Being older in Rwanda

Rwanda has a young demographic. The people I work with, except for one woman in her early forties, hover on both sides of 30. About 60% of the population is under 25. There are not a lot of visible elders. Too many young people make their way without the support, guidance, mentorship of the older generations. Too many of them have a deep and unmet yearning. And I have also come to consider that older people in Rwanda are lonely for their age-mates.


We are invited into a young friend’s home and his aunt, a woman in her fifties, is ecstatic that her nephew has brought home older people. Come again, come again, she says, you are old, you are welcome anytime.

A woman, only forty-five, tells me she left a job in government because everyone was so young and she didn’t fit in.

I am on the mini-bus and I feel a touch on my arm that is resting along the back of the seat. The touch comes and goes and then a hand comes to rest over my forearm and doesn’t leave. I turn around and there is an older woman sitting behind me smiling. I smile back and her hand stays there until we reach a stop and she has to change her seat. Her hand on my arm was warm, welcoming.

I go to a rural village, invited along to a visit to a community association where people from perpetrator and survivor families are working together to create change. An older woman spots me, rushes over and throws her arms around me. She wants our picture taken together, instantly. She doesn’t want to let go of me.

She takes off her headscarf and takes my hand and puts it on her graying hair. She wants me to touch her head, to stroke her.

She winds her headscarf around my head to the accompanying laughter of others.

Wrapped up in this scarf, I look frighteningly like my mother when she was my age and there’s no avoiding that a lot of years have passed!