As a teacher, nothing beats the excitement of a new school year. Each school year brings the prospect of a fresh start. New notebooks, new pens and most importantly a renewed energy for teaching and learning. I was particularly excited to start school after a long, unstructured three-month-long break. While the promise of three months off sounds delightful, in reality, days on end with no purpose in my community can be mind-numbingly dull. On the first day of school I showed up to work grinning ear to ear, greeting my colleagues and students gleefully, but that glee quickly turned into despair. What started as a day of promise and excitement turned out to be a day of heartbreak and grief.
A mother came to the school and explained that two of our students had died. They were found near the lake and the community was not sure what happened. Ntibarufáta. Death always comes unexpectedly.
In any culture, death and tragedy are a combination of philosophy, psychology, religion, anthropology, and sociology. Processing this combination is emotionally exhausting in one's own culture, but in a new culture, it is compounded by the barrier of a different language and cultural customs.
Understanding the circumstances surrounding death is challenging in the Peace Corps because of language barriers. When someone dies the first thing that many people want is clarity. People want to know the when, why and how of a death. This simple question of how someone died is made extremely complicated when you don’t understand what someone is saying. When learning a language in the Peace Corps one quickly learns the vocabulary needed to survive. Going to the market or communicating during work is easy because it is a daily activity. In contrast, death is something that happens far less often so one gets far less practice with the language. An explanation of the circumstances of death involves a concoction of tenses, expressions, and words that may be new to the speaker. Picture reading a sentence where every third word is in Aramaic. Kurohama, to drown, guhera, to disappear, and igenzura, investigation are new words that I had to learn while I processed our community's tragic event.
Even if one can follow along, death is hard to understand in a place with word of mouth news sources. In the United States, we can trust what we hear on the radio or read in the newspaper is true, in rural Rwanda rumor is king. “The boys were poisoned.” “Where is the boys' father? He is missing. They ‘say’ he was in Kigali. Maybe he caused this....” “An investigation will be completed!” Conversations like this swirled around the town like this for a day until it was confirmed that the two boys drowned swimming in Lake Kivu.
In Rwanda, Ikiriyo, the time of mourning, begins soon after a person dies when family members gather to pay respect. Ikiriyo lasts anywhere from two to seven days. It is similar to a repass in western culture. During Ikiriyo, family, neighbors and community members pay respect and family leaders make arrangements for the funeral. While the concept of Ikiriyo is not difficult to understand, Rwandan views on death can be.
Rwandan views on death are very different than American ones. In Rwandan culture, strength is highly valued. Strength personified means that one is stoic and non-emotive. Crying, in particular, is viewed as culturally inappropriate. In contrast, Americans are much more emotive, particularly young Americans. After death, crying is viewed as normal and healthy. What makes this even harder is that as Peace Corps volunteers you are a temporary resident of the community. When you are grieving in the Peace Corps, your community almost always has a deeper relationship with the person who died than the volunteer. Personally, grieving in my community is hard because the way I want to grieve is not always culturally appropriate and my grief is also connected with the way that I view mortality in Rwanda as a whole.
In general, death is more common in Rwanda than in the United States. In Rwanda, 27 infants die per 1,000 births while in the United States only 5.6 infants die per 1,000 births. Americans live 78 years on average, while Rwandan live 68 years on average. Furthermore, the fabric of life in Rwanda life has more risk, which can lead to more death. A mountainous countryside means more bus accidents. Over 1.25 million people die each year from road traffic accidents, 90 percent of which occur in low- or middle-income countries, with Rwanda being one of them. About 11 people die of car or motorcycle accidents each day in Rwanda, that is about 1 death every 3 hours. Lack of access to clean water causes a multitude of issues, the most pervasive one being diarrhoeal diseases. In Rwanda, diarrhoeal diseases account for approximately 1 of every 19 deaths in Rwanda.
Death is tragic anywhere, but I have found that because death occurs more often, people can more readily accept the reality of death. This does not mean they are not affected by it, it just means that they can accept death as a reality more easily. In many ways, tragedy is expected in life.
In Rwanda, they say that Death always comes unexpectedly. When I signed up for the Peace Corps I was mentally prepared for a multitude of different hardships, death was not one of them. But as with all parts of my experience, death provides another learning opportunity. In experiencing death in Rwanda, I have seen how death is a combination of philosophy, psychology, religion, anthropology, and sociology. I am learning how all societies have different ways of processing death and no matter how different, they are all okay.
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