Wedding Confusion

On Sunday, I attended a wedding and got to see my host mom!! Go mee!!  She really is the sweetest lady ever.  She gave me the biggest hug and her brightest smile when she saw me and I greeted her with just the same.  Two other volunteers traveled to the wedding with me...and yes, making my way to the wedding was yet another adventure, but at least I didn't have to go it alone this time.

When the three of us finally found a bus that was going to Kamonyi (a town a little less than one hour away), we had to sit on that bus for 1 hour before it finally took off.  The buses here will not bust a single move if they are not full.  One empty seat means no travel, so it's always best to look for a bus that's almost full (that's if you want to be on time to your appointment/destination).  Anyway, when we finally got going at 10:00am (which was when the wedding was supposed to start) I immediately noticed that our bus wasn't in the best condition.  It was putt-putting very loudly and I was almost certain we wouldn't make it to the wedding...this thing sounded like it was going to break down and blow up at any minute.  Much to my surprise, the bus never broke down (nor did it blow up) however me and the other two volunteers did encounter another problem.  Justin's host dad (the wedding was to be hosted at his house) called us to see how close we were because he realized that we were running a little late.  When Justin hung up the phone, he looked at me and the third volunteer and said, "The wedding is over.  Our families are on their way to Kigali."  I was totally confused as we were leaving Kigali to go to the wedding and the wedding wasn't supposed to start until 10am.  By this time it was about 10:30 and there was no way in the world a Rwandan wedding was over in just 30 minutes.  We didn't know what to do.  We debated getting off of the bus where we were (even though we were already halfway to Kamonyi), but in the end we decided to just continue on our way and hope that Justin misunderstood his dad about the wedding being over and the entire wedding party leaving for Kigali. 

When we arrived to the wedding, we
walked around to greet our families and realized that the darned thing hadn't even started yet!  Here we are thinking we missed it and it hadn't even begun!  We caught up with Justin's dad and he told us that what he was trying to tell us earlier was that the bride was in Kigali and all of the guests were being driven there for the first part of the ceremony; then they were going to bring the bride back to Kamonyi for the second part.  I sooo wish we had known this information before because we could have saved our little bit of money and just stayed in Kigali since that's where the wedding was now being held.  We did our best to laugh off our frustrations at going allll the way to Kamonyi for no reason and then after some short dialogue with our families, we hopped onto 1 of 3 busses (with the rest of the guests) and started on our way back to Kigali.  Once the busses arrived in Kigali for the 10am wedding that didn't start until 12pm, everyone entered the seating area and waited for the beautiful bride to make her grand entrance.  And then the wedding began...

The next blog post will detail the happenings of the wedding and how Rwandan weddings go in general.

Stay tuned!

Love and Peace Corps,

Dametreea