Swear In

So it finally happened, after three long months of training we became Peace Corps Volunteers in a beautiful ceremony at the American Ambassador’s house in Kigali. It was ironic, to say the least, that the whole thing happened in a little slice of America. The Ambassador’s home is a  towering gated mansion in the nicest part of Kigali. When you get past the security screening, you are confronted with a home that somehow looks both like it could belong in the hills of northern California or a more mountainous Midwestern locale. Of course, we were not actually allowed in the house other than to use the spacious bathroom – which we took full advantage of – but it looked nice. We were especially intrigued by the Christmas tree we could see through the bay windows.

            The ceremony, being coordination for and by Americans, was much shorter than most Rwandan affairs. There were speeches from our director, the minister of education, ourselves and the ambassador himself. The whole thing took place under a white tent on the sprawling lawns of the home. I could imagine swanky affairs, ala The Great Gatsby, happening on the lawn as it was lined with huge flower bushes and studded every few feet with white lampposts which wouldn’t be out of place in either Charleston or Disney land.

            Finally the moment came to take our official oath, lead by the Ambassador. We take the same oath sworn by all state employees and thus it is not all that interesting or Peace Corps specific. I can post a full copy of it later but essentially we pledge to, ‘uphold the constitution,’ ‘defend it and America,’ and to always be loyal. There are some big words in there, however, and at some point we definitely all got lost. There was an awkward moment when the Ambassador clearly read off more than we could repeat and the group got lost, dissolving into giggles and awkward mumbling until we could compose ourselves and begin again. I think that next time trainees will be provided cards to read off of.

            Then it was done. In the same slipshod fashion that we spent most of our training, mumbling and bumbling and laughing our way through it so, also, we became volunteers. Yes, we embarrassed ourselves on national television (granted Rwandan television so who really sees that?) but really it was the perfect ending to our particular experience.

            After all the hugging was over we volunteers were released to the lawn to take some press photos for the newspapers and offered drinks and American style appetizers. The Rwandan food went untouched as pizza, chocolate chip cookies, veggie dip, lays potato chips and meatballs disappeared from the premise. Sorry to any of the higher ranking officials we didn’t get as much food but really, I don’t feel that bad, they can afford to pay for it and they live in Kigali.

            Precisely 45 minutes after we became volunteers the Ambassador left his home and the catering staff magically disappeared all lose plates. It was our cue to leave. Apparently, the ambassador doesn’t like to ask his guests to leave so this is how most functions at his home come to a conclusion. We were driven back to the Peace Corps hostel and set free on the city. After buying a few necessary kitchen items that were easier to find in Kigali, the celebrations began. Nothing too crazy really went down, we had some beers and food and talked about how crazy it was to be done. Then came back to the hostel and bonded some more before everyone passed out from exhaustion and relief. 

Swearing In

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! 

The Second Imbeba Saga

The Second Imbeba Saga

Last night I came home and was sitting in my bed watching “Anchor Man” when I noticed a strange object chilling in the bed with my. As you can imagine it is difficult to see things by Kerosene lamp alone so I had to get rather close to the mysterious object to determine what it was. To my horror, I realized upon further inspection that it was a bone. Yes a bone. Not a large one but not a tiny one either. Naturally, I was horrified and after my initial first 5 minutes of silently shuttering and screaming (so as not to alert my host family because quite honestly their involvement would have made the whole thing 100% more stressful), I calmed down and tried to reason out why there would be a bone in my bed and what exactly I should do about it. I don’t know a lot about bones but it is  my generally understanding that they do not move of their own accord, so I decided something had to have put it there. My first assumption was obviously that my host family was messing with me, but once my paranoia subsided I remembered that I had all three keys to the door and that was not possible. Assumption number was that one of the mice who live in my ceiling (yes there are mice that live in my ceiling it is not the best of situations) had died and its bone had fallen out into my bed. However, after intensive inspection I realized there were no holes in my ceiling and that the bone was too large to be a mouse or a rat’s bone. Finally, I settled on the fact that a mouse had taken the bone and brought it into my bed to nest – after taking a text survey of other volunteers I was told mice do this – gross. I know. After ripping apart my room to make sure there wasn’t a snake because even though everyone told me it was not possible I was partially convinced a snake had eaten a mouse in my room and left a bone. (turns out that is not how snakes consume mice but whatever).

            After taking some sleeping pills so I could convince myself to actually crawl into my bed and throwing the bone in my trash box, I finally crawled into bed. Problem solved. Nope. Not quite.

            I came home the next day to find the bone IN THE SAME EXACT PLACE IN MY BED. Naturally the paranoia that someone was messing with me resurfaced but soon I calmed down and realized that the mouse had crawled into my trash box, rescued its toy and placed it back in my bed. Feeling a little bit like a crazy person at this point, I built a trap to stop the mouse from getting back in to my room, put the bone in a ziplock bag and taped it to my wall so that I would know without a shadow of a doubt if it moved again. Yea, this is the type of thing I revert to in this country. In the morning I woke up to realize that the bag had fallen off the wall and the mouse had chewed a hole in the bag and stolen the bone and it was nowhere to be found. This was getting ridiculous. (Also yes I realize that the real solution to all of this was to throw away the bone, but I had no other way to track if the mouse was still in my room.)

            When I returned from class that day the bone was on top of my pile of clothes because I had made a barracade to keep the mouse off my bed. This was the last straw and promptly threw the bone out the window. Moments later I heard scuttling behind my trunk and when I went to investigate came face to face with the culprit himself. IT was one of those rare nights where I get to have a beer in this country so I was in a charitable mood and decided to level with the mouse. The conversation (yes I said this outloud) went something like this:

Me: Game over buddy. The bone is gone. I really don’t wanna have to catch you, I know you came in right there. If you leave peacefully no one will get hurt.

The mouse stared at me for a second and then seemed to think this was a reasonable offer because he scampered right out the hole in my door.

*This was the most exciting and dramatic interaction of my week. A battle of wills with a creature whose brain is the size of a pea. Riddiculous. But in the end I was victorious so I guess it could have been a lot worse. 

AIDs Training Day

Yesterday we had a whole day seminar about AIDs prevention and education in Rwanda. As with most things that Peace Corps does the whole event felt a lot like a bad convention. We spent an hour writing our goals for the seminar and presenting them to each other and then deciding at what later event we would actually discuss them. Additionally, 10 local children were present to learn about AIDs as well, despite the fact that the level of English all day was well above their level. I am told that they were required to be there because the event was funded by PEPFAR money (the President’s Emergency Action Plan for AIDs Relief). After we wasted another hour introducing all 50 Peace Corps trainees and staff in the room to the ten students who would never remember all our names the educational portion of the day finally started – after a 20 minute break that is.

            A Rwandan doctor from a local AIDs clinic gave a typical Rwandan speech on that matter – and by typical I mean exceedingly long. And tedious. However, he did do a good job of breaking down the topic into English simple enough for the students to understand. But as always, most of the benefit was lost because he chose to focus on completely useless and obscure details of the disease instead of useful preventative or treatment measures.

            Sometimes its incredibly difficult to sit through sessions led by Rwandan locals because I feel like nothing is accomplished. So much time is spent in the formalities of hierarchy that a lot of time simply goes to waste. After which the person speaking usually is ill-prepared or chooses to talk about things which are related but not exactly relevant to the discussion. For example, the AIDs day speaker had a long list of acronyms used in relation to AIDs and HIV which he spent an hour systematically going through and explaining instead of talking about how the disease actually functioned.

            The day finally got productive when 8 volunteers led short sessions on the transmission, cycle, stigma, and myths concerning AIDS and HIV. Although the students were clearly uncomfortable participating in the discussions while 50 or so foreigners looked on, I hope they took something useful away from the lessons. There was one amusing moment when were talking about what is the difference between a good and bad relationships and someone said a good relationship is one which “smells good.” Senses are often confusing to Rwandans because the verb “Kumva” means to smell, to listen, to feel, to hear, to look, and to pay attention. Thus when converting to English there is often confusion about which sense to choose.

Pizza in Kamonyi, aka the Meanest Trick Anyone has Ever Played on Me

Anyone who knows me understands my obsession with pizza. I could eat it all day everyday and not get bored. Ask the fellow inhabitants of 319 Euclid how much pizza I would consume if left to my own devices. There was delivery, there was Dijorno, there was flatbread pizza and pizza bagels and even the occasional spaghetti pizza (where I poured cheese and pepperoni over spaghetti so it would taste more like pizza) and on days where I needed a change, there were calzones. I don’t pretend this behavior is normal or healthy but I’m just saying that adding tomato sauce and cheese to ANYTHING makes it better; eggs, bread, crackers, salad, soup, anything. This background is needed to understand the seriousness of the situation presented below.

Since we have come to town there have been some definite adjustments to what the shops and restaurants carry in an attempt to attract the Muzungu’s business. We take our lunch at one of two local restaurants most days which caused some of the other local businesses to change their menus to get in on the action. The most recent example was a shop in Mu mujyi (town center) near our center starting to make crepes. Obviously Crepe lady immediately became our new best friend because crepes are awesome and anything new and different is immediately better.  On Sunday we went into crepe lady’s and she greeted us with some amazing news, on Monday she would start making pizza. Now we should have been skeptical but the news was so good we just couldn’t resist getting excited. After hugging her profusely we promised that we would all be back Monday for some pizza.  Chipati, similar to Indian Naan, is a staple here in Rwanda and crepe lady sells that also so our logical assumption was that she was going to put sauce and cheese on that and cook it. Which would have been fine, and quite frankly absolutely amazing.

            Come Monday 20 trainees crammed into the small back room of the crepe shop and waited the typical 45 minutes of trying to accomplish anything in Rwanda (despite the fact that we had told her what time we would be there and that we only get an hour for lunch). After much anticipation the pizzas came out and the dissapointment set in. The pizzas were about the size of bagel bites and cost 300 RWFs each (yes I know that 300 francs is 50 cents American but it’s a lot out of our budget to waste). Once they were consumed the pizzas did , in fact, taste vaguely reminiscent of the type of pizza you would find at  a 711 somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike. One volunteer put it perfectly, “If I was drunk this would taste like Pizza.”

            Reasonably, I should have been prepared for this outcome, but I will never forgive crepe lady for getting my hopes up and certainly will not be frequenting her shop again. Even in Kigali what they sell at the best pizza restaurants is a sad and overly healthy imitation of my favorite food. There is never enough sauce (and I say that about American pizza sometimes so you can imagine the sauce is really lacking), the pies are small, and the bills are large. So I have to decided to forgo any further attempts to find a substitute here for my beloved pizza. Until I get to site and decide to attempt to make it myself, which lets face it will still probably be disappointing, I’ll just have to live without. Mark your calendars friends, family, and Papa Johns alike when I return to America all bets are off I will be pizza crazed and picky. 

Care Packages

This post is to say a GIANT thank you to everyone who spent the time, effort and money to send me a care package. Honestly, I’m not sure how I will ever convey the level of gratitude that I and the other trainees feel for them. Additionally, a thank you should go out to my parents for teaching me good sharing skills because the PCTs definitely benefit highly from my packages.  All five of the packages that were mailed to me were received on the same day (a product of the postal system here) the night before Thanksgiving. The oreos and pretzels sent by the lovely people of Travelers Insurance were immediately put up for grabs and just as immediately devoured. The nerf football also made Thanksgiving that much better as we were able to have a touch football game (in the pouring rain) and explain to our Rwandan  teachers the game of football and its significance on Thanksgiving. It is also the only football that anyone has in this country – where soccer is much more popular – so you cannot imagine how much the males of our group appreciate it! Another thanks to Mama K for the prepackaged pumpkin bread mix and canned pumpkin. It arrived literally just on time and we constructed our own oven just to cook it up for the celebration! The Rwandans loved it too which is rare for something so different from the norm!! My children – yes I call them mine they are my favorite Rwandans by far –  were overjoyed with more jump ropes to play with and there are now a dozen or so little boys with American flag colored friendship bracelets. My boss whose son has been in the hospital for quite a while was brought some of the chocolate and oreos, which I am told he appreciated. Care packages, as you can see, clearly bring an immense amount of comfort and excitement to myself and those around me. Anything from America is automatically considered epically cool and people are excited just to have access to it. But I have to say a big thank you last but not least for the food! It is beyond comforting! This week I have eaten a tuna fish sandwich! Goldfish! Salsa! And Kraft macaroni and cheese!! And I can safely say that they made my week and the week of everyone I shared with. Today after a long, rainy, and stressful day of AIDs training myself and several other trainees came back to the hub and cooked up a big pot of packaged mac and cheese from one of my packages and some brownies from someone else’s. You’ve literally never seen a bunch of happier people. It was borderline indecent. So if I haven’t expressed my gratitude enough let me do it again. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you for the food and toys. Thank you for the thoughts. Thank you for the obvious support it shows for myself and the Peace Corps’ mission at large. Thank you for making my week. Thank you for the few pounds it has helped me gain back.  It’s an incredibly comforting thing to have concrete signs of home, and love, and support, land a million miles away and realize that someone took the time and effort thinking of you. It makes hard days here easier and good days better. Thank you! And don’t worry, I am paying forward.