Muzungu!!

I am back home from Kigali. I should be preparing for our upcoming month-long trip to Peru, which kicks off just 5 days from now, but my mind is still bumping along the dirt roads of Rwanda. Since it is a relatively small country, we got a chance to cover a lot of ground; we saw most of the northeast section of the country when we visited Akagera Nat'l Park and later a big chunk of the south when we visited Nyungwe Park. All along the way, two things were all but guaranteed. One was stunning vistas; I was constantly fighting the urge to ask our driver, Modeste to stop for photo ops, since I knew the goal was to actually get to these parks in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. The second sure thing was the chorus of cries from the children everytime we would drive through any of the villages. Sometimes, we would hear them before we saw them. "Muzungu! Muzungu! ( something unintelligible in Kinyarwanda) Muzungu!" We quickly learned that Muzungu is a Swahili word which originally meant "someone who tours the world", but now is used more commonly to mean "whitey." As best as I could tell, when one child spots a muzungu, it become his or her solemn duty to inform every other child within a one mile radius of his find, so that they can all drop whatever they are doing and run out to see for themselves. If Modeste would slow down or in more daring moments, stop altogether so that we could hand out empty water bottles (which I knew from my prior trip the kids loved, since it gives them a way to carry water with them when they walk to school), we would get mobbed like rock stars. When we were on foot, kids would come out of nowhere, either shyly shake our hands or more brazenly give each of us a hug and then run off smiling. Some of this no doubt has to do with prior whities who have given them candy or money, but there is a sweetness and curiosity to the whole thing that just can't be described. We must have handed out a couple dozen water bottles and shaken a least one hundred little hands. In return, we got some fantastic memories, some nice pictures and a great excuse to procrastinate on the Peru planning.