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.