Skip to main content

How on Earth Did I Get Here?


This photo was taken at my introduction (Gusaba & Gukwa), a traditional Rwandan ceremony that comes before a religious wedding in which the bride's dowry is settled among the two families. Afterwards she is brought out (I was escorted by my brother, bridesmaids and aunt) to greet her new family, exchange gifts, and share a meal next to her new (official) betrothed.

That day, I felt like I was in a movie. In That particular moment, I was trying - and failing - to stop giggling. The second I saw my then fiance sitting in a banana-leaf chair next to a vacant one, which I would eventually occupy, atop a low, covered platform, dressed in his silky, brown traditional Rwandan garments, looking at me cooly, staff in hand, like a king, the realisation that this was actually happening to ME erupted in the form of uncontrollable laughter. No. It was not anything like the twenty-something versions of my future wedding I had conjured up during my childhood.

Now it is three months later, the two of us have been to the U.S. and back for the holidays, and I finally have to face the fact that I live here. I am going to be living here for a long time. I have to make my life...here. I don't know if I could attempt to compare my experience with the average, uni-racial marriage. For that matter, I can't even picture how things would have been if we had decided to get married in the States and live there instead. This is my experience. Everything has changed. All at once. When I, anxious and completely unsure of how our wedding and future life together was going to pan out, received a call last summer from my fiance with the news that he had been offered a promotion at his job, it was decided. I think it was my suggestion in the first place. There was no reason for him to leave Rwanda. There was no reason for me to stay in Arkansas.

Now I'm sitting outside a bagel shop in a gated compound where I can take a break from all of the bewildered stares, writing my first blog post, because it's just a little bizarre to me that I am here. I feel need to record this somehow. I have thoughts here that I would never have back home, comfortable, able to speak to almost anyone, doing everything from muscle memory. Everything is new. It's scary and exciting, frustrating and satisfying.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rewind and Remember

Sometimes it's easy to miss what is happening right in front of you. Sometimes you realize that there are chunks of time that you were only doing the necessary things to get to a certain point and you missed a lot of the details in between. Kind of like when you get home from a long drive and you get the feeling that you don't even remember driving. Maybe you were lost in your thoughts, but haven't even really kept track of those either. But when you finally sit down, take a break and rewind back to the beginning, you can fill in the blanks. Well, at least they seem like blanks, but you find that somewhere those moments are stored in your memory. These last three months have been a whirlwind. And now, I'm here. It feels as though I was in Arkansas, fell asleep, and woke up married and living my life in Kigali. Now, I have to rewind and recall what exactly happened in the middle of all that glorious chaos. How everything looked, who I encountered, what I was thinking, ...
4 comments
Read more

Lesson No. 2

Lesson No. 2: Living outside your home country can bring out the best in you -- and the worst. I keep restarting this one. It keeps turning into this giant mush of self-pity, and that is not at all what I am intending to get out of writing this. What I would really like to come from this post is for people to see that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, it is freaking difficult to live outside your home country, and you don't have to feel bad if it's hard. I know in the heading I mentioned the best first but I will save that -- the best -- for last... I have always had this sense like certain things were harder for me to cope with than for others. I think everyone gets that feeling now and then. For some, it's paying attention in class. For others, it's noticing the emotions or nonverbal expressions of other people.  For me it's keeping my cool in just about any social interaction beyond my circle of absolute closest friend...
1 comment
Read more

Imitation-Rwandan Food for Thought

I haven't been in Rwanda long enough to merit any judging rights. But, being in the position I am in - not completely able to relate to my Rwandan family and neighbors but also not here for the same reasons as most of the expats I have come into contact with - I am seeing a lot of different things from the outside, and from many different angles. There is one particular thing I am noticing more and more as I observe people around me. I had originally typed up whole stories about the specific occurrences, but to avoid making this a gossip column, I decided to make this a more of a general thought. And the thought is this: It seems to me that people who travel the world, whether for work, religious missions, to study, whatever reason, as they become more experienced with the expatriate life, they begin to develop a certain attitude towards others who are doing the exact same thing. It's an attitude that seems to say something along the lines of "I know the best way to li...
1 comment
Read more