As we walked beneath an unrelenting sun, a rushed day amassing condiments, canned vegetables, soaps, and various supplies potentially necessary for our upcoming venture into divergent lives, Danielle and I began to tire. The two of us had lived relatively in tandem since our midnight arrival into Kigali what was then one month ago. The memory of arrival remains distinct: the clamoring for overheard luggage; the curious enthusiasm; an opening of air-locked doors and clanking of shoes against metal stairs; the distinctively familiar and sweet aroma--of air thick with heat containing the exhalations of burning plastic, sewage, and the smell of sun-baked sand. Stepping into that night was reminiscent of so many in Niger, that scent so characteristic of Africa that whispers: you’re on land foreign and long from home.
After two hurried days of Embassy orientations, we had disembarked from that dusty capital bearing suitcases and chimerical conclusions about Rwanda. A handful of weeks followed in the verdant southern city of Nyanza, the nation’s center of cultural heritage, home to former Kings once revered as deities. Danielle and I trained alongside 70-some Peace Corps volunteers, intensively learning Kinyarwanda; participating in cultural-immersion sessions; acquainting ourselves with cultural subtleties spoken with eyes, the oft-jagged earth, and the brilliant turbulence of foreign clouds.
As we are here through Fulbright and not Peace Corps, we spent a lot of time together when not engaged in their official requirements and became good friends in those first weeks. But our time as a minority within a pack had ended that afternoon as each of us set out on independent journeys to new homes and lives. And so we found ourselves in Kigali, accruing supplies beneath the pressing noon. Our backpacks and arms weighted, our ears exhausted by the yelping of children or automobiles, our faces damp with perspiration, we trudged home. We crossed a hazardous intersection arriving safely on a frontage road when--without warning--a boxy sedan barreled down upon us without a hint of breaking. Danielle and I literally leapt out of its path. I struck its trunk with a clenched fist as it passed, furious. After a moment of bewilderment we marched on, anger yielding only to exhaustion.
Yet within a matter of steps, the day’s geometry upturned. A precious little girl of no more than three ran from out of nowhere, grinning aglow with eyes that laughed. She gazed up at us with neither fear nor covetousness. Without hesitation, her tiny fist unfurled to take my free hand. We walked with our new friend beaming at her soft, childish replies to our questions in Kinyarwanda: How are you? What is your name? How old are you? In engaging her little world we seemed to escape for a moment from the matrix of time, the once vehement sun melted into the rolling hills of the horizon, its absence filled with the refulgence of a vivid present. After a few minutes her small fingers released, we all said good-bye, and a blur of her yellow dress receded into the arms of the city. Though the sun reformed atop the sky and yelping car horns remembered to squabble, a residual feeling of joy remained throughout that afternoon, lingering like an aftertaste of a rich, dark chocolate. And neither the toils of past nor the future unknown mattered in those moments short and sweet.
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