A Day of Fame and Fortune

Several unbelievable events stacked on top of one another on Friday.  At about noon, a group of visitors arrived.  I had been told a family of potential donors was coming.  I shook the hands of three extremely cute and impressively articulate kids and their parents, as well as a British woman with them who introduced herself as Opheila Dahl.  This name registered as I shook hands with the other men—whose names I barely heard.  The Ophelia Dahl!  The Executive Director of Partners in Health!  I read about her and Paul Farmer, PIH’s founder, in Mountains beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, a great book about the organization and its struggle to bring medical access to developing nations.  I was so starstruck, I didn't know what to do.  I ran into the teachers' lounge and kind of freaked out and tried to explain to everyone that she was kind of a big deal.  Then I kind of followed them around with a camera, because I was asked to document the visit, but also because I was suddenly transformed into the paparazzi.  I followed them on their campus tour, and the girls sang to them (I was so proud!) 

PIH has two hospitals in Rwanda, Ophelia apparently knows Sr. Ann (my boss at the Paraclete), and the Cambridge friends she was travelling with apparently gave some money to get this school started, so it might not have been surprising that she was there...except to me.  The sisters even asked me and the other American teacher to sit down to lunch with them.  I should have asked a lot of insightful questions, but it was all I could do to speak in complete sentences about the school.  Ophelia was unassuming, down-to-earth, and friendly.  She is in Rwanda for a short visit of the hospital sites nearby, then she will head off to another site someplace else in the world, maybe Peru or Haiti.  

The mind-blowingness of the day continued after lunch.  Sr. Juvenal was eager to get on the road because the Maranyundo School for Girls was being given five cows at a special ceremony.  It turns out this is a BIG DEAL in Rwanda.  Cows have long been associated with wealth.  They mean food security and are a major part of the culture.  In love poems, a beautiful woman’s eyes are compared to cows’ eyes.  The word describing the slow and graceful procession of a bride and groom down the aisle is the same word as a cow’s walking.  Many dances and songs are dedicated to the important event of a gift of cows.

The gift was made possible through Heiffer International and maybe also somehow through the Rwandan government, which gave cows to a number of genocide orphans and widows some time ago.  The program specifies that the first calf of a gift cow must be passed on to another deserving person.  So now it was our turn to receive cows!  The girls’ dance troupe and chorus had packed into the vans two hours before us to get ready at the site of the ceremony, along with several prefects (student leaders) whose job it was to select at random the name of the person whose cow they would be taking home. 

The crowd was seated under a tent on a grassy yard, looking out on the speakers at a single microphone and about 20 cattle just beyond, grazzing and mooing and occcasionally excreting.  Women turned out draped in colorful formal silk dresses.  The girls, festively attired in leopard prints and headbands, sat in their own tent, which was decked out in woven wall hangings and a low table with gira, traditional vessels for amata (milk). 

There was a lot of rejoicing and hugging as the recipients were paired with their benefactors and introduced to their cows.  Sr. Juvenal gave one of the speeches.  I took an amazing video of a man, costumed as a shepherd, brandishing a staff and singing the praises of the cows.  At one point, the girls ceremoniously passed around the gira to share the milk.  Laura and I were proud again to see how they shared with the dust-covered children from the neighborhood who gathered around.  The girls’ concluding performance was brilliant, with slow, flowing movements, practiced hip twists (they’d be great at lindy hop!) , and frequent arms-extended gestures en homage to the cows’ graceful horns.

After the ceremony itself we piled with the girls into a van.  I expected us to head back to school, but no such luck.  Instead, we bumped along a dirt road for 40 minutes or so behind our inka (cows) to the place where they will be kept.  Then we threw a sort of housewarming party for the inka; there was a big fuss about getting them off the truck and into their stalls; we watched them eat, brushed them with hay, patted their noses, fed them corn husks, and sang to them.  I kept looking around me thinking this is completely normal, trying to convince myself it was absolutely true in this context!

It was well after dark when we returned.  The cows are young and not yet giving milk, but one is already pregnant, we are told.  I asked Sande how the milk will get to school each day, and he said that we could hire bicyclists to do it without great expense, though I suspect that bumpy road and all that milk will still be quite a handful for our milk courier!

Finally back at the house, we ended the night with what was probably the most intense thunderstorm I have ever lived through.  The rain was heavy enough that it poured in through the wall vents, and I had to move my wooden desk away from the wall.  At one point, our door was blown open by the wind; our floor immediately became a lake, and the curtain in front of the door waved dramatically in the wind, the lightning pulsing behind it menacingly.  After hesitating, Laura bravely went out to close it, facing substantial headwinds down the corridor.  She and I proceeded to do such fearful things as: preemptively turn off the lights and get out our flashlights, take inventory of our fire extinguishers in case of a lightning strike, sing “My Favorite Things” on repeat for 20 minutes, and huddle together in the hallway in the middle of the house.  The girls told us later they were likewise terrified.