Rwandan Kiddos

I did a little write up about my thoughts on Rwandan youngsters when we completed training and am just now getting around to posting it. 

So the kids here are way more independent and self-sufficient than in American. No contest. Basically there are children of all ages wandering about willy nilly—with or without adult supervision. For babies, the mama will carry her kid on her back, held on by some fabric. For the most part, kids are playing ball in the street, wandering around miles from their homes, or maybe forming a mass entourage to follow some weirdo stranger like myself. They also like to gather on the side of the road and wait for the abazungu (Americans) to pass so that we can do a fist bump that they call “chance” here. I've taught them to add the explosion part. I also made it my goal to get all of the neighborhood kids to say "dude." I think so far that's been moderately successful.

For fun, my host siblings like to gukina umupira (play ball). Usually the ball is some ad hoc deal fashioned out of plastic bags. On that note, I haven’t seen a lot of toys in the villages generally. Usually you’ve got your plastic bag ball, an old bicycle tire that you push around with a stick, or some other contraption you’ve fashioned yourself to play with. And there’s no complaining about it either. They just like to have fun any way they can and don’t need all the gizmos American kids sometimes take for granted. You can buy all sorts of toys in Kigali but I’m sure price point is an issue as well. They were pretty pumped the day I brought a dozen slap bracelets back from a visit to the capital.

Slap bracelets!!!

Another favorite pastime is listening to the radio. Whether they’ve got on some Rwandan tunes or are jamming out to American music (it seems people particularly like Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, Rick Ross, and Rhianna lol), my host kids love spontaneous dance parties. And surprisingly, when I played them a song I downloaded to learn the numbers from 1 to 10 in Kinyarwanda, they memorized the melody in like 10 seconds and were singing it for weeks. On that note, I’ve noticed that kids here are generally awesome at memorization. My host sister Grace loves to play a card game where you place all of the cards face down on a table and have to take turns trying to find matches. And she's pretty damn good—schooled me every time we played. I also taught one girl a clapping song/game that a few volunteers and myself created to teach kids about hand-washing. She literally learned the song in about 2 minutes and was still doing it a month later. My host siblings sometimes like to read and draw when they're bored at night, but it's difficult without electricity. Sometimes when I pulled out my solar lamp the kids would grab a social studies booklet from school to read or ask me to bring out my Rwanda travel manual so that they could try to read the Kinyarwanda/English translation section, or just look at photos of animals.

The kids reading a school book with my solar lamp

Kids chilling in the kitchen

When they’re not playing they’re in school or working—tending to the cows, cleaning the house, washing dishes, fetching the water, etc. Lots of responsibility to contribute, in exchange for a roof over their heads. A cool discovery I made was that my host bro is handy around the house/an aspiring electrician. They teach some basic info about batteries at school and this kid can take 2 D-cells and fashion a make-shift light like it aint no thang. When he hooked up a light in the bathroom one day, complete with exterior switch, I was a happy camper. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of peeing in the dark.

Simon Pierre: Rwandan electrician extraordinaire 

I'm interested to see how the kids in Nyamasheke compare to my buddies at my training site in Kamonyi. Time will tell!

PS I literally just got electrocuted by my computer adapter while writing this. Hope it was worth it. haha