the tutor's wedding

I may start learning Kinyarwandan (the local language), and a tutor came by today to introduce himself. As we talked, it turns out that he's getting married next month! And wow, marriage traditions here in Rwanda are very different than back home. My older sister is getting married in May (yay!!) and so this potential tutor and I exchanged information about cultural expectations. He was just as surprised at mine as I was at his:

1. If you like a girl in Rwanda, you pretty much decide right away if you want to marry her or not. Dating, at least traditionally, isn't very common here. (I write this with the caveat that as western culture infiltrates the country, this particular practice is changing a little bit.) Essentially if you start spending exclusive time with a woman here, everyone will ask almost right away when the wedding is.

2. Once you decide you want to marry a girl here, you give her parents a dowry, usually cows. Now, my soon-to-be brother-in-law (in the USA) is a great hunter, so he's given my parents some good steaks and such. But we're talking about real live cows. My tutor gave two good milking cows to his fiancee's parents (and now there are four milking cows, so the engagement must have lasted a while so far...I forgot to ask). Cows are highly valued in Rwanda. The tutor quickly explained, lest I should misunderstand, that the cows were not PAYMENT for his wife-to-be, but rather a gift of thanksgiving for such a wonderful girl. "Her parents made her," he explained with a smile, "for me."

3. The groom-to-be and bride-to-be are equally responsible for planning the wedding here. The groom is particularly responsible for "preparing the house" for his bride, preparing the meal for all the guests, and one other sizeable task that I can't remember right now. I told him that although in some cases there is a lot of involvement from the groom, traditionally brides in the US did the bulk of the wedding planning. He thought this was pretty odd.

4. Here in Rwanda, the bride and groom split the costs of the wedding; no parents of either party are involved in ceremony or reception costs, and in fact, the couple will generally present a gift of some kind to the parents during the ceremony (more cows?). When I told the tutor that generally the parents of the bride foot the bill in America, he was so surprised. "Why is this?" he asked, taken aback. I had never really thought about it, and so I told him my guess was that traditionally, the bride lived with her parents until she lived with her husband, and so the parents were responsible for her expenses (and for hosting the party) up until the point they handed her over to her groom at the wedding ceremony. (Anybody know about the tradition? I really have no idea where that comes from...just took it for granted.)

5. Last, it is apparently very common to invite everyone and their brother to the wedding, here. Nobody is excluded. I found out about my tutor's upcoming wedding as I was being extended an invitation to attend....after a five minute conversation about Kinyarwandan lessons. Apparently limiting the guest list is, literally, a foreign concept here....or at least it is in my tutor's case.

Interesting stuff! Never a dull moment, that's for sure. It has been a busy two weeks and I will give you an update soon about how child survival and newborn research is progressing....talk to you again soon!