It makes you wonder.
I’m almost at the end of my time here—only about a month left!—and it’s
really starting to hit me that I’m leaving.
I’m leaving behind this absolutely wonderful family, who has made this
house a home away from home for me and has provided so much love and support
during my time here. And this could be
it. They don’t often get a chance to use
the internet—and if they do, it costs money—so most of them don’t have Facebook
let alone email. Rwandans don’t appear
to have mailing addresses either and calling from the US costs a fortune. They’ve given me so much to be grateful for
and I feel that I can never repay them.
It’s an incredible privilege to be able to leave my life in the US for a
semester and spend time in another country just learning, not working or
volunteering or anything, just learning.
After all this family has given me, I am just leaving, with newfound
knowledge taken from my experience and a distant, somewhat skeptical hope of
someday returning to visit.
I’m spending a lot more time in the poorer parts of Kigali,
too. La Maison des Jeunes is home to
many orphans and young people with no place to stay. Last week, I had a little girl, probably
about 12 years old, follow me onto the bus, all the way to my house, rubbing
her stomach and asking for food. How do
you turn that away? (I bought her some
food and sent her back on the bus with enough money for the fare.) But I can’t stop thinking: it’s such a luxury
to look at these theories and the embedded structures that inherently oppress,
but honestly, striving to change those paradigms doesn’t feed the hungry girl
hanging around at the youth center. It
doesn’t help my family here find enough money to rebuild their house’s
crumbling wall. It doesn’t get the
drunken beggars who greet me every morning off the street in the
short-run. It’s a luxury to look past
those grievances and say, “It will be better in the future.” It’s easy because my present isn’t a hungry
belly and a crumbling house.
Research, I’m realizing, also feels quite exploitative. I’m asking these people to give up their time
to provide me with research that I will use in a report that will have little
effect on their actual lives. In the
case of the nurse I just interviewed, it means that the time she gave me cost a
patient an appointment that day. And
here I get to just waltz into this clinic, past all of the wailing babies,
haggard mothers, and heavily bandaged limbs, to speak directly with the clinic
coordinator, barely waiting 5 minutes in line.
We get called “muzungu” hear, meaning “white person.” At first, this bothered a lot of us, since
it’s hard to simply be identified not as a person but as a color. It doesn’t bother me in the least
anymore. As naïve as it sounds, this is
the first time I’ve realized to what extent my color gives me incredible
privileges. People are defined by their
color every day, even within my own country, within my own town, let alone here
in Africa. Drawing on post-colonial
theory again (my newfound interest), for the first time I feel like an Other,
something that made my whole group uncomfortable at first, only because we
weren’t used to it. But how can we hate
it, how can we feel angry about being defined by our color, when it happens to
so many people each and every day?
We keep talking about the need to dissolve barriers between
people—national identity, ethnic identity, racial identity—to just view
ourselves as people, as global citizens.
It stems from the desire to dissolve the divide between “settler” and
“native”, “colonizer” and “colonized” (talked about in Mamdani’s book, also a
newfound interest). The identity of
“colonizer” should cease to exist, inarguably, but what about the identity of
“colonized” or “native”? That “othered”
identity, born out of the colonial divide between colonizer and colonized, has
grown into an identity to be proud of—minorities take pride in their
differences, in their unique cultures that differentiate them from the
hegemonic (for example: White, or male) identity. To personalize it, I can say the same for
myself, in terms of being a woman. I
take pride in being a woman, an identity seeping in inequality (more for others
than for myself, I can certainly admit), but I fight to promote my femininity,
my womanhood, my right to be a woman.
But being a woman means not
being a man, yes? Being a woman relies
on the existence of a man (whoa), since she is the opposite. That’s what post-colonial theory says,
anyways. I’m still thinking about it,
personally.
So how can we say that these “othered” identities need to
break down the barrier that separates them from others—i.e. their unique
identity? Just become global citizens,
see yourselves as people, not as citizens of separate nations, not as white or
black, not as male or female, just as people.
Is there any room for unique identities within that? Is there a huge danger of homogenizing the
globe, at risk of falling under the dominance of the majority? I don’t really have answers, just thoughts.
Despite all of this reeling through my head, (and perhaps a little unrelated...) I am finding
out a lot about women, sexual health, and priorities of the government in my
research. It’s fascinating to hear
attitudes about sex and condom use in different settings in Rwanda. The Maison des Jeunes stresses waiting until
marriage but if you “fail” you should use a condom. Much of the information is geared towards
men; for example, in the literature provided on male and female anatomy, the
description for a vagina is “the place where a man’s penis is inserted” while
the description of a penis includes an entire explanation of sex/how the man
can orgasm/how “the penis is used to penetrate a woman’s vagina”/etc. (This is coming from the National Manual on
sexual health.) Just those descriptions
say a lot about the assumed hetero-normative nature of sex (only between a man
and woman), the focus on the man and his control over sexual intercourse, and
the emphasis on only a single function for those body parts (i.e. sex is only
conceptualized in one way). The
government is trying to implement family planning methods so that women can
space out and choose the time of their pregnancies, or, by using condoms, can
reduce the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.
Which sounds great except… many women are skeptical about using modern
contraceptives because “in the culture of Rwanda,” as I’ve been told, it’s
prohibited for women to be having pre-marital sex. Women don’t openly talk about sex, are afraid
to let anyone know that they might be having it, and feel skeptical about these
new contraceptives. It’s funny, because the
government of Rwanda is trying to promote this vision of a modern, developing
nation, seen in many ways but also in the promotion of modern methods of
contraceptives, but those modern methods aren’t seen as acceptable to many
people, especially women. In Rwandan
culture, you aren’t supposed to be having sex if you don’t want children. Yet, it appears that young people are having
sex, especially young men (and who are they having sex with? Yep, unmarried women) but the protective methods are highly stigmatized. I’m hoping to find
out more within the next few days that can add to all of this! But this is just a taste.
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