The Time Everything Worked Out, Exactly As it Should Have

As mentioned in my previous post, I am no longer a PCV in Rwanda. So if you are looking for a post about life there, this is not it. However, the story about how I came to leave Rwanda and how perfectly timed it was with my future life plans merits telling, so here it is.
I quit Peace Corps on a Tuesday morning which was a national holiday, I took a moto taxi out of  my school at 5am and didn't look back. By 11am I had arrived PC's Kigali headquarters where I first had to alert my boss that I was quitting by calling it thru her window - she wanted to know why I was in Kigali without permission - in the middle of her morning meeting. Off to a great start. Once a PCV resigns they have 72 hours to process the paperwork and get you out of country - due to the holiday I got an extra 24ish hours. But here's the part where things get crazy:
In December shortly after moving into my permanent site I had a serious security situation where a coworker of mine was harassing me in the middle of the night, while the whole thing was being sorted out  I stayed in Kigali for a few nights. I was naturally upset and decided to send in a few law school apps to the schools that had sent me fee waivers (i took the LSAT before graduating college) just as a safety net. For some added security I also sent in app to my top choice school, American in DC, figuring it wasn't so bad to pay for one application. After the security issue was resolved I returned to my site and figured I could defer an enrollment if I got in. I was accepted to one law school and waitlisted at American, so I put myself on the waitlist just to see how things shook out and applied for a deferment at the second. The morning after I arrived in Kigali I was still waitlisted and hadn't heard a decision on my deferment request.  I called the first school to see if I could still be accepted into this years class, which they gladly agreed to if I sent in a deposit in 72 hours - turns out I had decided to resign the week law schools were selecting their waitlist candidates. I held off sending the deposit figuring it would be easier to send once I was in the USA (which was now less than 72 hours away). That same afternoon American emailed me saying they were filling their waitlist spots and asking if I was still interested in a place, when I answered in the affirmative I got an email to send in a deposit immediately. Both the first and second email contained a 24 hour time limit to respond before the offer expired. If i was in my village I wouldn't have even seen the emails in time!! With 24 hours to go before my flight I wired the money to American and officially secured my spot in their class of 2015. American even runs a program on educating local students on the Rwandan genocide, that you know I'm going to get involved in somehow. I found an apartment a few days after getting home. It was a friend of my aunt's who was willing to give me a short term summer lease. I signed the lease site unseen. Later when i typed the address into google maps I was shocked and amused to see that the Rwandan embassy to the United states is on the same block!!  I can't wait to greet the guards in Kinyarwanda. So the moral of this rambling tale is that I see that as the last positive omen, out of many, demonstrating that this was the best decision for me personally and professionally. I move tomorrow! Wish me luck! nta komeza (i am going forward)

Resignation

It's officially been a month since my plane landed at JFK, ending my Peace Corps adventure and reuniting me with the great country of America, so it felt like time for an explanation. I wasn't going to post anything on her about my decision to resign, or in PC lingo early terminate, but this weekend I was at an event with family and friends who were consistently shocked to see me back on this side of the world and thought maybe an official announcement to the cyber world was in order. Also, this blog is linked to peacecorpsjournals.com where I know a lot of people considering joining peace corps go to try and understand the culture before they join and sadly, early termination is definitely a part of the culture. While I won't comment here on my own reasons for leaving, except to say that it was a decision to leave Rwanda and not Peace Corps, my issues were all specific to the culture, my site, and my personal situation. They in no way reflect on the operation or mission of PC Rwanda which I still support with all my heart. Let me say a few things about Early termination, for all those of you thinking of joining PC. First of all it was painless, I arrived at my bosses office in Kigali and very calmly told her I wished to resign. Since I had shown up in person without any previous discussion she asked me to sit and explain myself, but also this was the moment of no return. No one in pc staff after that point tried to talk me into staying - which I appreciated whole heartedly. I then had 72 hours to get my medical exams and paperwork finished before I had to get on a plane home. My fellows PCVs also responded with nothing but understanding to what was a surprising decision to them as well. I have met a handful of people in PC who chose to stay long past the point where they were happy in their decision to be in country, people who were staying simply to say that they finished their 2 year commitment and while I understand the urge, that kind of stubborness isn't my nature and I had no desire to do it. From my fellow pcv's the response I got most often to my decision to leave was respect. Many people told me they hoped they had the courage to leave once they realized that had crossed that point, because they too knew people who had chosen to stay. It's hard to quit PC and when I quit I had no plan. I just knew I had to be anywhere but Rwanda and literally 24 hours after I resigned the next 3 years of my life fell into place perfectly leading me to believe once and for all that I had made the right choice (more on that later). So now I have a plan, and a new apartment, and a new city to explore but Rwanda has taken up permanent residence in my heart. Despite not finishing two years of service the 8 months I did do have changed forever my outlook on the world. And even without finishing I still find myself constantly engaging in PC's 3rd goal of explaining Rwanda to Americans - an especially important tasked as I've learned how poorly understood the genocide is here - which makes me feel like I haven't abandoned Rwanda entirely, I'm just helping it in the only way I can for the time being.
I plan to post a few more times on where I am now and final reflections on service, but I wanted to start with this.
Once and for all Rwanda Turi kumwe (we are together) but it's time for me to move on.

April

April, as you may know is genocide memorial month, in Rwanda with the second week of April being a specifically specified genocide week  where the country essentially shuts down. I'll obviously have more to report on how this goes after it has happened - and i will only be in the country for half the week - but here is what Peace Corps sent out to all volunteers in preparation for the month.

April 7^th is Rwanda’s National Mourning Day for the Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. 

It is observed to:

-        Remember what happened during the Genocide

-        Sympathize with, and provide support to, Genocide survivors as they go through tough moments of remembering atrocities that happened.

-        Restore the dignity of our beloved ones who were killed, by burying them properly, remembering the good things about them and paying tribute to those who struggled to save lives during that period. (Guhesha icyubahiro abacu bapfuye, tubashyingura neza, twibuka ibyiza bakoze, tunashimira abagerageje guhisha no kurokora abantu)

-        Reflect on the crime of Genocide, and other related crimes against humanity

-        Resolve to “Never Again” allow Genocide to occur

-        Observe a minute of silence at 12 noon on April 7^th

The Government of Rwanda has not only assigned April 7^th as a day of National Mourning, but has included the entire week of April 7th – 13^th.  This week of mourning will be observed through conducting various activities including, but not limited to, semi-formal discussions, visits to Genocide memorial sites, dignified burials of those bodies that were discovered in mass graves, and visits to Genocide survivors, especially orphans and widows. The Government of Rwanda has also dedicated April 13^th to the recognition and commemoration of the politicians who were killed because they stood against the killing of the Tutsis.  This particular day will be commemorated at Rebero Hill in Kigali, where those identified among the politicians are buried.

The 1994 Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda is a Rwandan tragedy but it is also a global tragedy. The United Nations has recognized the 1994 Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda as a global tragedy that should be mourned and reflected upon by the entire World, regardless of nationality or religion.

The 18^th Commemoration of the Genocide against Tutsis will last 100 days, as the Genocide did in 1994. At the end of the commemoration period, on or around July 17^th, the Genocide Survivors’ Umbrella Group “IBUKA” will organize a closing ceremony. Details shall be communicated as soon as they are received.

                 

Each year, the National Commission Against Genocide issues a communiqué, stating the theme of the year and a general overview of activities. This year’s theme is known, but the entire message has not been issued yet. The theme is “Commemorating the Genocide Against Tutsi: Let’s learn from the past and build our future”.

Ceremonies at the National level are scheduled to be held at the National Stadium in Remera, Kigali, on April 7^th. No other activities are conducted on that day. People are asked to observe the day and not celebrate or have other joyful events. At mid-day, a minute of silence is to be observed by everyone. Apart from the National activities that will be held at the National Stadium, each village (umudugudu) will also hold its own commemoration activities. PCVs are encouraged to attend these ceremonies. You are encouraged to ask your supervisor or other community members where and when exactly the activities are going to take place; however, please be patient with them as they may be informed of these details as late as the evening before. Also, in each umugudugu, there is usually an organizing committee that collects funds to support people who may be traumatized. You are encouraged to contribute. With the little contributions, organizers are able to buy drinking water and tissues to use while helping trauma or strong emotional cases that arise during the events.

We recognize the uniqueness and the challenges associated with working in a Post-Conflict society, especially in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Therefore, it is very understandable that a PCV may choose not to attend these events at all. Feel free to excuse yourself; but, also remember that the PSN representatives and PC staff members are here for you. Please talk to fellow volunteers, PSN representatives, and PC staff for any questions related to these events. Contact the PCMOs if you feel the need for further support.


I include this mainly so any that people realize, although it is a sad time it is not a dangerous time. And also so that you can see how well PC supports volunteers here in what is understandably a unique service situation. Note that despite PC's focus on community integration volunteers are not encouraged to participate if they do not feel comfortable.  

Asian American PCVs

While we’re on this vain here’s a bit of a peak into what its like to be an Asian American volunteer. Rwandans are obsessed with kung-fu and I found out recently that there is a whole channel on Rwandan TV that plays exclusively Chinese Kung-fu movies. Even in my remote village the boys at my school have started a very intense martial arts club and when I gave a writing assignment, “Pretend you are going on a trip. Tell me where you will go and what you will do.” One of the most popular answer was, “I will go to China/Japan to become grandmaster/learn kung-fu etc…” Thus many Asian American volunteers face the problem of children walking up to them and play fighting Karate, kicking and punching at the air usually while making strange baby like noises that they pretend is Chinese. I’ve seen it in person and honestly it makes you wish you were a karate expert who could kick back. Additionally, they make no distinction between any kind of Asian, they are all Chinese. Rwandans also tend to be a bit racist, and my host mother for example would always impersonate Asians by pulling back her eyes in a way that became politically incorrect in America quite a while ago. An Asian American volunteer friend of my has joked that she should just round house kick someone one time, make the stereotype true, and then they’ll leave her alone. But of course she would lose her job for that, so instead she takes the more PC method of trying to explain why this is wrong and offensive.  

African American PCVs

Being a PCV is hard, being white in a country as undiverse as Rwanda is hard, a statement I believe I have adequately proven several times in my blog. However, this past week I got an up close look at how hard it can be to be a non-white volunteer in Rwanda. My best friend in PC who I call my work-wife – we’ll call her C here – is African American and it causes her a whole host of problems that white volunteers do not face. We worked together in Kigali this week helping out another aid organization and I got to see just how different her experience is from my. For starters people refuse to believe in many cases that she is American. As I’ve said before despite all the evidence to the contrary Rwandans refuse to believe that there are black Americans and thus she falls into that category. Their response is always, “I think you are somehow Rwandan/African.” And when she does admit that she has heritage in Africa – both her parents were born in West Africa – they act like she’s proven them correct – she is African not American. It is very difficult to persuade anyone otherwise. Example:We were visiting a friend’s site together and decided to tour her school. When the other PCV introduced us to her students saying these are some other American volunteers they invariably answer with some version of, “both teacher?” Unsure whether to come right out and say it. Luckily C has a sense of humor and usually told them what she told her own students when the “muzungu” arrived at school and didn’t look very muzungu at all. “I am here to confuse you.” And confuse people she does. While we worked with the charity organization more problems came out as well. People expect her to know Kinyarwanda, wherever we go they just assume she is Rwandan and so they do not speak slowly to her the way they would to us.  She often complains that people don’t have as much patience with her making mistakes in Kinyarwanda – and hers is much better than mine – she jokes, “its because I look like them, the second its not perfect they give up on me.” When she was in the market shopping with other volunteers once the vendors implored her to make her friends pay more because they thought she was Rwandan and would be on their side. We were walking down the street once when a belligerent Rwandan started screaming at her for ignoring them. Demanding that she respond and calling her all kinds of names for thinking she was better because she was with Muzungus. I should say here that C does not look Rwandan, she looks distinctly West African. Even when she tells people shes Nigerian many times they expect her to speak Kinyarwanda, it goes along with misunderstandings about the outside world. I guess I hadn’t thought about it before, what being an African American PCV in Africa would be like, but now that I see it its exactly what you would expect. They are asking more of her than they are of us, because they can’t quite find the distinction. By being American she still gets some of the passes   that we get on not always knowing the culture, but outside of her village especially, she is constantly mistaken for a Rwandan and thus subject to a lot of things people would generally let slide for us more obvious Muzungus. 

Charity Work

arity Work

I spent most of last week in Kigali helping an internation NGO run an event there. I am not going to mention the name of this organization because this post is about to get slightly negative. Lets just say they help children with cleft lips and pallets. The organization needed PCVs help in the first place because they’ve suffered – as almost all institutions have – budget cuts in recent years and were attempted to stage this event at a lower cost. PCVs, since we can’t accept money from any outside sources, are free. Also, we’re already here, already the kind of people who volunteer and speak the language, it makes perfect sense and many of us were happy to be of service. The trouble became clear when we got their and realized that we were not helping so much as we were running large parts of the event. While the actual surgeries were taking place at the hospital pre and post opp patients were located several miles away at a church where they were staying for the week. This is where  PCVs were . We had been told we would simply need to serve food, play with children, keep calm, and occasionally trouble shoot. This quickly proved false. I was at the church for four days and in that time never once met a representative of the organization we were helping. Here is a list of the absurdities of that week:

-When volunteers arrived there were no trashcans, no soap, no bowls/plates, no jerrycans etc for the people staying at the church to use and it took hours to get the organization to buy and provide them.

-We are not translators, we do not know complicated medical terminology and yet we found ourselves trying to explain these things.

-The post-op handbooks people were given which were meant to tell them the dos and donts post-op were written in French, English and Afrikaans – the language of South Africa not Rwanda – and this organization didn’t know it was the wrong language until we told them.

-Food was sent for post-op patients that they were not allowed to eat post-op and no replacement was sent forcing people to decide to go hungry or risk damage.

-Medicine was left which we were asked to distribute and the organzation got increasingly angry at our refusal to do so. It is strictly against PC policy to distribute meds and we could lose our jobs for it. No one was ever sent to hand out the medicine.

-There was often not enough food for the people present and no extra food to be procured.

-The one day organization representatives did come most of them women were dressed in a way that was very culturally insensitive and we made it very clear that these were not our colleagues – PCVs know how to dress.

Essentially we spent several days trying to manage people who sick, bleeding, unhappy, and scared with our limited Kinyarwanda skills and our hands badly tied by our jobs limitations – we literally can’t even hand out Tylenol .I agree fully with PCs policy of not allowing us to give out meds or provide care, the frustrating part of the situation was the fact that the other organization never sent a representative to carry out those functions after we explained we could not. And thus we were forced to watch people in pain suffer despite the fact that we had a box of pain meds on hand. The whole thing was a startling look how badly the best intentions can fail. NGOs not researching the country in which they are working and stubbornly sticking to their original course of action even after its proven flawed. I think it should be said that if an aid organization has limited funds it would be better to delay a project than to do it shoddily. Were this event to take place in America many of the things that went on would amount to no less than criminal negligence. Were anyone to have gotten hurt under our supervision they could have been sued. But this is not America, this is Africa, and the fact that different standards were adopted because of that makes me sick. So I have to research who you give your money, hope they are doing the job right, and don’t give to organizations who cut corners. I expect better from American organizations than what I saw here.

At the end of the day I just have to keep reminding myself that over a hundred people, mainly kids, got a surgery that changed their lives and that is the ultimate good. I met some amazing children and parents who were truly overjoyed at their luck from receiving these surgeries. Since my Kinyarwanda is on the low end of PCVs I spent my time entertaining the children and talking with their mothers which was a truly amazing experience.

As an addendum to this post, after this charity’s program was properly wrapped up they did contact PC senior staff to thank them for PCV’s involvement and state that they could  not have been successful without us. Also PC staff was very responsive to our requests that PCVs not participate in next years event unless the organization agrees to have PCVs involved in initial planning meetings to ensure that things run more smoothly. Progress. Buhoro Buhoro

The Trash Can Chronicles

There is a pretty standard practice – it seems – across Rwanda of people rummaging through volunteers trash. Partially its because we are just so damned interesting, but also because we have trash that they may not. I don’t really know. Sometimes it is incredibly frustrating. Students rip apart my trash, take what they want and then leave the rest scattered across my yard for me to pick up later. Other times they simply use it against me, “we know you have chocolate teacher. Give us some” To which I always ask how they know and since they can’t admit they’ve rummaged through my trash I never admit to having the chocolate. Here are some of the better instances of trash rummaging from myself and other volunteers.

-       The plumbing in my house isn’t good enough  to flash feminine products so I wrap them up in TP and put them into a stapled bag in my trash. Naturally anything wrapped up this nicely must be important and so someone ripped it open and spread dirty tampons all over my yard. I threw most of them back away but not before the crows incorporated a few into their nests.

-       When I cut off six inches of my hair and threw it away I found the children who live behind me playing with it the next day, pretending it was mustaches and/or their own hair. Also the crows made that into their nests.

-       Another volunteer found a child with her plastic tampon applicator trying to use it as a whistle.

-       Another volunteer who uses the Peace Corps issues birth control, which comes in those standard circular plastic containers that snap shit, told me that a growing number of women in her village use them as change purses.

-       One volunteer had their compost heap stolen.

-       One volunteer has reverted to sneaking onto her campus at night to throw her trash down their latrines to avoid this problem.

It’s a sad day when I say I miss pit latrines – I currently have a regular flush toilet which I like despite its other flaws – but I have to say, having the ability to toss my trash down a pit where it would be irretrievable would really make my life so much easier. Other people have pits where they burn their trash, but because I live on the school grounds they prefer me not to do this and instead I have a trashcan outside my door that the schools workers take away and burn, making it very accessible to the students.Its a weird, weird world we live.