On culture, community and a sense of belonging

M turns into the sofa where he has been sleeping…I’ve tried to get him to move to bed but he’s not interested…meanwhile I am watching a movie and A is in the half awake-half asleep fitful rest of the chronic insomniac, curled up on one of the armchairs as usual. P has disappeared somewhere and in the middle of all this I feel something that I haven’t felt in a long time….a sense of belonging, sense of family.

Its hard to say what caused the meltdown, but somewhere around my three year anniversary in Rwanda, I found I just couldn’t cope on my own anymore. Working environments here are a constant source of low level stress, mostly related to coping with frustration and bureaucracy. Eventually the frustration turns inwards and you no longer remember what it was like to not to feel frustrated. It was bad, real bad, and a few of my friends were worried about me. Having too much time on my own to think was making things infinitely worse, so I abandoned my quiet little house where I stayed alone and temporarily moved in with P and M. These days A is semi permanent visitor to the house and N stays when he is in town, which is 2 weeks out of every month. There are four bedrooms but there’s never really an overcrowding issue as A is mostly nocturnal and N has a habit of crashing on the sofa and forgetting to go to bed.

We all have our problems, we fight, we drink, there’s lots of drama in the house but we put up with each others shit and it feels like family. Albeit a somewhat screwed up, emotional, semi alcoholic, insomniac family – but we’ve kinda created our own norms of behaviour in the time we spend together. I have a few other close friends in Rwanda but I don’t know how many of them would have had me around in the state I was in. We eat, sleep and play together and its nice, I feel more balanced. I had never lived alone before I came to Rwanda and I’m pretty sure now that I’m not cut out for it.

As we spend more and more time together, we develop our own unique ways of communicating with each other and our own in-jokes. Often it will only take a facial expression to have two of us in hysterics and the others wondering what went on. We are creating our own culture, it’s a micro version of what happens to and with human societies everywhere…all you need to spend enough time with each other and culture emerges. It emerges out of a shared experience of living. This phenomenon is easiest to see with couples, they quickly develop a “culture of two”. The longer they are together the more developed it becomes and the less those external to it can decipher what goes on. If culture is a way of relating to people, a way of feeling connected, of having something exclusive…a feeling of belonging and inclusion in something bigger than yourself, what then might be the flip side, the alternate state?

I think it was Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, who described madness, insanity, as the Culture of One – the state of having nothing or no one who can totally relate to you, no one who can share your experiences. It must be truly awful to be stuck in a Culture of One despite having people around you…like solitary confinement, even in crowd. It certainly seems that people need people in order not to go crazy and certainly my recent experiences have shown me just how important a sense of community and the company of others are in keeping things on an even keel.

Over the last few months, I’ve also become aware of the effects of invisible process of adjustment and acclimatisation which I have undergone in the past three years. Its so gradual that I think it takes looking back over a long period to see just how far you have come from where you were. While on holidays in Europe last year, one of friends asked me when I was going home and I gave him the date. He paused for a moment and I asked me did I mean Ireland or Rwanda? To me in was a strange question, Rwanda was of course home. Ireland is “just” where I’m from. This feeling of belonging manifests itself it many ways. I used to squabble over moto fares, now I willingly give a couple of hundred francs (100rwf=10p, 15c) over the odds and I tip more. I feel some kind of belonging, that I’m part of what’s going on and it makes me more generous in terms of time, money and the almost daily frustrations of living here. Over the past weeks P’s house has taken on the role of home and where I pay rent is my house. Although I can’t easily explain why or when this change took place nor what exactly has been my trajectory on the path to acclimatisation. I have a feeling such things are never discrete events, more of a gradual shift in your thinking…like aging, you don’t see its effects until you try to compare photographs of yourself some time apart.