the most memorable and rewarding parts of the broad, interdisciplinary education I have gotten at Harvard has been the unexpected connections between seemingly disparate fields. Here, I’d like to share a few of the cases where my studies in Kinyarwanda and computer science have unexpectedly coincided. Hopefully I can teach you something about at least one of the two, and not completely confuse those with limited exposure to either!

Note: I originally intended for this to be a single post with three sections, each about one area in which these two subjects have influenced each other in my education. I have worked up a pretty sizable post with just the first section, though, so I suppose this will turn into a three-part series, more to come!

Type Systems

Programming languages are built around variables, which are names that hold values (e.g. x = 5, or y = "car"), and functions, which do things with them (e.g. addition, which takes two numbers and returns their sum). Variables can have a number of different types, like integer (e.g. 5), string (e.g. "car") or even function [e.g. add (x, y)].

In the same way, human languages are built around words of various types: nouns, verbs, etc. We could even draw a parallel between verbs and functions, as verbs take in other words and do things with them. More on that later.

Different programming languages vary by how explicitly they require the programmer to “declare” the types of their variables. For example, in C, to tell a program you want x to have a value of 5, you have to write

int x = 5 ;

where int classifies x as an integer. In Javascript, on the other hand, you can simply write

x = 5 ;

and its classification as an integer is implied. The reasons for those differences are varied; the latter case tends to be more convenient for the programmer, whereas the former makes it easier to catch mistakes in the code. There is no consensus on which way is “better,” which is really a matter of taste.

In English, now, you don’t really have to add anything special to say that a given word is a noun or a verb; sometimes you do, but usually not. In Kinyarwanda, every word (except for some loanwords) must have a prefix that declares its type. All verb infinitives start with ku-, and there are a number of “classes” of noun, each of which has its own designated prefix. (We might call this subtyping.) Adjectives all have prefixes that agree with the nouns they modify. No word can appear in a sentence without a prefix.

Another way programming languages vary is how they handle conversions between types. For example, consider the following code extract in C, which I will explain:

char x [30] = "I am about to turn " ;
int y = 21 ;
strcat (x, y) ;

The first line defines x as a string of text. The second defines y as a number. The third tries to tack y onto the end of x, with the intended result of y = "I am about to turn 21". (strcat is short for “string concatenate.”) But it doesn’t work, because the function strcat is expecting you to input two strings, but instead got a string and a number. So it throws an error. Before using strcat, you would want to explicitly convert the number to a string of characters that looks like a number, using a separate function made just for that purpose.³

In Javascript, on the other hand, it is much easier:

x = "I am about to turn " ;
y = 21 ;
z = x + y ;

Notice it doesn’t care that they are different types, and can even use the + function—intended for two numbers—to concatenate them.

English is like Javascript. If you want to use a verb as a noun, you don’t have to do anything special to it. Think about the word love, which can be either a noun or a verb. (Of course, often you do add suffixes, like light to lighten.) In Kinyarwanda, however, the verb gukúunda “love” must be given a new prefix and suffix to become the noun urukúundo “love.” This is true of all conversions.

Briefly, in Kinyarwanda, the meaning encoded in the prefixes and suffixes is considered essential to the complete word. This allows for some pretty cool things: for example, starting with the noun umugabo “man,” you can change the prefix to cast it into a different noun class and change the meaning, e.g. ubugabo “manhood,” akagabo “little man,” urugabo/ikigabo “big, boorish man,” amagabo “worthless men” and even ingabo “male pig.”

In English, on the other hand, we figure you can mostly get that information from context. Lack of a mandatory prefix allows our words to get much shorter, though perhaps vaguer and less versatile. The English system also allows us to change things between classes at will in a way that would be difficult in other languages. Think of the following sentences: I was sandwiched between two obese men. and That is very 1970s of you!

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It’s funny, recently I have been speaking a lot of Kinyarwanda, a very strict language, but recently most of my coding has been in Javascript, a pretty loose language. In human and computer languages, the trade-off between strictness and looseness is about the same: the strict ones tend to be complex but very sensible, whereas the the loose ones are simpler but often unpredictable.

So to master a very strict programming language like OCaml, you have to wrap your mind around a lot of difficult concepts, but you can be sure everything will work as long as you follow the rules. You can learn everything about the basic structure of a loosey-goosey language like Python, though, and still have to memorize a whole bunch of individual functions, all the while getting annoyed that they are not consistent with each other.

I can say it more relatably about human languages: English and Kinyarwanda are both devilishly hard to master, but for different reasons. English is difficult because nothing makes sense: though the grammar is simple—you can learn everything about normal verbs and nouns in about 15 minutes—but almost everything is somehow irregular, and sometimes there is no distinguishable rule to follow at all. So the only way to really learn a new word is to hear it in context a lot.

Kinyarwanda is difficult, on the other hand, because everything makes sense. Once you figure out the structure, you can instantly conjugate a new verb or pluralize a new noun. Almost nothing is irregular, and almost every minute detail is grammatically specified. To be so precise, though, the supporting grammar has to be extraordinarily complex, requiring years of study before it clicks.

Which is better? I would argue neither. The range of meanings that the two can communicate is exactly identical. (This is a thing in computer science too.) And we generally don’t generally have the luxury of choosing our native tongue, so it may be a moot point anyway. But looking down from our ivory tower, I would say—in a language whose precision falls somewhere between the two we have been discussing—“De gustibus non est disputandum.”

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¹ Ironically—or maybe not—almost all design-related classes available to undergraduates at Harvard are at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

² It’s not actually that hard; there are functions that would let you skip the step. For example, the third line could be sprintf (x, "%s%d", x, y) ;. I wanted parallelism, though, and to not confuse people more than I already had. And I don’t know other programming languages that would better illustrate what I want!

23 June 2014: Observations

My day was only a little bit interesting: Registered my SIM card so now my phone works. Helped my host adjust my mosquito-net so it reaches all the way to the floor. So in place of a story, here are a few uncategorized observations I’ve made over the past few days:

Time

Yesterday, I asked one of the houseworkers¹ whether I could give him some clothes to wash; he told me to bring them tomorrow. (I did, and they are currently drying.) In saying that, he said, “ejó, ku wá mbere.” That means “tomorrow, Monday.” It occurred to me later that he was clarifying because ejó can mean either “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” and the context (e.g. verb tense) disambiguates.

I have read that this reflects a cultural perception of time as symmetrical. I know that to say, literally, “in a moment,” (mu kaánya) can mean either “soon” or “recently,” and keéra can mean either “long ago” or “far in the future.” I don’t know much more in the cultural vein, but I think it’s interesting that it is not actually an inconvenience to have such symmetrical vocabulary!

Nighttime

A number of times, now, late at night, I have heard what sounds like at least a half-dozen dogs all howling in unison for about 15 or 20 seconds at a time. It goes on for a bit, and then stops. Weird.

Perhaps related, my host’s car alarm went off at about 2:00 a.m. last night. I was still awake reading about computer science; I heard my host get out of bed and walk over to the door. The alarm went off again about ten minutes later. He explained later that someone had been trying to steal things out of the car, and that thefts of that kind are common at night.

Unrelated to crime, a couple of nights ago I woke up naturally at 4:15 a.m. (I had taken an unusually long nap the previous afternoon.) I lay in bed for awhile, listened to the barking dogs, and then at 4:30 I heard—completely unexpectedly—a call to prayer. Nyakabanda, the neighborhood where I am living, is (I believe) majority-Muslim, and these calls are broadcast from loudspeakers at every mosque in the area. They sound lovely, and they are hard to ignore (which, I suppose, is the intent). I just hadn’t known that they started so early!

Money

I have noticed that the 500-franc notes I have been getting are all very crisp. Then it occurred to me that the design is different from what it was last year. They used to be green, with a picture of the National Bank. Now they are blue, with a picture of kids using O.L.P.C. laptops (and cows). I may actually have read about this in a news article last year, and some Googling shows that, indeed, distribution of the new design began in late 2013. In any case, I am happy to be able to add a new item to my collection.

Practicing vs. Encouraging

I have noticed this year, I think more than last year, that many of the people who talk to me in English do so not because they think I wouldn’t understand them but because they want to practice their own English. This has kind of changed my approach, which last year was to speak Kinyarwanda as exclusively as I could for my own benefit and out of politeness, as I realize that I can now provide something of an opportunity to people: the opportunity to talk to someone whose native language is English, which they are trying so hard to learn.

To be sure, there are lots of foreigners in Kigali with whom they could practice, but none of them live around here! Expatriates tend to be geographically concentrated in a few safe, stable neighborhoods, and in any case are pretty socially insular.² I certainly don’t see any when I walk around near the house.

So now I tend to oblige, or at least alternate. I still have plenty of opportunities to speak Kinyarwanda, and the biggest barrier to my learning remains my shyness about making a fool of myself. (If I am not sure quite how to say something, I still tend to keep quiet rather than risking it—I’m workin’ on it.)

Bugs

“Everything’s bigger in Africa” seems to be a useful generalization. (Depending on how much that frightens you, you may not want to read the footnote.)³

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¹ There are two workers who maintain my hosts’ property: one to look after the kids, and another who cooks and cleans. This is normal for a middle-class, urban Rwandan family: houseworkers are usually rural migrants who want to find a better life in the city, so they essentially work as servants until they earn enough money to support themselves. I’ll talk more about this at some point.

² This is something else I need to blog about soon (even though I am pretty sure I already have).

³ I just killed a massive daddy-longlegs-type thing. If it’s anything like analogous non-spiders in the U.S., it was totally harmless, but it kept bobbing up and down. There was also a really big fly that looked like a wasp (but was also harmless) in the living room yesterday. By contrast, the cockroach I killed in my bedroom yesterday was quite small!

22 June 2014: Service

Another thing that came out of my conversation with A. yesterday was that she and some family members would be going to church the next morning. She asked if I would come with them, and I said I would: I went twice last year, and it was really interesting. It was interesting partly because of the language, and partly because of the religion: Jehovah’s Witnesses do things very differently from the mainstream Protestant denominations I am used to.

I also remembered thinking (and blogging) after the first service last year that I would be really happy with myself if I could follow what was happening in one of those services by the time I went home. I remembered the preacher speaking very clearly, but quickly enough that I did not really know what was going on.

So I went with them this morning. There were lots of people who were surprised and excited to see me—definitely the only white person in attendance in a packed sanctuary—but what nagged at me beyond that was how many people greeted me by name! I guess I did say hello to a lot of people in the congregation a year ago, and I recognized many (if not all) of their faces but remembered few (if any) of their names. In my defense, it was kind of unfair: all these people had just one muzuúngu to remember, while I had dozens and dozens of Banyarwaanda. And I’m not that great with faces I see just once anyway…

One thing I had not been told was that another friend of mine, who I will call A.',¹ was something like a lay preacher for the day. He had prepared some pretty extensive remarks, with the general thrust that our lives are a gift from God, and therefore protecting our health is a very important goal.

I missed most of the finer points of what A.' said. I was very satisfied, though, that I got the basic idea of it, and that in almost every sentence I felt like I heard at least half of the words (albeit without much of the grammatical structure). In spite of all that I did not understand, though, I could tell that he was speaking well: he enunciated, did not speak too fast, paused at the right moments for people to laugh or contemplate, and only occasionally looked down at his notes.

And the quality of his own speaking was really driven home after he finished. A distinctive feature of the services I remembered last year was that they included a lot of audience participation, and this was no exception. The pastor got up briefly to introduce another lay reader, who moderated a discussion about a spiritual topic from an article in something like a lectionary, which most congregants had read beforehand. This week’s gave spiritual guidance for those considering emigration in order to give their families a better livelihood.

The article framed a discussion of that question with a vignette about a woman who wrestled with the problem herself. I was pretty satisfied with the general conclusion it came to, actually: that, though God would not want us to starve, both parents have critical roles to play in raising children, and separation can end up causing unintended stress on all involved. More than once, it invoked Matthew 6:24:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I wasn’t so sure about how much that applied. I kind of wish I could have heard what people in the congregation had to say about it. Unfortunately, they all mumbled! Or, at least, they didn’t articulate enough for me to understand. I think they were generally in agreement.

I said I would keep going back as long as I was here, and I intend to. I do not plan to convert—though I have been asked about this several times now—but it is interesting, and a helpful, if tiring, chance to hear a lot of Kinyarwanda. And they very considerately gave me a study booklet (in English) with reading material for next week!

Vocabulary Words (Inyunguramagaambo)

• guhaangana /ku-hang-an-a/: v.i. to oppose, to face each other
• guhumiriza /ku-hum-ir-ir-y-a/: v.t. to close (eyes) (from guhuma “to be blind”)
• guhúungabanya /ku-húngaban-y-a/: v.t. to annoy, to irk, to bother (from guhúungabana “to be annoyed, to be disturbed”)
• gushiishikaza /ku-shiishikar-y-a/: v.t. to encourage, to exhort (from gushiishikara “to work hard”)
• kubaanguka /ku-banguk-a/: v.i. to hurry; to arrive on time
• umugaragu /u-mu-garagu/: n. male servant

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¹ I have been referring to friends by the initial letter of their first/given/Christian name. (Remind me to write a post all about Rwandan names, because they’re really interesting.) This guy’s name starts with an “A,” though, and I already have an A. So he will have to be A.'—which you might instinctively read as either “A-prime” or “A-bar,” depending on whether you have more recently taken a math or linguistics class. I endorse the latter, of course, but I’m not the one pronouncing!

21 June 2014: A Conversation!

Until today, I was pretty concerned about my ability to speak Kinyarwanda. It’d been ten months since I was in an environment where I had to use it regularly, and though my understanding of the grammar has certainly improved in class in the last year, I knew I had forgotten a lot of words. Also, in trying to listen to Kinyarwanda radio in the weeks before coming, I was starting to think that the prospect of actually understanding Kinyarwanda speech was all but impossible.

That last bit may still be true. The hardest part of the whole language, at least for me at this point, is the extent to which Rwandans elide their words together (or slur, if I’m feeling especially frustrated). Basically, unless they speak really carefully, the first of any two adjacent vowels is totally unpronounced, and the last vowel of a phrase is almost always dropped (especially inconvenient because every word ends with a vowel). So a sentence like

Muzaanira inzoga ikóonje ngo acecéke.¹
“Bring him a cold beer so he stops talking.”

comes out sounding like

[muzaanirinzogikóonjengwacecék]

So, in the end, it is just really hard to hear a sentence and parse it into separate words. I’m sure this is hard in all languages, but I find that I am about as good at parsing words in French as I am in Kinyarwanda, and that is a language I have never studied!

But I digress.² I started the post on an optimistic note, because today I had a long Kinyarwanda conversation with a friend (A., who I mentioned often last year), and it actually worked. Like, the conversation seemed to function and flow almost normally. Only very rarely did I find myself completely at a loss for how to say what I wanted. We talked about school, friends and family, Rwanda, the U.S., and language-learning, and strayed dangerously close to religion. (She’s a Jehovah’s Witness; more about that in the next post.)

She said I was speaking much better than I had when I left last year, which was really encouraging. She also noted that there were a lot of foreigners who lived in Rwanda more than a decade without getting to my level of proficiency; I appreciated this because it shows how much she—and many others who I have heard say similar things—appreciate the effort I have put in and recognize how difficult it is.

I was also encouraged to notice that I generally understood what A. was saying. She probably spoke more slowly and with fewer words than she otherwise would have, and when she started talking to other people my comprehension fell to about 20%. Still, I was happy with myself.

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¹ If you scroll far enough back, you’ll find at least one explanation of why I don’t like the standard way of writing Kinyarwanda; in a nutshell, it doesn’t mark vowel length or tone, both of which are critically important features of the language. On this blog (at least from now on), I will use the standard system except that I double vowels when they are long, and put an acute accent mark for high tones. To get to the standard orthography from there, just remove all the accents and consolidate doubled vowels. The above sentence, then, would be written Muzanira inzoga ikonje ngo aceceke.

² And I will continue to digress! It’s one of the most fun things about having a blog.

20 June 2014: Improvements

The first update I should give is that I did not, in fact, have any digestive problems this year. It’s kind of miraculous, because I thought all foreigners did. Maybe there was actually something funky in what I ate the first night last year. Or perhaps my stomach is just used to it by now (and I did still feel a bit queasy, as I said).

I’ll give some credit, though, to the probiotic pills I’ve been taking: the principle is that they populate your digestive tract with natural, helpful bacteria that can restore balance when things are off (e.g. after an antibiotic kills all of them). The package features a whole laundry list of other wonderful effects that they can supposedly have, but that have not been verified by the F.D.A., one of which is “[h]elp minimize travel associated stomach and digestive issues.” I figured I would try it, and hey, all the food stayed down! Pretty unscientific, I know, but I’m happy with it.

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Anyway, today (Friday) I went into the city center for the first time. It was morning, and I had some things I wanted to buy in addition to exchanging money. It was very good to see the place again, and though a number of things were noticeably different, I was happy to see that the general vibe was the same, and that I still knew my way around.

I got everything I needed and then headed back. The overall theme I noticed on the day was that things were getting better (though, in some cases, they are better than last year because before I’d just been doing it wrong). Let me elaborate a bit:

The City Itself

Kigali is constantly growing and constantly developing. I commented more than once, last year, on how many construction projects there were, and how apparent it was that most of the modern buildings in the city center had not been there just a few years before. In the ten months I have been gone, things have changed noticeably.

There is a big convention going on, with lots of huge white tents, in what was last year a completely undeveloped, open field not far from the city center (just uphill from Nyarugenge Prison, roughly across the street from La Gallette). The soon-to-open Marriott Kigali is noticeably more complete than it was last year.

Probably most visibly, the massive construction right in the middle of the city, which was last year entirely shrouded in dark-green scaffolding, is now partly exposed. I’ve heard it is going to be a new city hall, and that it is funded by Chinese investments. (Either or both of those statements may be true.) Anyway, large swaths of shiny windows and swanky elevators are now showing, and it’s pretty impressive.

I was only in town for a couple of hours, and kept myself pretty directed in the interests of being home for lunch. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll make sure to go back and document these changes, maybe even trying to match them up with photographs I took last year in the same places. It’s these sorts of things that we assume are documented by someone, somewhere—and, in the Information Age, probably are—but I still like to think that I might be contributing to something by doing my part.

Mass Transit

This is a very preliminary assessment, based on the one minibus ride that I took to get home. For the most part, the minibus taxis that I saw riding around were as I remembered them: some nice, actual buses, even air-conditioned, but mostly standard, 18-seat minivans with lively designs and a happy, scrappy feel. The nice ones, from my experience, usually went on the nicer routes (through Remera, Kimironko or Kacyiru), and I very rarely saw one going to Nyamirambo (on the route that goes closest to where I am living). The first one I saw going to Nyamirambo, though, which I got on, was one of the big and nice ones. Take it or leave it, just an observation.

Side-note: There is something distinctive about the smell of the inside of a minibus taxi. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was anything interesting until I got into one today and realized I hadn’t smelled it in a year. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly sweat. Maybe Rwandan sweat is somehow different—or maybe everyone just sweats a lot because it’s hot. Never having been to another equatorial country, I’m in no position to judge. Again, just an observation.

Telecommunications

I bought myself a phone, and a SIM card to go inside (and was proud that I did so without speaking any English). I forgot to register said SIM card, rendering it useless until businesses open again on Monday, but never mind that. Anyway, I asked for a cheap phone (iterefoóne idáheenze), and suggested a price of Fr. 10,000 (about $14).¹ This is about what I remembered paying last year, and I got a phone of the same brand that I had, and that looks pretty much identical to what I remember.

It is a somewhat better phone, though: that price now buys you a wider language selection (including Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili, in addition to English and French), and a few other features that are less interesting to a linguistics major. See? Improvement.

On the advice of a friend (thanks, Augustin), I also bought a modem to use to get online. It is of the same sort that I used last year, a U.S.B. device that holds a SIM card and hooks your computer up to a cellular data network. This one comes from Tigo, rather than Airtel, though, and unlike the one I had last year offers reasonable rates: Fr. 800 (~$1.15) for 24 hours of unlimited usage, whereas I ended up paying almost that much for every megabyte with Airtel.

This is where I think I might just have been doing it wrong. Perhaps Airtel offered a daily plan that I just didn’t know about. In fact, I would be pretty surprised if anyone in their right mind chose to use that pay-per-use service, knowing that there were other options. Nevertheless, even the pay-per-use deal from Tigo is much better, and the Internet now is faster than I remember it being before too. So I’ll call it an improvement.

Infrastructure

Get ready for another judgment based on limited sample size: the neighborhood where I am living has a problem with running water. It’s been running for about 14 of the past 18 hours, and otherwise not since I arrived. This is much more consistent than it was a year ago! Caveats: (a) I’ve only been here about three days. (b) It probably has something to do with all the rain we just got. (c) 14 hours over three days is still pretty inconsistent. To fit with the theme of the post, though, let’s look on the bright side!

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I noticed lots of other things that were about the same as I remembered, for better or for worse. You’ll hear about them at some point; for now, I think I’ve written a pretty good amount.

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¹ This reminds me that the exchange rate from U.S. dollars to Rwandan francs is also much better than a year ago: I got 693 francs per dollar, whereas I am used to around 650.

19 June 2014: First Day

I sit down to write my first post-arrival post just before 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, 19 June. I found my host at the airport, and as we drove home I was happy to hear myself forming complete sentences in Kinyarwanda, almost all of which I think made sense!

We did switch between Kinyarwanda and English; I think we both wanted to practice the language we were less comfortable with, and probably each wanted to impress the other. Also, it definitely crossed both of our minds that if we spoke normally in our native language there was a very good chance the other would not understand it.

We got home to find the rest of the family (wife and two young children, 21 months and 5 years old). It was very nice to see them again. The parents were very welcoming, and the children very curious: they kept wandering into my room, looking around and waiting for their mother to call them back out again. The older one, at least, remembers me from last year, and apparently my name has become a staple of his still-pretty-small vocabulary.

It turned out they had left my room almost untouched, aside from cleaning it up and maybe getting a new chair. There was even a bunch of stuff I left behind because I was worried my suitcase was too heavy that they left there for me. I had been trying to give these things to them—medicines, mostly—but admittedly I didn’t communicate this very well. Other things I guess I didn’t expect them to find use for—an undershirt and a couple of cold-packs, and some other things—but I guess I thought they would just throw those away. I guess I underestimated something about my hosts.

I could, perhaps, have slept more on the plane. My plan had been to sleep 10:00–6:00 or so, but that turned into about 10:30–10:00, or thereabouts. I think I needed it, and certainly felt good afterward.

This morning was my first meal, too. There’s something about the food in a new place, maybe especially a new place in Africa, that doesn’t sit well on the first day; I remember last year I spent my first morning throwing up in the toilet. I think that’ll happen today also—I’m starting to feel a bit off as I type this. I decided that I wanted to get a good night’s sleep, though, so all I had last night was some tea (which I figured was probably fine after being boiled).

Given the likelihood of being sick, I’m going to stay in the house, today. (It’s also been raining since the plane landed, quite dramatically at times.) I have some planning to do: things to buy, places to go, postcards to send, and how to manage my research. But, at first, I’m content to move kind of slowly, at least until I (and my stomach) settle in.

18 June 2014: Why I Am Going Back

As I write this, I am flying over the Adriatic Sea, just east of Rimini, Italy. It is about 1:00 p.m. local time,¹ 8:00 a.m. Eastern, and to me feels like… um, hopefully the former, but actually hard to say. My strategy is to be tired when I get in: the local time will be 7:20 p.m., so I want to be able to go to bed by 9:00 or so, then wake up after a long night’s sleep at around 6:00. It might be working, but I’m feeling tired enough now!

I slept for three hours on the transatlantic flight yesterday; that went by without any inconvenience. It was operated by Delta, rather than KLM, which seems to mean basically that the in-flight entertainment was better but the food was not as good. Aside from sleeping, everyone around me spent their time watching movies; I, on the other hand, broke out my new (used) computation theory textbook and started reading that.² I felt cool.

The transfer in Amsterdam was a little rushed—sadly no time to enjoy the lovely airport—but also went without a hitch, and now we’re off to Kigali. As I remembering noticing last year as well, there are a lot of Africans on this flight: mostly coming home to Rwanda or Uganda (the flight goes on to Entebbe after Kigali) from tourism, study or visiting family abroad, but it also looks like there are a good number of young people just visiting as tourists. Contrast that with the flight to Amsterdam, where almost everyone was white.

Anyway, I should use this post, my first of the year, to explain why I am going back to Rwanda. I’ve always told people, there are so many places in the world that I want to see, so I don’t see the point of going to the same place twice—but here I am, returning to the same country where I spent eight weeks last summer, staying with the same family and planning to do just about the same thing.

First, there is a reason of convenience: Harvard has given me money to do thesis research here. I’ll be looking into the history of grammatical tone in Kinyarwanda, in preparation for the senior thesis that I was planning to write when I applied for the grant. (In fact, my thesis topic has entirely changed since,³ but I will still do the project I applied to do because it is still interesting to me.)

Second, and at least as importantly, Rwanda has an important place in my life. I have spent five years studying Rwanda’s history and people, and three years studying its language. After two months last year, I have an affinity for the food, I know my way around, and there are a number of people there who I would call friends.

That was why I applied for the grant in the first place, and why I always assumed that my thesis would be about Kinyarwanda. I really like it there. I also recognize how rare it is to have the opportunity to spend weeks and weeks abroad pursuing a cool idea on someone else’s dime; I am extraordinarily lucky to be able to do this a second time, and I know that I may never have such a chance again.

So in my six weeks this year, I’ll be doing research, spending time with friends and practicing my language skills—much like last year. And, much like last year, I’ll blog all about it. I also want to travel around a bit more than I did last year, and I have a number of completely unrelated projects that I’ll be pursuing in my spare time. I’ll blog about all that too.

Thanks for reading! More later.

Oh. I did allow myself another nap in there. It’s O.K., I think, because I am still tired. It is now about 4:30 p.m., and we are flying over northeastern Sudan.

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¹ Fun fact: Rwanda, Italy and the Netherlands are in the same time zone, G.M.T. +2 (at least at this time of year, when the E.U. has no daylight saving time).

² There’s a computational linguistics class that I want to take this fall, but without taking the prerequisite theory of computation class. So, in consultation with the professor, I am reading the textbook over the summer.

³ I now plan to write about the general nature of tone in Kikuyu, a different East African language.