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
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!
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