Language Ventures - The Gayz

I have a whole entry brewing in my head on language and the experience of living within a language that is not your own, but I'll leave the philosophical ponderings for another time.  This time, I just want to tell a funny story. 

A piece of information crucial to understanding why this story is so hilarious is that Lake Kivu, the lake that separates the western border of Rwanda from the eastern border of the Congo, is known to have large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide gas under the depths of the water due to volcanic activity deep below.  This gas has sometimes bubbled up in large quantities to the surface of the lake, gruesomely suffocating or drowning unsuspecting swimmers.  Because the gas is less dense than water, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be swimming over a gas bubble, you drop into the gas layer and then drown.  (If this sounds like a bad horror movie, you're not too far off.  Here's a creepy-sounding BBC News Story on Lake Kivu entitled "Killer Lakes")

So then.  On to the story.

The scene: The kitchen of our Burera house, a coworker and I are cutting vegetables for pasta sauce.  He had visited Gisenyi, a lakeshore town near the Congo border, over the weekend.  I was telling him about an experience I had once in Gisenyi.  He is a native Francophone, but speaks English well (better than my French).


Me: "So there we were in Geiseny, just eating lunch, when this huge naked man floats up, face down in the water, dead."

Him: Thinking for a moment.  "Ahh, yes, that's because of the gayz."

Me: "The gays?  Really?  I know homosexuality is illegal here, but do you really think they would kill him because he was gay?"

Him: Confused look.  "No, the gayz, you know, from the water."

Me: "OH!  The GAS!  You think the gas killed him?"

Him: "Yes, of course."

Me:  "Then why was he naked?"

Him: Pondering look.  "Aha.  Now this is a very interesting question."


Endnote: The naked dead body story really did happen to me in Gisenyi in 2007.  It was truly a surreal experience.  The general conclusion at the time was that he was likely a thief or a cheat and somebody had taken out their own retribution.  Of course, he had clearly floated all the way across the lake from the Congolese side because they "do these things".  The possibility that he could have come from the Rwanda side was roundly dismissed.