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?