Posts Tagged ‘cross-cultural communication’
The personal-life liabilities of pursuing a Pulitzer Prize
About a month ago, I realized that my apprehension about talking to men here was impeding my work. The feeling, I decided, was an overcorrection. I’d dropped myself in Kigali with the same universal trust of strangers I apply everywhere I am. This leads me into dicey situations sometimes, and my mother is often telling [...]
Maybe Kinyarwanda is actually the universal language
I was sitting in the bus station in Butare and four Asian men walked in. A tall guy in an Indian-style tunic went to the counter and said, “Mwiriwe, amakuru?” Good afternoon, how are you? He proceeded to try to get bus tickets in Kinyarwanda, but the prices tripped him up. For the fun of [...]
I’m getting a reputation
I met up with a friend in town today, and somehow wound up talking with him about my trepidation at dealing with the gender issue here. I told him I don’t know that many women, but that I somehow know tons of men. Because the men are not shy. They hear me speak Kinyarwanda, and [...]
Missing signals that aren’t even cultural
Here’s a little intermission from my genocide memorial posts, which you can anticipate more of this week… For the record, I realize that with this, I’ll be fulfilling age-old gender stereotypes that smart women as far back as my grandmother have been fighting, but I’ve always preferred honesty to -isms, even the good ones. And [...]
Is this what they mean by pidgen English?
I went with a roomie to Gisenyi today, just a quick day trip, mostly with just enough time to go down to the lake and back. We stopped at one place asking for directions, a hotel which has a separate building of apartments for rent. $200 a night—Kigali lux prices, in a place that’s barely [...]
Language Lessons I
I have been taking Kinyarwanda lessons for almost three weeks now. Thank God I studied Swahili for a year; I can remember almost none of it, but all the hard work I invested in laying a neural network to make sense of noun classes and negatives is serving me well in Rwanda, where the language [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [