Uselessness

I wake up every morning to a banging knock on my door – Mme Beti bringing hot tea water and sometimes an omelet for breakfast. And after tangling through my mosquito net tucked in all the sides of my bed, I manage to stumble to the door. Every morning she tries to tell me that I can just get up earlier to open the door and go back to sleep and every morning I don’t even bother trying to explain (in my first French of the day) that getting up at 6:30 to unlock the door is no less annoying than getting up now, and at least now I really have to get up.

It probably sounds like luxury having someone make all your meals, do the dishes and on occasion clean the floor and the bathroom. In the sense of my not having to do all those things, it really is, but there is another side to the story. When your food is prepared for you, you lose choice in the matter – you don’t know if the vegetables are cleaned enough (soaked in vinegar or a diluted bleach solution to make sure there are no parasites), or if the water is truly boiled before it goes into the thermos, and you end up eating rice and peas for lunch and then pasta and peas for dinner, or just potatoes and rice and no peas for dinner. I could specify all these things, but it’s easier to hope that if I do get parasites they lie dormant until I’m back in the states and trust that my pervious over-proteined American habits will allow a few lapses in balanced eating (generally there are beans in almost every meal, so I’m really not worried about the long run). Because on top of all this there is an awkwardness of my sitting around, reading or writing syllabi while all these things are done for me. Please and thank you’s aren’t a big thing in Rwanda (I believe there isn’t even a word for ‘please’ in Kinyarwanda) – if you need something you ask, and if someone can’t give, they refuse – but this is another habit I’m yet to kick. I follow all of Mme Beti’s actions with a merci in hope that I don’t seem to be the useless foreigner I often think I am taken to be.

Food prep is just one example of many forms of uselessness I can’t seem to help. I can’t fix the many broken computers in our two computer room because they need new licenses for their programs, so they’d be useless either way. I can’t prepare all my teacher materials (there are about four different books and forms I have to fill out throughout the year in regards to syllabus, curriculum, etc) without asking a dozen questions. I can’t lock my house without telling Mme Beti when I’ll be back or giving her the key so she can prepare meals while I’m teaching. I can’t even go into Butare for a day or a weekend without people asking where I was and how on earth I managed to get there by myself!

(However, the one area where I'm NOT that useless and very proud of myself - the BUGS! Huge wasps - like 2 inches - biting ants, crawling, flying beetles, plus a bird and two frogs that tried to move in - I killed none, never screamed, and have in short become very zen about it all. Luckily no cockroaches have tested this out...)