A day at the market

This morning was chore day, and the girls were busy with tasks including washing the stairs outside and raking rocks in the driveway.  I told the girls this was new for me.  One asked if I would like to try (sneaky of her, right?)  I obliged, briefly.  Then I talked with another girl, Nithia, for a long while.  She said her family was in Uganda for a long time and she grew up speaking English, but she had to learn Kinyarwanda when she got here.

Laura and I went to market today in Nyamata.  I was completely overwhelmed.  Just when Maranyundo seems like home, this place was so full of smells and different dress and people close to one another.  And I couldn’t think about what I might want, or how I might ask the price, or how I could possibly try to haggle for a better deal.  I almost physically hid behind Laura.  It was crazy how small I felt.  And guilty for not buying anything even though everyone was looking at me expectantly, as a "mazungu," which means some combination of roch person and white person.  (I guess that's me.) 

On the way back, we stopped at a bar with outdoor seating.  (I am told that's the culture here---you do something, anything at all, then you get drinks on the way back.)  It was like being in someone’s back yard, with plastic lawn chairs, the white ones with arms (only these were red) and a wall surrounding the courtyard.  We had a quick drink, then saw Amos, a teacher at Geshora, a nearby school, whom Laura knew, with his pregnant wife Rachel.  Then we were invited to have another drink; we joined them and Joseph, our academic dean, and later Agnes.  All of them are Ugandan.  We watched Joseph enjoy some gin and become rather silly.  I could hardly understand what he was saying, but it was fun! 

On our return we found out the we had missed the girls going to mass as well as the arrival of our two American guests, who, as it turned out, are staying with us.  Luckily, I am so communitized (quiet, MS Word, I’ll tell you what’s a word!) at this point that having guests is completely great and not even a little inconvenient.  To be fair, this is helped by the fact that I do not have to cook, clean, or buy food. 

While Nathan, the middle-aged design professor I met at the Paraclete on Monday, slept, we had dinner with Andrew, a sociable early-to-mid-20s psych researcher.  Then we all invited ourselves along to the girls’ weekly movie night in the dining hall.  The film was in Kinyarwanda, a sort of Romeo and Juliet.  The lovers’ families forbid them to be together because the young man’s father has killed the young woman’s father in the genocide and his family holds her family responsible for their father being in prison.  Undeterred, the lovers run away together and marry, but are very poor without the support of their families.  We haven’t made it to the end, but all is not well because the heroine’s brother is still planning to kill the hero.