Mwihangane [My Condolences]

I was on my way home, after a week away training a group of brand new Peace Corps Trainees when I received an SMS from a fellow teacher, Joselyne.

Joselyne: HOW ARE YOU ELISABETH? We lost one of our students. Eric.

Huh? I work at a boarding school where students cannot leave without permission. Nevertheless, they do. And occasionally, we have to track them down. But I wondered at the wording of her text.

Elisabeth: Ndaje uyu munsi. (I’m coming today). Lost how? Yapfuye? (Did he die?)

Joselyne: Yego. (Yes.)

Double huh.

Elisabeth: I’m so sorry. Are the students very upset? What happened? Was he sick?

Joselyne: He was sick. We’re all surprised of his death and we’re at school with his family.

Elisabeth: It is very awful. I will be in Murunda by 5pm if you will still be together then.

Joselyne: We will be together celebrating tonight.

With that heavy news, I continued my long journey home.

Mu Rugo Wanjye [My Home]

They say you can’t go home again. Barabesha [they lie].

Abakozi [Domestics]

Ameneza appeared in my compound on Tuesday. I didn’t know her name when I saw her but she was lighting charcoal in my neighbor’s outdoor kitchen and it was enough for me to guess she was a new umukozi [domestic].

Abakozi are a cultural standard in Rwanda. They are almost always young children. Anywhere from eight to twenty-two. They are everything from a weekly laundress to a live-in maid. They are paid for their work. Live-in abakozi, the most common, not only get a small salary but also room and board for their work. They leave their families, often the village they grew up in, to go live with a stranger and do the household chores.

When I arrived at my new home, I was asked several times if I wanted an umukozi. Someone to wash the floors, cook my meals, do the dishes and laundry, even prepare my bath water. I said no.

Icyongereza Amaclub [English Club]

‘You were born in Rwanda. If you wish to live in Rwanda, work in Rwanda, die and be buried in Rwanda, you may stop learning English now. Kinyarwanda is all you need.

But, if you want to go outside Rwanda, meet people from outside Rwanda, do anything beyond these borders, English is what you need.’

Forty students sat in the warm classroom, three to a desk, listening to Ivan speak.

They had come to join English Club and had asked us, three fluent English speakers, ‘How do we succeed?’

‘Practice. Practice, practice, practice,’ we said.

Ndashaka Ikawa [I want coffee]

Going cold turkey off coffee is one adjustment I didn’t anticipate having to make when moving to Rwanda.

In a country whose second largest export is ikawa [coffee], where it grows on trees all around me, and my own host Mama spends her days cultivating the red berries – all I can get is instant!

Don’t get me wrong, the icyayi [tea] here is delicious.

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.