Back in Rwanda

I got on the bus from Kigali to Kampala four weeks ago, took a plane to NYC for my sister’s wedding, made my way back to the UK to take a Rayanair flight to Berlin for the JSC-JDC seminar, got back to the UK for a week, then flew back to Entebbe, and from there the plan was to take the bus back to Kigali but I was a bit ill – perhaps thinking about the logistics of getting back – and so decided to hash out around $150 for the flight back. So that’s where I’ve been for the past four weeks, on the vacation between school semesters.

Ever since I was four years old, the earliest I can remember flying, I have always absolutely loved flying. I love waiting in the lounge, feeling absurdly lucky and privileged and worldly. Only at airport lounges do I have the ego to sit and read an entire Economist from cover to cover. And I still get a terrific rush when the plane starts to speed up, and then you feel as if your body weight is changing as the plane lifts up. I love airplane food and always have. I did when I was five, and everyone on the privileged playground thought I was weird, and I do now, and I really really do now that airplane food is relatively refined compared to the daily rice and beans. I love how a personal assistant - and that's what they are, in my mind - brings me a prepared meal and asks what I would like to drink today, and if I would like ice with that. I mean, how many people bring me my drink on the ground? And ask if I would prefer my tomato juice with salt and pepper? I don't, that's gross, but I love being asked.

My bus-ride to Kampala was about 10+ hours, which is not bad for African bus rides in general, but the ride on “executive class” was supposed to be around five hours. I unintentionally paid 5,000 francs for "economy class" and after the ride found out that “executive class” was around 7,000 francs. I think the main difference is that in the economy class the bus stops anytime anyone needs to go to the bathroom. At least I got to watch Ugandan music videos on loop until the songs began to be catchy. They are very dramatic music videos, like little movies with actors - sort of like 1980s Madonna music videos used to be. One was about a man who begs for money from a rich person (a relative, perhaps?) who scoffs at him as he checks the time with his gold watch and his wife, with a really pricey fancy weave and pedicure, goes and watches lots and lots of DVDs, sometimes throwing them up in the air because she can, as she takes a seat on her golden couch in her pastel living room. The poor man goes home empty-handed to his neighborhood of brown, sad huts with colorfully, traditionally-dressed women who sing and dance about problems I largely cannot understand, perhaps both literally and figuratively. Not only did I get to see many music videos on loop for ten hours, each music video itself has quite a few repetitive loops - the man then goes back to the rich man, begs again, with the same scenes shown, before he returns home and I get to see the dancing village women again.

When I arrived in Kampala I was relieved that the local buses (they are like mini-buses in the developed world) actually have seats for people, as opposed to Rwanda’s sort of randomly divided rows where as many people as possible are shoved in, with three per official “seat” if need be. And English – ah! English! – is really exciting when you need to find your way around.

And then I went o New York, bla bla bla, and then England and then Berlin. Wow. Berlin. I want to write about Berlin because I loved it, but it has nothing to do with the theme of my blog, so just three fun-facts: First, the post-modern art stuff that you see in museums in other major cities? Y’know, randomly broken umbrella with light bulb or something. That stuff is actually sold in galleries and people buy it. Second, there is an uber-trendy spa called “dung” that I passed. Third, Berlin is like Paris but with more strait edges. It is very trendy more than beautiful. It’s not really beautiful, it just looks really, really good. And you feel really, really cool.

Ok, that’s all on Berlin. Oooooh, except for the really cool restaurant we went to on our first day of the seminar. It was all black, painted completely black, except for flashlights that hung from the ceiling above every table, shining a small spotlight over the menu, full of fantastic dishes, served in tiny portions. And one more thing, just one more thing: All those hundreds of Israelis I have met in Israel who have lived, are going to live or really want to live in Berlin - are really in Berlin. There are about 15-30,000 Israelis in Berlin, which feels like a lot. And Berlin looks like what Tel Aviv is trying to look like, which gives me a smidgen more respect for Tel Aviv....or at least respect for what Tel Aviv is trying to look like.

I had lots of really interesting things to write about in Rwanda, but now that I have a camera, all the interesting verbal data has seeped out of my brain to make room for photos. These photos will be in my next post, in order to create a sense of anticipation. For now, here are some of the things I do remember, starting with my name:

Because “l” is like “r” in Kinyarwanda, my name is always pronounced like “Mary” as opposed to “Mollie.” When I tell my name, people call out, “Ah! Like Maria! Mother of God!” I take it as a compliment before saying, “Thankyou, but actually, no, it’s Mollie, like the country, Mali.” But many people pronounce the country like “Mary” as well. Just like they pronounce Coca Cola like Coca Cora. So now I tell them my name is, “Malka”, which is the Hebrew name I was given which no-one has used to refer to me since 3^rd grade. For some reason, everyone pronounces the “l” in Malka like I pronounce “l.” When teaching reading, I usually just tell students that "r" in English is like "l" in Kinyarwanda and vice-versa.

There is one little girl with a house not far from ASYV, around seven or eight, who always asks to borrow my Mp3 to listen to music for a few moments, before going on her way. Many do this, but this little girl is especially jumpy and smiley and easily excited, and also extremely polite, asking, in Kinayarwanda, in that universal tone of politeness – a mixture of almost apologetic yet with crisp clarity – “May I please listen to your radio”? She always runs up an extremely steep hill to catch up with me to have her few moments of mp3 time with American music. We always forget each others’ names and when she last asked what my name was, I think I said, “Malka” this time, rather than “Mollie.” She asked me in Kinyarwanda, “name somethingsomethingsomthing Kinyarwanda?” which I eventually understood to mean, “What is your name in Kinyarwanda?” and I told her that I did not have a name in Kinyarwanda. She laughed, said good-by, and ran home.

The boy in Rubona who somehow found the dictionary which a volunteer lost is progressing in reading. I taught him what a “metaphor” was. I was explaining the word “fringe” and I pointed to the end of a piece of cloth with a fringe on it. Then I asked him if he knew what “society” meant, and he did – the word is thrown around a lot in official political rhetoric, so this did not surprise me. I then told him that people who live differently, or who maybe act differently – people who are outside, in general – can be called on the “ fringe of society” or a “fringe group.” “They are people, not the edge of a cloth, but they are also called ‘fringe.’” The next word that came up was “sway” which is easy to explain when taken literarily. I then told him that it can also be a “metaphor” – when a politician persuades people to vote for him, he can “sway” the audience. When a shopkeeper and customer are haggling over the price of a pineapple, the customer can sway the shopkeeper to accept his price.

The hardest word to explain? “Lush.” Telling him that “lush” meant a place with a lot of trees and grass and flowers and greenery did not really work. “Greenery?” he asked. “So ‘lush’ is like a color?” “No, no…try to think of a place with no trees at all – no grass, no flowers. Only sand. This is a place that is not lush.” I pointed to the closest not-lush picture I could find lying around, a picture in a spider-man comic book I had brought, where the villain is in some scary, dungeon-like place with lots of brown and beige and no green. “See? Not lush.” I then pointed outside, “in Rubona, everything is very lush. There are lots of trees and grass and flowers and nature.” “So it is like a garden?” He asked. I figured that was the closest I could get to – I said, “you can have a lush garden, yes” and we went onto the next vocabulary word, as I did not know how to explain to him a word that described something he probably had never lived without in the ten-kilometer radius that he had experienced since infancy.

It is good to be back. Though the first day, when I had a craving for a diet coke, I realized I was back in Rwanda when all the super-markets I checked in Kigali seemed to have run out. These super-markets don’t look so different than the ones in developed countries, so as you walk into the spacious, florescent-lighted, clean super-markets, you have sort of developed-word expectations.

The Governor of Eastern Province Dr. Aissa Kirabo came to visit Agahozo-Shalom. After giving a very nice, to-the-point, short speech (it really was a good short speech in a country where speeches often go on for a very long time), she asked for a speech from one of the students. A male student came up and gave a speech, and she then asked for a girl to speak. I was happy she had asked for a girl to speak, but was somewhat disappointed that a girl had not volunteered to begin with. She stood in front of an entourage of all male public officials, about half of them from the Rwanda Defense Forces or the police. She was the first female elected mayor in Rwanda when she was elected mayor of Kigali in 2006, and was recently appointed to her current position. It was nice that she had asked for a female volunteer.

Next up…photographs. Finally.