Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The End of Training


Today is the last day of training, the last day of 3 grueling months of 10 hour work days filled with teaching, language, teaching theory, medical, safety training and a lot of paperwork. There were tears, there were laughs, there was diarrhea. Friendships were formed that will get us through these two years and last us a lifetime. Training was boot camp, it was a test of our wills and our minds and our patience. It was a way to ensure that we liked and could live in the Rwandan culture. It was a crash course in evasive answers, handling awkward silences, sign language, passive aggressiveness and drinking more chai than any human being could ever need. We did our best to become Rwandans here. We learned to wash our clothes in a bucket, to tuck a mosquito net, to skip work when it rains, to cook over open flames, to avoid the umusazis, to sweep with a bundle of sticks and keep our minds occupied during endless tedious Rwandan meetings. Training was an introduction to the absurdities and inefficiencies of the Rwandan system (and for that matter lifestyle) which we will have to endure for the next two years. It was a lesson in patience and acceptance; BIR.
The next step will be scary, this weekend we move-in to our permanent sites, and finally officially we will be Peace Corps Volunteers. Alone. In Africa. We’ve got all the preparation we could need, or handle for that matter. Despite how nice it would be to stay with each other in our Muzungu caccoon, we are ready to emerge as butterflys. Quite frankly,  we are pretty sick of training, and Kamonyi. Its time to sink or swim. We can speak the language, or at least we can shop in the market, comment on the weather, cry for help, and describe why we are here. You know, the essentials.
Although having control of our schedules and diets will be phenomenol there are downsides as well. I am looking forward to cooking my own food, showering at night (with hot water!), not eating if I don’t feel like it, sleeping to a reasonable hour, locking myself in my house and not talking to any Rwandans on those days when you just don’t wanna be here, getting started on the several hundred books I’ve acquired on my kindle, and finally establishing a routine again. But there will be challenges too. I have to find new children to play with, new people who won’t gawk at the Muzungu, a new place to buy food and clothes and chai. I’ll need to set up a whole house, buying all the furniture and other things necessary to make a house a home, in Kinyarwanda  in a country without supermarkets and transport them back to my site either through a 30 min moto ride or a 2 hour walk. But on the upside there will be electricity and running water! And lesson plans to write. Hopefully I’ll be so busy that by the time I’m finished three months will have passed and my no travel ban will have lifted.
All the preparations are done, we have the skills, we have the means, we have the determination, the only the thing left is to do the damn thing. It’s time to get out there and see if we can hack it. There’s nothing left to say. The fat lady has sung. We are swearing in on Thursday in front of the United States Ambassador to Rwandan on Rwandan national television. And then we’re finally, officially, and theoretically on our own. Except that we’re not. We’ve formed a family to get us through this crazy thing we all came here to do, and this will be the first big test of that. So we’re loading up on the phone minutes and shipping out. Wish us luck! 

1 comment:

  1. Good Luck! God, after all these posts, I feel like I know you! This is fantastic!

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