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Favorite things about serving in Rwanda:

The climate

Rainy season view of Kigali

Compared to many places the climate and everyday average weather is pretty good; it could be worse. Rwanda has two seasons that happen twice a year.

Rainy season (September – January, March – June): cooler, unpredictable weather.  It rains here about once a day and the length of rain varies from day to day but is usually not more than a couple hours. The roads and area become incredibly muddy; too muddy to walk on or take transport in and out of the village.

Dry season (January – March, June – September): hot, dry, barren, everything dies off and becomes brown. The area becomes overwhelmingly dusty, so much so that I am usually constantly covered in a layer of dust.

Overall both seasons have their pros and cons but the weather is average, and most days you can’t complain about extreme heat, extreme cold, too much rain or too much sun.

The food; especially amatunda (passion fruit) 

You don’t have to eat anything too strange here. In fact it is quite the opposite. Rwandans usually chop, peel and cook their vegetables so much so that they lose their original flavor, texture, and nutritional value. Goat is a common and popular food here, and it is common to eat brochettes or grilled goat on a kebab.  The strangest foods I’ve encountered: goat intestines (that stuff just wouldn’t go down) and these bugs that look like worms with wings (they really do taste just like chicken). But Rwanda has wonderful fruit, avocados, pineapples, bananas, and passion fruits. The first time I ever ate a passion fruit I thought to myself: you know, I am going to be okay here as long as I have some of these in my life every day.

Women In Office

Women hold 64% of the seats in parliament. And Rwanda as a country works hard to promote gender equality. It’s a thing. “With regards to empowering women and promoting their socio economic and political participation, we continue to make modest progress. We believe that, besides improving gender relations in our country, this marks healthy progress towards realizing our vision of a united, democratic, and prosperous Rwanda.” President Paul Kagame at the 63^rd United Nations General Assembly, New York, 2008.

For more about women leadership in Africa and Rwanda click here. 
  
Imigongo

Examples of Imigongo

Or art made from cow poop. Cow dung is taken and mixed with water to form a clay like substance. Then geometric shapes are drawn out of cow dung on a gridded wooden panel. The shapes often have some form to them, and are three dimensional. The cow dung is left out to dry for three days and then the geometric forms are painted over, usually in black and white. Why do I love this so much? It only comes from one tiny area in the whole country, the south east region called Rusomo. Likewise, it was almost lost during the 1994 Genocide, but the women in this area fought to bring it back. It baffles me how one area can be so artistically creative with natural resources while other areas are void of any creativity.   

Worshiping the Cow and the Cow Dance 

PCVs dancing the traditional Cow Dance at their Swearing In Ceremony

In Rwandan culture, the cow is king. Nothing is idolized more than the cow so much so that there is a beautiful traditional dance for the cow. At our Swear In Ceremony our language teachers taught us the traditional dance and we performed it. A major part in the dance is to raise your arms up over your head and outward to mimic the horns of a cow. 

Rwandans dancing the traditional dance

Agatogo

Plantain stew. Boil plantains together with tomato paste, tomatoes, sometimes onions and green leafy vegetables. If you are wealthy or if it is a special occasion, you would add goat or cow intestines in the stew. Agatogo has an incredibly thick consistency, and makes you never want to eat again; its glue for your stomach. One bowl can fill you up for at least a day if not two, and you are not having any bowl movements during that time either. It is a delicious filler upper that makes you forget about eating for a while.  

Dressing Smart

And I don’t mean dressing smart for the weather. Dressing smart here means you look nice. If you are a woman, your knees and shoulders are mostly covered and you are wearing a nice dress, skirt, or jeans and a top. It is completely fine and normal for women to wear jeans and a nice shirt here. Dressing Smart also means that your shoes are incredibly clean, even the insides of the shoe must be clean! I have problems with this, and the levels of extreme this is taken too, but I also respect the time and attentiveness people take to make themselves look nice. There is something to be appreciated about people who value presenting the cleanest version of themselves (this is especially difficult and time consuming in a developing country) and also value each other for cleanliness.  

There is no word for please

There is no word for please, simply put you would say: Listen, I want… in a store, restaurant etc. Rwandan culture can be incredibly passive aggressive, and there is something about the non-passivity and the absence of the word please in a store or at a restaurant that makes me feel a bit more sane. It reminds me of the New York hustle and bustle, it reminds me of home.

Picking your nose            

Totally culturally appropriate. Biting your nails is very bad culture but picking your nose in public is completely fine. You can have full length conversations with people who will be digging for gold up their noses while speaking to you. And there is something about this that puts a smile on my face, especially when trying to have a serious conversation. 

Bibaho (Bee – ba – hoe)

That’s the way it goes. Bibaho translates to English as: that is the way it goes. It is my favorite saying here because nothing can trump it. After you say bibaho the conversation is finished. Also you don’t have to explain things after a bibaho either. For example, my answer to  the constant question of why I don’t go to church here. I simply say I have been a few times but it is not in my culture, and then I end it with a bibaho. Done. Finished. There is nothing another person can say after that. They will shrug, nod and walk away or change the subject. It is the perfect way of ending subject matters that can get culturally dicey and complicated. Bibaho!               

What I Do

My Nutrition Mamas after class

In July 2012 I waved goodbye to the shining white Peace Corps vehicle as it left me in my new home, a rural survivor’s village in the north east corner of Rwanda. Cyabayaga was located forty five minutes from a paved road and town via motorcycle.  The area was flat, dry, barren, dusty, and what I suspect most Americans to think of when they hear the words ‘African village’.  My concrete tin roof house was minimal, without electricity and complete with a concrete latrine and outdoor shower. The area had problems with water, but thankfully our village had it due to massive tanks installed by another PCV’s project. The tanks allowed us to fetch water in jerry cans morning, noon and night.  It was unlike the entirety of Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills; food was hard to find, the land was flat, the sun constantly on your back, and I would often break a sweat before eight am.  

I am a health volunteer and was placed at a village health center. The health center too was minimal with concrete rooms, tins roofs, and latrines, yet fairly expansive with two outdoor pavilions for waiting patients.  My assignment, to work in: maternal and child health, nutrition, hygiene, water sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. Oh boy. I lived there for over six months before I was moved for security reasons.

In February 2013 the shinny white vehicle arrived to hastily take me off to Kigali and away I went. After several touch and go meetings with Peace Corps staff it looked like Global Communities would be my new home. Global Communities is an international non-profit organization (NGO) that works closely with communities worldwide to bring about sustainable changes that improve the lives and livelihoods of the vulnerable. (That was taken from the website. http://www.globalcommunities.org/ Why reinvent the wheel when it’s right there for you.) Specifically, I work within the Ejo Heza project (http://www.globalcommunities.org/node/37053) loosely translated to “brighter future” in Kinyarwanda. Ejo Heza focuses on women’s livelihoods.

Okay, so there’s the back story and fancy jargon of the NGO community. But what do I actually do?  

Simply put, I am a nutrition and health teacher. About every third week I was going “into the field” or visiting villages and doing nutrition trainings.

 Most often, I teach the rural poor population with a Rwandan co-teacher in Kinya about nutrition. Other times, I teach nutrition and health trainers how to teach nutrition in a more effective manner. I have learned to call these things TOT (training of trainers). Other times, I am developing Ejo Heza training resources and teaching methodologies; right now we are working on finalizing a tailored cookbook for our Mamas to help them eat a balanced diet. The cookbook is aimed at meeting the needs of the mamas and uses what is available to them in the villages.

When I am not preparing for or co-facilitating a nutrition training, I am working with the Behavior Change and Communications (BCC) Officer to create the best resources to generate the most behavior change in the villages. Most PCVs work heavily in BCC no matter what they do. After all, you can build 600 hundred hand washing stations for your entire community, but if people are still not washing their hands what was the point?

There are some days that I miss village life, other days not so much. I work in the villages often, which helps with the missing-the-village part, and live in a village in Kigali (the Capital City) which is interesting and presents its own set of challenges. *Both situations have their pros and cons; some PCVs would love to be in the position I am in, while others would hate it. It is completely individual, and I’ve learned here that most things are a gamble.  

To sum up what I do is complicated and yet simple. I am a nutrition teacher, and work in BCC but PCVs generally wear many different hats doing many different things, or as we call them: secondary projects. At my former site I was developing projects, but the majority of my time there was spent figuring out how to survive daily. As dramatic as that sounds, I spent hours fetching water, finding food, and washing clothes so that I could look smart at the health center, an incredibly important cultural entity.

In this world where monitoring and evaluating is everything, I find it increasingly hard to simply sum up what me and fellow PCV colleagues do. There are labels, objectives and indicators, but the descriptions never feel right; it always feels like something is left out, missing. Maybe I took one too many abstract/modern art classes at school, or am just too much of a right –side-of-the-brain thinker. The way I see it is we are people who are just trying in many different ways and forms.   




My counterpart, Jeanne d'Arc (left), and Mama Mutoni (right) discussing kitchen gardens. Jeanne d'Arc is my strength, my backbone, my confidant.  





I'm Still Here

Every once in a while life gets in the way, and every once in a while you get in the way of yourself. In the case of this blog, both are true.

To my faithful and loyal readers: I am sorry I stopped writing for what the World Wide Web would consider to be an eternity. The past months have been the most challenging and changing of my life. Let me be clear, when I say changing I do not mean that I have been changed, although I am sure I have, but rather that change here happens often and quickly (or so it seems in respect to my service). Nothing seems to be permanent or fixed.

I have been moved from a tiny village without simple amenities like electricity and water, to the capital city of Kigali. I’ve had support systems, supervisors, counterparts, projects, and expectations come and go.

I have been terrorized by more living things than I ever could have imagined: bed bugs, fleas, bats, mice, and intestinal worms. I found two snakes in my house on separate occasions. And then later discovered one of the snakes was a black mamba. I have lived without electricity for ten months. I've been stolen from, lied to, taken advantage of, and stared at for hours that seem to turn into days. I have been treated (in a good and bad way) like a unicorn from the forbidden forest, whose blood has magical healing powers.  

I have also been instantly accepted by individuals who have received me like their own daughter. I have connected and felt connected not in a networking-for-a-job way, but in a real humanistic way. I have learned a culture, shared a culture, and had many laughs in between. I have been cared for, received, looked after, understood and loved.

I am still here with 11 months left in service, and with the determination to not only finish but accomplish a few more tall order tasks that I’ve gifted to myself. And within these tasks is the idea of maintaining this blog.

In the past 7 months I’ve seriously contemplated the point of Peace Corps blogs, and why I should revive mine. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t partly for selfish reasons. What a wonderful way to document this experience. But there are other factors, reasons, motivators for me getting back into blogging.

I’ve been hearing a lot of misinformation lately, and two things have been really getting under my skin. 1 – The single story - buying into it, trusting it, living by it. 2 – The male perspective. (The two, more often than not, go hand in hand.)  

The single story, be wary of it. We have too much faith in one story, and are too willing to accept that, take it in, and serve it up for dinner night after night. It is comfortable for us as human beings to write things off, or rather put things in a box or category and make them more logical for ourselves. And while this is comfortable, it is also problematic. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.” – Chimanda Adichie. There are multiple sides to everything. 

Let me provide an example. Recently, I had the opportunity to take a vacation to one of three African countries. One of these countries was Ethiopia and it was a front runner in the decision making process. While mulling it over with some loved ones I was STRONGLY encouraged not to go for unclear reasons; something to do with the civil war and famine that happened in the 80’s, that I was well aware of. I was very taken aback by the negative reaction I received, partially because Ethiopia is one of the safest places to travel in East Africa. And especially because this rational made no sense considering Rwanda had genocide in the 90’s and I live here. Ethiopia is safe, you need to be smart about things but it is comparable to NYC, and is a Peace Corps Post. It was sad to me that people’s impressions were still a media based story from long ago. A single story; and probably one of the only that the U.S. has told about Ethiopia.

I have been a victim to the single story many times as well, and am still a little unsure about people from L.A. But the more I experience, the more I learn that everything is…complicated. I am complicated, you are complicated, Rwanda is complicated, the U.S. is complicated. Most places, people and things are complicated in one way or another. If there is anything I have learned here, it is to keep an open mind and be wary of the single story.  

So, here it is the revival of my blog. And what is the point? Well, this is my story and I want to give my perspective as a 24 year old single female in a developing country. But it is also one story of many, and I’d like to encourage readers to keep an open mind, understand the complicated nature of everything and join me until this thing is complete (if that’s even possible).

 

 

BE Camp

* *Written on December 10, 2012**

Two weeks ago I participated in my first Peace Corps camp. It was a BE camp. BE is an acronym for Boys Excelling. It is the boys equivalent to GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). GLOW is a Peace Corps wide initiative and exists in many different PC country posts. For more info on GLOW click on this link: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/08/196065.htm BE is Peace Corps Rwanda specific.

BE Banner. Photo by: Justin McDonald 

BE camp was four days long for the boys, a  week long for the staff with three days of TOT (training of teachers). But before I get into the inner workings of BE camp, we must start with an explanation of BE club.

BE clubs begin with the volunteers who work at schools and promote youth development. Whether a health or education volunteer (the two PC programs we have here), starting a BE/GLOW club is one of the best ways to teach life skills, and improve youth development.

BE and GLOW was started in my community about a year and a half ago by my former site mate. (A site mate is another volunteer who lives at your site in a different training program.) She was an education volunteer that lived about an hour walking distance away, and worked at the primary and secondary school. During my first three months, I was able to attend, observe, and get a better feel for the clubs she started and that I am now taking over.

The focus of BE and GLOW is for girls and boys to have a single sex focus group where they can become educated partners in gender equality, goal setting, public speaking, career planning, decision-making skills, and learning confidence. While some of these skills may be obvious to American readers, there is a great void in youth development here in Rwanda.

The education system in Rwanda needs some work. While there are some Rwandan all-star teachers who really push their students to be critical thinkers in the classroom, the majority of classes go like this:

Teacher introduces the subject and speaks. Teacher writes lesson on the board. Students copy lesson from board. Students memorize lesson. A day, week, month or many months’ later students are tested on what they memorized.

The camp. See if you can find me, hint: I'm wearing blue. 

There is zero critical thinking or discussions involved. Moreover the lessons are not interactive, and are straight up boring. School is run more like a factory rather than an opportunity for students to grow, learn, and develop. In most lessons students memorize what they’ve ‘learned’, and that is the extent of it. This bothers me, and I’ve seen little opportunity for young people to think for themselves. Personally, I don’t think this is an effective learning style, and this is where the importance of BE and GLOW materializes.  

When a young person speaks to you it is common that they turn their head in the opposite direction of where you are standing, and/or look at the ground. They usually speak softly and/or mumble. The indirect eye contact, soft spoken nature, and mumbling makes an awful combination when trying to understand a bantu language. In the beginning of my service I was often confused by this behavior, but was later told it is good culture to act in this way.

So I was completely shocked, and speechless when I attended my first GLOW club. Peace, a student, walked right up to me, shook my hand, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hi, my name is Peace.” I had never encountered a young person with so much confidence, let alone a girl with confidence. This is rare. I was so shocked I forgot how to respond to her, and we were speaking English. How she approached me with such confidence emulates the importance of GLOW and BE, and gives a nod to their wonderful teacher.

So how do these things start? The clubs are started by PCVs in their villages, and after clubs have been strongly established, PCVs get together and decide: a) if they want to have a camp, b) when, how, what, where, and why. And finally, a BE/GLOW camp is born.

The camps are held during school vacations, and are free for students to attend. Each camper is placed into a hero group with a camp counselor, a PCV. Their group is called a hero group because their group name is named after a famous person to model their own life after. Ex: Martin Luther King Jr., Steven Biko, Gandi, Fela Kuti, just to name a few of the great hero groups we had. This acts as your family for the four days.

During camp there are three days of classes, with three classes each day focusing on one topic.

Day 1 – Communication and Decision Making

Day 2 – HIV and Malaria

Day 3 – Gender Equality

After classes there are afternoon activities including: baseball, kickball, volleyball, soccer, dance, and bread making classes. There are three meals a day (rare for Rwandans) and after dinner are the evening activities, which included a bonfire with smores. If you are ever in Africa I’ve found that smores is one of the coolest cross-cultural exchange things to do.

Video still of me teaching. Classroom size at BE was about 25 students.

The fourth day is split into two half days. The first day they arrive and get settled, and the last day includes: a closing ceremony, packing up, and leaving before lunch (if you are lucky).

PCVs volunteer to play different roles; all PCVs are expected to lead an afternoon activity and help with evening activities. I played the role of Teacher, teaching a class on Relationship Building and Partnering in Gender Equality (Day 3), and co-teaching a class on Facts and Myths of HIV and AIDS (Day 2). The classes are ninety minutes each and when you teach a class you teach three classes in a row. I did this for two days in a row, and it was exhausting but awesome all rolled into one. The most common myth in the facts and myths class: AIDS was invented in a lab in America. In every class I had at least one boy ask “but Teacha, are you sure AIDS was not invented by Americans?” While no one knows where it came from for the purposes of the class, and to eliminate confusion, I responded with: “Yes, AIDS was not invented in America, Americans have AIDS too.” This blows their minds every time.  

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/08/196065.htm