April Fool's Day, Dancing Wizards and All

At times, our training resembles a sleep away camp for 20-somethings, with our centralized living quarters, family-style meals, and communal bathrooms (not to mention ghost story nights.) However, this was never more true than when the April Fool’s jokes started with someone stealing the bell (really a piece of metal that we hit with rocks) that summons us to class each morning. The jokes continued with us switching classes before the teachers got there, though the joke was, in the end, on us, because the teachers just continued teaching class as though nothing was amiss. Our class was particularly into the April Fool’s jokes, so when one of our members went to the bathroom, we naturally hid her notebook in the rafters of our little classroom hut and her water bottle in the bush outside. Halfway through class, the gardener came along and started pruning the bush, completely oblivious to the water bottle, which remained hidden.

The day got even better when one of our language classes was dedicated to discussing dancing wizards…in Rwanda, there is a verb for “to be a dancing wizard in the night” (gucuragura). No April Fool’s joke. Apparently there are also dancing wizards in many villages- the teacher who explained all this to us said there were two in her village, but they both died (which begs the question, how does a wizard die?) I still don’t have the full story, but the wizards seem to dance outside people’s houses at night and then go home to their wives, where their wives must provide a hot bucket bath. Odd detail yes, but as a health volunteer I applaud the cleanliness of the wizards, even if it is after a full night of terrorizing the countryside.