Day 24

This morning’s breakfast contained the funniest moment of the day. I was eating with Jadeau the dentist, Gideon the data manager and another male coworker. In case you didn’t notice I have a plethora of male coworkers. I’m thinking of setting up e-Harmony Rwandan style to fix them up with their future wives and make a fortune. Gideon was telling me that Solange was coming to breakfast and asking if I knew her. I’ve met close to a million people in the past month so my usual response is “Probably, but I don’t remember”. He proceeds to say, “You know, the black girl.” “Well that narrows it down for me.” At site there is literally not a single other white person (excluding Edison). I can go days seeing only Rwandans. But Gideon keeps it up, “She’s really black.” I don’t know what he’s getting at, especially since rating a person’s shade of black is offensive in the US. I don’t think they care so much about here because the boys proceeded to relate her skin to charcoal. Oh culture.

I have been schooled in being a proper Rwandan woman today. My counterpart decided to visit my home after work. My house looks like an absolute disaster zone. I blame half of it on the fact that I have no furniture and eat random food and the other half on my general nature of being a slob. I’m sure she was horrified as soon as she stepped foot inside my gate, but she held off a good 15 minutes before saying she was going to sweep the outside of my house. She took my traditional Rwandan broom and went to town. There is a fine art to sweeping dirt here. My entire yard is dirt, as it should be. I have walkways that are made of bricks and a border of concrete around my house that acts as a trench to the water that falls from my gutters. I observed as she worked in silence, only breaking it to say that cleaning the outside of a house is the woman’s job in Rwandan culture. Enough said…I got it.