By Jen Olsen
Peace Corps preaches that we as voluneers live at the level of the local community, and on some points, we really do. But even by the minimal monthly living allowance Peace Corps gives us, it‘s still a far cry from what the typical Rwandan lives off (probably because they‘re also accounting for our letters home, phone credit, toilet paper and the occasional relapse into western life by splurging on an egg sandwich and coffee at a café once a month. Mmmm...).
But my neighbors don‘t have such luxury, and the girls in my village don‘t take the bus, go to town, or contemplate buying tree tomatoes even though they‘re out of season. Every day I walk the four miles to town out of the mountain with my neighbors. They‘re mostly heading to the markets, but doing so with bas-kets of maize balanced on their heads.
This means of carrying things had lost its shock value until I saw a woman walking down our mountain carrying a full-sized school bench, a chair, a market bag, and a basket of produce, all balanced on her head. There was also a baby on her back. She also had the forethought to cover the baby with a shawl to protect him from the sun. And the mountain‘s not a small decline by any means. I still feel like I‘m in boot camp every time I go up it and I almost fall once a day going down. These women are malnourished, usually pregnant, usually with a baby already strapped to their backs, and they move jugs of water, vegetables, or benches, apparently, up and down the mountains like mules. No complaints, no hesitance.
When I walk with their kids, they‘re always excited: excited to play with their friends at the water pump; excited to kick a football made out of banana leaves; excited to tell the muzungu they‘re going to look for food. Small children chew on sugar cane or unripe tree fruits, and stumble their chubby legs over to me, arms stretched out for what feels like hours waiting to get close enough to touch the mysteriously white-skinned, fine-haired girl who lives god-knows-why in their village. And I feel guilt at the empty water bottle in my bag, at the pros-pect of bread, eggs, maybe even juice and other luxuries of having more than 500 rwf a week to spend.
Being confronted by these images moment by moment, acknowledging the women who carry one jerrycan strapped to their heads and the other to their waists, and I wonder how they aren‘t still scoffing at me. One woman tried to carry my hoe for me, amongst all the other stuff she had on her. I told her I had strength and could carry it, and she laughed. The children gossip about me. A little girl I walk down the mountain with sometimes told me how other children tell her rumors about me, and she refutes or confirms them (since she has ACTUAL CONTACT with the muzungu). And this one girl, she said that you never take lifts from passing cars, and you always walk, always! Even though you could have a ride! (True. My rigorous dedication to walking is paying off because people notice, thank goodness. Plus, my legs look awesome.) And the other kids, they tell me that you have a fiancé! And that you won’t take a Rwandan husband! (Also true. I don‘t think that requires an expla-nation . . .)
We are both quite the paradox, I think. I look absurd to them and likewise, they boggle my mind on a regular basis: movements, facial expressions, emotional expressions, dress, work, contemplation, everything. We blink at each other and sometimes I‘m not sure who the zoo exhibit is. Okay, that‘s not true. I know it‘s me. I actively try not to stare while they actively embrace the impulse.
But they‘ve started to accept me. They‘ve let me in to their lives for, I don‘t know what reason.
We (Americans) pulled out of Rwanda in 1994. Not only did we pull out but we pulled every other white person out, too. We left friends and colleagues to burn themselves out, to smolder until all the flames had scorched the land and a million people had died. And now they welcome me into their village? I walk home with friends and neighbors, marveling that everyone knows my name, that the mothers bid me hello, that the older boys and girls cast casual remarks as I pass, and the children ambush me with hugs as we approach my house. I feel a little like a rock star; exhausted, but riding a high on the cycle of adjustment; I've just hit the gold star on rainbow road and can now just sit back and enjoy the ride. I don‘t feel like I deserve this, but I‘m grateful.
No one should take such a gift without a second thought. I felt I owed it to my village to get a little closer to their world. Living in the village isn‘t enough if I can still have all the comforts of change in my pocket and American dreams on the edge of my vision.
So I spent a week like a Rwandan. I ate one meal a day; beans, rice, cooked bananas, so on and as much water as I could afford to boil and carry with me during the day. The beans I cooked came from my own garden, and the 2000 rwf I budgeted for the week was spent only in the markets on produce from the people I call my neighbors.
It was just an experiment, really. We can all acknowledge that it isn‘t their way of life that‘s confusing to the senses. They live the best they can. They are farmers, or mothers, or workers, and that‘s no different from us. It‘s the millions of moments in between life, in between active decision making about how to live that confuses me. I just wanted to get in touch with them, to understand their mannerisms and movements. To quiet my curiosity at things I see but don‘t have an explanation for [which is most everything]. They‘ll still think I‘m a muzungu, that I‘m hiding my baby-pool of money and riches in the closed door of my bedroom. But at least I would understand more. Maybe I would have answers to the millions of unfamiliar moments I experience each day. Or just one. One answer would be enough for now.
It took until day five of this lifestyle for me to have a delusional urge for bagels, day seven to dream about pizza, but it only took until day three or four to start to feel the effects on my body. My lips shriveled and my skin broke out in an unfamiliar dryness. My motions were slow, deliberate, which I only realized while I tried to swish my head around in a bucket to wash my hair; I became instantly disoriented and nauseated. I also realized that a mannerism I‘d noted, particularly in men, of walking (moseying, almost) slowly, with the arms lingering out to touch things, meandering side to side, in what had appeared to be a very random and erratically slow movement, had an underlining malnutrition to it. I found myself reaching my arms out unintentionally to touch passing objects, and then realized it was because I was so dehydrated that I couldn‘t be sure where my feet would be landing. I had reached my fingertips out to graze the surface of an electrical pole, a plant, anything, because it gave me a sense of depth, grounding me to my current location and giving an awareness to my surroundings that I wasn‘t able to comprehend anymore on my own.
Anyhow, I made it to day seven before I bought eggs and some bread to make an obscene amount of French toast (a compromise with myself, for not deliriously going to look irrationally for expensive Kigali-city bagels). I felt like Hermann Hesse while researching Siddhartha but with much less clarity than he had. That also might just be the hunger talking.
How do you even begin to even the score? Not only are my neighbors hungry and poor, but they‘ve accepted it as a standard of living. At the same time, they‘ve opened up their arms to me, accepting me as one of their own despite every indication of being dramatically different. Even trying to live at their level for a short period of time, there are some things we can‘t understand without having lived it the last 16 years. I‘ve only lived through the past seven days with notable consequences and because of that small, relatively insignificant experience, I count myself lucky for every day I feel accepted here, because I‘m not sure, what with so many other things to worry about (food, water, illness, shelter), I‘m not sure I‘d ever let the zoo exhibit convince me it were human. And yet here I am (here we all are), the doors to our cages have been opened, and we‘re peeking our heads out to mingle with our communities, a little less foreign than we were yesterday.
Photo courtesy of Jen Olsen
No comments:
Post a Comment