Day 6: Azizi Life
Azizi Life is an organization that connects tourists with a women’s cooperative in a rural village an hour away from Kigali. Groups stay with Rwandan families in their homes and experience a typical day in the life of subsistence farmer. After spending five days in Kigali, Azizi Life served as our rural Rwandan experience and a chance to talk to locals before we head to Ddgeye village in Uganda.
To explain my experience at Azizi Life, I have to go back a day. We spent a portion of the day at the Reconciliation Village Sophie wrote about yesterday. While the primary take-away from this visit was the spirit of forgiveness of the villagers, a few experiences made me ponder a new perspective on our interactions with local people. Two boys on our trip stopped to play soccer with a young boy. While this felt like a universal activity joining the three, when they stopped playing, the boy said “Usually after people play soccer with me, they give me money”. Later, the villagers sang and danced for us. During the last song, a girl grabbed my hands from where I sat in the first row and pulled me up to dance with her. She looked about my age, and I marveled at the experience as she danced wonderfully and I danced horribly, but happily. The song ended and before we got back in our van, we were shown an array of baskets and bracelets for purchase. I spent money for the first time on the trip. I didn’t question it like I had all the other times people pushed souvenirs at me because I felt like I was having a genuine experience. I felt connected to these people.
Back at our hostel that evening, we talked about our experience and the more we shared our individual stories, the more it became clear that we were continuously asked for money. Groups come through the village three times a week and three times a week they dance, invite travelers into the dance and ask them to buy goods. We were reminded that the nature of being white in a developing country is that we are seen, to some extent, as a source of money. I had understood that the people on the streets of Kigali trying to sell me jump ropes saw me as an opportunity for money, but suddenly all of our interactions felt as though they could be ploys for money. At the same time, I felt bad for questioning people’s desire to connect. I looked down at my bracelets and felt naïve, confused, and manipulated. It was a quiet night among our group.
Back to Azizi Life (the next morning)—a big draw of this trip for me was the opportunity to interact with Rwandans and Ugandans. For this reason, I had been looking forward to our time in home stays. At the same time, my experience the previous day tainted my excitement, especially when we arrived at the Azizi Life offices and the first thing we saw was a room full of baskets, earrings, and paintings for sale. None the less, I was determined to approach the day with an open mind. We drove a short distance to our home stays, and were introduced to our hosts. They carefully wrapped the girls in traditional skirts and head wraps and the boys in lose full body wraps. We communicated with the women of the cooperative through an interpreter as we peeled Kasava, learned how to carry items on our heads, and fetched water. One of my favorite things I learned was that the women had heard of cheese but never seen it. Being the cheese-obsessed American and proud Oregonian that I am, I made our interpreter tell the women about Tillamook Cheese Factory. They thought it was hilarious. Our conversations covered an impressively large and humorously disjointed variety of topics.
In the afternoon, we learned how to strip and dye fibers from a sisal plant to weave. We were split up to work with one other group member and a woman from the collective to make our bracelets. Katie and I sat down next to our teacher on her banana leaf mat ready to learn. With each group working independently, our interpreter left us to communicate through others means. Our teacher would take our sisal fibers, do a step a few times, and hand the bracelet back to us to work on. When we messed up, we laughed and handed the bracelet back for operation. Somehow, she taught us to ask “what’s your name” and “my name is Shantih” in Kinyarwanda. In order to not forget my new phrase, I would ask Katie what her name was every few minutes and she would respond. Our teacher laughed every time. When Katie finished her bracelet, our teacher held up her wrist proudly to show Veronica their shared work. I loved sitting and working with this woman, and wanted so badly to believe that the sweet, if fleeting relationship Katie and I had with her was genuine.
The rest of the evening was marked, of course, by our hosts going above and beyond to be hospitable, taking us on a beautiful hike, make mattresses out of enormous bundles of banana leaves, and showing us their traditional dances. We went to bed around 9:00pm. As I suspected, I woke up at 12:02 needing to go to the bathroom. Needing to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night in a rural village in Rwanda is, as you might suspect, a bit different than in the U.S. I put on my shoes and headlamp, dragged our bedroom and house door open, and crossed my fingers I wouldn’t wake the pig. The homemade pit toilets in the village happen to be in small log structures where the pig and rabbits are also kept. As I watched the little pig snoring and snorting happily in its sleep, I was confident that I was achieving one of the goals of Azizi life—experiencing rural life in Rwanda. I was still unsure of my process on the second goal, of interacting with locals, as I stumbled back into our house.
Flash forward to our departure from the homestays. Although the home only belonged to one of the women in the collective, the others slept at her house for the night. The women joined us on the walk to the main road. We met up with the other half of the Catlin group and their hosts, saying hello in Kinyarwanda to each of the other women. Once this process was complete, it was time to say goodbye to our hosts. When Katie and I got to our weaving teacher, instead of saying “goodbye” she asked in Kinyarwanda, “What is your name?” We responded in unison, and she laughed as she took our hands in hers and now said, “Goodbye!” I did the stereotypical “watch out the window smiling until you can’t see given person” move.
I felt a lot closer to achieving our second goal. I won’t say that any sense of skepticism has been stripped from me. What I do think is that it seems like the easy way out to prevent myself from feeling connected to people with the feeling that I am being used. It also seems irresponsible to not consider how our group is seen in a developing country and our power for good and bad as foreigners. It is also possible that the people we have met simultaneously need money and see us a means for that and want to share their lives with us. I have some clear conclusions on the pig/toilet situation and a better idea of rural life in Rwanda. I’m still working on my thoughts about our interactions with locals.
--Shantih
