Stories from Rwanda Part One - From Fear to Family

I’ve done some pretty scary things in my life. I once decided it would be a good idea to run a marathon, even though the furthest I had run before was less than a mile. Instead of giving up on my teaching career, I determined it would be best to create my own business, even though I didn’t have the faintest idea about how to run a business. I even entered a dance competition just one day before with four other people in front of hundreds of strangers who might not have realised it was just a joke. Oh, and by the way, I can dance about as well as a pig could fly. But travelling alone to Rwanda to meet and work with people I have never met is the one thing that has terrified me the most.

After my plane landed and I found my baggage I searched for the host family that would be looking after me for my three week stay. I had seen a couple of pictures of Xaverine and her son Gustave but I am terrible at remembering faces; I even had an embarrassing moment of asking an unrelated stranger if he was Gustave. The man just shook his head (I don’t think the poor guy spoke much English and my Kinyrawanda vocabulary was about two words by this point). I moved on.

When I finally found them, my nerves almost completely vanished. Gustave was extremely warm and welcoming and helped me with my bags. Xaverine was every bit as welcoming, and in the days to come I was to learn what an incredible woman she really is. There was also someone else there whom I didn’t expect, but ultimately became someone very important to me – Another volunteer with Dramatic Need who had already spent three weeks in Rwanda. She was a South African girl called Caroline, who I learned would also be there for my entire trip. She will never know the strength she gave me.

On the way to Rwamagana my Rwandan hosts wanted to know everything about me, and I told them as much as I could, but I also wanted to know about them. Caroline began to explain to me that Xaverine has seven children when she was interrupted by Xaverine exclaiming with a smile that “No, I have eight children!”, indicating that Caroline was now a part of her family. She quickly altered this statement by adding “And now, I have NINE children!”, smiling at me. I wondered if I had done enough yet to be called a part of the family, and felt just a little intimidated that Caroline had already bonded with them.

They also wanted to know what I knew about Rwanda. I had spent the past two and a half years reading and writing about the genocide, watching films and learning as much as I could. But when actual Rwandans asked me what I knew about their country I became quite modest, and didn’t want to bring up such a delicate subject on my first day. Little did I know, I still had much to learn about Rwanda’s painful history and the people’s rise from the past to building themselves a much brighter future...

During the coming days my Rwandan hosts and I did exchange some interesting bits of information about each other’s countries that each party was flattered about. Claude (Xaverine’s oldest son) knew about Scotland’s upcoming independence referendum, and I asked about getting involved with Umuganda as my first Saturday would be the last Saturday of the month – a sort of national community service day across Rwanda.

Settling in was easy, both because Caroline was there to help me and because the family were so welcoming. I had already eaten on the plane but I was served with copious amounts of rice, beans, spaghetti and bananas that looked and tasted more like potatoes – Along with some actual potatoes. They also provided some Rwandan beer – I am by no means a drinker, in fact, I rarely drink at all and when I do it’s very small amounts and never beer. By the end of my trip I had drank so much beer that I developed a bit of a taste for it. My Rwandan hosts never allowed me to drink an unhealthy amount and would never put me in any danger, but I did drink a lot more beer than I ever would back home!

I arrived in Rwanda on a Thursday night, which meant I had a few days before my first teaching day to get to know the family. The times I spent with them are some of the most valuable memories of my time in Rwanda. The first thing that immediately struck me was how much this family truly love spending time with one another. Xaverine’s two youngest children, Bella and Kelly are the only ones who still live at home permanently. On my first weekend I observed their big brothers Gustave and Claude spending time with them, playing games with them and cuddling them. This show of affection warmed my heart and to see how much this family love each other was truly something inspiring and beautiful to witness. On one of my last days in Rwanda we travelled by several buses (Not as easy a feat as jumping on a bus in Scotland!) to the capital, Kigali so that Xaverine could visit another of her daughters who attends a boarding school. She only gets one day out a month and nearly the entire family were gathered in Kigali to spend the day with her.

Every member of Xaverine’s family works ridiculously hard, right down to Bella and Kelly. The school year in Rwanda is January to November, with four weeks off at Christmas. I know there are two weeks in April where the schools are off for the genocide commemoration period, and I believe there may be two weeks off in either summer or autumn too but apart from that the children are in school. The school day starts at 7am and usually ends at 4:30pm, unless it rains heavily during lunch time and the pupils are delayed getting back, in which case they will stay later, sometimes as late as 7:30pm. When they get home they have homework to do and they stay up very late because, well, that’s just what Rwandans do.

Poor Bella and Kelly would always be falling asleep at night while trying to drink their tea. Xaverine insists that they must drink tea to be able to sleep – I didn’t point out that caffeine is more likely to keep them up!

The two oldest – Claude and Gustave – both have jobs that they work really hard at. I had talked to Gustave briefly before

I came to Rwanda via Email. He studied in the same part of India I visited last year and came back to Rwanda as a freelance filmmaker, and also does work for Rwandan TV station Family TV. Occasionally we would see an advert pop up on television and Xaverine would inform us that Gustave had made it. I couldn’t help but notice big similarities between Gustave and a friend of mine who is also a filmmaker, Nathan. Both make funny little films all the time and have a huge passion for films. Gustave, like Nathan, watches every film that comes out, and he enjoys every one of them from a filmmaker’s point of view. He has a dream of making a successful film in Rwanda some time, and I really believe that he might just do it.

The three girls in the middle all study very hard too and unfortunately I never got to see them very much. They all made time when their sister had come out of boarding school for her one day off which was very nice to see.

My “Rwandan Father” as Caroline had described him was always working hard too. I never quite understood what he does as a job; I think it’s something along the lines of sales. He leaves early in the morning and we wouldn’t see him until quite late at night when he would relax with some food, a little bit of gin, and then go to bed. He doesn’t speak any English but like Xaverine, he is fluent in French, so Caroline and I tried our best to converse with him with our best attempts at French.

And finally, Xaverine herself is probably the hardest working of all; Apart from being mother to seven (Or, excuse me, nine) children and being the principal of Espoir, she is also the vice president of a genocide reconciliation organisation which she had several meetings for all across the country during my stay, she is the Dramatic Need representative for Rwanda, and – I didn’t find this out until very near the end of my stay – She also used to be the mayor of Rwamagana!

Before I even got to Rwanda, Amber from Dramatic Need had told me that Xaverine runs on what she likes to call “Africa Time”. This was actually one of her most charming aspects. She would tell Caroline and I to be somewhere for 8:oo the next day and not arrive until 9:20, simply raising her arms in the air and exclaiming “Africa Time!!”. I could definitely not run like this back home, but I did find some of these situations hilarious in my time out in Rwanda.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that Xaverine, while very heart warming and kind, was also possibly the most hilarious woman I have ever met. She thinks her English is terrible, but actually it’s pretty good. She struggled to understand my Scottish accent for the first few days but eventually got used to it. But when she would struggle with English she would sometimes just trail off and say “Ah, I don’t speak English. I speak French. Please try to understand French.”

It didn’t take long for my nerves to fade completely and for me to feel I had caught up with Caroline to “family member” status. “I felt like part of the family” is a very cliché thing to say, but I really did. On my last day Gustave thanked me and said that I was like a son to his parents, and a brother to Bella and Kelly. I have volunteered in China and India the past two years and now and then someone has called me their brother – But never has it meant so much to me as when my Rwandan hosts – no – my Rwandan family said it to me.I was completely honoured that they would think of me that way.

Even down to Caroline – I spent so much time with her in Rwanda and she was there every step of my journey. I felt like she was already part of the Rwandan family when I got there, and by the end she had made me feel like I had been there as long as she had. I could happily call her a sister.

Even after my first weekend, I began to question why I felt scared at all in the first place. After all, it’s the things in life that have absolutely terrified me that I’m most proud of, and this fact alone should have filled me with confidence. But there was one more thing to think of. After two years of planning and fundraising, I had put all my efforts into just getting to Rwanda. I had temporarily forgotten what on earth I was actually going to do when I got there...