Not JUST a Muzungu anymore...

Innocent, the mission's driver, took the truck to Kamembe last week to buy gas and other things.  I grabbed the opportunity to come along, so I could use the ATM machine to replenish our money supply, which was down to 400 francs (less than one dollar!).

The truck with the nonexistent shocks.  

  

You might wonder why I don't drive here.  Well, there are many reasons: 

1. We don't have a car. 

2. I don't have an international driver's license, meaning it would be illegal for me to drive in Rwanda until I get one.  It is amusing to me, however, how easy it is to get an international license.  Basically, you just go to a AAA office and sign a piece of paper, and voila!  You are qualified to drive internationally.  Wow.  I know this because Tim actually obtained his license before we left last June.  He is braver than I.  Which leads me to the last reason.......

3. I'm too chicken to drive here just yet. 

Anyway, with Innocent making the trip for other reasons, I was allowed to hop in and make the trip for free.  And as our old friend Harley Belew used to say on his morning radio show in Kerrville, 

"If it's free, it's for me!"  

I jumped in the old Toyota truck, complete with its nonexistent shocks, and we started our 1 1/2 hour trek for Kamembe, home of banks, crisp, juicy apples (the only I've found so far), grocery stores (sort of), and gas stations!  

Kamembe, big city life.  Kamembe is right on
the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has
the same fun feel as border towns Laredo or Eagle Pass
used to have back before all the crime hit with the drug war violence,
with loads of people walking across the border all the time.

We'd driven about 100 feet when I saw a friend, Louise, walking along the road headed our direction.  

Without even thinking, I asked Innocent, "Hey, could you stop and see if Louise wants a ride to Tzazo?"  Innocent just stopped the truck and looked at me blankly at first, and then registered my question with an enthusiastic, smiling, "Yes, Yes! Yes!"  

We stopped, I asked Louise, and she jumped in with a big "thank you!".  Then it happened. As soon as Louise jumped in the truck, three more friends we knew, whom I hadn't seen somehow, jumped in as well.  "I go to bank", "I go to near Kamembe.", "I go to district office Nyamasheke."  

"Oh!...... well, okay!  Well, .....here we go!"  

At Tzazo, we dropped off Louise and the one headed to the bank.  Fifteen minutes later, we dropped off the friend headed to Nyamasheke, and then picked up a soldier walking towards another town along our route about 30 minutes' drive away.  We stopped again 15 minutes later to buy some bananas from a  lady walking to market with a huge bunch of them on her head, and then stopped 10 minutes after that to place the purchased bananas (we had no room for them in the truck) on someone's front porch until we returned later in the afternoon.  Oh, yes, Innocent and I didn't know this person at all - I asked him later.  Innocent just went in and asked permission to leave the bananas there and for him to watch them for the next 5 hours.  No problem.  

The trip continued on this way all the way to Kamembe and back.  We stopped and started more times than I can count, helping people out with their travels all along the way.  It made the trip so much more interesting and fun than if we had just travelled alone.  I thought about my own country, as wonderful as it is and however much I might miss it, and thought how very dangerous and crazy it would be to pick up even one hitchhiker along the road.  It would be a death wish!  Yet, here, where so few have cars or even bicycles, sharing what you have is just what you do.  

Suddenly I realized:

All the other times Innocent has driven me anywhere, we have never picked up a single person along the road.  It must be a driver's rule that, when driving Muzungus, or Abuzungus (official plural of Muzungu, though many here just say Muzungus), you just don't stop and pick up extras along the road.  It just isn't done.  Muzungus just don't do that.

I now understood why Innocent had just sat frozen for a second when I had earlier asked if we could pick up my friend.  He was processing my request and realized he did not have to treat me like a Muzungu anymore, at least not in this one little area of daily life.  He realized I wouldn't mind picking up others along the way.  

Because of that one little thing - because I saw my friend and invited her to ride with us - our boring business trip morphed into more of a college road trip party from start to finish.  

So much fun.  

                        So much joy.  

                                                  So much sharing.  

I'm so glad to not be "just a muzungu" anymore!