HOWDY

And then they were all staring at me.

So I shout: This is a typical American greeting.

C'est une salutation typiquement Americaine.

Please understand, this is the first day of school

and the year before, there was no school

because of the war, une année blanche, a white year,

a blank year, and school was supposed to start

in September and it's October already, the first day

of school a month late, just when we've all begun

to wonder if school would start this year or not.

123 unpronounceable names, every first-year

pre-med student in Rwanda gathered here in this

room

to learn from me all the English they'd ever need:

If a bomb went off it would be really tragic.

They throw wads of notepaper, gyrate their hips,

sing Mama We! whistle, sprint up and down the

aisles,

leap from seat to plastic seat. I stumble down

each concrete step to the auditorium's bowels

as if I were descending the icy rungs of hell,

and they shriek at me in a language I can't

understand:

Umuzungu urashaka iki? Umuzungu ujya iwanyu!

White man what do you want? White man go home!

The microphone's stainless steel lung resembles

something with which to club them into submission.

So I rear back and holler Howdy, sheer horror

takin me back to that Oklahoma twang I thought

I'd done gone and give up fer good. And when

they holler back: How-Dee, it's an amazing grace.

So I do it again and so do they. All semester I howl

English and they bellow it back, the future doctors

of Rwanda chanting in unison: shinbone connected

to the kneebone, kneebone connected to the

wishbone.

And by December when I meet them between classes

under the blossoms of the campus poinsettia, I say

Muraho and they say How-dee. I say Amakuru and they

ask

How're ya'll doin? I say Nimeza and they say Jes fine.