I want to take this blog post to highlight some of the
people from my village who have been inspiring to me personally and to me represent the best of Rwanda.
Emerthe
Emerthe is in her mid-twenties and owns the house I live in.
She is a genocide orphan yet somehow she still managed to become an infinitely
warm hearted person whose patience and kindness I so heavily depended on when I
first arrived at my site. Emerthe was born and
raised here in Rwabicuma and is known and loved by everyone. She invited me to
do everything with her and our other roommate, Clotilde. Through Emerthe I
became a part of the community.
I love Emerthe’s enthusiasm for life. Young women in Rwanda
are traditionally supposed to be quiet and demure but Emerthe loves to jump in
at community meetings and sing loudly at church. She was the Executive
Secretary of the cell office (our local village government office) for my first
year here, although she has since been transferred to another cell. Last year
Emerthe represented our community at our GLOW (Girl’s Leading Our World) Camp
and she was so enthusiastic about the camp and excited for the campers from our
town. Her loving enthusiasm and quite
confidence make her a natural leader. I wish there were more people like her in
government all over the world.
The thing I will remember the most about Emerthe is how she
loves to laugh and people love to laugh with her. One of my greatest regrets
leaving Rwanda is that I will miss Emerthe’s wedding which will take place in
the end of December but I hope to visit her and meet her children-to-be in
some not too distant future.
Vincent
Vincent is also an English teacher at G.S. Rwabicuma. In
addition to teaching Vincent is a full time university student at the National
University in Butare where he studies journalism. Despite exhausting
and expensive travel between our school and his school, Vincent is consistently
cheerful, engaged, and professional. Vincent has a true knack for languages and
loves speaking English and asking me about life in America. One of my favorite
cross-cultural discussions with Vincent happened the other week as we were
walking back from a ceremony. He was asking me about tire shoes. Throughout
east Africa you can find these quite practical and often surprisingly
expressive and attractive sandals with soles made from used tires. I thought we
were talking about these tire-soled shoes. He asked if I knew what these ‘tire
shoes’ were and I told him I did. He asked me if they were difficult to use,
how can you go so fast? I looked at him, puzzled, and said I guess you can go
fast in them but it’s probably okay. He asked how you stop when you are going
so fast in your tire shoes, again puzzled, I told him you just stop. After a few more questions I realized he was
talking about roller skates! Shoes with
actual tires!
In addition to Vincent’s responsibilities as a student and a
teacher he volunteers his time once a week to lead our school’s anti-AIDS
club. I plan the lessons, we discuss
them, and then Vincent teaches the lessons to the club in Kinyarwanda. This week we are hosting the first ever
Nyanza region BE (Boys Excelling) Camp and Vincent will be one of our adult
facilitators. Vincent’s commitment to
his students, his own future, and new ideas is inspiring.
Vincent Helping Students at Anti-AIDS Club
Mama Gitoko
Mama Gitoko is perhaps the jolliest person I have ever met.
We got along immediately. One of my first days in the village I was wondering
around aimlessly as the population unabashedly gaped at my foreignness. I
remember so clearly walking past her house and greeting her as I was greeting
everyone, bracing myself for whatever awkward or bizarre response might follow,
but she just laughed. Not a jeering laugh but a sweet laugh of pure delight at
my fumbling effort at Kinyarwanda. When everyone else found my foreignness
bizarre and rather frightening, Mama Gitoko thought it was hilarious and I
loved being around her. She loved when I would come to visit her, even when my
Kinyarwanda was awful and we had to resort to hand gestures and sometimes even
shadow puppets to communicate. As my Kinyarwanda improved she continued to
speak slowly and use simple vocabulary that she knows I can understand. We can
talk for over an hour even though she only speaks Kinyarwanda because she
really tries to meet me at my level. She is the only one in the world who knows
exactly how much Kinyarwanda I know. Over the last two years she has truly
taken on a motherly role, always giving me a snack of warm milk or porridge
when I come to visit and fussing over my hair, how rough and dark my skin has
become, forcing me to eat because I’m getting much too thin, and always
chastising me for not visiting enough. Mama Gitoko expects all of my guests to
come to her house and meet her.
Mama Gitoko’s joie de
vivre makes it sometimes hard to believe she has been through as much as
she has. Mama Gitoko was part of a huge
sprawling family that owned most of land in the area before the genocide.
During my first Genocide Memorial Week she took me to her house and pulled out
a photo album and showed me family pictures from the seventies and eighties.
Every single person in the photos, including both her parents, all of her
siblings, and her daughter’s father, was killed during the genocide. Not only
did Mama Gitoko survive the genocide, she went on to serve as a judge at the
local gacaca courts and had the strength to pardon those killers who were
willing to repent and promise the live a better life. Mama Gitoko’s one international trip was when
she was brought to Kenya to teach people from other East African countries
about the gacaca courts.
Mama Gitoko and I Greeting
