Tuesday, March 30, 2010

A Weekend in Paradise

Well this has been a great weekend in mini America (or as close as I’ll get in the next 2 years). We have been staying at a very nice hotel for 3 nights to have a health conference with all the organizations Peace Corps health group will be working with while in Rwanda. We are staying in a hotel with individual huts with a roommate. But we have hot showers and flushing toilets. It has a swimming pool and what’s even more amazing is that we were actually told there would be a pool and to bring our swim suits. The pool felt so amazing I have been swimming every day at every chance we get. (So about 3 times because there has not been a lot of down time until now). Many people left for their site visits this afternoon. Me and about 10 others leave tomorrow so we get to spend an extra night in this exquisite hotel with free wireless. This is why I have been able to upload pictures to my blog and to facebook. Our first day when we arrived in Kigali in February it did not seem like such a big, amazing city before. It was not a big deal, a city in Africa nothing like even the smaller cities in America. Now after spending only a month in the semirural city of nyanza, Kigali is this huge luxurious city in which we get seasoned food and can hear cars driving by at night. Definitely a different perspective. Also the first traffic lights I have seen in a month was when we drove back into Kigali. I never even noticed they were missing until I saw them and thought it was strange seeing them.
The point of the health conference was to learn about the organization we would be working with and see all the other organizations that others are working with. It was great getting to meet my counterpart and supervisors this weekend. I also got to learn a little bit about my organization. They work with rural communities to help make sustainable living for underprivileged families. They work with farmers to raise crops like corn and flour and fruits. They sell a famous health porridge around Africa called Sosoma which I got to even sample and it’s like a runny oatmeal without the oats. The company also helps craftsman to make, sell and market wood projects such as doors and beds and cabinets. I am the very first volunteer this organization has ever had. My role as of now is still a little unclear but I know I will be working in the community with the farmers and working in the office doing business plans and organizational things. I will be living about 45 minutes from Kigali in the district of Muhanga which is much bigger than Nyanza but only slightly smaller than Kigali. I will share about what i am doing here once I have gotten to see my site and spent time in my community and with my organization.
Thank You all for reading!

Monday, March 29, 2010

Umugonda (National Day of Service)

Rwanda is a truly amazing country. On Saturday we all woke up early to go to the monthly event called umuganda. This happens on the 4th Saturday of every month. Shops close and everyone works together on this national community service day. We went to go help one particular umudugodo (village) with cultivating land for Cassava plants. The mayor recommended we help them. It was an hour and a half hike through woods and over mountains and down hills, it was beautiful but of course I forgot my camera. Anyway we get there and we see over 2 hundred people hoeing the ground, the old fashioned way to turn the soil. We all had to take turns with the hoes because they were many more people than there where tools which seems to be a common problem. Anyway we worked for a few hours on this large area of land, then everyone sat down for some sort of meeting and role check I think,(it was all in Kinyarwanda). Umuganda is a mandatory event in the country and some community’s even fine people who do not attend. After the meeting the Rwandans all start chanting and then dancing and I realized that in Rwanda everything turns into a dance party. There is never down time because anytime people are waiting to do something they just start singing and dancing. Maybe if we all did the world would be a happier place. For lunch we got to eat umugati, which is a roll of bread dough that you dip into a sauce. I really like it but it takes some getting used to. The way one person refers to it here is the most earthy taste you can imagine, but in a good way.
Sunday it was off to Kigali. We are staying in a hotel with huts as rooms. Its really nice, we have hot water showers and flushing toilets and amazing food. We had French toast for breakfast which made me amazingly happy. Today we met our supervisors of the organizations we will be working with. And we also have free wireless internet, what more could a PCV ask for!

A day with an Umudosi


So I had my first dress made last week. It was quite an experience. I found out that my host mom owns a fabric shop so I felt a little obligated to buy fabric from her shop. She had a small selection compared to some other places but I found some I liked. I had a rough sketch of the dress I wanted made but I am not very good a drawing so I was nervous of how it would be interpreted. My host mom and the umudosi (tailor) do not speak any English whatsoever. Just trying to get the point across that I wanted to buy fabric for a dress was a challenge. Agreeing on a price was also quite funny. I would write down a price then she would write her price. We haggled for a bit Then we came to an agreement before the umudosi arrived. The umudosi was not pleased with the price and refused so I had to pay a little more. It was so confusing but in the end I thought we had it figured out. Then I stood there for a while thinking I needed to be measured but I had no idea how to say that in Kinyarwanda. So I just stood there, my host mom keep trying to talk to me but I can understand her very little. A common problem with learning a language is even if you do know what the words mean; understanding them from a local who speaks fast is hard. Our teachers are really good at enunciating and speaking slowly so we can understand but in the "real world" it’s a whole different story. Eventually my umudosi comes back into the room with a tape measure to do my measurements. I show her the length I want and how thick I want the straps by spacing my fingers out over my shoulders hoping she understands. I also try to show her how I want a band around my waist. Anyway, let’s just say things didn’t seem very clear and I had no idea how to get the point across so I just hoped. I did this all on Wednesday and they told me Friday to pick it up. Well I go to my mom’s shop on Friday and ask for my dress and she tells me in Kinyarwanda something that makes no sense to me. I have no idea where my umudosi is. I give up and try to find one of my friends who had a dress made by the dame person. A few hours later I found someone to show me where to go. It straight down a dirt road, I then had to turn right into a tin door which let me to an open corridor with multiple rooms on every side. I wander into each of them looking for someone familiar and don’t see any umudosi I recognize. I forgot what she looked like; I did not have her name. it was almost hopeless. I leave and head back home when some lady comes chasing after me. Apparently I was in the right place my umudosi was just on break or something. I try on my dress and its perfect. But is didn’t fit right. I had to show her where she needed to take in. Hoping she got it. She took some chalk and made some marks I gave the dress back she made alterations tried it on again, needed a little more she fixed it again and it fit perfectly and was exactly as I drew the dress and pictured it wanting to look. I am extremely happy with it and can’t wait to get a few more tailor made outfits in my time here. The fabric they sell is just beautiful and you’ll never find the same print twice. All in all it was a great experience and everyday the language gets a little bit better. buhro buhro we say. little by little. :)

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Things I love about Africa (so far)







1. Bucket/solar showers
2. Cooking on a fire and making hamburgers and fries
3. Walking 6 miles a day (back and forth 1 mile each day 3X)
4. Pretending to be a washing machine when hand washing clothes
5. Shopping at the used clothing market
6. Tailor Made Dresses
7. Somosas and Tea
8. Kinyarwanda language...?
9. The beautiful thousands of hills
10. Dance parties before and after every event
11. 10:00am tea breaks
12. Kids running after you in the streets
13. Guacamole, Beans and Rice
14. Chickens that run under your table at restaurants (also i love 1 legged chickens)
15. The lake near my house

Friday, March 26, 2010

Site Placements!!

Well last night we got told out site placements. As I think most of you know we are in training in Nyanza for the first 3 months of service before we go and live on our own. my site is in Muhangu. I am really excited about it. It is 45 minutes from Kigali and an hour or so from where I am now Nyanza (which has the best market in the country so I'm glad to stay close by). I am going to be place with DUHAMIC ADRI as a health and community development volunteer. I am the only volunteer with this co-op so it is both exciting and nerve-recking. My job description seems to include anything and everything so I am excited for what I may be able to do. So far I know they are a local co-op, with a savings and lendings group and they sell nutritious porage like drinks to make money. That is all I've been told. I will go see the group and see my site next week and will update with more information as it comes. For now I am just excited to see what I'm going to be doing and where I will be living.

Info I found online at http://www.fdh.org/Rwanda-DUHAMIC-ADRI-Association.html

Duhamic-Adri, Association for Integrated rural development, was founded in 1979 with as mission to support rural community initiatives of self-development. Duhamic-Adri works particularly on conciousness raising among peasants around the mechanics of neglect and at offering services such as projects analysis, help in negotiations, training, support options...

The objectives are several :

Fight against the neglect of the rural community
Stimulate construction and merging of peasants groups and associations
Reinforce collective actions among peasant associations by starting up or motivating the launch of independent organisational structures such as inter-grouping.
Support of rural community initiatives in different development activities (agricultural production, processing and commercialisation, reforestation, craftsmanship, etc.)

Sunday, March 14, 2010

this country has come so far

3/14/10
This weekend has been the most emotional of all. We went to a city called Butare, which is about 1 hour south of Nyanza I think. It was nice to get out of Nyanza for the day. WE first made a stop at a nice historical museum; it had traditional tools, clothes, how things are made and such throughout the museum. There was also a traditional house made of weave that we could go in and see. I would give up electricity and water and everything to live in a traditional hut like that was. It was very Africa, but stayed cool and had a rather comfortable bed, just as comfortable as where I’m sleeping now anyway.
Then we went into town for lunch and the umuzungu grocery store. Basically foods from America but at double or triple the price but it was worth it for a one time treat. I got Pringles, nutella and granola cereal. Afterwards a few of my friends and I went off with 2 of our language culture facilitors to a “good” Chinese restaurant. I was not really feeling Chinese but at this point anything besides beans, rice and potatoes would be great. We first find out they do not have soy sauce because the “sauce specialist” was not in that day. So I go buy some from the grocery store and come back, I mean what is Chinese food without soy sauce. That was about 30 minute’s time and no food had come. 1 hour passes and no food comes. Our LCFs (language, culture facilitators) talk to the staff and they say their working on it. 20 minutes later 1 plate of noodles comes out. Not what ordered but we decide to eat them anyway. My food never came, my friend’s food never came, the 3 of us shared one dish. And let me not forget the fact the during our wait we saw 4 live chickens taken into the back and then one by one we heard a loud swak and them silence. Not the best feeling in the world that’s for sure.
Our last stop about 30 minutes from butare was a famous genocide memorial and a famous genocide massacre location. Words cannot even describe how hard it was to see this and nothing can prepare you for it. It was the location of an old boarding school that tutsis’s fled to for safety because it was supposedly protected by the French military. It was not safe the school was surrounded and some 50,000 were killed. Now the rooms are filled with the bodies “frozen” in time with a type of molding in the positions which they were found, not just one or two rooms, I have no idea how many rooms but we walked through at least 10. None of us knew how to handle it and it was the most terrible thing I have ever seen. I wasn’t sure how or if I should even write about it but I know how important it is that people know what occurred in this country, to prevent it from happening again.

Women's day celebration

3/8/10
I have officially been in Rwanda 11 days now. It’s funny because I feel like I have been here for a month or two already. Our training schedules are packed full each day, leaving very little spare time to think about or and even miss home and America. It also leaves no time for internet, blog writing, journal writing and letter writing, all things I wish I had a bit more time to do. Our schedule is 4 hours of language class, 1 hour language application (at our host family), then 2 of medical, health, or culture class in the afternoon.
Food is really bad and fattening, our meals are pretty much all carbs. We given potatoes every day usually for lunch and dinner, and fried in grease. We also usually have some form of really bland pasta with mystery meat, usually goat. Kale is our vegetable when we get one. But our 10:00am tea snacks are really delicious but also very unhealthy. They are made up of somosas, flat greasy bread (the name has escaped me right now), and fried sweet rolls similar to donuts.
Today was National Women’s Day. A holiday for women (obviously), apparently it is a big holiday here. As a group, we all went to a stadium area to see an event in honor of the holiday. There were a lot of secondary school students there, that sang, danced and chanted before the show started, since of course it started an hour and a half late, that’s Africa time for you. Each one of us was picked and taken to dance in front of everyone and eventually we were all down on the grass dancing with the secondary school children. It ended up being really fun. The rest of the show was speeches in Kinyarwanda (impossible to even start to understand) and some dances from school kids in African outfits. Later today we walked to a museum, where we tried to go a few days ago but with the hard we never went since it’s a 4 or 5 mile walk. Today we walked all the way there and found out it was closed. So we hiked back up a mountain through the woods as a “short cut” home. It was a really nice walk though with great scenery, so I’m glad that we got to have a walk around through areas we had never seen before. Who knows if we’ll actually ever make it to the Nyanza museum?

Friday, March 5, 2010

the beginning

2/23/10
Well the first day of staging is over and things are off to a good start. Staging was full of many ice breakers and talking about of anxieties and ambitions and going over rules and such. We also got to finally turn in all the paperwork that we were given to fill out with our invitation.
So far it seems I do have the most luggage which always seems to happen to me even though last night I weeded out so many clothes and little extras that I knew I would not need.(110 pounds, limit 100 but no charge!)Packing was quite a challenge, since its 2 years + some!
Saying goodbye to nick was very hard. What can you say knowing you won't see each other for 2 years. How can you possibly say goodbye to the man you want to marry. I know i just have to, if I decided not to join I would spend the rest of my life wondering what my life would have been like had I joined.
Staging (an event for peace corps volunteers in the US before they leave for their country) was 6 hours long and talked about our thoughts about leaving and aspirations and worries in joining the Peace Corps. It was long and boring but necessary and good for getting to know each other. Afterwards I joined three others and we went out for sushi as our last dinner in America. The next morning we all walked to get our shots together though I didn’t actually need any, and then we headed off on the bus fro 3 hours to JFK. Then the long two, 8 hour flights to Brussels and then to Kigali.
Upon arrival in Kigali, it was pouring rain. And I was so tired and so exhausted i could not really take it all in. We stayed in a nunnery in Kigali for 3 days, mostly spending those days getting shots and filling out paperwork.

3/3/10
Yesterday started our first official day of “classes.” Language, health, safelty and tech (skills trainging). This is what will be occurring all day, everyday from now until May 8th, our ceremony for becoming official Peace Corps volunteers. I also forgot to mention that we had a beautiful 2 hour drive from Kigali to Nyanza and saw a whole lot of the countryside. The hills and tree’s and farmlands, kids running and screaming Muzungu, which means white person. We stopped on a rock with the myth that the king sent is 2 best men out to find the best punishment. They each came back with 2 different, terrible ways to die. Because they thought these horrible things for their own race they were sentenced to the punishment they thought of. The rock we were at was heated with fire until extremely hot and then have the man stretched across it until he burned to death. Lots of locals came by since we are such a huge group of Americans, many have never seen so many white people before.
Here in Nyanza the volunteers are split up into 4 houses. I live about 30 minutes from where we eat and take classes. Everyone except one house lives about that far in different directions. It’s a great walk though. Its nice to see the neighborhood and the view. It’s a great temperature here. Around 80 degrees sometimes hotter but not too hot. Today is especially perfect, slightly cloudy, and breezy outside. It is rainy season, so it rains pretty much every day for an hour or two very hard, but then its over and the sun is back out.
Yesterday I met with my host family. Although I am not living with them I am suppose to meet with them for about 3 hours a week to practice language. It was very frustrating because we could not understand each other at all. We sat together and looked at my workbook and she helped me with the words in Kinyarwanda and I helped here with the words in English. Dinner last night was the best we have had all week, beans, rice and fresh guacamole!!
The rest of the night was spent practicing Kinyarwanda eating cookie with peanut butter and sour patch kids later.
Marabutse!

Culture Notes:
- Women have no modesty when breastfeeding
- Always carry raincoat and flashlight
- Kids call you muzugue constantly- (white person)
- Kids laugh when you try to speak kinyarwanada
- The electricity is completely unrealiable
- Fanta = 250F (50C) Internet = 200F (40C) per hour CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!!
- The malaria pills are only 70% effective...
- Moto’s do not stop for pedestrians
- Chicken and bananas can go together
- Kinyarwanda words can be spelled the same way but mean lots of different things
- Valuables should be locked in trunks, locked in rooms, locked by another door leading to the rooms from the living room, the house locked, and the gate locked with a 24 hour guard!
- Three meals are eaten between 8:00 and 12:00. Breakfast, tea, and lunch. And dinner at 7:00.