Foreheading at Church

Heeheehee, what a funny day.

I had a minor but significant triumph! I got my first bus into mumuji all by myself! Huzah! It wasn’t too scary.

There, I met Léon from the office and he took me for breakfast at a local café. It consisted of two plain flour pancakes and a mug of traditional Rwandan milk tea – basically hot milk (usually reconstituted milk powder) with a few heaped teaspoons of sugar in it. Incredibly sweet, and still Léon piled a couple more in (which is normal, apparently). It was nice, but I think an acquired taste. Filled me up though.

After that, we walked across town to a large Baptist Church, next to which is a small Church for the Deaf. Quite a few faces from the office there, but apparently it was a small congregation as it’d been raining, making travel hard. Was a really interesting experience – lots of drumming and clapping, and then two or three people took it in turns to stand up and recite the same story from the bible. The one about Jesus walking on water. I got most of it by the third time, and learned a few Congolese and Ugandan variants on signs.

Augustin, the head of RNAD was there, and I received a big welcome. At the part were new people introduce themselves, I stood up and did so in AKR (Rwandan Sign Language). Was brilliant, people understood me, yippee!

The other nice thing was that I got to do loads of foreheading. It’s a traditional greeting, I think I mentioned before. You touch foreheads on either side, three times, like kissing on the cheek. It’s really beautiful.

So, a very positive experience, though I don’t think my Bible Studies have come along any ;)

After that, Léon walked me to the Trade Centre and I went off up to the internet café that Martine showed me. I spent hours in there updating my blog, replying to e-mails, and uploading photos. The connection was pretty slow and it took the best part of two hours to upload to my Flickr account :( But, still, I had nowhere to be and it was blissful relaxation. I've found e-mails from friends make me insanely happy. I must have been there about four hours and it cost me something like £2.40!

I headed home after that, as I’d arranged to meet my friend Alexis. I met him through a language exchange website a few months before I got out here – the only person offering Kinyarwanda I could find. We’d been e-mailing quite a bit since then. I was looking forward to meeting up with him. We went to a bar just round the corner from where I’m living and had a fantastic night just chatting away. I’m going to devote another post entirely to Alexis’ project because I think it’s brilliant and I would like to help drum-up support for it. But he’s even more lovely in person than via e-mail, and we chatted about so much. He’s one of these nice people you can ask about anything and know that he won’t be offended by you – topics like religion, politics, AIDS, shamanism and, of course, the genocide.

I was surprised to learn that the Hutu/Tutsi divide is still deep rooted, and that some would say the current situation is like the leaves on a tree: aesthetically very pleasing, but no good if the roots are not strong.

It’s really hard being foreign. Well, more to the point, British. I feel so hopelessly awkward asking about these things, even though I really want to know. I call it walking on thin ice, he calls it walking on eggs. Some people I’ve met will turn around and just tell you things. One Deaf lady wrote an introduction to me on a piece of paper saying who she was, where she was from, what she did, and, at the bottom: My father and my mother died in the genocide in 1994. Thank you a lot.  

Another person told me only he and his sister survived out of a very large family. I know another lady who was only a girl. She was raped, probably at knife-point because she has an unusual scar on her neck, and chose to keep the baby. It’s pretty close to the surface but, at the same time, if you didn’t know something had happened, you wouldn’t guess it just from walking around the place. For an outsider, you can’t feel any tension. It’s impossible to tell Hutu from Tutsi. Even Alexis says it could have all been a misconception, one that’s lasted non-the-less. I likened it to standing an Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman next to each other and trying to guess just by looking at them which was which – impossible.

He actually didn’t flinch when I told him I was Pagan. Apparently, during the genocide there was an orphanage out near him with a Swedish woman in charge. The Swedish woman was a Pagan herself! When we were talking about religion and humanity later, he said I sounded a lot like her in my thinking. I was amazed.

One of the things that baffles me at the moment, and a few other people I’ve talked to, is that the entire country is going from francophone to anglophone in rejection of the French, because of their part in the genocide, which was significant. Yet, at the same time, the Catholic Church, whose part was just as great, are accepted with open arms still. How can that be? Priests telling hundreds of men, women and children: "Don’t worry, you can go and shelter in the church, you’ll be safe there," and then turning up a few hours later with a truck load of Interahamwe and a machete in their hands. Priests.

So, yes, that and a few other things baffle me, but I’m new here. I’m allowed to be baffled.

Something that made me laugh: we got talking about AIDS and American aid being conditional on preaching abstinence before condoms. It’s something I only learned in training, and was really annoyed about. You’d expect more common sense really. 

The saying here goes: ABC – Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise. After our discussion, Alexis said "Ah, for Britain it’s the other way round: CBA?" :op

[NB 2013: If you've been following along, you might have noticed that this is the first post I made where I didn't add the 'GMT + 2' notice at the top. I'm not sure why I originally started doing that, but its absence suggests to me that I finally felt comfortable in my new life. Just fourteen days after arriving in-country, I stopped referring to my home timezone. Whether consciously or otherwise, I'm not sure.]