The Miss Rwanda Final, amongst other things

Well, the long-awaited day –the Miss Rwanda final- has been and gone; and, despite the somewhat flippant subject, especially when compared to everything else that we’ve done over the past week, it seems appropriate to start this update with a blow-by-blow account of how the whole thing happened. After all, it is the single event that has dominated the minds of at least half the group for a sizeable amount of our time here.

The evening was scheduled to start at six pm. We are now experienced, or more experienced, in the vagaries of timing in Rwanda; however, despite all warnings to the contrary, I think it is fair to say that most of the UK contingent expected the competition to commence within, say, half an hour of the promised time. It didn’t quite. The program itself began at 7:30, when the channel announced it in excitable tones and we were shown a large room in a hotel (for this room thanks was given to the hotel by the presenter at least once every twenty minutes for the next four hours), in which were a number of tables; around them people were milling uncertainly. Every now and then a waiter or guest would bustle past the camera and the screen would go black for a moment. After a few minutes of this, a loud voice picked up declaring that the 2015 Miss Rwanda contest was now underway, and announcing that the fifteen beautiful ladies would be entering our field of vision in the immediate future. This they did, but only after five minutes further camera time for the waiters and the assembled diners at their tables, most of whom seemed to be mutely picking away at their canapés or quietly sipping whatever was in their glasses.

The vow of silence was temporarily forgotten when the potential Misses themselves walked on; each faction in the audience cheered for their preferred candidate. They were dressed almost perfectly homogenously, each contestant wearing a strange orange-yellow-coat and a tight black vest, with hairstyles similarly uniform. As each name was called out, its owner tripped onto the stage: oddly, though, the cameraman seemed to have little interest in this, and would often cut away to show instead an elderly person of unidentifiable gender who sang throughout the initial introductions. In this way Anaise, Ingrid and Jordon were denied an early glimpse of Balbine, the crowd favourite for the title. Once they had made it onto the stage, the girls took up an identical shop-mannequin type pose for a while; they then took it in turns to flounce downstage (some experiencing momentary difficulties due to the enormous heels they all wore), where they loosened their orange-and-yellow coats before giving a sort of shudder in their tight black vests, after which they left to go and get changed. Most looked fairly unenthusiastic about this part, and some distinctly embarrassed.

A Candidate (I don't know who); I think she's presenting one of the traditional items. Sorry for the photo quality

To plug the gap between events, the two hosts for the evening strode onto the stage, at which point the audience once again mislaid their vocal chords. These hosts were, to wit, one very capable, charismatic woman, and a small energetic man called Arthur. It was apparently (presumably; it may just be that they hadn’t rehearsed, but that seems an absurd idea) Arthur’s job to cut across the hostess whenever she was building up some momentum, and to regale the audience with desperately poor jokes once this had been accomplished. The jokes varied in content (from the racist to the sexist), if not in style (all were delivered in a manner suggesting that these were the funniest quips ever created by men, and that he was well aware of this fact); they were, however, universally met with all-consuming blankness by the audience. Arthur would’ve found a better reception if he had been regaling the attendees of a funeral for a dear and much-loved Departed. After a couple of hijackings the hostess managed to squash Arthur for long enough to announce a ‘documentary’, at which point Arthur broke back in again to declare that we’d be told all about what had happened during the contestants’ ‘boot camp’ of the past two weeks, (we were told nothing of the sort; and, so far as I remember, we saw no more of Arthur for the rest of the evening).

The documentary met with some technical issues (at one stage resulting in the audience being shown the technician’s screen background; he has a very pleasant-looking family), and then after a pause –filled by a panpipe rendition of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You- it got working. The ‘documentary’ transpired to be a conversation between a former Miss Rwanda and an unknown Chap; he began by asking her such questions as ‘What would you like to be in the future?’ (‘A fashion designer and actress; a strong woman’) before reaching the end of his script, at which point he clutched at a few straws (‘How would you define strong?’) to break up the increasingly large pools of silence. The TV audience was shown all this by having the camera, which had previously shown us just waiters and the tongue-tied table-people, zoomed in a bit more on the screen in the hotel room.

After this interview, a troupe of traditional drummers came on. They were dressed in leopard-skin togas, which they had to keep hitching up as they fell down, and they drummed for an interminable length of time. Once their piece had finished a pair of singers sang the Miss Rwanda theme, a song with endearingly naff lyrics (‘Remember that your skin is African, your smile- Rwandan; your catwalk- fantastic, your brain- Rwandan’) and enough unexpected pauses to equip an orchestra for life. This was followed by perhaps ten minutes of waiting before the Misses returned to the stage, now clothed in ‘traditional’ garb. We haven’t seen any of it in Rwamagana so far –perhaps they’re not traditional enough- and, personally, it’s not the kind of clothes I would choose to wear, at least not in the temperature we have at the moment. The dresses were extremely skimpy, with cut-away backs and tasselled mini-skirts; they must have been very cold in Traditional times. The camera-work also took a bit of a tumble at this point: there was an accidental up-skirt shot before cutting hastily away, as well as several blurry close-ups of ankles.

The Leopardskin-Toga Drummers, drumming in their leopardskin togas. Very much sorry for photo quality

Each contestant was carrying a traditional item (mats, pottery, a bow), which they put down before resuming the plastic poses and stretched grins exhibited earlier. The main part of this stage was made up of the judges asking the contestants why it was that they had chosen their particular traditional item. To get up to the bit of the stage from which the questions were answered, the girls were forced to walk- and I say forced for a reason, because almost to a woman they went at a pace slow enough to make snails look over their shoulder in disgust as they sprinted past. Apparently walking slowly demonstrates nobility. This makes sense, in a way: time is money, and if you have the time to walk at a speed more normally associated with those suffering from acute arthritis, you presumably also have plenty of money. Indeed, one contestant –the strongly-supported Balbine- was roundly criticised by the judges when she went at a mere amble rather than a sedated sloth’s stroll. Once the questions about the traditional items had finished, the fifteen girls started to do a traditional dance, with varying degrees of confidence.

Following straight on from this was the Question Round so beloved by this sort of thing, in which the contestants have to answer, well, questions. These were addressed to them by a judge with the air of a strict headmistress; she had a pair of spectacles on the end of her nose over which she peered sternly, and she insisted on asking each contestant, moments after they had been boomingly announced by the presenter, to remind her of their name and, in some cases, the spelling. The questions ranged quite wildly in difficulty, from the classic ‘What would winning this competition mean to you?’ to, immediately after, ‘What problems do young girls face in modern Rwanda, and what policies ought the government to implement in order to address them?’ The answers also varied in quality –although, in fairness, there were no head-in-hands-inducing howlers- from five-minute, three-point manifestoes on the state of Youth in the country to, in response to ‘What is the government’s 20-20 program?’ (a flagship project by the Rwandan government), ‘The 20-20 program is a program set up by the government for the benefit of the country’.

After this came two Nigerians who declared themselves determined to introduce the ‘Shuffi Dance’ (which is, they said, ‘sweeping the country back home’) to Rwanda. The pair was made up of a) a gangsta-looking man in full tracksuits and baseball cap, who bounded around the stage bent double, and b) a woman dressed in a red shirt and high black boots, with nothing in between. This duo called upon the leopardskin toga-drummers to come up and dance the Shuffi, which they did with some reluctance, apparently not having been forewarned. After a bit of prompting from offstage, the woman then borrowed one of the leopardskin togas to reinforce the clothes around her midriff, before turning her attention to the challenge of getting the drummers to do the Shuffi. For several minutes the drummers gamely attempted the Shuffi, but then they returned themselves to safe territory. Some of them went off and got their drums while others started up some traditional Rwandan dancing, at which point the two Nigerians recognised a lost cause and ushered them off; the drummers beat themselves a gentle tempo and slowly wound their way back to their seats. After this I gave up and went to bed, so I can’t comment on later proceedings. The whole thing, though, only finished at midnight; Patrick’s chosen Miss carried off the crown.

SO, that was all very exciting. It was, however, on Saturday, and before that there were, obviously, another seven days. The previous Saturday we had the chance to attend a Rwandan wedding, which was a very interesting event for all the UKers (we especially liked how the bride and groom gave each other ‘gifts’ of songs during the ceremony); and on Sunday we went to church and cooked as usual.

On Monday we resumed our nascent teaching careers, giving lessons in Social Studies (on the weather and climate) and on nutrition. While we were there, one of the students commented to Lucy that she was hungry; Lucy replied that she was, too, before asking whether or not she’d had breakfast. The answer to this was that she had not, and that she had not had supper the day before. Her family, she said, has ‘run out of food’, and so she had come to school having not eaten for at least eighteen hours. Hearing things like this puts into perspective what the school is doing here, and what it is that we are a part of: many of the students walk for an hour to get for school, some on an empty stomach, and Centre for Champions is here to try and give those same students a better chance in life.

Patrick speaking at the Self-Help Group meeting

The next day was eventful. In the morning Olivier, from Tearfund head office in Kigali, came to visit; after that Sam gave a lesson on corruption before we headed to the Field. Our visit to the Field for that day was attending the weekly meeting of a Self-Help Group, at which they put the money they save each week into the collective pot, return and take out short-term loans to catalyse entrepreneurship, and discuss plans for the future. When we left in the car, it was beginning to rain; by the time we were halfway there, we were well into flash-flood territory, and stuck behind a convoy of five enormous lorries bound for Tanzania. We could barely see ten metres ahead of the car in the deluge, but this clearly did not faze the lorry-drivers, who continued to jockey each other at high speeds around bends treacherous at the best of times, but downright insane given the weather conditions. We arrived at the SHG meeting-house in one piece, despite the perils of the near-suicidal instincts of the lorry drivers and the shallow river bed (an ex-mud track) down which we travelled. At the house we found a tiny room into which we crammed ourselves (over two dozen, squashed in like sardines). This room was decorated, very unexpectedly, by three large posters. One was of rappers from about twenty years ago, but it is with the other two that we are primarily concerned. The first showed Jennifer Lopez sitting down, with a large bunch of fluorescent tulips photoshopped in front of her, and a tiger lying on its back, paws in the air, on a chaise-longue. The caption read ‘Happiness is not something you postpone for the future, it’s something you design for the present.’ The other, even more weirdly, showed a mirror image of a Korean child, cross-eyed, wearing a Santa outfit and with fists raised. Above it floated a bee with a wand, with a caption of ‘Baby’ in neon colours. Quite how that came to be there is anybody’s guess, but it surprised us, at least.

The bizarre pair of posters

The meeting itself, however, was inspiring. The Self-Help Group has transformed their lives, taking them from utmost poverty to a situation that is relatively flush with comfort. Those who started with nothing now have houses, cows, goats, and a steady income of both food and money, as well as the self-esteem that–many of them stressed this- they were enormously lacking before. The group members shared with us their stories, and told us of how far they had come (which, like speaking with the hungry school-child, was hugely affirming of the projects we are working with), and then Ingrid, Patrick and Lucy gave talks on entrepreneurship, budgeting and sensible use of money. On the way back it was discovered that the river-bed down which we had travelled had reverted to a swamp, leading to a couple of exciting moments in which the car was perpendicular to the side of the road (where there is –as everywhere in Rwanda- a deep ditch for drainage) and threatening to leave the road behind altogether.

MUGIRANEZA Patrick meets another MUGIRANEZA Patrick. The first name (that is to say, the capitalised one) is the equivalent of the surname; it's chosen by the parents when their child is seven days old. Patrick met this small child on the way to our friend's house, and, on discovering that the child shared both his names, immediately became friends. The child conducted most of the conversation upside down.

On Wednesday we continued giving lessons, teaching Maths, English and French (the latter two new to us); in the afternoon we went to visit a friend in the community. She had prepared for us a vast amount of maize, and Rwandan visiting customs make it a matter of disrespect not to finish what is given to you as a guest. Our willpower, and the size of our stomachs, were therefore tested to the utmost extreme: the ICS motto is ‘Challenge Yourself To Change Your World’, but I for one hope that the part of the world that needs changing is never again one containing a large quantity of maize.

The Dreaded Maize

She had some chicks, to which we fed a bit of the leftover maize. They were very cute.

Photo of the team with our friend. You can't see much of the backdrop, but it was exceptionally stunning.

There are, I think, challenges and Challenges, and this was one of the second type. It was, though, fantastic to go and see her: she’s quite a character, and the view from her house, furthermore, is first class beautiful. That afternoon there was also a match between Sunrise and another Rwandan team in the First Division, on the same sports pitch where we play with the students. The crowd, of roughly a thousand, was vocal in their support, including two blokes with vuvuzelas who seemed to think that keeping up a constant cacophony was some sort of public service, and one chap with a whistle, on which he played the ‘final whistle’ notes for about twenty minutes straight. Sunrise won 3-0, and at the end there was a pitch invasion with traditional dancing, and the star player was paraded on shoulders.

Sunrise 3, Other Team 0: a view of the game minus the blare of vuvuzelas

On Thursday we attended another SHG meeting, this time without surprising posters, downpours and tiny rooms; they conducted their normal transactions of loans and communal money (this group saved two hundred francs each every week), shared with us some of their stories, and we (Sam, Patrick and Jordon) gave talks on the same topic as before.

Jordon giving a talk to the SHG

Friday saw yet more rain, in phenomenal, Noah-and-the-Ark quantities. We (Anaise, Patrick, Cynthia and I) gave a maths lesson, shouting over the bullet-like sound of the rain on the metal roof; the others had been intending to visit Verdi-Ann, the headmistress of Centre for Champions who until now has been on maternity leave, but were forced to postpone the trip until the afternoon, when it cleared up and resumed normal service of sun. 

The pitch at Centre for Champions, during rain: swamped.

The same pitch, a few hours later: quite different, with a happy game of football taking place

The Rwandan soil and sun, in fact, proved so able to cope with water that we were even able to play a match on the pitch (which in the morning had more closely resembled a lake than an area of grass intended for sports) in the afternoon against another local charity. This was a very fun occasion, and it was good to meet up with our counterparts, some of whom had worked for AEE (our partner charity) before moving. We won three nil, after which there was the traditional celebratory Fanta.

The celebratory Fanta

On Saturday we went to Lake Muhazi, one of the largest bodies of water in Rwanda. To get there, we had our first ride thus far on the bus-taxis. Bus-taxis have two maxims. The first is, thou shalt not stop. This is a rule to be applied in all circumstances except when flagged down, at which pass it changes to thou mayst stop, but only after thou hast travelled an extra twenty metres, at least; at all times, regardless of circumstance, the Horn must be sounding. If a granny is crossing the road, it is assumed that she will recover her youth for long enough to scurry out of the way; if another driver is at risk of a collision, it is assumed that he will see reason and allow the bus-taxi to carry on without deviation. The second maxim is a scientific one, and one that has not yet diffused to the wider intellectual community. It is, the number of people that may be fitted into a given space –that space being a bus-taxi- is never finite. As a result of this principle, the risk of knocks, greatly increased by the first maxim, is easily annulled: when six people are occupying seats intended for three, there is simply no room in which to knock, and one cannot move to knock oneself anyway. 

A bus-taxi looming up out of the morning mist: a sight to strike fear into the hearts of all who behold it

Lake Muhazi, though, was beautiful, and the entire thing was well worth it- four of us went on a boat ride, and Anaise, Cynthia and Ingrid were happy to find that the Miss Rwanda ‘boot camp’ stage was being shown, meaning Arthur’s broken promise later on wasn’t so egregious as it might have been. That evening there was the Final itself; about that, though, plenty enough has been said.

Cynthia, Anaise and Ingrid, delighted to find Miss Rwanda waiting for them

Lake Muhazi: beautiful. The President's house, in fact, is on the far edge of the lake.

Jade, Lucy, Patrick and Jordon, shortly before (or after?) heading out onto the lake in a boat.