Wednesday, April 8, 2009

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.

Graduation Day

When you think of graduation, especially college graduation, in the United States, often one of the first images that comes to mind is that of large white tents with flocks of proud parents and robed graduates-to-be milling underneath. Well, this was surprisingly like the graduation here for the National University of Rwanda graduates. As the largest and more prestigious university in Rwanda, the graduation was quite the occasion, and from Thursday on (the graduation was on Friday) there was an air of excitement surrounding Butare. Seven of our language teachers, including my roommate, graduated, so we were invited to attend and take part in all the excitement. What was truly different about the graduation here was how excited the graduates here were to be graduating- the nonchalance of too-cool-for-school college graduates in the United States was nowhere to be seen.

A Presentation or an Earthquake?

I’ve experience a tornado, a hurricane, and many a blizzard back in the United States, but I had to travel all the way to Rwanda to experience (at least to my knowledge) my first earthquake. Per usual, I was on time to breakfast and sat down to the standard coffee and bread. Before I had even finished buttering my bread, there was a loud shaking, but I just assumed it was a big truck going by- only the California people knew what it was, and left the dining room immediately. Rumor has it the earthquake registered a 6.1 in Chyangugu, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, but here in Butare I’m guessing (with my extensive earthquake experience) it was far less. BUT it was the largest since the earthquake here last year that killed several people- fortunately this one injured neither people nor buildings. For all you geography/geology buffs out there, the volcanoes along the DRC and Rwanda border were formed by seismic activity of tectonic plates in the region, so there may be more excitement in store for the volunteers place in the Western province.

After that bang (or, rather, quake) of a morning, came another first- my first health presentation in Kinyarwanda. The presentation was to an outreach group brought together by the nearby women’s center and actually took place in the same Catholic Church where my resource family goes to church. We (four of us) were scheduled for the very beginning of a full day on family planning and I was responsible for explaining the biology of HIV and AIDS to this group of young adults. Biology is a hard subject to explain even when you know the language and culture, so you can imagine the difficulty I had in explaining this subject in Kinyarwanda. When describing the immune system, for instance, I had to call it “the body’s way of fighting bad things.” Close, but not quite. Fortunately, the audience was very receptive to the muzungu butchering their language and explaining a concept that seems so divorced from the everyday reality of diseases like HIV and AIDS. After all four of us finished, we even had several questions, which we took as a good sign- Rwandan culture tends towards a reserved nature, so their confidence indicates that we may actually have gotten some of the information across. The presentation helped to reassure me that while communication and the community’s trust may be a struggle at first, it is indeed possible and I just might be able to achieve something once at site.