I was jolted awake at two in the morning by the sounds of a
woman screaming. I sat up, trying to get oriented. I had to remind myself that
I was in a rural Rwandan village. For a moment, I thought that the scream had
come from a dream. Then I heard it again. She was yelling something in
Kinyarwanda and it sounded panicked and desperate. I jumped out from under my
mosquito net and lurched toward the window that looked out to the red dirt road
that ran through the village, next to the Pentecostal church. The moon was
nearly full, and it illuminated the banana groves around the church. I couldn’t
see anybody. However, as the screaming continued I heard somebody getting up in
my house, opening and unlocking doors. I had only been studying Kinyarwanda for
a week, but I felt that if I tried hard, I might be able to understand the
phrase the woman kept screaming. It was frantic, haunting, and had a distinct
cadence. I couldn’t quite make out the words, except I thought I heard
“urusengero”, the word for church. I heard our front door open and saw my host
father, a Pentecostal pastor, walk across the street and enter the church
compound. Whatever was going on, I felt my host father was taking care of it. I
had no idea what to make of it, but I forced myself to go back to bed and sleep
through the now intermittent wails. If I had been in West Africa, my midnight
imagination would have steered me to thoughts of juju, or witchcraft and
traditional African beliefs and religious practices. This culture, however, is
mostly absent from Rwanda, which is at least 90% Christian. No, in this
post-conflict country, these screams seemed far more sinister.
***
New blog, new country, new purpose. Whatever. Let me get to
it. I’m in the Peace Corps now. It’s a weird thing for me. While all of my
travels have come from completely different motives, this is completely
different than anything I have done before. Some people have thought it would
make sense for me to join the Peace Corps. After all, I am used to being abroad
and can deal with new situations. It’s not that simple though. Not only have I
not been abroad for as long as two years, and more importantly, I have not
stayed in one place or committed to one job for anything close to two years in
a long time. In fact, I have been so transient in the last decade that it has
been since high school that I even lived in the same place for more than two
years at a time. The same would probably go for a job too. So as much as it
might seem like I am going off to do what I have been doing for the last six
years, I’m not, and yeah, it scares me.
***
When I woke a few hours later, I came out of my room and
found one of my host sisters sweeping the living room floor. I tried to ask her
about the woman I had heard screaming in the night. She understood what I was
asking about, but my Kinyarwanda was not good enough to understand what she was
saying. All I understood was the word “umusazi”, which is a general term for a
crazy person. I never got more information about what was going on. All I knew
was that she was an “umusazi” and her shrieks had something to do with the
church.
It was not the only incident we have had with an “umusazi”.
One morning I woke to a couple of loud crashes and bangs that seemed to come
from the front of our house. I jumped up and looked out the window. I saw some
of the village kids and a few adults from the surrounding area starting to walk
toward our house. I threw on clothes and ran out of my room. Our front door was
open and a crowd was gathered around our porch. I walked out and saw my host
sisters standing outside in the crowd. A huge stone that must have weighed 40
or 50 pounds was sitting in front of the door. Scattered around it were a
dozens of photos, that seemed to have spilled from a paper bag that lay nearby.
I was still groggy and trying piece this whole thing together. One of my host
sisters rubbed my back in a consoling way, telling me it was just an umusazi,
and that I need not worry. I found this kind of funny, as I did not feel
threatened by the incident, just confused. Down the road I could see a few
people hustling in the opposite direction, apparently chasing the man who had
done this.
I later found out that this person had stolen a huge bag of
photos from a woman that lived nearby and makes a living as an event
photographer. He had proceeded to throw the photos and stones at our house and
at least one other nearby. I also heard that he was arrested soon after and
thrown in jail.
It is strange to have these incidents and know very little
about what is going on. My ability in the local language is improving, but I am
still in the dark about most of what goes on around me. I feel an urge to
connect dots about these incidents. I am living in a country that is still
recovering from one of the most horrific events of the 20th century.
Rwanda is rife with posttraumatic stress disorder. It is natural for me to try
to put two and two together. However, the genocide seems rarely, if ever,
talked about. At this point it is actually difficult to see the realities of
what happened only 18 years ago. Is what I was seeing in the mental health of
some of my neighbors related directly to this? I had seen plenty of so-called
“mad men” in the cities in Ghana and Mali, although never in such small
villages. Or, perhaps, this was a result of government policies that keep
people like this in their villages and out of the cities. Obviously I have a
lot to learn about this small, but complicated country.
***
Besides the bizarre incidents described above, my time in
Rwanda, the tiny land-locked country in Central Africa, has been less eventful
in blog terms than my previous adventures. My first six weeks here have been
full of routine and restraint. The Peace Corps has kept me on a tighter leash
than I have been on since I was a child. Although I don’t want to admit it,
this is possibly for the better.
Our first couple of days saw us basically locked into the
compound at the Peace Corps office in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. All we saw of
the capital was a nearby cell phone shop and whatever we could glimpse on the
way out of the city as we went to our training site. It was only an hour
outside of the capital, but the change was drastic. We drove deep into the
hills into a small village that was completely removed from crowds and chaos of
Kigali. We were given almost no information about where our training would take
place, so I was surprised that such a small village was going to house 34
American volunteers for the next three months. In fact, we would be scattered
throughout several villages within eight km. of our training center.
The first thing event in our training site was meeting our
home stay families. The volunteers and the home stay parents all gathered
behind the training center, underneath a pavilion to protect us from the sudden
downpour of rain. Looking back on it, it was amazing how little we knew about
what the next few months would be like. We were told nothing about the village,
whom we would be living with, what our training schedule would be like or what the
living conditions would be. One by one our names were announced and we were
matched with our host parents. Most of the host parents outlandishly animated
when it was their turn to greet and welcome their new guest. They would jump up
and wrap them up in big bear hugs, then drag them over to the seat closest to
them. When I was announced, my host mom was markedly more reserved than the
others. She gave me a light hug that was more like us patting each other’s
shoulders, a common Rwandan style of hug.
After the ceremony, my new mom and I walked to our house.
There was a big crowd hanging around the church across the street. My host
father was there for a wedding and he came over to greet me. He was stout man
with a round head and a huge gap-toothed smile. He was very warm and seemed
excited to add someone new to the family. That night, I met my huge new family.
Four sisters and two brothers, plus a mystery brother who was studying in
Uganda. They ranged in age from ten to mid-twenties.
The first thing that I learned about my family was that they
were very religious. At first I thought they were Seventh Day Adventist because
it was an Adventist wedding going on at the church. However, it turned out they
were actually Pentecostal, and the father, was a Pastor, and leader of the
Pentecostal Church for our whole district. His name was Pastor Bonnke, which is
my favorite name so far. When I found out that my father was a pastor, I knew
that we would probably be one of the wealthier families in the area. While we
were not rich, necessarily, we did have a few luxuries that most of the other
volunteers did not have. Most of all, we had electricity. This was nice, of
course, though I felt it would have been good to go without electricity for the
first three months. It was also something of a curse, since we also had a TV
and DVD play, which were constantly running videos of church music videos and
footage of local choirs performing. The novelty of this wore off very quickly.
The main exception, ironically, was that the boys would usually watch action
movies dubbed in Kinyarwanda on Sundays.
That night I could hear the choir singing across the street
late into the night. It cut through the otherwise silent night with a deeply
atmospheric resonance. I felt very happy to be where I was.
On my second morning, I got dressed in my nicest clothes to
go to church with the family. The church was large and I sat on one of the long
wooden benches with Aline, my oldest host sister. I noticed that it was all
women and children in our section, while the men sat in a section to the right.
Aline said it wasn’t a problem. As people slowly filled up the benches in the
first hour, the four (four!) choirs sang. For the most part, I really enjoyed
the music, and we all clapped along. Later in the service, guitars and a drum
set were added, which I felt was unnecessary and reminded me of the new age
churches that have Christian bands play instead of choirs.
The mass was about three hours, which I was not expecting.
Luckily at least half of it was music. The next week, Aline gave me an English
Bible, so I read for most of mass, which made it a lot more enjoyable.
Since I have been here I have constantly been in the habit
of comparing it to the other African countries I have been to. In so many ways
Rwanda is completely different from the West African countries I have been to.
That is not to say that Mali, Ghana and Mauritania are that similar, but Rwanda
seems completely unique. I have already formed a lot of opinions about this
place and made plenty of observations. It is a strange place, however I don’t
feel I am ready to give my opinions quite yet. I have only been here for six
weeks and I am sure I have a lot to learn. I’m afraid that if I might regret
any strong statements that I make at this point.
