Margaret Helen Mclennon, Masters in International Development and Globalization, 1st year
Internship country: Rwanda
Canadian NGO: CECI
Local NGO: SaferRwanda
After having traveled to twenty-six countries I walked into Rwanda with what I thought was a fairly disciplined habit: no expectations. Read the history, understand the broad strokes, and then let the small textured things surprise me.
What I didn’t expect was the assumption I’d been carrying without knowing it — that I would simply be treated like everyone else. That whatever I did or didn’t have, would be irrelevant next to the more obvious fact of just being a person, waiting in a line like anyone else.
That assumption didn’t survive my first week.
My first day in Kigali, my coworker took me to run the essential errands — groceries, a SIM card, the small logistics that turn a strange city into a place you can actually live in. We walked into the shop and there was a line. People had been waiting, some of them for what looked like a long while. We walked past all of them.
No one stopped us. No one seemed to expect otherwise. I was ushered to the front like it was simply how things worked, and within a few minutes I had a SIM card in my hand and we were back outside in the sun, errand complete, while the line behind us hadn’t moved.
I didn’t say anything in the moment. But it sat with me for the rest of the day, and honestly, it’s still sitting with me. It was simply how it worked, and my discomfort with it — the impulse to say no, that’s fine, I’ll wait — read to everyone else as confusion rather than principle.
That was the first assumption I ran into: that where I come from means I don’t wait, don’t struggle, don’t budget. It’s continued in smaller ways since. People have been unusually eager to talk to me, to include me, to bring me into rooms and conversations and, more than once, into projects — sometimes with a kind of hope behind it that I’ve started to notice and sit with. I don’t think it’s cynical, exactly. I think it’s a reasonable bet, given history and circumstance, that someone who looks like me might be able to open a door, offer a connection, contribute money. I’ve had friends tell me plainly that I’ll pay more for things, sometimes double, and that this is simply a known cost of how I appear here. I’ve had conversations where I could feel, underneath the warmth, a kind of quiet calculation — what might this person be able to do for me.
I don’t say that with resentment. I think if our positions were reversed, I might do the same math. And honestly, I came here to leverage my privilege for those who were not born with the same opportunities as me.
The harder thing to sit with has been my side of it. I didn’t come here thinking I was better resourced or more important than the people around me — if anything, I’ve spent years actively resisting that idea, tracking every dollar, working jobs since I was a teenager, feeling the debt I’m still paying down. I've spent just as long resisting the bigger version of that idea, too — the notion that the West's way of knowing is somehow the default against which everywhere else gets measured. I've tried to sit and connect with other epistemologies, not just cite them: Indigenous knowledge systems back home in Canada, Eastern philosophy, Ubuntu here in Africa — I am because we are — which feels like it should undercut hierarchy rather than reinforce it. But none of that history, or that effort, is visible. What's visible is where I'm from, and that turns out to matter more than what I actually am.
There’s a particular discomfort in being assumed wealthy by people who have so much less room for error than I do, while knowing that objecting to the assumption — actually, I don’t have that much either — can sound, even to my own ears, like a small and tone-deaf complaint. I am still, undeniably, someone who chose to be here, who can leave, who has a passport that opens doors that stay closed for most people I’ve met. The specifics of my bank account don’t erase that larger truth. I’ve had to learn to hold both things at once: my discomfort is real, and it is also not really the point.
A few of the friends I’ve made here have talked with me, unprompted, about how colonization shaped who gets seen as having authority, money, and expertise in this part of the world — how those associations didn’t arise from nothing, and don’t end just because the colonial period technically did. I don’t think it’s my place to explain that history back to anyone; I’m a guest with a few months of exposure, not an expert. But it’s changed how I hear the assumptions people make about me. They’re not really about me at all. I’m just the shape those assumptions land on, this month.
I don’t have a clean resolution here. I still don’t know the right way to decline being moved to the front of a line without it becoming its own kind of scene. I still don’t know how to be genuinely befriended by someone while also wondering, honestly, what part of the friendship is about me and what part is about what I might represent — and I’m learning that those two things aren’t always as separate as I’d like them to be, and don’t have to cancel each other out.
What I keep coming back to is that the assumption I arrived with — I’ll just be treated like everyone else — was never really available to me. Not because of anything I did, but because of everything I didn’t have to do to end up here. Recognizing that hasn’t made the discomfort go away. It’s just made it a more honest kind of discomfort to sit with.