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Mariah Griffin-Angus |
I wrote this post during my first week here but due to technical troubles, I have not been able to post until now. Hopefully my future posts will be more current.
It has been over a week now since I’ve arrived in Rwanda. Much like my previous trips, it has been a week full of unexpected challenges and surprises. I suspect this trip is quite different for me than it is for other interns of the Rwanda Initiative. For one, I have a profound hearing loss. The usual language barriers become magnified in the face of accents and foreign languages. It has not been a serious problem before but Rwanda poses a unique challenge in that more people seem to speak French than English. I speak only limited French- learning a secondary language has been a distant priority for me as keeping up in English is hard enough! Regardless, with the help of my dad who sends little French tutorial lessons by email, I am attempting to learn some French.
So far, it has been met with limited success. My conversations with moto drivers have been filled with confusion (on both sides), shakes of the head and furrowed brows. Luckily though, I have not gotten lost yet (knock on wood!), so I must be doing something right.
With my some-what limited ability to speak French and understand accents, I’ve often resorted to watching the conversations around me to figure out what is happening. I think people find it strange that I’m so quiet but for me, it’s how I keep up. By watching for body language and visual cues, I find I can pick up cues that tell me what people are talking about, how they are approaching the issue, and often how they feel. I always wonder if I’m coming off as rude or aloof in my silence but I also wonder how to explain my deafness. Deafness is not easily explainable- I can hear but not everything. Some people are easier to understand than others. Background noise makes conversation more difficult. Blasting blues music in a bar in Nyamata makes conversation impossible!
So maybe it’s ironic that I ended up on a communications project, but I am excited by the challenge. I start work on Monday with a social communications organization that focuses on HIV/AIDS and related issues. Despite being a policy student, I will be largely working on communications/journalism projects. My bosses, Alison and Assoumani, were delighted to hear that I possessed a laptop with magazine layout software so I will be designing and editing a magazine aimed at youth. We will be venturing out to the countryside to conduct interviews and take photos for the magazine. It will be interesting to see how this will pan out with the language differences. The sounds of Kinyarwanda and French, the red, red soil beneath my feet and the zipping sounds of the motos all remind me of how far from home I am. At the same time, the Rwanda Initiative is about communicating despite these differences- maybe even because of these differences- and so I begin my journey of learning with my ear to the ground.
