September 19th: African Tea

In America, coffee is typically served in most households, restaurants, and offices in the morning. Here they serve Ikayi (tea) that is about 10% tea, 10% sugar, and 80% fresh-from-the-cow milk. We have drank a dozen cups each of this at least since being here. It’s not so bad, but it has a very distinct taste so we can only handle so much of it. Also, we think Julianna is lactose intolerant, because every time we drink it her stomach hurts badly. When I have asked for coffee (ikawa), it turns out not so much like coffee, but instead just hot water and a can of NesCafe instant coffee crystals. For anyone who remotely enjoys drinking coffee, this is nothing less than awful.

We discovered that most restaurants, including Seeds of Peace and Seeds of Hope, have black tea. This is a great compromise for both of us, and the few times we have had it it has been delicious and spicy much like ginger and apple cider mixed together. Unless someone served us the traditional “African tea” at there house etc, we decided to start requesting black tea. Until today, we did not know how to say it in Kinyarwanda, so as you can imagine, we had a difficult time explaining exactly what we wanted. For the past few weeks, as Julianna and I have been trying to communicate that we want black tea, we were successful only once. All the other times were utter failures, but hilarious in hindsight.

Multiple times we have asked for black tea, but recieved ikayi instead. One of these times, unbothered, I had a little but then slipped back to my room to fill up my french press with coffee and hot water. When I returned, they were curious what this contraption was. I explained to them how it worked by turning the hot water to coffee and separating the grounds from the coffee and so on. It was a lot of fun telling them about it, but unfortunately in the conversation somehow they thought that we were telling them that anytime we enter the restaurant, we wanted a piping hot canteen of water and a can of instant coffee instead of Ikayi or Ikawa. Then for the next two weeks we were served hot water for every breakfast. This was not bad, just disappointing seeing that we were trying so hard to get some black tea. If we tried to communicate that we wanted tea instead of water, they would again bring ikayi. If we said we wanted black tea instead of ikayi, they brought out hot water.

Yesterday in a little cafe, we tried desperately with hand motions and pictures to communicate to the waiter that we wanted black tea. If you looked at the notecard I scribbled on, you would see a picture of tea being poured into a cup circled a thousand times, and next to it was a jug of milk (even with the word amata which means milk) with big X’s drawn through it. I thought that it was clear that we wanted no milk and only tea. I asked him repeatedly urabyumva? (do you understand?) and he acknowledge by raising is eyebrows (the Rwandese way of saying yes, similar to our head nod). In spite of our hard work telling him what we thought was “we want hot tea with no milk,” he brought out, instead, hot milk with no tea at all! Although we were disappointed once again, it was very difficult not to laugh at the irony of the situation. When we left, we decided to give up trying to communicate our request.

This morning, still thinking we would be served hot water, we decided to bring my french press and tea bags for the hot water they would serve us. Ironically, the morning we stopped trying to ask for black tea they brought us black tea. We aren’t sure what will come out of the kitchen tomorrow, but we laughed and laughed at the whole scenario while happily drinking our delicious black tea.