Celebrity

Think of your favorite celebrity. That one you obsess about and wish you knew in real life. Do you have one in mind? Good. Now get excited. They are moving to your town. What do you do? Stalk them? Try to be their friend? Note their every move and talk about it constantly?
Surprise! You are that celebrity in a small village in Africa. This was  a cross-cultural exercise we did during training and its very accurate. As the only white person in our respective communities (for the most part) we are constant focuses of attention. Everything we do is talked about. People start rumors about us, and about the people who associate with us frequently. People try to do us favors to get in our good graces. Or steal insignificant things just to have something that belonged to us. And everyone, everyone wants a picture with you. Even if its on your camera and they will never see it.
This constant attention gives us a real platform to enact change or to enrage locals. In a  culture far removed from our own the line between Paris Hilton and Princess Diana is thinner than you might think. Plus, just because she was Princess Di, doesn't mean the tabloids didn't try to come up with all the dirt they could. And when they couldn't they lied.
* Just though this was a short peak into my life. :) *

The Perks of Being Muzungu

Despite all the obvious downsides of being so clearly different in this country today I’ve decided to look at the positives. So here they are:

-       Regardless of how many other people are on a twege (bus taxi) they will always either squish or remove another passenger to accommodate you. – Ya I know that sounds kind of awful but I treat it as my Karma for all of the bad things.

-       Women will always let you hold, carry, play with their cute babies. Even if it is just because they want to laugh at the image of a Muzungu holding their baby.

-       There are no lines in Rwanda, especially in stores or the markets, people essentially walk up to the counter as they see fit and any one who knows  the owner gets a free pass to the front of the line, which can only be trumped by the Muzungu card. Since as an American I am very used to lines and order I don’t feel all that bad about cutting to the front of the chaos.

-       All children want to play with you, all the time. Which is awesome when you are in the mood to play. 

Budget

This might not be the most exciting post but I thought I’d fill everyone in a little bit on my financials because I get a lot of questions about it. Currently during training we don’t make a full salary because our home stay families provide us with most meals. This means we get a “walk around” allowance of 37,000 RWF every 2 weeks or 74,000RWF a month. The exchange rate is 1 USD to 600 RWF so we are making roughly 120 American Dollars a month. Not exactly a 6 figure salary but as you can imagine we are still very highly paid compared to locals. Here are some of the local prices so you can guage how much money that really is:

Bunch of onions – 100RWF

3 Small green peppers  - 200RWF

Sambusa – 100RWF

Lunch – 800 – 1000RWF

Bottle of water - 300 RWF

Soda – 250 RWF

Beer – 600-900RWF

Amandazi (Rwandan Donut) – 100RWF

Phone minutes – are bought in 250RWF chunks and a call costs 30/minute

Internet minutes are the same as phone

Avocado – 50 RWF

Loaf of bread – 300 RWF

Small tub of Margerine – 900RWF

Eggs – 100RWF each

Igitenge (clothe) – 3000RWF a panel ( a dress takes 2 panels)

Twege to the market – 300 RWF

These are the types of things I buy most often but there are obviously other expenses that come into our lives. Once we get to sight I will be buying a lot more groceries and furniture etc on my own. But by no means am I broke or starving for all of those who are worried.

On Teaching

Despite the fact that several currently serving PCVs have come to talk to us during training about exactly what teaching in a Rwandan school would be like, these first two weeks have still been a struggle. 

-       Children do not raise their hands to get the teacher’s attention in Rwandan classrooms. Instead they snap their fingers in the air a call “Please Teacher! Please Teacher!” (Its incredibly annoying)

-       All Rwandan teachers organize their chalkboards in the same 3 section manner, meaning that students do not know how to take notes independently. If you do not use that method they will write nothing in their notebooks.

-       Critical thinking exercises are almost impossible. Students here have never been asked to creatively apply grammar rules so when you ask them to there is generally ten minutes of confusion.

-       During my lesson this week 5 birds. Like live birds. Flew into my classroom and circled above all of our heads for the entire lesson. None of the children were shocked in the least.

Since a lot of our purpose here is to teach critical thinking skills and practical English usage – such as speaking out loud – we will run into these problems continually. Many of the creative learning techniques so common in the USA are completely unheard of here and thus many of the students, headmaster, and other teachers we work with will continually be questioning our methods. Hopefully, test results and other outcomes will be enough to convince people of their merit over these two years. Many of the volunteers we have spoken seem to have made progress so there is hope!

Market

I realized my language skills truly have progressed when I was at the Market this weekend. Suzie and  I were buying quite a lot of food so that we could cook an American meal for our families. I hadn’t been to the market in a while but its incredibly how different a grasp of the language can make things. Only one particularly grouchy vendor tried to rip us off and we were able to talk her down. For the most part the opposite happened, once a vendor realized we were Americans who could speak Kinyarwanda and we explained we were Peace Corps volunteers there was a tendency to under charge us. I paid 100 RWF for a bundle of 5 small white onions (the standard price) and the sales woman gave me a second one for free and thanked us. We are planning to cook breakfast for dinner because we don’t want to rock the boat too hard. Rwandans are notoriously stubborn and literally any change is usually unwelcome. Granted there are a limited number of foods available here but instead of getting creative people choose to cook them in the same 10 combinations over and over again. For example I made guacamole for my family once and they had to be begged to even try it, despite the fact that they mash avocados into their rice all the time. So we are making scrambled eggs with vegetables in them, French toast and hashbrowns. This shouldn’t scare them too much since omelets are a standard here as are French fries  but I’m still anticipating that they will be highly disappointed. Wish us luck!

Budget

This might not be the most exciting post but I thought I’d fill everyone in a little bit on my financials because I get a lot of questions about it. Currently during training we don’t make a full salary because our home stay families provide us with most meals. This means we get a “walk around” allowance of 37,000 RWF every 2 weeks or 74,000RWF a month. The exchange rate is 1 USD to 600 RWF so we are making roughly 120 American Dollars a month. Not exactly a 6 figure salary but as you can imagine we are still very highly paid compared to locals. Here are some of the local prices so you can guage how much money that really is:

Bunch of onions – 100RWF

3 Small green peppers  - 200RWF

Sambusa – 100RWF

Lunch – 800 – 1000RWF

Bottle of water - 300 RWF

Soda – 250 RWF

Beer – 600-900RWF

Amandazi (Rwandan Donut) – 100RWF

Phone minutes – are bought in 250RWF chunks and a call costs 30/minute

Internet minutes are the same as phone

Avocado – 50 RWF

Loaf of bread – 300 RWF

Small tub of Margerine – 900RWF

Eggs – 100RWF each

Igitenge (clothe) – 3000RWF a panel ( a dress takes 2 panels)

Twege to the market – 300 RWF

These are the types of things I buy most often but there are obviously other expenses that come into our lives. Once we get to sight I will be buying a lot more groceries and furniture etc on my own. But by no means am I broke or starving for all of those who are worried. 

Halloween

Due to our limited freetime and the constraints of having to be home after 6pm, we celebrated Halloween last night. Better late than never. It was actually pretty close to an American celebration! We had to make a special trip to Kigali to find candy because there is literally no candy out in the villages - unless you count stale juicy fruit that is clearly imported from China. We went to bar we frequent here and had beer pong, banana wine, candy and costumes! Bars are set up differently here with each group of patrons receiving their own room so it was perfect we just shut the door and were in our own small America for a few hours. Since I hadn't brought many costume materials i improvised and made cat ears out of duck tape. Several people had pretty good costumes though. We had tectonic plates, a farmer, a Kinyarwanda lesson, and a mouse. The Banana Wine that I was so excited to try is actually terrible! People usually can't drink it straight because it is so sweet, so they mix it with sprite or another soda (the same goes for the pineapple wine which is a little bit better). So now I can say I've tried it but I have no interest in trying it again. The night was otherwise uneventful but definitely a good way to blow off steam and relax because we had had an extremely stressful week before that.