on speaking kinywarwanda

i have been in the process of learning kinyarwanda since i first arrived in rwanda towards the end of 2007.  from the first time i heard the language, marching in syncopation off a rwandan tongue, i knew it was going to be important to me.  its so beautiful and the words really do bounce up and down. people speak it in sticky sweet tones.  you could almost be lulled right to sleep.  it somehow sounds like the country itself, enchanting and mysterious.  what i didnt know when i first heart it was that it has been labeled one of the hardest phonetic alphabet languages to learn. i wont go into all the details about why its so complicated but ill say this, there are ten classes of nouns, and each modifying word has to be spoken according to the class of noun to which it is referring.  so for example, in english we can use the word 'good' to describe anything; meal, day, song, dog, morning, food, movie etc.  in kinyarwanda there are more ways to say the one word, good, than i can even remember because there are both singular and plural ways to say good for many of the classes.  you've got mwiza, beza, keza, nziza, kiza...the list is long.  and so you can't even describe a word (or use numbers to count something) unless you essentially conjugate the adjective appropriately.  its.  really. hard.

and at times, that has kept me from feeling confident about my ability to learn it.  but thankfully i have had good friends who have been willing to teach me, albeit disjointedly and not in any truly organized way.  and i have practiced and i have committed to teaching the girls anything and everything i can.  it is so incredibly important to me that they learn it because it is in fact theirs.  its theirs in a way that it is not even mine.  and they must know it in order to feel the connection that i so deeply want for them to feel.

its amazing to me but this time around, my mind seems unusually poised to absorb and compute and communicate in kinyarwanda.  i have had so many circumstances this month where i have had whole conversations, from start to finish, and have communicated everything i needed to, and understood everything i needed to.  now don't get me wrong, i am not even in the neighborhood of fluent; no where close.  but simple conversations are starting to be in my wheelhouse like they have not before.  and it seems there is a framework to which new words and phrases can attach in a way that they have not been able to before.  my brain feels alive and its so thrilling.  and the girls are watching that, and they are noticing that the more i speak it, the more is open to me here.  

it gets me thinking about what a privilege and marvel it is to learn to communicate with someone with whom you would not be able to communicate at all otherwise.  its like you have a key to open something that is naturally closed.  the reward for the toil and labor of committing oneself to a foreign tongue is that once you do gain some mastery, you gain access into a membership which most others will never know.  and this is especially true here, where kinyarwanda is the only language spoken natively, and its only spoken in rwanda.  if you learn kinyarwanda, you are affirming the dignity of this people in an exclusive way; you learned it only for them.   unlike learning spanish or french, which are spoken globally and can be learned in schools internationally, if you learn this language, you are learning it of your own initiation and only for these people.  and they feel that, and they respond so warmly to those of us from the outside who attempt to enter in to this membership. 

and my girls must learn to use this hard-earned key, to wield it and use it to take down barriers.  because this is their language, these are their people, and its way too important for me to let it pass them by.