"Mzungu!" and "Bashakashatsi!"

“Mzungu!” and “Bashakashatsi!”

These are the first two Kinyarwandan words that I learned when I arrived here. They’re appropriate because they pretty much sum up two important parts of my identity here in Kigali: I’m a white person and I do research.

I learned the word mzungu on my second day in Kigali when a huddle of Rwandan school children saw me walking down the street to the grocery store and began shouting in my direction, “Eyyyyyy mzungu!” They proceeded to run after me and without a moment’s hesitation began to touch my arms and run their fingers through my hair. I found this strange because Kigali has quite a number of Caucasian people living or travelling here, but I soon discovered that you can walk for miles in certain parts of the city without encountering a single foreigner. I suppose I was walking through one of those parts. Since that day, I’ve heard the word mzungu at least 1,000 times. Yesterday, for example, I went hiking through the villages of Mt Kigali with my friend and colleague, Dan, and we were under the distinct impression that a broken record of “MZUNGU!” had anthropomorphized into hundreds of villagers chasing after us (not all at once but in total over the course of several hours). While this grew tiresome pretty quickly, it wasn’t all bad. The best part was that about 20 village children who lived on Mt. Kigali very enthusiastically sprinted up the hill toward us, placed their hands in ours, and started up a conversation that was a mixture of English, Kinyarwandan, French, and fits of laughter that sounded like this: “Bonjour! How rooooo! My name is Pierre. Murakoze falco mundi kelipto mgwezi. HAHAHAHAHA!” Even though I could not understand the majority of what these kids were saying, nor could they understand me, it was refreshing to have a “conversation” where the other party was 100% genuine in their happiness and enthusiasm. This comes across in the photos I’ve taken of the children here, where nothing about their poses or facial expressions are contrived. They’re so transparent and honest. Kids everywhere are pretty transparent with their thoughts and I think that’s one of the reasons I love them so much and am seriously considering going into pediatrics.

As for the second word, “bashakashatsi” (translates to research), I learned that on my first day of work at Project San Francisco. I was sitting with one of the nurse counselors in a cramped and dusty office, listening to him explain the clinical study protocol in Kinyarwandan to two new patients and my ears perked up when I heard him emphatically repeat “bashakashatssssssiii” over and over again. It was the funniest sound (though not as cool as the tongue clicking noises you hear in Xhosa) and provided me with the only entertainment for the next 20 minutes, as I could not comprehend anything else that passed through their lips.

So, what is my bashakashatsi in Rwanda all about? Well basically, Project San Francisco is an NGO that was started back in the ‘80s by Dr. Susan Allen of Emory University to address the growing transmission rate of HIV amongst heterosexual couples in Sub-Saharan Africa. Research has demonstrated that HIV-negative men and women with HIV-positive partners are at especially high risk for HIV acquisition in this part of the world. PSF is a Rwandan branch of Emory University’s School of Public Health that offers and promotes couples voluntary counseling and testing (CVCT), a couples- directed intervention that is effective in reducing HIV transmission. I could go on with the details but that might take up pages and pages. If you want to know more, visit www.rzhrg.org. In my opinion, this is pretty awesome stuff. Oh, they’re also working on an HIV vaccine here. Unfortunately they’re not anywhere close to finding one just yet but I have a dream….