Linguistic groping in the closet, listening through a sieve

It has been nine years since I have really spoken French - first learning it in West Africa, then trying my hardest to make myself understood when hitch hiking in France. I am pretty sure that the neurons in my brain that were trained in French joined together in a collective action of mass treason against those damned surrender monkeys and gladly welcomed in Spanish as a replacement. However from the very first Rwandan I spoke to, the old, bespectacled matatu driver, it became readily apparent that French was going to come in handy in this former Belgian colony. Suddenly the usual French greetings, and a few basic phrases starting spewing forth from my mouth, and I seemed to understand what they were saying, and they seemed to understand what I was saying - it felt like Mozambique and Portuguese all over again - some linguistic fun to be had dredging through my brain searching for old words and trying to transpose across languages.

However, once things moved much beyond the pleasantries I started to realise that my French was lousy - constructing sentences became an incredibly arduous process involving first trying to find the vocabulary by racking my brain, and then doing a comparative analysis from Spanish to see if the Spanish word would trigger a memory. Next I would need to get the words in the right order, again I relied on my Spanish grammar, and finally I would have to conjugate the verb - which made me realise that I had never really got much past the first person in French. A few times I would start a sentence with we and then have to give up and revert back to the first person, I, simply because I couldn't conjugate the damn verb. It often felt as though I was groping around blind in a dark, linguistic closet, grabbing on to whatever I could find, then feeling it with my mental fingers to see if I could tell from its feel, sound or construction what it was.

Listening likewise proved to be quite a difficult activity. It is not very often that I had a conversation without background noise, and disappointingly  Rwandan French was often unlike its West African counterpart - lacking clarity,simplicity, and a gentle, lilting almost sing-song rhythm. Rwandans seemed less concerned about annunciating and had a penchant for mumbling away at speed, then looking at me with expectant eyes, waiting on my answer. Meanwhile for me, it often felt as though I was listening through a sieve - hearing every other, or third, or fourth word, and then trying to fathom some meaning from the seemingly disparate parts I had managed to comprehend. Whilst context gives assistance, helping smooth over the gaps and allowing me to get some semblance of meeting out of some phrases, the out of the blue question or statement often left my completely perplexed, as I racked my memory, trying to fit some of the square words I had heard and understood in to the round holes of what I knew things to mean, within a time frame which made conversation possible. And all this under the pressure of Damien having started the conversation with, "I don't speak French, but my friend here does".
Damo and I, dedicated self improvers at heart, often converse in Spanish for practice, but also as our secret language knowing that most locals won't be able to understand us. However, in Rwanda I found myself speaking and listening to locals in French, talking to Damo in Spanish, and then adding English to the mix every now and then.
Needless to say by the end of most days my brain was aching from the effort.