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.