First, you have to imagine the bus. It’s not anything like ours. It’s a small van, like a VW line cast off, with four carpeted seats inside. It’s rickety and dirty and sometimes you wonder if it will hold together all the way to your stop. People are packed in so tightly, though, that I think the car itself could crumble, but we’d all stay happily wedged between each other, a big clump of people united in and protected by the forces of physics.
A woman gets on and sits next to me. She is tiny, and she is wearing an outfit I have never seen in Kigali: It’s a lime green dress, with a fancy bodice, spaghetti straps, and a slimming skirt. It looks like a second-hand prom gown. She has a tartan-like shawl but she doesn’t wear it, and her shoulders and bra straps show. She sits carelessly, the skirt bunched up and her mid-thighs exposed. She puts on makeup. It’s 1 p.m. I start to wonder whether perhaps I have met my first prostitute.
She speaks good English and she wants to talk. She likes America, likes Americans. Her sister is in America, and she wants to go, but the visa eludes her. “So I pray and a I pray. Do you believe in God?” I never know what to do here, even when I tell the truth this question makes me feel like I’m lying, and so I always just nod and hope I won’t have to elaborate. “Well then you pray for me too?” I smile.
She doesn’t have much, she says, but now she has prayer. “Before, I just wanted to go to Jesus, that’s all, just take me to Jesus, I was telling my husband, but now I can pray to Jesus,” she says, as if it’s a close enough substitute that she might as well go on living for awhile.
Then she says, perhaps triggered by talk of husbands, that her sister in America is married to an American. “She’s changed her citizenship, this may be the visa problem? The husband is an African-American.” Her eyes widen, as if she’s re-remembering that I, too, am from America. “They live in Texas! You know Texas?” I nod. “His name is Doug! You know Doug?!”
I shake my head, and she can’t quite believe it. Rwanda is like a small town; everyone is connected somehow. I try to explain that America is big, but this has little effect. She’s done with me and that land of plenty. Don’t even know Doug. Jeez.
As I get off the bus, she says, with more sincerity than I am comfortable with, “Good luck to you.”
Haha, I have so many memories of experiences like this (not with prostitutes, but with people who think I must know any/every Mzungu because I am one).
Also, no concept of how far apart places in America are! Always interesting to me.
Hey Jina!
this one is my favorite so far, although the one about the food is interetsing, too. i noticed that, from the few i have read so far, the food posting garnered the most responses. funny how food can bring people together and perk interest. it’s something we can all relate to to some degree, while possible prostitutes on a shanty town bus might be a bit hard to grasp for readers in the cornfields of Nebraska. Or maybe not, I’ve never been to Nebraska.
has anyone asked you to get them a visa or a passport yet? when josh and i broke our bed in kolkata we went to the carpenter downstairs on the corner who fixed it in about two seconds and then refused payment. and then asked if we could get him a passport. we have him a bunch of rupees instead.
You don’t know Doug?!?! And I wasted all these years of my life on you, geeze!