Tonight I have no title

No theme tonight, just some moments from the day.

While I was handing up bricks today Samual called me over to him. We'd been listening to some music on a transistor radio. Usually the songs are either in French or Kirundi but we'd just heard a few English songs in a row and there was another on at the moment.
"There are many American songs about love" Samual said.
"Yes," I said, "That's true."
"Why?" asked Adonis who was sitting next to the radio.
I was a little stumped. "Well, lots of people are in love or have been in love so many people can identify with love songs." Then after a some more thought, "What else do we have to sing about?"
Samual translated this into Kirundi for the others who were listening who didn't speak any English. There was much shaking of heads. Adonis told me, "In our country we sing about war, about poverty and being hungry." And sure enough when a Kirundi song came on I was told it was about death. The singer was telling how his brothers and sisters and parents had all been killed and he was warning death not to come for him. I told them there were some American songs which were about serious things but those didn't seem to be the songs that make it to Africa. They did not mention it but there are also a lot of songs about God as well religious programs on the radio. I can tell they are about God because I'm becoming very familiar with the Kirundi words for things like God, Savior, Lord and so on.

The way I study Kirundi in the evenings is to work on a series of lessons written by a woman named Betty Cox who was a missionary in equatorial Africa for about 40 years, starting in 1944. The lessons come in nice bite sized pieces and interspersed among translation assignments like, The man and his sons are hoeing in their field are things like, I have the light of Jesus in my heart and Our God is very great. I also finally got someone to teach me a song in Kirundi which it turns out is actually an English song that's been translated- Our God is an Awesome God.

John stayed home from the work camp today since his hand is still pretty swollen and Red and I came very close to getting to go to Kamenge on the bus by ourselves but Jocelyn came to take us. But then to come home Alexia asked me if I thought we would be all right going into town by ourselves. Yes! I told her, absolutely and enthusiastically yes, I have the money, I know how to pay and I know the way home from the market where the bus ends up. It wasn't a total foray into independence because she still walked us right up to the bus door but I'll take my little victories where I can get them.

Now probably because I felt I had a little something to prove (both to myself and our hosts) about being capable of doing things without an escort I paid particular attention to the change I was given. Jocelyn warns us all the time that people will charge us more for things because we are mzungus and either we won't know the difference or we won't care. She checks in after we pay the fare to be certain we are given the correct change. So when we were charged 300f instead of the usual 280 I polited objected- en francais. He told me I was mistaken, that the fare was 300f per person. I told him it was 280 yesterday. The passengers right around me all said, no, no it's 300. We went back and forth and soon 1/2 the bus was part of the discussion. I was constantly worried that I'd be hit with a barrage of French I didn't know and would not be able to answer or make my point but if there's one thing that foreign language instruction in America teaches you, it's how to buy things. I explained (patiently I think) that I understood the fare to be 300 to go to Kamenge and 280 to come back. They told me the fare had gone up. Today? I asked. Last week they replied. But yesterday I paid 280. Monday and Tuesday, I paid 280. My friends have all told me to pay 280. Your friends lied to you, they said. I don't think so I said and I know I have only ever paid 280 in the past. He must have given you a special price because you are a visitor. Every day? From 3 different people? The same special price? And tomorrow? How much will it cost me tomorrow? That at least made them laugh. Of course in the end, what could I do? It was mzungu vs. abantu and mzungu lost. Now the punchline to all of this is that the amount of money we were discussing was less than 4 cents. But as I said I was fixated on being about to come home and tell Jocelyn I had taken care of everything. Oh well, if only I'd been able to conduct the exchange in Kirundi. They'd have been laughing too much to argue.