Love Don't Cost a Thing....Or Does It?

Last weekend was a learning experience in two of the most important aspects of Rwandan culture: money and sex. Not to say that these are disproportionately important in Rwanda, but that they are important everywhere, but different in Rwanda from anywhere else I've ever really been.

Saturday marked our third and final Umuganda (community work day) during training. Last month, most of our families opted out of Umuganda, which meant that most of us spent the morning at home, doing laundry with the door locked for fear that we might be found out. My family was ditching as usual this month, but this time it was because of the legitimate reason that the wall to our compound had mysteriously caved in and they needed to take the time to fix it. Since I wasn't needed at home, I decided to go to Umuganda without them. However, this time was nothing like our first experience when which we built two full roads in the course of a morning. We arrived at the Umuganda site, meant to be the construction of a new district office, to find about 20 men sitting on a mound of dirt watching two others shoveling dirt to mix cement. We stood around being gawked at for a while before we decided to use one of the hoes we had brought with us to teach our audience to limbo while they waited. About an hour in, there still wasn't much to do and it was becoming clear that that wasn't likely to change and, at this point, some of us went home to do laundry. The most productive part of the day came when we loosened some of the soil near the construction site to plant crops, but this was a pretty short lived activity and I was beginning to understand why my family normally seems to opt out of going.

Umuganda is a great idea in theory, but, like many theories, isn't so hot in practice. On some days, like the day of our first Umuganda, having a large labor force put to work for a morning can be a huge driving force in development. However, it is almost impossible to expect that kind of outcome every time because the projects the community has real need for are constantly changing and not always the kind of projects that can easily be accomplished by large groups of unskilled workers. The construction project we were supposed to participate in this weekend is an excellent example of that. It also seems that Umuganda is more for the poor than for the rich. If you are wealthy, you can afford to pay the fine for refusing to attend (not that it's often enforced) and maintain your status in a society that frowns upon getting one's hands dirty. Also, if you are wealthy, there is a good chance you live in Kigali, which has far less need for Umugandas and which is also where I ended up on Sunday.

Kigali is a world already entirely different from rural Rwanda: the roads are mostly paved; electricity is a standard rather than a luxury; and there are foreigners everywhere, which means that people are acclimated enough to Americans that they don't stop what they are doing to watch them like they normally do in the country and like they did on Umuganda. Honestly, I feel like this contrast causes me a little bit of culture shock. A friend of mine pointed out that the vast economic disparity is probably one of the best indications of Rwanda's development. Granted, it is hard to see the inequity just between the nation's capital and the majority of it's citizens outside of major cities (so dramatic that you can find urban Rwandans eating burgers and milkshakes in the city, but only the wealthiest can regularly eat rice in the countryside), but in a few years, the wealth could start to spread.

We came into Kigali with two purposes: to stock up on Western food and to attend a wedding for Kassim, one of Peace Corps' teacher trainers for ESL and the man I will report to when I move to my site.

The wedding was beautiful; it would be hard to find a more brightly colored gathering. Women came dressed in their brightest garments with beautiful wraps for their hair. The men wore Western tuxedos that sparkled in the sunlight, but the color scheme of the wedding were decked out in it. They wore shiny yellow, gold, and bright green with golden head bands that I could have never pulled off in my life, but they definitely knew how to work. As always, the bride was the most decked out of anyone in all of the same colors as her bridesmaids, but with much more fabric and a gorgeous gold-embroidered green hi-jab. The guests were seated (men on one side and women on the other) under giant white canopy tops that provided plenty of shade, but started to overheat from the hot air rising off of all of the guests below them. Everything was decked out in the bride's colors, creating so much of a spectacle that a Western couple in a nearby guest house stopped what they were doing to watch the ceremony from their balcony (I wondered if they were aware of how much of a spectacle they were themselves by wearing shorts and a strapless dress, clothing that is certainly not appropriate by Rwandan standards and especially by Rwandan Muslims). Even the juice that the bride and groom pored for each others' family members in a gesture of coming together was dyed florescent green and yellow to match the theme.

We weren't able to attend the actual wedding at the mosque, but the dowry ceremony which takes place before the wedding when the family of the groom traditionally presents the family of the bride with a cow is a crucial step in getting married in Rwanda. Kassim's family is relatively well-off and urban so they didn't actually present the bride's wife with a cow (as they would in the country side), but they did present them with a large enough sum of money to buy a cow if they wanted and several other gifts as a symbolic gesture. The gift that struck me the most was a bottle of Coca-Cola, which was pretty telling of how rapidly Rwanda is developing, but also of the way that corporate American junk food is taking over the world. After the prayers had been made, the gifts exchanged, the juice pored, every member of each family had been greeted by the couple, and some photos had been taken, it was time to eat. We were served fanta by women in giant, billowy, Aphrodite-like dresses and then helped ourselves to a giant buffet full of food with infinitely more spice than we are accustomed to getting at home (which is none).

It dawned on me how much emphasis the dowry ceremony, as an expected precursor to the wedding, places on the transactional nature of marriage in this country. Certainly, judging by Kassim's smile last Sunday, this particular marriage was more about love than it was about money, but the conversation I had with my host sister later that night about the monetary aspect of Rwandan marriages told me that Rwandans still place a lot of import on the ability of the husband's family to provide which is indicated in paying for the wedding and in presenting the gifts at the dowry ceremony. To a certain extent, the transactional nature of marriage is present everywhere (and it certainly used to be much more prominent in the states), however, the concept is still a bit foreign to me as an American, having grown up hearing people swap vows to love each other “for better or for worse” and “for richer or for poorer” values that naturally extended to the engagement and the wedding ceremony as well.

Of course, the Rwandan notion of romance is pretty different from what I'm used to in general. In an HIV conference we had today, students were asked to relay their expectations in romantic relationships. Before they ever listed love or trust, they listed family, which is the primary expectation of love and marriage. This also provides a lot of explanation for the heavy emphasis on the financial security necessary for supporting a Rwandan-sized family (sometimes with up to 15 children) and why sex and money are thought to be so much one in the same (so much the same that there is a noticeable spike in the HIV positive percentage of males in Rwanda around the age of 44-45, when they most commonly become financially independent and wealthy enough to pay for prostitution). This is changing rapidly. The Kagame administration has placed heavy emphasis, not only on development, but also on health and family planning, which means that family size is on the decline, hopefully creating more time for married couples to enjoy a bit of romance in their lives.