I don’t even know what language I speak anymore

So, I’ve officially been at my internship at Abakarikuta (Missionaries of Charity) for 3 days. I started at 8 am Monday morning, and it’s now Wednesday afternoon. It’s been interesting so far.

The organization allows “visitors” from 8-10am and 3-5pm every day except for Thursday and Sunday, so those are the hours I’m currently working. I have a meeting with the head sister when she gets back from Uganda to discuss a way to add hours to my work by doing a separate project to benefit the organization. This is supposed to be my internship, so I don’t really like being considered a visitor. Volunteer would be fine since that’s basically what I’m doing right now, but I guess that’s just the term they use.

Monday morning was interesting. I arrived at Abakarikuta at about 8 and went down to the toddler’s room. The workers (I don’t really know what to call them. They’re not sisters, but they work there regularly and they’re Rwandan, so maybe they’re volunteers? I don’t know. They also don’t leave after visitor hours, so I don’t know.) and another volunteer had brought them outside for some fresh air and to put the leg braces on those that need them. There are about 20 kids aged maybe 2-5 with varying levels of ability. Some are completely able-bodied and minded. Some are mentally fine but physically disabled, and some are both mentally and physically disabled. One is blind as well. They are mostly boys with a small handful of girls. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do for the first day, so I mostly just played with the kids and watched the other workers and volunteer. The other volunteer approached me and asked if I spoke French. I told her no and asked if she spoke English, which she didn’t. We each spoke a little Kinyarwanda, but that didn’t get us far. A little while later I asked her if she spoke Spanish, on the off chance that I could actually use that language here, and she did! She speaks Spain Spanish though, and she speaks it much better than I do, so I don’t always catch everything she says, but we can communicate a lot more than I can with the Rwandan workers. She taught me how to walk the kids with leg braces—I promise they’re not on leashes, there’s just not a better way to put that. For most of them, you stand behind them, hold their hands, and urge them forward or help them move their legs to walk forward. Some of them can walk pretty well, but some of them can’t at all. For one of the bigger kids, you have to loop blankets through his leg braces and pull his legs forward with the blankets to help them walk.

 As we were doing that, a group of Muzungus arrived. A few of them were regular volunteers who usually come on Wednesdays, they told me, and the others were friends of theirs who were in town from Oklahoma! I talked with them for a bit, and then we took the kids to go play on the playground. There’s this merry go round thing that they absolutely loved, so we pushed them on there for a bit and pushed some on the swings, and then they brought out little suckers for the kids. One of the guys asked me why I was there, and I explained that I’m doing an internship as a part of my program and that I love working with kids. He then asked me if I was Christian. I told him I wasn’t, and he looked at me oddly. I told him that I was a Unitarian Universalist, and he thought that since this was a Catholic group with Mother Teresa that did such good things I must be Christian. I told him nope! I secretly wish I could have told him that nope, non-Christians can be good people and do good things too! Imagine that! The missionary types here are *really* interesting. Anyway, they soon left, and it was time to bring the kids inside for lunch (I guess it was).

We brought them inside and sat them in the middle of the floor—well, the ones who couldn’t walk anyway. The ones who can walk are basically on their own here. Since they don’t need as much attention as the disabled kids do, they can run around and play, climb on things, climb on us, walk on tables, whatever and only get yelled at occasionally. They’re definitely independent. Unless they want you to hold them. Which they do. All the time. Anyway, we brought the kids in and the workers brought in giant bowls of rice and vegetables. They dished out the food into little plates for the kids, sat the able ones down at a table to eat on their own, and then we each took a kid and fed them. It’s kind of an art form. You sit them down in these little plastic chairs, sit across from then in another chair, tap them with the spoon on their bottom lip to get them to open up, put the spoon in their mouth, and then use their top lip to scrape the food off into their mouth. One kid at a time until they’re all fed. It’s probably the calmest time of the morning since they’re all occupied, but it’s also the messiest. By the end of it, there’s rice on the floor, on their shirts, up their nose (you think I’m kidding), etc. But they’re fed and happy :) By the time we finished, Teresa, the lady from France, told me that it was well past time to leave—10:40 almost. I had completely lost track of time. I headed out and went back to Kacyiru (where SIT is. My internship is in Muhima, which is right next to downtown) to have lunch with some of the other students.

I went back to Abakarikuta that afternoon at 3 and raced the rain to the gate. Seeing the rain and lightning move over the hills here is pretty cool. The kids were in the same room when I got back, and it was time for another round of feedings—this time banana, bread, milk mash. Seemed tasty enough. Messy as well. After snack time, it was play time, which basically consists of bouncing kids up and down on my legs and singing frère jaques/the English version of that/the Spanish greeting song to that tune/a Kinyarwanda of the greeting song that I made up. Oh, and the Noble Duke of York. They love that too. One of the workers also turned on the radio for a bit, so it was dance time as well :) Dinner time rolled around, and of course I lost track of time again. One of the sisters had to come tell me I’d overstayed again by 40 minutes! Oops.

Oh, the title of this post. Basically, I don’t even know what language I speak anymore. If I’m just talking to myself, it comes out as a Kinyarwanda-Spanish-English hybrid. If I’m talking to a Rwandan, it’s either broken Kinyarwanda or simple English. I read an article once about Simple English being the lingua franca of the EU or something like that. Even those who spoke English natively had to learn this new type of English because they had to speak so differently than they were used to. That’s basically how I feel here. A common joke among the SIT students is that we don’t even speak English any more. We’ll try to form a sentence and it just comes out so mixed up and backwards or grammatically incorrect that it hardly makes sense. Or we’ll just forget words all together. Speaking of which, apparently I’ve forgotten so much more Spanish than I thought. The Spanish I speak to Teresa is a Spanish-Kinyarwanda hybrid. Also, I’ve had to pick up a little French out of necessity—prices, days of the week, greetings, etc. just because that’s the older generation’s first second language (if that makes any sense) and that’s what they assume you speak. Basically, I don’t even know what language I speak anymore. But it’s really funny to start speaking random languages to confuse the hell out of my siblings :)

Au revoir, inshuti

Good bye, ami

Urabeho, amigo

Adios, friend :)