Language and Poetry

So, as I've mentioned, the language here is a mess. Kinyarwanda is the local language everyone speaks, Belgians instituted French in schooling system, was the most common language of the educated, but during the years leading up to and including the genocide, so many people fled eastwards and spent significant time in Anglophone countries that English is widely spoken, not to mention Swahili which exists quite a bit as a regional lingua franca.

So, its theoretically a tri-lingual (English, French, Kinyarwanda) country. Very few people though are fluent in all three. The past week I've run a few workshops for work, and usually the format was: the head of the organization would present for 15 min to his staff in Kinyarwanda to introduce us. Then my colleague from the US would present in English, and I'd translate slide by slide into French (using such hard to translate words as framework, balanced scorecard, etc). Then I'd present in English and a local colleague would translate into French and Kinyarwanda if necessary.

Something I've noticed though, is that people here are very, very good with metaphor. Not sure if its something thats used a lot in Kinyarwanda and they translate them, whether the educational system encourages it, or whether they are just a poetic people. When the audience of the presentations would ask questions of us, even in English or French (remember, not their native tongue) they would really have a way with words, giving vivid examples, etc As anyone who speaks other languages knows, you're usually just happy to get the grammar and the words right, let alone flowery speech worthy of literature.

The best example I can give is the following. At OTF, I'm managing two local consultants (kind of at the McKinsey equivalent of BA, the position right out of undergrad). One of them - whom I really, really like, is really smart, super nice and one of the few trilingual Rwandans - and I were working on a project on Friday. It was about 5:50pm, he was at my desk, and we were talking about how our meetings had gone that day and what needed to be done as the next steps. In my mind I was thinking, these are things that need to be done next week, but apparently that wasn't clear and he thought I was asking him to do them right then. He looked at me so earnestly, almost like a little boy (he is my age, married, and with a 3 month old son), and said, How long do you think this will take, I have a meeting with the queen of my heart tonight, and I am already twenty minutes late.

Referring to his wife as the queen of his heart. Isn't that the nicest thing you've ever heard?