Rwandan Girls

Posted by Janine (You’d probably agree that Mikkel should write the blog with this title but since he’s not writing anything at the moment, I’ll do it.)

Rwandan girls are beautiful. This is something that Rwandans, Ugandans, Congolese, Kenyans and  Westerners all seem to agree on. But there’s something interesting because they’re pretty for different reasons. My Rwandese colleagues told me the other day that the most beautiful girls have big eyes, ‘with a lot of white, just like cows’. Like cows? Yes like cows.  (They love them here and I can always count on some approving looks especially from elderly people when I say we are from Holland)

Back to the girls. They should also have big legs. Not skinny ones like us white girls. ‘Legs just like cows?’ I ask my colleagues.  But no-no-no that has nothing to do with cows, and they look at me as if I just said something completely stupid.

There’s also the black-white dynamic of course. While we see enough Rwandese guys who are obvious ‘Mzungu hunters’ I am wondering if they really prefer the white girls based on the skin colour. One night in a bar a guy asked me if I could explain him what a beautiful white girl looks like, because he realllllly didn’t know or understand how someone with white skin could be attractive! He kept talking about how the brown skin colour keeps changing on the body and how exciting that was…

But here comes the trick: there’s a big difference between the Rwandan girl just before and just after marriage. As soon as the girl gets married, she grows. She might even grow really fat and this is something highly appreciated among many men. I’ve seen ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of the girlfriend/wife of the trainer I work with and it looked like an entirely different woman to me, unrecognizable with double the weight!

One explanation for this fascinating change is that being slim here is not necessarily a matter of choice (of course there are exceptions). It’s really normal for people to have one meal a day at lunchtime.  Many girls, students and other unmarried young women just have that meal and then take some tea or fruit in the evening. Once they get married and/or a job and more money to spend, they make sure there’s food on the table several times a day, which explains the drastic change in their posture. We once met this guy at someone’s birthday who asked us if we had met his wife yet, adding with a huge proud happy smile: ‘she’s the fat one!’

And then there’s our hilarious Ugandan sales man Livingstone who joined us for lunch one day. I asked him if he would prefer to stay in Rwanda and find a girl here to marry. ‘Yes’ he says ‘Rwandan girls are more beautiful but…they are boring! Ugandan girls are more interesting and active!’ Of course followed by a well-intended cliché phrase that beauty is on the inside. But he still had to make up his mind if he’d rather go for "average & active" or "boring & beautiful".