Wedding and Monkey Trekking

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Our friend Francoise invited us to her daughter’s traditional Rwandese wedding in Kigali. We attended with another couple from the Embassy that also knows Francoise. The wedding was located in a different area of Kigali, and we arrived 45 minutes late due to being lost. However, the wedding began two hours late, so we were actually early. The first part of the wedding was the dowry negotiation, and the seating was divided into two sections (one for the bride’s guests and one for the groom’s) that faced each other. In between the seating for guests, there were couches covered in cowhide skins and standing grass panels and baskets.

All at once, the groom’s party entered the yard and warm sodas and beer were served to all guests. An hour long negotiation ensued between the two male elders representing the head of the bride and groom’s families. The groom’s side gave expensive bottles of scotch to the bride’s male representatives. The hour long negotiation revolved around the principle that the bride and groom come from respectable families but that could not be stated directly. Members of the bride’s guests were allowed to comment on whether they approved of the groom, and this included a disapproval since the groom (who was European) had not gotten visas for the bride’s family. Once the price of two cows was agreed upon, the farmers went to check the quality of the fictional cows and returned with a five minute song and dance praising the cows. Then the bride emerged from the house and joined the groom on the couches were they were served sodas. At this point, we unfortunately had to leave to go monkey trekking.

We picked up another couple from the Embassy and headed up north to Volcanoes National Park to see the golden monkeys. We met additional couples at the Kinigi Guest House where we had dinner and played cards around the fire. In the morning, following the worst cold shower ever (Alex later figured out how to get hot water for his shower), we ate a quick breakfast and headed into the park. At the park headquarters, there were about 75 people there for gorilla trekking and around 10 for golden monkey trekking. We drove though a small farming village and walked across potato and flower fields to the edge of the forest. In the village, we had hired a porter for $10 to carry our backpack for the day to provide him with an alternate source of income over poaching. The monkey troupe had approximately 80 animals and was playing just on the edge of the forest where they frequently plunder nearby crops. This troupe is habituated to humans so the monkeys came within feet of us. We followed them into the bamboo forest and watched as they jumped with reckless abandon from tree to tree and wrested with each other. After one hour, we hiked back to the village and stopped for lunch at a nice hotel before driving back to Kigali.

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