Language

Language in Rwanda is absolutely fascinating. Everyone speaks the local language, Kinyarwanda, and most also speak, or at least understand, Swahili. French, which was the predominant language in the schools until the mid-1990s, is the most common Western language in the country, but since the new government came into power after the war of 1994 (the genocide is always referred to as "the war" or "the war of 1994), English has become an official language and is also taught in the schools. So for expatriates, none of whom it seems can speak a word of Kinyarwanda, it's best to first use French to communicate with someone, and only to use English if the person responds in English. However, there are always exceptions. For example, Rwandans who fled during the war to neighboring Anglophone countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania most often speak more English than French, so using French will get you nowhere. Of course there is no way to know which language to speak until you begin a conversation.

Most of my conversations, whether with persons I know or with strangers, involve a combination of all three languages - Kinyarwanda, French and English. With coworkers, a conversation may go something like this:

Me: Maramutse! (Good morning!)
Rwandan coworker: Maramutse! Amakuru? (Good morning. How are you?)
Me: Nimeza. (I am fine.) How was your weekend?
Rwandan coworker: It was very good. How was yours?
Me: It was very good. Thank you.
Rwandan coworker: Good. Est-ce que vous avez le câble de mon ordinateur? (Do you have the cable for my computer?)
Me: Oui, mais ça ne fonctionne pas. Je vais acheter un nouveau en ville aujourd'hui. (Yes, but it does not work. I am going to buy a new one in town today.)
Rwandan coworker: Ah, merci. (Ah, thank you.)
Me: De rien. (You're welcome.) I'll bring it to you later.

The conversation is also mixed with taxi drivers, though French usually dominates these conversations:

Me: Bonjour. (Hello.)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan grunt and nod of acknowledgement)
Me: Je voudrais aller à Kimihurura. (I want to go to Kimihurura.)
Taxi driver: Où en Kimihurura? (Where in Kimihurura?)
Me: Près de le restaurant Papyrus. Ou près de le restaurant Hellenique. (Near the restaurant Papyrus. Or near the restaurant Hellenique.)
Taxi driver: (Look of confusion.)
Me: The middle of the hill. (Kimihurura is a neighborhood of town situated on the side of a hill, so the price for a taxi depends on where you want to go on the hill.)
Taxi driver: The middle?
Me: The middle. Oui, le milieu de la colline. C'est combien? (Yes, the middle of the hill. How much is it?)
Taxi driver: Huit cents. (800.)
Me: Huit cent!? (800!?)
Taxi driver: Eight hundred.
Me: Oya. Non. C'est beaucoup. C'est cher! (No (in Kinyarwanda). No (in French). It is a lot. It is expensive!) (This is said loudly, skeptically and indignantly to show that I am not a tourist and refuse to pay the muzungu - white person - price.)
Me: Quatre cents. (400.)
Taxi driver: Non, seis cents. (No, 600.)
Me: Non. Toujours c'est quatre cents à Kimihurura. (No. It is always 400 to Kimihurura.) (This is also said skeptically and indignantly.)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan head gesture to come)
Me: Quatre cents? (400?) (Checking that I am coming under the assumption of paying my price of 400 rather than his price of 600)
Taxi driver: (Kinyarwandan eyebrow raise of acknowledgement)
Me: Sawa, sawa. (Ok, it is fine.)

Conversations in the market usually require more Kinyarwanda on my part and are therefore even more mixed:

Me: (browsing thin, clear plastic bags filled with various powders) Qu'est-ce que c'est? (What is this?)
Rwandan woman: Farine. (Flour.)
Me: (shaking my head to say "no")
Rwandan woman: Qu'est-ce que vous cherchez? (What are you looking for?)
Me: Je cherche... (I am looking for...) (as I try to remember the French word for "sugar")
Rwandan woman: (holding up various bags to ask if any of them are what I'm looking for)
Me: Isukari! Nda shaka isukari. (Sugar! (remembering the Kinyarwanda word for "sugar") I am looking for sugar.)
Rwandan woman: Ah! (holding up a bag of sugar) Sept cents. (700.)
Me: Sept cents? Sawa. Murakoze. (700? Ok. Thank you.)
Rwandan woman: Murakoze nawe. (Thank you to you also.)

Although the combination of languages is usually amusing in most settings, it can be just as confusing. Take, for example, a conversation that happened this morning in my office:

American coworker: What does "ashante" mean in Kinyarwanda?
Me: I don't know.
Rwandan coworker: It means "to sing."
American coworker: "To sing"? But people say it all the time. By itself. Are you sure that's what it means?
Rwandan coworker: Yes, of course.
Another Rwandan coworker: No, it doesn't. "Ashante" is not a word in Kinyarwanda.
American coworker: What?
Me (with a light bulb appearing over my head, as in a cartoon): Wait, what word is it?
American coworker: "Ashante."
Me: Are you sure they're speaking Kinyarwanda?
American coworker: I think so.
Me: I think they're speaking French. The word is "enchanté."
American coworker: "Ashante" is a French word? What does it mean?
Me: No, it's "enchanté" and it means "delighted" or "it's a pleasure" or something like that. You say it when you first meet someone or when you respond to someone saying "thank you."
American coworker: Ohhhhh. That makes much more sense than "to sing."

And so the conversations go, with mixed languages and even more mixed understandings, so I continue to study and practice both French and Kinyarwanda.

Vacation in Kigali

Every now and then, even though my life isn't particularly "hard" in Kigali, it's nice to take a vacation. The easiest vacation is at the Serena Hotel here in town. Although it's just a few blocks from my house, it's an entirely different world, so once in a while, it's nice to treat ourselves to a lazy day by the pool.

Vegetables!

I finally have vegetables in the garden! They're not quite ready to eat, but they're definitely there. I took my usual series of pictures this week, with each of the beds - radishes, carrots, squash and zucchini, cucumber, spinach and cabbage and tomatoes.
I also took a few close up pictures of everything. There's cabbage:
The spinach looked a lot better before I picked a bunch of it today. I should have taken the picture before instead of after!
I think these plants are cucumbers, but I'm not entirely sure. I guess I'll know once they start blooming.
Lots of baby zucchinis:
And lots of squash, too:
The radishes are also growing well and should be ready before long.

Continued reminders

Even though the genocide has been at the forefront of everyone's mind this week during its annual commemoration, some have had more personal experiences than others. Josh Ruxin, a board member of Orphans of Rwanda, an organization for which two of my closest friends in Rwanda work, who lives here in Kigali, published the following article this week in the New York Times blog. I think it's a pretty incredible reminder of the impact that the genocide still has on everyone here even though it's been fourteen years since it happened.

14 Years Later
by: Josh Ruxin

April 7, 2008, was the 14th anniversary of the commencement of Rwanda’s genocide. With periodic massacres that date back to 1959, Rwanda’s genocide did not happen overnight. Its climax, however, began April 7, 1994. It was a few days later that 36-year-old Epafrodite Rugengamanzi was murdered. From what his sister, Josepha, has gathered, he was chased into the yard of the house where we now live, brutally killed, and buried. Her brother’s killer confessed to the murder during gacaca — the traditional court process for genocide suspects — and brought her to his burial spot.
Josepha came to our house Wednesday with other family members and dug up her brother’s skeleton. The orchestrated process took several hours. Once they were sure that all of his bones had been collected, they carefully cleaned them. Josepha then asked me and my family to come over and listen to their testimony (and asked us to share it with others). Josepha was smiling and told us how lucky she felt to have found her brother’s bones and to be able to re-bury them shortly at Gisozi, the national genocide museum and burial ground.
Epafrodite’s murder was avoidable, since the UN had the power to prevent it. Ultimately it was not an international team of peacekeepers who brought Rwanda’s genocide to a close, but rather, the Rwanda Patriotic Army, a disciplined military force drawn from Rwanda’s diaspora. After years of fighting, the Rwanda Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994, brought stability to the country. Human Rights Watch, a French judge, and a Spanish judge allege, however, that the Rwanda Patriotic Army carried out thousands of reprisal killings and crimes against humanity during and after the genocide. President Kagame publicly bristled this past week over the recent Spanish indictment.

A close look at the complexities of Rwanda’s genocide would remind China’s leader Hu Jintao, President Bush and others of the path history can take, yet does not have to. Darfur is at least beginning to take on some of the dimensions of Rwanda: a gradual genocide in a region still lacking an adequate peacekeeping force and the political commitment to bring it to an end. The carnage there continues and now a new genocide threatens in Southern Sudan. While hope has so far proven elusive for Sudan, it is even harder to imagine that its people will get themselves on Rwanda’s track to peace and prosperity anytime in the next few decades. Rwanda’s resilience and approach are exceptional.

My friend and head of Orphans of Rwanda, Jean Baptiste Ntakirutimana, wrote me the other day about his meeting last week with his mother’s killer: “I inquired first about his life in prison, his family and his state of mind. He said he was expecting that I could kill him, which he thinks was the way of doing justice for having killed my mum. He added that no one dared killing my mum; that she was brought by two militia to her home village and called for people to come and kill her. No one did so besides him who felt he had to kill her. In fact he told us that they were told that no one was allowed to loot from Tutsis before killing all their family members. Since they thought I was already killed from Kigali, where I was residing, the only hindrance to take all the family property was my mum. So she had to be killed. By the time he started explaining how he killed her I partly lost consciousness. I prayed to God to give me His spirit to revive me and give me more strength to continue, as I felt it was His mission I was on. Miraculously I felt warmth from my head to my feet, I felt like a big rock melting from my chest and my head. I felt very refreshed, cleaned up my tears and carried on the conversation tremendously relieved from my whole being. I then told him that I have personally been forgiven all my wrong from God and that it is in the same spirit that I was coming to him offering him pardon myself. Then it was like a huge veil off his face he started smiling with a lot of words of gratitude. He started holding my hands and telling me many other things I couldn’t expect about himself and the reality around the genocide. He agreed to go and see other people for whose family members he killed.”

Fourteen years later, Rwandans are still struggling to reconcile the past. The struggle, however, is proving easier against a backdrop of national stability, economic growth, and a rising national profile. Foreign investment is at a high, there are swank hotels, and tourists are coming by the thousands.

Post-genocide history is mired in enduring civil conflict and instability. Rwandans know firsthand that exports such as peace and stability are far superior to tales of disaster, massacres, and corruption. Rather than provide the object lesson of what can go wrong, Rwanda now embodies quite a different ideal. The nation was one of the first to send peacekeepers to Darfur and today has one of the largest contingents on the ground. Nothing points more clearly to Rwanda’s recovery and resolve.

Tortillas

Tortillas are a staple part of my diet when I'm in the States. Here in Rwanda, though, they're pretty much impossible to find, so this week I decided to take a stab at making them myself. The end result could probably pass as pita or chapati or any other flat bread, but they're close enough to tortillas to make me happy!