Lunch with the Pastor

After church, we headed over to Pastor Julius’s home for lunch. I felt so blessed to be able to share time with him, his family, and some church elders in his house. Visiting people in their homes gives a visitor much more of a sense of being in a country, learning customs and traditions that you just don’t get from a hotel or restaurant. When we arrived, everyone was seated in chairs and sofas around a coffee table in the living room of the house. We started with pleasant conversation, and I was glad to learn that the Rwandans at Pastor Julian’s house spoke French in addition to their native Kinyarwanda. I am conversant in French, if no longer quite fluent from my days as a college student in Paris for a semester. Between their limited English and my somewhat limited French, we could hold an enjoyable conversation.

I was interested to learn that French had been an official language of Rwanda, harkening back to the days of French Belgian colonial ties. While all natives spoke Kinyarwanda, those who attended secondary school (comparable to our high school) had learned French. This meant that virtually all professional and business people of Kigali spoke French, but most of the working poor and rural Rwandans did not. However, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, had led a push to have the official language changed to English as of the first of 2009. President Kagame had said that English was the business language of the world. It was also the language of his larger trading partners Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to the east and north, as opposed to the smaller, poorer neighbors Congo and Burundi to the west and south that speak French. He felt if Rwanda was to advance its economy, it benefited everyone to learn English rather than French. Having seen the prevalence of English in the airports of Nairobi and Amsterdam, I’d say he is right.

Back at Pastor Julius’s house, it came time to eat, and we all practiced a tradition of washing our hands with soap and a bowl of water brought into the room. Lunch was served buffet-style on the coffee table, with the traditional meal of stewed meat, rice, fried potatoes and plantains served. We all drank passion fruit juice, served from concentrated fruit juice with water added. It was great! All of the guests ate together with the local men, but notably the local women did not join us. One of the older women then came in and joked about the fact that Ebralie and her sister Mary ate with the men. She noted that they were wearing pants (as opposed to traditional skirts worn by the other women). She said that because they now wore pants, they were becoming part men and therefore they now ate with the men. After a laugh, Ebralie told the story of how when she was a young girl in Rwanda, the girls were told that they could not eat goat meat or chicken, two favored meals in Rwanda. Girls were told if they ate goat meat, they would grow a beard like a goat, and if they ate chicken they could not have children. Such stories of wearing pants and eating goat meat did illustrate how Africa in general, and Rwanda in particular, are male-dominated societies.

After lunch, the women took some chairs outside and sat under the shade of banana trees, leaving the men in the living room. As soon as the women left, the men began to ask me how things worked in America. In particular, they wanted to know how much men had to work around the house. They said in Rwanda, when the man comes home he wants to relax. But the women were beginning to expect the man to help with chores around the house and help with the children. They wanted to know how we men handled this in America. I found it interesting that this was the thing they were most interested in, particularly after the conversation regarding pants and goat meat. I explained that many years ago, American men also wanted to come home and relax. But, as women entered the workforce, it has now become more of a custom for the household chores to be divided more equally. I told them that as the chores are divided more evenly, things are more peaceful and happy in the home. They thought long and hard about my answers, but I don’t think they were happy with what I had said!

After spending the whole afternoon enjoying the company of our hosts, we headed back to the Presbyterian Guest House for the evening. It seemed like we had seen and done so much, and I had already learned so much about the people from our visit at the church, and the home of the pastor.