Sunday, July 11, 2010

This is the first day I've actually felt physically OK. My cold is gone, except for a slight cough, and I'm not tired all the time. Its hard being sick anywhere, and it's particularly hard while alone in East Africa. I hadn't realized just how much the isolation would bother me. Perhaps I'm getting more mentally healthy and connected, which is certainly a mixed blessing. I wonder if I can get my old cut off self back. This will be a real issue when I take my sabbatical. Or if, but I think I will get the fulbright if I get the letter of invitation.

The woman who was going to be my guide at the National University turned out not to be available. Actually, she was willing to do it but her father wouldn't let her go. More on that later. Fortunately Eric knew somebody who could do it. Eric seems to know people everywhere. No matter where we are we always run into somebody who says hello to him. I joked with him that when I was leaving the doorman in my building said "say hello to eric." This isn't true, but it might have been.

When the woman I was going to hire, Alice, said her father wouldn't let her come, I asked if I might meet her father and her family. Actually, I had mentioned this to her earlier, since I thought her father wouldn't let he go without knowing who she was travelling with. She didn't think it was necessary, but I did, and it turned out to be right. (It is still a traditional society although this is changing, and in this case the father was the one to give permission - or not, as it turned out.) Anyhow I went to their house in a relatively well to do section of Kigali, and met the family. It was what I have come to see as a conventional Rwandan negotiation. About an hour of small talk and hospitality, then a meal, and then discussion. The discussion was in english and french. I can't really say much in french but they appreciate my making the effort.

In any event, the father didn't change his mind. Perhaps he isn't used to changing his mind. But i did meet him, and also alice's mother, who is blind and paralyed from the waste down from bad medical care, they say. I also met alice's fiance and we talked about how they met, how they fell in love, when they would be married, etc. They met in the course of business, Seth, the fiance had business where alice worked. At first they were friends, then they discovered they had a lot in common, and then decided each was the one for each other. What they had in common was that they liked the same literature, had the same outlook on life and africa, and were ambitious. They will be married when she finishes school. His family is in the congo and she will go to meet them. They his family will give her family a cow to cement the union. They are quite clear that a marriage is a union of families (I don't know if the cow is literal or a metaphor, and couldn't quite get clear. I think they found the subject embarassing, not quite modern). Were they physically intimate, you might be wondering? I don't know and didn't ask. I think the norms are changing.

It is still patriarchal, though. Alice served everyone food and drink. She did it with a kind of devoted gesture and expression, particularly when serving her father, that I can't imagine anyone american doing. Almost like a sacred duty.

Communal culture. I spoke to JB about this, and his friend chantal, who told me several interesting things: The child belongs to the village before it belongs to the family, at least traditionally. People will always give to each other to make sure that no-one is lacking. They will even give when they don't have enough. Neighbors take care of each other. Reciprocal altruism, theory calls it, and it is a survival mechanism, I think. Solidarity is enforced unoficially. If a person or a family moves into a compound and isn't sociable, the neighbors will come by and ask him what his problem is, what is the matter with him. The pressure is hard to resist.

Chantal raised a question. If people are so neighborly and so altruistic, how is it that neighbors killed neighbors in the genocide? It makes sense that we are evolutionarily predisposed to reciprocal altruism, which makes collective societies possible. What evolutionary predisposition makes genocide possible?