Are you there God? It’s me, Caitie

This Saturday my sister was confirmed into my family’s catholic church. I’d thought it be appropriate, (maybe, probably, not really) to talk about my own faith and how it matches to Rwandan’s faith.

I first heard the phrase ‘living in a bubble’ while attending Miss Porter’s, often referred to as The Farmington Bubble. Meaning that the girls who go there live in a perfect bubble, naive and far away from the threats and reality of the real world. While that may be true, I learned more there, and grew more there, than any other place or experience I’ve had thus far. It opened my eyes to the world, and I am ninety percent sure I wouldn’t be a PCV, if it was not for MPS. But, Porter’s was not the only bubble I resided in. Rather my whole adolescence was one big bubble.

I was raised Catholic, and attended a Catholic school from Kindergarten through Eight Grade. Strangely, I took to the Catholic religion quite intently. I yelled at my parents when they took the Lords name in vain, and when we ate breakfast before mass, I informed them, on our way to mass, that we couldn’t take the body and blood of Christ. It only counts on an empty stomach (true story, look it up).

My parents are somewhat religious, but as the story goes, the public schools in my area were below par, so they put me in a Catholic school for a better education. Honestly, I’m not sure why or what made me such a devout Catholic at such a young age. Needless to say, St. Joseph’s of Vernon, Connecticut had me under their spell from ages five to thirteen.   

When I went to Porter’s after catholic school, I was thrown into a pool of diversity, unlike my town and middle school, which is anything but diverse. And one of the bubbles that shielded me from the workings of the world burst.

I began to meet girls from all different backgrounds and religions, and started to learn about their beliefs. One of my first encounters was with Judaism. There are many aspects and beliefs to Judaism but the one thing my fourteen-year-old mind clung too was their ideas about the Messiah. In Judaism the Messiah (or their version of Jesus) has not come yet, but will come and bring peace and unity to humanity. For my entire life I’d been learning about Jesus and how great he was. I had no idea there were millions of people in the world believing he has not come yet. MIND BLOWN. I remember thinking, “well, I guess anything is really possible.” These encounters unleashed a can of worms that changed me and challenged me.

Coincidently, around the same time, I was forced into confirmation classes. The timing was unfortunate for my confirmation teacher, as I was being taught to question everything in high school. And question EVERYTHING I did. After two classes the confirmation teacher knew better than to answer my questions when I raised my hand, avoiding the ongoing debate I would unintentionally create about religion, and Catholicism in particularly.

Since then I’ve been on a never-ending search for a religion, and search for a reason to keep my own. Ninety eight percent of the world believes in a higher power, and as time goes on I can’t imagine that there isn’t one. I find myself enjoying the time spend in churches; I frequently visited them in New York. But if it is not Christmas or Easter, I have a hard time going to mass, and even more difficult time sitting through one.

Recently I was listening to an NPR radio show, This American Life. Dan Savage told a beautiful story about the death of his mother, and his grapples with Catholicism. As I listened I was stunned. I felt like Dan Savage had somehow jumped into my brain, decoded my thoughts on being catholic, and reinterpreted them into a beautifully said argument on why it is hard to keep faith.

 He is more cynical about Catholicism, and ideas of Heaven, he errs on the side of atheism more than I do. But some of what he had to say, I swear, were my thoughts exactly.

“But when I am tempted [speaking about returning to Catholicism], when I feel like maybe I could go through the motions, return to the sacrament, take what comfort I can, the Pope goes to Africa and says that condoms spread AIDS [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/17/pope-africa-condoms-aids]. Or an arch bishop in Brazil excommunicates a catholic woman for getting her nine year old daughter an abortion, but not the catholic man that raped the girl. Or I contemplate how the church views me, and the two people I love most in this world, my boyfriend of fourteen years and our loving eleven year old son. And I can’t even fake this…. Being brought up in a faith built around a guy jumping out of his tomb makes it difficult to reconcile oneself to the permanence of death. Who knew the afterlife, its cruel really when you think about it, criminal, telling children that the people they love don’t die, that there is some other place, some better place…maybe that lie is a comfort to some but it’s made death more painful for me…I visit St. James, like an addict drops by a drug dealers house, for a quick fix, to detonate the pain by losing myself momentarily in the fantasy that she lives. There is an inscription on the ceiling of St. James: “I am in your midst”.  If I were the kind of person who could believe I would believe, but I’m not that kind of person…."Dan Savage, This American Life, Episode 379: Return to the Scene of the Crime, May 1, 2009 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/379/return-to-the-scene-of-the-crime

This American Life: every week they pick a theme, and bring you stories on that theme. That week’s theme was Return to the Scene of the Crime. Dan Savage’s story is the last act titled Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow, if you are interested in hearing the full story.

Joining the Peace Corps I was utterly aware that my feelings about faith and my host country’s opinions on faith were probably not going to match. But, ironically, I find it hard not to attend mass here. First, it is important to know that over seventy percent of Rwanda is Christian and the rest are Muslim. As a culture they are very serious about religion.

Fear of losing my identity, opinions, and self, I attempted to tell my Rwandan neighbors my true, slightly watered down, feelings on religion. The result was: “I pray in my house.” To which they reply: “that is not possible, you must go to church to see God.” Hmmm, how interesting. In Catholic school they told us God is everywhere. The Catholic Rwandans do not feel the same.

I also try things like: whether you are a good person, or a bad person is not determined by whether or not you go to church every Sunday. But that one is harder to translate, and is usually glazed over by the disbelief that I pray in my house.    

Church is about six hours long. And it kills me. The first three to four hours I don’t mind so much. There is singing and dancing, and it truly is beautiful. But then we read the bible for three hours, and I feel myself starting to go a bit more insane with each passing scripture. You know that part in church where someone gets up and reads a passage from the bible, and then the Priest gives a sermon? We do that times twelve. I’m almost positive I’ve read the whole thing by now. And the passages never seem to relate to each other. We go from Genesis, to Exodus, to John, to Revelations, to Corinthians. And this part I understand because, for some reason, there is always someone with an English Bible waiting for me when I get to church.

 There is no formal taking of the body and blood of Christ. We do it spiritually and mentally because there is a food and water crisis here. Any extra food is used for the malnourished babies, and Rwandans don’t mind taking it spiritually.  

The real kicker comes at the very end when they confess their sins. Confession is the opposite of the catholic confession I’m accustomed to in America. You know, where there are two little rooms on the side of the church. One room the Priest sits in, the other has a small pew for you to confess your sins. They are enclosed and connected by a joining wall, and there is a screen so the priest can hear you, and you can hear the priest, but you can’t see each other. You also have the option of going into the small room and sitting with the priest, which I always preferred because the other small room is dark with no light and far to scary to sit in by myself. But the Rwandan version of confession involves going up in front of the entire church, and confessing their sins. They close their confession by saying what you are thankful for. And praise God. I usually don’t understand the majority of the confessions. But when I do understand, boy do I hear some crazy things. I can’t help but think how humiliating this must be for them. And as a person of the parish you are required to sit and listen to the confessions. This can take anywhere from thirty minutes to five hours.

While I am not sure if I like American Christianity or Rwandan Christianity better, the one thing they have on us is women can be priests. They honest to God, call me a liar when I say in American Catholic churches women cannot be priests. The follow up question is why. My follow up response, I have no clue.

I grapple with religion, Catholicism, and Christianity, but in the two months and three weeks I’ve lived here I skipped church three times. This is unlike myself who, in America, would only attend on Christmas and Easter. I try not to skip it, even though I loathe it, and have developed a love-hate relationship with Sundays. Six-hour church means no lazy Sunday for me. But like I said above, I have a hard time not attending. It is a community wide thing. I feel like I am missing something when I see the entire community gravitating to the church on Sundays. And when I do skip I have the community in my backyard asking questions about why I did not attend today. When I go, they are so happy to see me that it is almost worth it. 

Little Victories

I tend to think in movies most of the time. I’ve watched too many for a lifetime, and there is one movie

line that has been looping in my head since I arrived.

The line is from Blood Diamond (if you haven’t seen it you should) where Leonardo DiCapiro who plays, Danny Archer, meets Maddy Bowen, played by Jennifer Connelly. Archer is trying to figure out who Maddy Bowen is, and why an American is in Sierra Leon. He rattles off a list of reasons why she would be in a West African country during a civil war. Eventually he questions if she is Peace Corps, and says the line:

“Peace Corps types only stay long enough to realize they aren’t helping anyone.” Ruling out that she is not part of Peace Corps.  

I would’ve thought that was an overly harsh statement before joining. While the experiences are not comparable, the line still runs on loop in my mind due to several circumstances.

The major circumstance at the moment, how do I put this correctly? Rwandan culture is, well, I can’t think of another word other than slow. Everything happens at a pace that it is half the speed of America if not slower than that. It is common for an important meeting to start an hour or two later than planned, or for important things to get pushed till tomorrow. The saying “don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today,” would be laughed at. Likewise, my coworkers would respond with: “why not put it off till tomorrow?” or “be patient” the most common saying in Rwanda.

It tends to be extremely hot in the afternoons at the H.C. (health center). So usually the health center is dead after twelve with nothing to do. I often bust out Uno to make the hours pass faster, and to create bonding time with my coworkers.

Uno is the best icebreaker I found during the integration process. It’s easy enough to explain without any language skills, you can use visuals to explain the object of the game, and Rwandans love it.

So it is a typical weekday afternoon, I am playing UNO with my coworkers and someone comes into the H.C. profusely bleeding. I’m thinking farming accident. The nurses see the bleeding person and say, “let’s finish this game first.” The person waits patiently. I freak out, tell my coworkers they need to do their job, and it’s more important than Uno. Then they have a discussion on why the American is freaking out. This is a typical workday, and the epitome of Rwandan culture. Furthermore the person didn’t complain, just sat quietly and waited.  Didn’t seem to mind.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I am a fan of the culture, but they could speed it up a tad. 

I have my worries and frustrations about accomplishing anything due to the utter slow speed Rwandans tend to move. And that line from Blood Diamond, does not help. So when I accomplish anything I take a sigh of relief, as I am constantly battling the response of “tomorrow, we will do it tomorrow.”

Two weeks ago, I hit my two-month mark, and In-Service Training is now only three weeks away. So far, I have two concrete things to show for my two-month mark.

Last week the Ikibaho (e-chi-ba-hoe) or blackboard was finally finished. Since the moment I arrived the community has been begging me to teach them English. I’m excited to teach English classes, but have been putting it off because I want to learn more Kinyarwanda first.

 I’m often envious of the Education volunteers. Peace Corps: Rwanda has two volunteer programs: Health and Education. I’m a health volunteer. Education volunteers have a concrete schedule, lesson plans, and work at a school. How fun! I think to myself whenever I hear about what they’re doing. And I often wonder why I was placed in a Health Center. What part of my resume made you think I’d be good at this, PC Washington? 

I’m sure that the grass is always greener phrase applies here, and Education Volunteers don’t have it as easy as I make it sound. But I came into this experience wanting to teach, and teach I will. After weeks and weeks, about a month actually, of asking when this was happening. I stumbled upon three men making an ikibaho (black board) one Saturday morning.

I’m excited to start teaching English, but my hope for this blackboard goes much farther than English classes. I want to create a Healthy Living Education Program, teaching the community about good hygiene and health. Everyday malnutrition becomes more apparent and necessary here, so I want to implement a Nutrition class as well.

My second small victory is a survey I made a while ago. I wanted to know where the problem areas and areas of improvement were in the eyes of the H.C. staff. I also wanted to know what they wanted from me. Like I said above, unlike Education Volunteers, Health Volunteers don’t have a set schedule or lesson plans.

At the end of August, I created a survey for my coworkers to fill out. I explained that I could conduct interviews with them, and they are always welcome to talk to me directly, but I usually don’t understand the response. A written form is always nice, and I tend to understand languages better written then spoken.  

The survey had questions like:

What are your expectations for me?

How can I help you?

What do you want to see improved?

Name the three biggest problems of the community?

Name five projects we can do in the community to better the health of villagers?

And so on, and so forth. I handed the survey out August 24, 2012, asked for it back by September 14, 2012, fully knowing that wasn’t going to happen. And by September 27, 2012 I had full 100% participation of surveys received.

While some of my Coworkers wrote things like: I want you to get me a car, or I want you to get us more American friends. The majority of the surveys provided great information, and gave me a good starting point.

The results:

1. Food security. Way way too many malnourished people in one small area.

2. A better way to distribute A.R.V.’s (Anti-retroviral drugs).

3. A way to prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading, and becoming a bigger problem than it already is.

Thanks Coworkers. And to think, they have no idea that their information is being shared from across the world.   

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