Waiting for Corn Flour

I recently took a trip to Gisenyi, a town bordering Lake Kivu about 4 hours northwest of Kigali. Didn't pack much besides a Bradt guide, 2 t-shirts, a bar of soap, and some peanuts. No plans, except to see more of Rwanda. Most of the trip consisted of taking buses, but that was the fun of it. My buddy (awesome girl from Germany, Nina) and I were completely dehydrated the whole time, because the last thing you want to do is drink anything before, during, or after these bus rides. Gotta go? Cool. Hold it, because we’re not stopping for you. We definitely learned about our extraordinary human capabilities on that trip.

Gisenyi deserves a lot more documentation, but the corn flour experience has rights to a post of its own. It’s a hall-of-famer.

The bus stopped in what looked like a town, and it was close to the lake, so we got off. We weren’t sure if it was the right town, but what the heck. Oh, language barriers and being lost. Now a part of daily life. There we were, in the middle of a huge desert. Dirt. A bus station. Another bus station. More dirt. A few people. We walked for awhile in what we thought was the direction of the lake. Got stared at. Turned some corners. Got stared at some more. Then, a guy probably in his early twenties in a bright red t-shirt popped out of nowhere and started walking beside us. He had beautiful English, explained that he was an interpreter for big-time foreign businesspeople who come into town. We talked some more, then we started asking him where in the world we were and where the cheapest guest house/hostel was. On the way there, he told us how “he loves the Western culture.” “Oh, and why is that?” I asked. “I love white women. I want to have mixed children.” Cool.

We said our good-byes. (Side note: I’ve now been here for about 3 weeks, and I’ve gotten 2 marriage proposals. “Ticket to America” must be written on my forehead.) We settled into our very cheap room, full of large green grasshoppers, and then decided to wander around. And we wandered. We went down to a main road (paved, which is a rare sight) and started walking along the lake’s coast. It was refreshing to be in the clean air, to stare down at the banana boats, to walk in peace. We walked along, waiting to spot a moto to take us some miles closer to the lakeside. No motos came. Kept walking. No motos. 3 miles. No motos. 4 miles. 5. 6. We passed a woman carrying a door on her head, another with a basket of bananas and mangos, another with a barrel of coal. I’m telling you. These people and their loads. A couple of times, I wanted to complain because it was really hot and humid and I was wearing not-so-great shoes and we had to trek up nearly vertical hills at times and we had no idea where we were and we couldn’t do anything but keep walking and there was no sign of life around but the people we were walking with, but then, there we were, charting the same course as people with stuff on their heads. What were we complaining about?

We kept walking. One thing we figured out on this trip is that people in the rural countryside walk for an entire day, sometimes even through the night, just to get a barrel of potatoes or whatever from point A to point B. We got a little taste – not even comparable, but little – of daily walking life. It made me think about efficiency and productivity in predominantly agricultural countries like Rwanda, in which 90% of the population is engaged in farming, mostly subsistence. Time is an entirely different concept. It’s crazy to think about – lots of interesting implications, and a completely different way of life.

Oh yeah, not to mention: we collected a crowd of people behind us on our walk who couldn’t stop marveling at us for about an hour. This is a common occurrence, as many rural farmers have never seen an “umuzungu” (white person) before. The sky suddenly turned black and the kids started running. Monsoon. We took cover for a couple of hours at a restaurant built from cardboard, brick, and a few slabs of concrete. The only thing on the menu was bread and hot tea. The rain came down so hard we could barely hear each other across the table.

The following day, we decided we would take a bus further towards the lake to explore more. Take a bus. No matter what. We found the bus park. There were about 100 buses (often called “matatus,” a term used in Kenya) and we weren’t sure where we were going. Nina remembered seeing the name of a brewery close to the lake, and so we hopped around from bus to bus saying the word she remembered. We were pointed in the direction of a matatu sitting at the far side of the park. There were a couple of people just hanging out in the bus.

Let’s take a small pause in the story for a second to describe the matatu. Little anatomy lesson. These buses are all over Rwanda, and I take them everywhere because they’re cheap. The matatu (see diagram boasting high-quality graphics) has sliding doors on 2 sides, but most of the time only one door works. There are 4 rows: the first seats the driver and 2 other people, and the rest of the rows are made to seat 3 people each. That’s 12 people total, plus the bus boy. The bus boy is the driver’s sidekick, squeezes in at the last minute, collects people’s money for the ride, and spends the whole ride sticking half of his body out the window as the bus speeds ahead, screaming the name of the final destination to people walking around on the street.

So 13 people. Yeah, right. I learned pretty fast that these buses won’t leave until there are at least 20 people in the bus. That’s not hard to do in bustling Kigali, but the countryside is a different story. They wait until the bus fills. Most of the time, that means hours. There’s no schedule. I get it – I mean, they do need to make a profit.

Nina and I waited for about 30 minutes outside the bus that was supposedly going to the brewery. No one was around. No driver, no bus boy. We weren’t really sure if the bus was leaving any time soon, let along leaving at all? We then decided to get in the bus, thinking that might speed up the process. Nothing. We sat in the third row for an hour. It started getting really hot. We had to open the window, which invited all kinds of candy, bread, shoe, and lukewarm soda vendors our way. A few other people got in. Maybe now that people are in the bus, it’ll go. Nope. Waited for another hour. More people got in the bus. Now the bus had 12 people. The bus boy and driver came and sat in the bus. We sat there. We didn’t go anywhere. The bus boy started yelling out the final stop to passersby. No one got in the bus for another half hour. It became evident that we weren’t leaving until there were at least 20 people in the bus.

But little did we know that we were waiting for something else. I was squished up against the left side of the bus in the third row. My left cheek was flattened against the dirt and who-knows-what-else-covered window. There was a bar sticking out of the seat in front of me that jabbed into my knees (awesome having long legs sometimes). Nina was turned towards me so her shoulder, rather than back, was against the seat to make room for the 3 other people in our row. She had no idea where to put her left arm, so she put it on my shoulders. I had no idea where to put my right arm, so I put it on my head. We sat in that position for I don’t want to know how long.

The greatest part about the whole thing is that we weren’t even close to giving up, getting out, and taking a cab. It was too hysterical. We were trying really, really hard to keep from laughing out loud. I failed a couple of times. Another thing: no one complained the whole time. A very evident thing about Rwanda (not only in the matatus, but everywhere else) is that other people come first. If you’re waiting for someone or something, you wait without complaining. If someone is late or holding you up or “wasting your time,” a concept common in America, you cheerfully wait and don’t complain about it. Other people come first. If someone asks you to do them a favor, you bend over backwards to do it and even find ways to go above and beyond their request. This is startling, remarkable, and quite a beautiful thing.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a guy pull up alongside the bus, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with about 15 bags of corn flour. I didn’t think anything of it. Then, someone tapped my feet. I looked down. In came 1 bag of corn flour from behind, pushed under the seats of the bus. Then came another bag. And another. They were stacked on top of each other. Everyone lifted up their feet. My knees were in my face. Nina and I gave each other an “Are you kidding?” look.

The bus tilted. Someone was walking on top of the bus. Keep in mind that these buses are made of something close to plastic. If I poke the side of a matatu, it will make an indentation. Now that there was corn flour equal to the weight of an adult elephant inside the bus, there was corn flour equal to the weight of a baby elephant on top of the bus. That’s what we had been waiting for. Corn flour.

The bus started rolling, and it was obvious the engine wasn’t on. There were a few guys pushing the bus down the hill and out the gate of the bus park. My heart skipped a beat. Nina and I exchanged an “I’m going to die” look. The bus screeched and squeaked under the weight of 20+ people and 15 bags of corn flour. The driver finally turned on the engine. The ceiling of the bus – comprised of maybe one layer of flimsy tin – started shaking and the screws seemed to come loose. The corn flour is going to come through the roof. I tried not to think about it. I said some prayers, thought about the people I love. Nina, who was pretty much sitting on my lap, and I had some deep conversations about life.

We made it. We got off the bus. The right side of my body was numb; my tailbone was screaming. We could’ve walked to get there faster, but not even for a second did we wish we had. To think that some Rwandans do this every day. I’ll never look at matatus the same way.