July 16, 2011

Its saturday and i've been in kigali for two days now.

Friday I was exhausted and just settled in. I did have two intersting conversations, exhausted or not. The first one was with a man who was training the rwandan army so that they would be prepared when they go to sudan. He was with a military team and they were training the army in what sounded like organizational stuff. He'd met kagame and a lot of the people in the history books, and was impressed by their efficiency and relative incorruptibility. He is a southerner and from a military background, clearly. He'd actually done trainings in many of the world's trouble spots, including cambodia, so we had a lot to talk about. Two different sides of the same phenomenon. It was a good and interesting talk despite the fact that he hated obama and still was angry at the north for the civil war. Did I say that he was from georgia?

The other was with a sociologist turned marketing consultant, who had worked with a medical group that did abortions for women raped during the genocide It was hard, he said, because the church opposed it. Another interesting man.

Today I got TIGO working, the modem, with some help from eric who has a friend who is a computer expert. It wouldn't have been apppropriate to pay him, so I offered to take the friend, and another friend, both of whom are eric's best friends, out to lunch. They took me to a real rwandan hangout, a small place on a side street on a dusty steet, where they knew the owner. The restaurant did have an inner court, but they pulled out a table and chairs and were served outside. Another group of Rwandan men were also there. Various friends of eric's came by and we just sat around and talked and drank beer and ate brochettes. Actually they talked, occasionally explaining to me what was going on in English. They seemed to alternate between kinyarwandan and french. I could occasionally follow the frencn and a word or two in kinyarwandan.

The content doesn't matter, though. What matters is that this is what men do on saturday, hand out and drink beer and talk and joke. They say that their wives are at home, and are glad that the men are with each other instead of getting in trouble with other women. Sunday the whole family goes to church. The wives will have cooked and taken care of the children on saturday. Louise, if you are reading this, I'm learning about the Rwandan gender system. One woman came by and sat down briefly. She knew some of the men having worked with them on aid projects. As it happened when she learned that I was a psychologist she asked me to tell her about herself. I did what the magicians call a blind reading: I told her that she was an ambitious woman but had a great deal of anxiety. She reluctantly acknowledged the ambition, but totally agreed about her anxiety. She worried about the future all of the time; what would happen to her, what would happen to her children, could they afford the university, etc. She is married to a german man and was going back there to live. When eric and the rest heard that she was worried about the future they said she wasn't african any more. According to them, africans live in the present.

Some thoughts for later:
the rwandan culture of distrust and strategic communication
the rwandan love of children
village versus city

Eric is what the literature calls a hybrid, and louise and i have called a creole. He says explicitly that the replaces what is bad in his culture with what he learns that is good from other cultures. He does this consciously, and in fact learned how to do it. I think they all are hybrids. They were sitting around in a traditional fashion, but they all had cellphones, which rang continually. The restaurant was playing American music.