The annoying thing about keeping a blog… well, back-track a bit. Blogging is a lot of fun, and I am glad I am doing it. It is annoying, though, that the more interesting things I do, the less time I have to blog about them! I have been fairly busy for the past week, going on excursions, starting my research and also working on some side-projects. It has all been great fun, but I value the writing of these blog posts as a way to synthesize my thoughts about them, and now here I am a week behind!
Anyhow, Monday, 30 June, I started my day very early to get up for a meeting with a professor at the Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) in Kimironko. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was O.K. telling the woman at the market that I would come back on Monday because I had to go out for this meeting anyway. As I mentioned in a previous post, Kimironko is about an hour-long commute from where I am living, and my meeting was at 9:00 a.m.
This meant waking up at 7:00 a.m. to leave at 8:00, which is totally normal—even a little lethargic—by the circadian rhythms of an average Rwandan (at least the ones I have talked to about it), but kind of uncomfortable for me! As it happened, I woke up to an e-mail saying I should come at 2:30 p.m. instead.
So, after closing my computer and going to eat lunch at 1:04 p.m., I headed out around 1:30 and headed toward KIE. Now, I know that I closed my computer at 1:04 p.m., because when I opened the computer again, I saw that it had received an e-mail with that timestamp—but had not had time to download it. The body of the message, which I read after I got back home at 5:00 p.m., began “Posponement [sic] of our meeting.”
Ah well. The only consequence was that I got really nervous when the minibus hit traffic and I arrived ten minutes late, and then hung around waiting outside the guy’s office for awhile, worrying that he had decided he had more important things to do during that interval. But as I said, I had to be in Kimironko anyway, so I put those thoughts out of my mind and set off for the market.
I have a pretty good memory for places, I think, but I need to work on remembering faces of people I meet only once. What this means is that I remembered pretty much exactly where the woman who said she would make me a tie had been sitting, but did not remember what she looked like—aside from being dark-skinned with short hair, which described almost everyone within a 100-yard radius.
So the best I could do was go to where she had been and ask the nearest person whether anyone had made me a tie. The result of this was that said nearest person got up and loudly asked whether anyone had made a tie, with no responses. This was perplexing. I was about to have to make a decision about whether to pursue it or let it go, when that same woman said, well, this lady here could make you one. Upon asking how much it would be, she said Fr. 3000 ($4.31), the same price the other woman was going to charge, and she had her own cloth that she offered to use. Moreover, she said she would be done in a half-hour, not some other day.
My split-second thought process led me to the conclusion that, as I had not actually paid for the first tie, this would give me exactly the same result as tracking it down, i.e. a tie, and no additional money down the drain. The only difference was that I wouldn’t get the leftover cloth from the big piece I had bought, but that was fine. It seemed at the time as though the first woman had run off with the cloth, but I didn’t want conflict.
And anyway, they told me I could just sit and watch the tie be made, which sounded like a lot of fun. So I did, chatting with the seamstresses as it came together. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the process of making it, but it was pretty interesting, and the tie came out looking just about how I was hoping it would look! It’s not a fancy tie, largely because of the material, but it’s symmetrical and the right length, and moreover I watched it being made! I thought it was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, the best shirts I have for wearing ties with are polo shirts! (Hmm… now how could I solve that?)
It is also a much longer tie than others I have, which makes it much easier to make outrageous knots like this one.
Afterward, naturally, I went over to buy some fruit.
This time, I was told the avocados were Fr. 200 (29¢) each, which was an improvement, and I didn’t feel like I needed to heckle, so I just bought two of them. The salesperson was very nice, and picked one out for me that would be good to eat today, and another that would be good to eat tomorrow. (In retrospect, by the way, she chose very well.) I also got a mango, for Fr. 500 (72¢—ooh, expensive!). My bag got to be quite heavy, but it was heavy with fruit so it was all O.K.
I actually saw my guide from the previous visit—apparently a white guy speaking Kinyarwanda to a group of fruit vendors is something of an attention-grabber—and he asked whether I had gotten my tie. I considered telling him I hadn’t, but I realized that would mean paying for another tie. So I lied and said I had found it just fine.
In retrospect, maybe the original seamstress eloped with the cloth I had bought, but I have a feeling she was just off doing something else. I kind of doubt that her income would allow her to just skip out on work for that period of time (though I really don’t know). I do plan to go back, as my parents now want me to get them clothes, and if someone comes up to me and tries to make me buy that tie, I wouldn’t refuse: I did ask her to make it for me, and anyway it’s not that much money. I won’t pursue it much in either direction, though.
The upshot of all of this was that I got a tie, two avocados and a mango for Fr. 2,900 ($4.17). Now, at an average American supermarket, the latest data says that I could get two avocados and a mango for $4.08. So, from one perspective… I got a free tie!
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