Friday, 18 July 2014
I occupied myself with various projects during the day. I had said I would meet A. and V. and family for church, and I remembered the starting time as 5:30 p.m. I got there right on time, only to find that it had in fact started at 5:00 p.m., and their houseworker (J.) said they would be back at 7:30 p.m. So I wandered around for a long time, walking the length of Nyamirambo and even into Gitega, then back. It still wasn’t 7:30, so I walked around the bend toward Nyabugogo, and then back. And then they were late coming back from church, of course. They got there, though, and because they got in after 8:00 they felt like they had to give me dinner, which was fine, of course.
The long walk was a good opportunity to just think about a lot of stuff; my head had been filled for the whole day with thoughts about upcoming fellowship applications, and how to handle those, and that got me thinking about the future and life after graduation, which was stressful. But I find that walks are a great way to tackle problems like that: think them through rationally and in depth, and then move on to other things. I think it worked.
Granted, I wasn’t outside much before the evening, but I only remembered as I was going to bed that 18 July was the twentieth anniversary of the end of genocide in Rwanda. I’m sure there was something on television, but maybe all of people’s energy had been directed toward the April commemorations and then Liberation Day earlier this month, so as far as I could tell it sorta just came and went.
Saturday, 19 July 2014
In the evening I went out to Amahoro Stadium in Remera-ish, to see the so-called “Rwandan music festival,” Kigali Up. I knew a guy from Harvard who was going to be there, and I remembered the food being good, so I went. Also, it was a sort of conventional thing to do in Kigali, which there are not all that many of!
Upon arrival, it became clear that most Rwandans did not feel like Kigali needed such a thing to do. The turnout bordered on decent at 6:00-ish when I got there, and improved over the next couple of hours, but what struck me was the demographics: almost all under the age of 30, and at least half obviously foreign. I started brainstorming other places in the world where you might see this balance of ages and ethnicities at a concert, and I didn’t come up with very many; then again, maybe expat communities in other developing countries behave similarly to the one here.
Another interesting observation was that, though the turnout was not all that bad, the audience was pretty unenthusiastic. Part of this was language barrier: musicians often introduced themselves and tried to buzz the crowd in Kinyarwanda, which didn’t work too well on the rest of us. Additionally, I have a theory that because so many expats in Kigali are here to do research, nonprofit or public health work, they’re all nerds who are far more comfortable at the weekly Sol e Luna trivia nights than live concerts. First, I totally fall into this category; second, it’s probably not true, merely one explanation for the lack of enthusiasm I saw at Kigali Up!
The music was fine, if kind of uneven. One or two performers were very good, but there was a lot of time between songs and it was easy to let one’s mind wander. My friend, who is interning in an emergency room at CHUK (a hospital in town), compared the level of engagement to watching surgery videos on YouTube. He qualified this by adding that watching surgery videos is something he does frequently, and they’re actually kind of interesting, but point taken.
I had gone last year, and this was approximately my memory of the way things were. Admittedly, a major reason I wanted to come back was the food: a number of local restaurants cater the concert, and I liked the idea of eating something different from my hosts’ food. (My hosts’ food is really good, by the way, and I ate that too after I got home, but variety is nice.) Also, it’s fun to spend not that much money and get a lot of food. I spent a locally egregious amount—Fr. 5,400 ($7.77)—and, despite a rather expensive (Fr. 2,500/$3.60) smoothie in there, still came away with a pretty nice haul: in addition to the smoothie, I had four goat brochettes, a big cookie and a seasoned meatball.
(In retrospect, I probably should’ve even done better.)
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