A good old-fashioned rant.

Things I need to get used to in Rwanda…

• Spitting everywhere, by everyone. Kids, grandmothers, men in business suits – doesn’t matter who or where (although people are generally kind enough to direct it away from you). Interestingly enough, there’s a letter at least once a week in The New Times, Kigali’s primary English-language newspaper, from someone asking everyone to please stop spitting in public. I’ve unfortunately not yet met an anti-spitter…
• Somewhat related to the first point… Everyone picking their nose. It’s absolutely acceptable to pick one’s nose in the middle of a face-to-face conversation with someone else, and acceptable still to flick whatever you’ve pulled out of your nose toward the shoes of your companion… I’m still finding it shockingly hard to keep a straight face when whomever I’m speaking to starts digging around…
• Also about snot: people blowing their noses everywhere… onto the ground. The funniest I’ve seen was a man using his handkerchief to hold one nostril closed while he launched snot out the other onto the sidewalk. Katie wins, however, because she saw people blowing their noses off the side of a pool one day. Classic.
• Still related to bodily functions and fluids… The sheer number of men I’ve seen peeing all over the place. On the sides of buildings, next to the street (more often than not facing traffic), in the middle of the sidewalk. I’ve watched men of all ages zipping back up along the roadside. This is definitely a gendered activity, as I’ve not seen any women squatting wherever they please. Needless to say, I’ve seen an awful lot of penises here...
• Everyone’s desire to touch me all the time. It’s never a harassment thing (and in fact, it’s split 50-50 between men and women doing it) so it technically isn’t a problem… but it is interesting. I’ve had women slipping their arms around my waist casually while we’re waiting to get on the bus, men rubbing my arm (one was kind enough to explain it was because as a child, he thought that when you rubbed at white skin, it came off), and children running their hands through my hair. They don’t need to know me (and often don’t); it’s just considered acceptable to touch the muzungu.

I decided over lunch a few days ago that I needed to write a bit of a rant. A lot of the time, my blog entries and my emails home are about all these amazing things about Rwanda – and there are so many amazing things, really. I’m lucky to be here, and I love living here, for all the quirks and things I’ve had to adapt to (like showering out of a bucket, whacking cockroaches with shoes, and having to wash my feet about 60 million times a day so I don’t look as dirty as I am). Most of the time, I wake up happy that I’m here, even if I’m not terribly happy about heading to work unshowered in wrinkled clothes on a 25 minute bus ride. The problem is that through the course of the day, some things just start to wear at me. Another volunteer in Rwanda described living here on her blog as being in a permanent state of PMS, and I’d have to say that’s fairly apt most of the time, as I can swing from loving Rwanda and everyone I meet to feeling like I’m going to turn around and smack the next person who lets muzungu slip out of their mouth.

The worst of my frustrations can be put into two categories, as follows:

• Men. I almost feel like not bothering to explain as any woman who’s travelled through Africa will likely understand, and everyone else can probably make the leap to understanding quite easily. I meet a lot of men here – for a population where women outnumber the men (one of the many consequences of the genocide and subsequent imprisonment of a large number of men, there are roughly 88 men for every 100 women), I meet perhaps 10 men to every 1 woman. Perhaps “encounter” is a better word than “meet,” because so often these meetings take the following form:
  o Man (or group of men) on sidewalk/sitting outside a building/guarding a parking lot/guiding people onto the buses/you name it: “Muzungu! Hey, sister! Hey, hey! Bonjour! Good morning! How are you? Sister, sister, come here. Where are you coming from? Your name? Muzungu! Tst tst tst [this ridiculous hissing noise Rwandese use to get someone’s attention, be it a waitress, moto driver, or white girl] Muzungu! Where are you going? Sister, how are you?” and on and on and on.
  o Me: Usually an awkward, tight smile, a nod or if they’ve not hissed or used muzungu to get my attention, I’ll generally politely answer their questions or say “hi.”
  I’m always torn. I don’t want to be rude, but I also don’t want to encourage the unwanted attention, so I generally resort to the least contact as possible without actually being rude or ignoring them. I just get so tired of the constant stream of attention and would give anything to blend into the background most of the time; it just gets old hearing the same thing day in, day out, over and over and over. Part of me keeps trying to remind myself that while I’ve heard it a million times already today, it’s rarely the same guy trying to talk to me over and over, so I shouldn’t get so annoyed with it… But at the same time, they’re all aware of how many times I and every other expat woman hears it. Also tiresome, the constant demand for my phone number. Originally I was giving out my Rwandese friend, David’s, phone number as a ploy to avoid unwanted calls… The problem is that Rwandese often have a habit of ‘beeping’ your number when you give it to them, to check if it’s the right number or not. Having been a bit embarrassed by this before, I’ve given in and give my number, usually taking care to save theirs into my contact list with something that tells me if it’s someone I’d ever want to speak to again. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve met a lot of great people (men included) and have begun to make some friends and contacts that are really nice and sincere people. But I’m also getting chatted up regularly by men of all ages (coming back from lunch when I wrote this the other day, a man in his 40s started talking to me from the balcony of the building next door… Could barely understand him and yet he still asked for my number. Worse still, he works right next door, so avoiding him may become a daily activity). I just would like some peace once in awhile.
• Children. I wrote before about how difficult it is to see mothers with young infants and toddlers begging on the streets, especially when the children are the ones with their hands out. It’s still hard to see, and it still occasionally makes me struggle inside a bit with my no-money policy. Luckily, the sheer numbers of painfully obnoxious children who beg from me regularly just for sport snap me back out of that struggle. There are the kids who beg because they have to, and you can tell those ones from a mile away – the kids wearing discarded winter jackets for clothes, barefoot and still out on the street at midnight. Interestingly enough, they’ve been some of the most polite kids I’ve met here. Then there are the kids who are just plain awful, really. The kids who will see me coming up the street and yell “Muzungu! Give me money! Donnez-moi l’argent!” It’s so frustrating! This happens multiple times a day and it never gets any less tiresome. The worst was Saturday when Katie and I were in the new grocery store that opened up downtown. A little girl, maybe about ten and very well-dressed with packets of cookies in her hand, stopped to talk to me. It started out pretty innocently- a “bonjour, comment ca va? Comment t’appelle tu?” etc. And then “Donnez-moi l’argent!” It just blew my mind. I hate that I’m seen as this infinite source of money – when in fact I’m here volunteering and my monthly stipend is less than what my coworkers earn. I get that a lot of the time, whites who are working here do have quite a bit of money, and I get that other people have set a bad precedent in giving kids money/candy/pens/you name it… but I do have such a firm stance against it as a whole and I really dislike the kids who expect you to hand over whatever you have happily because they demanded it. I think it’s the expectation that really does me in, as the children who ask politely rarely grate on my nerves like this. From the street kids downtown, it’s a pretty regular chorus of “Cent francs a manger” (100 Francs to eat) but more often than not, they’re the ones who back down quickly when you say no and more often than not will tell you to have a good day as you walk on.

I’ve had a difficult few days lately – feeling a little overwhelmed by the constant attention, struggling with language barriers and just generally feeling a bit cranky (let’s blame the heat, shall we?) and writing it all out makes it seem so much less of a big deal… And really, it isn’t. It’s good to know though that even when I forget why I’m here and start to wish I was back home, the people who know me best think I’m exactly where I should be and are there to remind me (thanks, Chris!).