Belonging

I was woken abruptly from my afternoon nap by Mama calling, ‘Elisabete! Elisabete! Karibu!’

Slowly clambering off my 3 foot high metal-frame bed (slowly both from grogginess and to minimize the metal squeaking), I rubbed sleep from my eyes and ensured I was presentable for public.

I opened the thin wood door of my bedroom and adjusted to the dim light of the late evening gloom in the living room. Sitting directly across from my door, in one of the family’s five wooden chairs with thin, threadbare cushions, was an old man. Mama was nowhere to be seen.

‘Mwirirwe?’ I greeted him. He stood far faster than I would have guessed at his apparent age and reached his thin arm out to shake my hand. ‘Yego!’ he responded. After the requisite questions about how each of our news was, we both sat.

The old man launched into an introduction I could only snatch single words from here and there. The most important: ‘Nitwa P…’ and ‘umudugudu’. They told me his name, if I could pronounce it, and that he was, in fact, the Chief of the village I had been residing in for the previous four nights and which I intended to live the next three months.

I knew he was the Chief because he was supposed to be at the house several hours earlier to meet me and two of my colleagues, also new to the village. It was a required step in being allowed to live in the community – all new people must meet the Chief and have their name recorded in the Village register.

My colleagues had gone home long ago, several hours being well beyond the accepted Rwandan culture of ‘flexible time’. So now I would meet the Chief alone.

He spoke at me for several minutes, I smiled. I heard ‘Peace Corps’ and said, ‘Yego, Ndi umusitajyeri wa Peace Corps’ [Yes, I am a Peace Corps Trainee]. I had no idea whether he had asked me a question but I felt the need to say something and explaining my purpose was a good place to start!

Mama came back in then, the greetings were all done again, and the two promptly set in to a fast paced conversation that I watched with curiosity. While they chatted, the Chief pulled a thin paper notebook from his shirt pocket and leisurely flipped through the fifteen or so pages as though in search of something.

Ten minutes later, he found it. An empty page was spread open before him on the table and he bent over with a pen and began writing, all while continuing to spitfire out multi-syllabic words I had no hope of understanding after only two days of language training. I heard him say my name and Mama repeat it, as she looked at me and grinned. I nodded and interjected, ‘Nitwa Elisabeth’ – again unprompted but feeling the need to participate in this ceremony of sorts.

I watched the Chief write, more than five lines of neat text carefully lined up and precise. I waited for something more. A request for my last name, perhaps. An explanation of what this meeting was about. A welcome. None of them came. Though as neither spoke any English, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Before I knew it, the Chief was on his feet, and I was saying farewell as custom dictated. The old man was out the door before I could think of the words to say ‘nice to meet you’ and my Mama called for Little Sister asking her to translate that the Chief joked about Mama teaching me Kinyarwandan and I teaching her English. Mama laughed. She has shown no interest in learning English though she is quite diligent in attempting to teach me Kinyarwandan.

Little Sister left to continue her ever present household chores and Mama disappeared to the outdoor kitchen.

I was left under the light of the single bulb realizing, that despite the lack of fanfare, I was now officially a citizen of an African village in Rwanda.