The Peace Corps Chronicles: Rerouting to Rwanda

Editor's Note: Regular readers of Rosemount Patch might be familiar with the name Mackenzie Drutowski. She is a former Rosemount resident (and graduate from RHS), who has been writing about her experiences as a teacher in the Peace Corps. Her first pieces had been from Niger, where she was tasked with teaching English to local students.

She and the other Peace Corps volunteers in Niger were forced to leave the country last month after the level of violence increased in the country. She is now living and working in Rwanda, and here is her first piece from her new home.

"Amashyo!"

On February 7th, following a marathon quadruple leg flight from Morocco to Portugal to Germany to Ethiopia and finally to Rwanda, I made it to my new home.  The view is a stark contrast to flat desertous landscape of Niger. Rwanda is lush and green and certainly lives up to its name of the "land of 1000 hills." 

Upon our arrival in Rwanda, the three other Niger refugees and myself we were introduced to Peace Corps staff and taken out to pizza.  The next day we left the capital Kigalli and headed to the training center to meet our host families and start our four week training. Thus far training has consisted mostly of learning the local language, Kinyarwanda.

Kinyarwanda is a surprisingly difficult language.  The first challenge I encountered with the language is that "no" in Kinyarwanda is pronounced "oh yeah."  Our very enthusiastic language instructor says "no" with an upward inflection that to me, perhaps especially coming from Minnesota, always sounds like an enthusiastic "yes!" 

For example, I will ask, "Are we going to the market today?" and our teacher Velance will respond, "oh yeah!" which means no. It’s very confusing.  Also, the words have so many syllables!  Consider the word for "volunteer," "umukorerabushake," or the word for "good morning," "mwaramutse."  Plus, Kinyarwanda has an incredible amount of verbs that apply to oddly specific circumstances such as "gukoropa" which means "to squigee" or "gusura" which means both "to visit" and "to fart."

It’s interesting to see how the language reflects different cultural values.  It’s evident in the language that family is very important because there are a lot more words to describe family members than we have in English or French.  There are four different names for siblings depending on whether or not they are older, younger, of the same sex as the speaker or of the opposite sex.  There are also different words for maternal and paternal aunts and uncles, partially because maternal aunts and paternal uncles are considered second mothers and fathers which is a nice idea. For me this would mean I have 4 mothers and 2 fathers, not counting my Tibetan, Nigerien, and Rwandan adoptive parents. 

When parents have their first child they are called mama or papa plus name of the first child.  For example, the oldest child in my host family is named Wilson but called Willy so in the community my host parents are called Mama Willy and Papa Willy. Add to the pressure of naming your first born child the pressure of changing your own name! 

One of the other host moms took advantage of this opportunity and named her first child Queen so she is now Mama Queen.

The language also reflects the importance of water and milk.  In Kinyarwanda one needs to be careful when talking about water because many common phrases have a double meaning.  "Gucira amazi" literally translates as "to spit water" but means something or someone is beautiful. 

"Guca amazi" or "to cut water" means to insult someone.  "Kuba amazi" means to be drunk and to have water and the very similar "Kugira amazi" means “to have a good sex life.”   I guess I will have to be careful when asking people if they have water. 

I will end this little Kinyarwanda lesson explaining the greeting I started with, "amashyo," which is my wish that you will have many cows and I take the liberty of assuming you respond with the traditional answer, "amashyangore," wishing yourself to have many female cows.