Lorna Nicole Kayitesi
Bujumbura, Burundi
17 February 2006

Walking one hundred meters through Bujumbura can feel more like one hundred kilometers. Every four meters you see someone you know, and you have to greet a former neighbor or a second cousin from somewhere or other. If you're a stranger to the city, you must go through this process anyway if you're moving with a local. In the case where you are walking with two locals, the sidewalk ritual becomes twice as intense and you stop every two meters.

You can make better time if you take a motorcycle taxi. In this case, you may as well sit backwards, which serves the dual purpose of waving to friends and gazing at the beautiful denizens of this city, as you zigzag between high hills and Lake Tanganyika.

Now, the motorcyclists of this tropical city of pineapple-scented breezes do not much fear death or head injuries. The typical rider likes to speed through the marketplace, jerking around wheelbarrows, brightly-dressed women carrying produce in baskets on their heads, and cars moving in every direction. Every obstacle seems to move back just far enough to clear a dubious passage for the two-wheeled missile of flesh and metal, as if all the people have foreknowledge of its circuitous route and they are partaking in a carefully choreographed ballet.

During my time in Bujumbura, I stayed with my Rwandan aunt, my Burundian uncle, and my numerous cousins. They live in a comparatively large and comfortable house and there are a lot of young people in each of the bedrooms. I failed to determine the precise number of youths in the house through observation and questioning and it seemed that a full enumeration had never succeeded.

The real problem in establishing the precise number of people in the house is that in addition to my cousins, there are a number of other young people who have been embraced and welcomed into the household, because they had been in a difficult situation. This is Africa, after all, and we take care of each other, even if we are not very rich. And we are not joking when we say, "The more the merrier."

It always gives a good feelling to observe the joy that the children take in each other's company, their profound readiness to share affection, and their eagerness to do everything imaginable to make a guest feel like a pampered princess. They told me how they had held and comforted each other in one room as factions fought nocturnal gunfights nearby earlier in the civil war. Their selfless devotion to each other seemed to confirm my hypothesis, which holds that love and virtue flourish in an unequaled manner in areas of adversity, and especially in a country like Burundi, which benefits from an ancient African culture that was never tarnished by slavery and was only recently discolored by the introduction of European ideas of race. The children were extremely eager to practise English with me, although they were too solicitous for my comfort to ask me to speak with them when I was listening to the radio or relaxing in the bedroom they had given me.

Indeed, every time I have been to Burundi, I have been showered with far more generosity and exposed to much more beauty than I deserved. I adore my Burundian relations, and I can hardly wait to return.