Funny Conversation

Met a guy at the market when trying to find a lightbulb and we had a long conversation about so many different topics. He is a father of 6 and he is still not done having babies, so I asked him if he was rich (this isn’t rude here) and he said yes, that is why he is having so many. I told him that I want all my children to go to university and that is why I am only going to have 2 because university is expensive in America. I always try to give concrete reasons for family planning instead of just telling people that they should do it. That doesn’t help. You have to give them reasons why it will benefit them. Then we discussed marriage, and he told me about marriage in the U.S. which are contracts for a certain number of years and after the contract finishes, so does the marriage. I told him there is no such thing, that marriages in the U.S. sometimes end in divorce, but that there aren’t any that have an end date at the beginning. He didn’t believe me and kept telling me about these marriages in the U.S. with contracts. Then we discussed black Americans. He doesn’t think Obama looks black and wonders why we say people who look like him are black when they are very light and then asked me if both my parents were white because I look like Obama. He tried to set me up with the electrician who was near us while we were talking, so I told him I was already engaged and he was very excited to learn that my ‘fiance’ is Rwandan and told me that I must invite him to my wedding and that he will contribute to it. Here, friends and family contribute to the cost of the wedding, so he said he’d give me money or some tablecloths or some laminate flooring (he sells plastic tablecloths and laminate flooring). He bought me a fanta and made me drink it, even though I told him that I must go while the rain was on a hiatus, but he told me that in Rwanda it is very rude and impossible to say no to an offer, so I must stay and drink the fanta he wants to buy me, so I did. It was a funny conversation.

Last week, my boss and I had to walk and take the bus back to Butare after teaching at one of the coffee washing stations because our car was busy with VCT activities in other parts of the district. As we were going, she stopped and talked to the young ladies who were working with the beans and tested them on their health knowledge. Then we followed the trail and ended up at a river, which people were jumping over. Both of us are not seasoned river jumpers, so we stopped and stared for a while, trying to figure out how to jump it without dying, breaking something or getting wet. I threw my bag to a guy on the other side and hopped down to a rock in the middle of the river and up the other side, in one (not so fluid) motion. Then it was my boss’s turn and she had to throw her bags across beforehand also. We both made it unscathed, but we were both laughing hard at our ineptitude. We had to take the bus again, yesterday, but this time asked the ladies with the coffee beans of another way to go. We had to climb a hill and it definitely wasn't a short cut, but it saved us the embarrassment of attempting to jump the river again.