Getting to ‘goodbye’

The most ubiquitous characters in my daily strolls in Kigali are the veritable army that sells airtime. They wander the streets in yellow vests, with a stack of yellow cards they try to pawn at every turn. When you need more money to use your phone—and in this country, where call rates are higher than anywhere in Africa, you need more money all the time—you find one of these (usually) guys, buy a card, and scratch off the shiny strip of silver on the back to reveal your air time code. It’s like playing the instant lottery—whatever paltry sum you “win” (and in this game, that’s guaranteed, of course) is going to disappear faster than you thought.

So I don’t use the phone very much. In part, yes, because it’s too expensive, but in part because my calls in Rwanda always seem to end awkwardly. I’ve mastered the beginning well enough—hi, it’s me, how is your day/weekend/family (this is very important), here’s why I’m calling—but the hanging up just never seems to work. I always end up feeling like I’m fourteen again and talking to a boy, trying to remember how to say, “See you at school” and simply hang up, but stumbling instead through minutes’ worth of extra pleasantries, never managing that elegant, simple closer: “Goodbye.”

So these Air Time Guys are enablers, constantly offering me the extra minutes I need to hold a conversation as if I were conducting a symphony, faking ending five or six times before things finally get quiet again. They can’t know about my secret habit of gratuitous chatter, but that’s the thing about pushers: they just know what you need, they don’t care why you need it.

Why, I began to wonder, did they think I needed air time quite so desperately? At first I thought it was another incarnation of the remarkable hospitality of this country. But then I noticed that when I bought air time from one guy, if I turned around, there was another guy right there, trying to sell me more air time. This didn’t make much business sense to me, so then I started to think that maybe the profit margin on phone cards is so slim that if they see a mzungu dropping money on one, they’re hoping she’ll just keep going.

If that were true, though, they should be flocking so earnestly to every person on the street. But they don’t. The just run to…me.

So I got up the pluck to ask (via text message, for the record) a Rwandan friend what I was really thinking:

“Do Rwandans think white people talk on the phone a lot?”

“YES, we do.”

I was trying to remember the last time I saw a white person talking as much on a cell phone here as they do in the States. I couldn’t come up with one.

“But…why?”

“Because white people do talk a lot on the phone. They’re too polite to hang up suddenly without saying goodbye.”