My Nahimana

Jamming out!



Our rooftop hangout:


On a recent hike in the Kibira forest (Hike? Us? Long story...we'll tell you about it another time)


Being a gentleman on aforementioned hike



So, I am going to take a moment here to tell you about my sweet sweet husband Ron. In Africa, he has been rechristened Nahimana, which means "I am here because it is God's way" (appropriate, yes?). At home, Ron is an engineer. In Africa, Nahimana is a rock star.

Principally, Nahimana is a rock star because he has some pretty decent Kirundi skills - rare for a white visitor to Burundi. He is even able to pray entirely in Kirundi when asked, which is pretty often, seeing as he's quite a novelty.

We take walks sometimes in the middle of the day, just around the neighborhood, and the neighbors and those on the street call out his name as we pass, and wave at him like a celebrity. Sometimes, little children, girls especially (Nahimana is quite popular with the ladies, even the baby ones) will come up and try good naturedly to speak to us in English after our Kirundi is exhausted. ("Hello, how are you?" they carefully enunciate, giggling wildly). Then they shyly take his hand. Seems I have some competition.

Nahimana also is a hero on the local soccer pitch, where he makes waves and gathers a crowd every time he plays. He plays in a part of town where there probably isn't another white person in a 3-mile radius, and we are treated with the appropriate curiosity. One day he took a dive for the team and ended up taking all the skin of his left kneecap. It created a scab that covered his whole knee and it oozed rainbows of pus for three weeks. Disgusting. This, however, earned him a lot of respect from his teammates and they are now quite interested in the scar. Men are strange and unfathomable creatures.

Warning to those at home: Nahimana is quite taken with the concept of African time. Good luck getting him to show up on time for anything ever again. If we are running "late" (admittedly a relative concept here), he'll dismiss me with a wave of his hand and "Buke, buke", our shorthand version of the African proverb "Slowly slowly the banana ripens".

Nahimana is also quite popular due to his dancing skills. Africans love to have their white guests come up to dance, so that they may all have a group laugh over what seems to be the entire white world's inexplicable lack of rhythm. (A Ugandan friend said to me recently in worship, "Just stand next to me and clap when I clap. Your people have trouble with this part.") But Ron actually gets up there and dances with the best of him. He has had honorary tribe membership bestowed on him more than once after he has successfully danced to the beat of a song.

In all, Ron is thriving in Africa and I think it will be difficult for him to transition back to life as a non-celebrity.