Peace Corps Rwanda

Swearing in

August 19, 2018 Peace Corps

On Tuesday August 14, 2018 despite any reservations anyone may or may not have had, I, along with 22 others was sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda representing cohort Health 10.

I wore a fancy dress. I put on make-up. I danced on live TV. I listened to speeches given by my fellow trainees/volunteers, the Charge d’Affairs, the Country Director, the Program Manager, the director of Training, a Ministry of Health official, and a tuitulaire.  Some speeches were in English; some were in Kinyarwanda, and around noon, after starting nearly an hour behind schedule, I stood, raised my right hand, and swore to protect the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

It’s the same oath everyone who works for the government takes including the US Military.  The military was never intended to be my career path, but in taking the same oath that several friends and family have taken, I felt a momentary surge of patriotic pride.

After becoming an official volunteer, we munched on snacks and Fanta, and mingled with the people there.  All in all, it was one of the happier days since arriving in Rwanda.

All good things must come to an end, and around 1:30 we were escorted to immigration to get our Rwandan ID cards made.  These cards mark our official residency status and in theory gives up Rwandan citizen status especially at places that charge a higher price for foreign tourists [Rwandan national parks, I’m looking at you].

On Tuesday evening, after the ceremony and after immigration, nearly everyone went out for drinking and dancing. I know myself well enough to know that would have been a mistake on my part, so I spent a quiet evening at home—home, one again, being our Catholic nunnery.  Before anyone starts to feel sorry for me for ‘missing out’ on anything, having the nunnery to myself was pretty awesome.   I had unlimited food and drink [I think I had 5 fantas and at least 2 plates of food], I was able to take a hot shower that lasted longer than 5 minutes [seriously, only my second since leaving America. The first one being at the PC infirmary a mere two weeks prior].  Without any competing devices, I was able to use the internet to my hearts’ content, download books to my Kindle, movies to my hard drive, and even video chat on WhatsApp.  I had a perfectly enjoyable evening doing the things I love with the people I love, and didn’t suffer the hangover that most of my cohort had.

Thanks to a Catholic holiday, we had a free day on Wednesday saving the actual moving until Thursday, and thankfully, most stores are not Catholic and were open for business. I’m not a huge shopper, but I did enjoy hanging out at the bookstore with the rooftop bar, getting my gas stove and a few other home goods, and going to the grocery store getting some food favorites in preparation for my first weekend alone.

Thursday morning involved moving all the stuff that had been stored in a room up to the parking lot to be loaded in to the moving vehicle.  I was as surprised as anyone when everything was loaded, and two volunteers’ stuff for two years fit in one Toyota pick-up truck.  Good byes were said; tears were shed, and off we went [I admit to remaining mostly stoic until one of my Northern friends hugged me and had tears in her eyes. Then my eyes did the same].  With bananas and bread in hand [who can eat breakfast at an emotional time like this] plus a couple bottles of water, my fellow volunteer and I set off to the South.

I still can’t believe nothing fell off the truck while we we’re moving

We dropped her off first, and I was a little envious of her site. A proper house with a small front porch, right in town, with neighbors for visiting.  Her HC happened to be a 15 minute or so walk which is just about perfect.  [I can hear the babies being vaccinated from inside my house].

Somewhere between her site an mine

After she was ‘installed’, we bumped along back roads for about an hour until we reached the town of Nyanza, and the dirt roads once again turned to pavement. Another 30-45 minutes later, we pulled up to my house. Things were unloaded; the gas stove was tested [it worked!], and suddenly I was alone… truly alone for the first time in quite some time.

I had planned for this eventuality, had ample international phone credit and data, and set about to making my first meal in my ‘new home.’ [It was delicious].  I unpacked a few things, hung some wall decor, made my bed [pulling out my quilt for the first time], and listened to some tunes.  Later on, I called some friends. Past experiences have taught me that I don’t make the best decisions when I’m either hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, and on my first night here, I was two of the four.

First meal at the new homestead… Moving all that stuff in the house is hard work

On Friday, I made my way down to the city, to get a few more food items, go to the bank, meet some current volunteers, have some Chinese food, and start to figure out how all this works.

I am in a small village in rural Rwanda.  Doing things the way I am used to doing is no longer an option.

This is my new normal.

 

 

Learning a language that will never be used again

August 12, 2018 Featured Post Peace Corps

One week later…

On our second day in Rwanda, our group of 24 trainees was split into six groups, and I sat beside three other trainees watched our Language and Cultural Facilitators, act out a short dialogue.

They stood a few feet apart, facing away from each other, then turned around and began to walk slowly with their heads down, as if they were walking along a street. Then they make eye contact with each other and one, and upon doing so, one of them breaks into a wide smile and exclaimed “Muraho!” to his freind. On cue, after hearing this, the other also grinned and returned the word.

“Muraho!”

The dialogue then came to a quick end. Upon ending, each of our language teachers looked at our group inquisitively. “Iki ni iki?”. They continued to stare at us, in silence, waiting for someone to respond.

I stared right back not knowing what a ichie or a nichie was. I’m a little unusual in the fact that silence does not bother me. I can sit comfortably in a room full of people and never say a word. I attribute that to my psych background.

Our teachers, still smiling, said nothing but went back and repeated the little sketch, beat for beat. After saying Muraho! to each other again, they repeated their question: “Iki ni iki?”. The lightbulb then managed to click in someone’s [read: not my] mind. “Oh! They are just asking us what Muraho means. 

Someone [read: not me] said “It means hello!”. We all nodded with recognition.  Oh, so this is how language class in Peace Corps was going to go. I am so fucked…   

“Yego!”, they said laughing.

As they continued, some of the smaller and more basic words were written down on flip chart paper [I never knew I could hate an object so incredibly much, but I’ve come to despise flip-chart paper], with their English definitions so we could reference them consistently.

  • Yego means yes.
  • Oya means no.
  • Iki means what.
  • Murabyumva means, do you understand?
  • Iki ni iki means, what is it/this?

On this first day, our little group buzzed with excitement. The teachers continued to act out small dialogues in lieu of telling us the words by didactic translation. They waved to each other and walked away, saying to each other “Mwirirgwe!”

Someone [again, read: not me]  blurted out ‘goodbye?’ and correct guesses would be rewarded with an enthusiastic “Yego!” and wrong guesses earned a soft and disappointing “Oya…”. 

“Amakuru?” means, how are you? We figured out slowly.

“Ni meza” means, I’m good.

“Wowe?” means, and yourself?

tiny Rwandan bananas; sometimes used to supplement breakfast
banana–a universal word in the Western hemisphere… In Rwanda it’s umuneke

 

One. Month. Later.

I have Double Language today. Double Language. Four straight hours. No snacks. Can’t I just get food poisoning for the day?

On a random morning about one month in, I thought this to myself as I walk to language class. The thought rattles around my mind with every step down the road.  DoubleLanguage. DoubleLanguage.

No matter how many times I’ve mentioned that I’d prefer both fruit AND eggs for breakfast, I rarely get both. Some days it’s one or the other, and thankfully not all that often, it’s neither. Today, it just a piece of stale bread. Walking to my language teacher’s class, I kept thinking ‘no snacks today because double language…I need snacks because the stale sweet bread I got for breakfast just isn’t cutting it.‘

In the one short month I have been here, I have lost nearly 15 pounds and I have learned one thing: I need protein in order to function. And I need lots of protein to function optimally. And my Rwandan diet, has been lacking protein  at almost every meal. As a result, I feel sluggish most of the time and randomly emotional. As every American knows, BREAKFAST is the most important meal of the day and why Rwandans think one piece of bread and tea is a proper breakfast is beyond me. 

But here I am. 

On the day with double language, my breakfast is stale sweet bread. And water. Prisoners get better food than this.

But like the semi time-conscious American I am, I arrive for DoubleLanguage right at 7:45am.

OK 7:50

I am here because the schedule says to be, and despite my proclivities for being a free-spirit and not planning anything, one thing I am not is late. At least not in Rwanda. Additionally, Peace Corps emphasizes in our training sessions to ‘Respect Time‘; however, none of my classmates nor the teacher are here. So I sit, in a plastic chair and nibble on my stale sweet bread, and drink my water… 

Best to fuel up, I mumble to no one in particular.

By 8:00, my other classmates have arrived and my teacher begins asking questions. All in Kinyarwanda, of course.

The teacher asks ‘What did you eat for breakfast?’

I fumble, my brain searching for the right words.  Oh…past tense… we haven’t learned that yet. Kurya… the verb for to eat… How do you conjugate it again?  

M-fee-tay ke-ke na a-ma-zi….I sputter out and produce said cake and water as evidence that I do in fact HAVE cake and water…not that I was avoiding the question

And this is how every language class goes. We are asked questions. I translate what I think I hear from Kinyarwanda into English in my mind. Then I think of what vocabulary I actually have in order to answer the question, and do I have the ability to conjugate that verb correctly? Once I run through this scenario in my mind, I compose the sentence in Kinyarwanda and then sputter out an answer that could come from a 2-year old child.

Gusa?  My teacher asks. 

She wants me to expand on that phrase. Make it a sentence or preferably a paragraph. 

“Donna-ni-way can-di da-shon-jay”, I answer, with a smirk. I am tired and I am hungry. All day every day, I am tired and hungry. One question down, four hours to go. Class has just begun, and it’s another two hours until there’s a break long enough to get snacks.

I could really go for a fruit salad right about now

Challenges

Not unsurprisingly, learning Kinyarwanda is considerably different from anything I’ve ever tried to learn in my life. I’ve always considered myself ‘decent’ at learning languages. I’m semi-fluent in Spanish and have safely navigated around using Portuguese, French, Romanian, German, and Russian in addition to English and Spanish. But Kinyarwanda is different… just listening to it makes my head spin. I’m six weeks in and I am still very much at an elementary level. I don’t need an exam to tell me that.

My host family has had 8 previous volunteers so they are used to speaking slowly and enunciating words properly and switching to French when I answer their questions with blank stares. Learning a language by immersion is exhausting. It takes a significant amount of mental energy, commitment, and time; and these three things are required every single day. After a long language session, I am exhausted…even more so than days requiring physical labor.

When I hear Kinyarwanda, I have a hard time understanding it. My language progress checks with my teachers also reflect this fact. [Mid LPI result on July 7, I scored Novice-Mid. Final PST LPI on August 7, I’m up to an Intermediate-Low, but don’t worry, we’ll be tested again in three months where I’m sure I’ll have the exact same level, because this language does.not.make.any.sense to me].

Speaking the language is also difficult, although I would argue it is not quite as difficult as listening. This is in large part because as a native English speaker the sentence structures, particularly of questions, are almost entirely backwards. In Kinyarwanda, question words almost always go at the end of sentences.

For instance, “Ukora iki”, means, what do you do?; but literally translates to “You do what?”. It is like that for just about everything. You are here why? This is what? The market is where? In addition to putting question words at the end, adjectives go after nouns; this is similar to Spanish. But when you put these two elements together, it forces your brain into cryptic problem solving mode anytime you have to say a sentence with any more than 5 words.

When I think to myself a moderately detailed sentence like, “What do your American friends like to do?”, my head spins. The question word goes to the end, there are plural words, there are possessive words, there is one adjective. It all goes completely out of what we would consider “order”: Inshuti wawe muri Amerika bakunda gukora iki?  That translates literally to: Friends yours in America they like to do what? It’s a difficult puzzle to solve each and every time. Don’t forget to blend Gukora and Iki … or they’ll know you are not native Rwandan.

The words for things, and the lack of words for thing captures stark differences between American and Rwandan culture. There is no word for “Please”. You can just tell people to do things, and it’s not considered rude. At all. As evidenced by all the people coming up to me saying ‘Give me money.’ No please. Just declaring. And I will always think that it is rude. Cultural differences be damned.

Some of my favorite words to say are:

  • “Umudugudu” which means village. Oo-moo-doo-goo-doo.
  • ‘Abakoreabushake‘ which means volunteers. A-ba-co-re-ra-bu-sha-che.  
  • ‘Ikigonderaubuzima’ which means health center post. Ichie-gon-der-a-u-bu-zima.
  • ‘Nka Kibazo’ which means no problem, don’t worry about it… Naa che-ba-zo.
  • ‘Tugende’ which is “Let’s go” too-gen-de

I’ve got two years, right?

By the numbers: One

July 29, 2018 Peace Corps

This post is a little different than previous posts as I am currently visiting my future home. I thought I would quantify my experience in Rwanda thus far.

Numbers 0-5

0: Number of pants that I brought that still fit. Note: I still wear all the pants that are too big so my outfits these days are quite comical. Also the number of things i have accidentally dropped into the latrine. Thankfully.

1: Number of kittens I’ve seen. Also number of kittens that currently live at my house. Also the number of times I have eaten fish. Also the number of Chinese Restaurants in Huye.

2: Number of volunteers from South Carolina in my cohort. Also number of volunteers from South Carolina that I know.

3: Number of ikitenge fabrics I’ve bought and have had made into clothing. Also the average number of liters of water I drink daily.

5: KM….Distance to Huye/Butare, the second largest city in Rwanda. I’m about to become a city girl.

Numbers 6-10

6: number of pizza bites I ate at our last training meeting. They were delicious.

8. Number of times I have eaten spaghetti with tomato sauce after I explained that I don’t just like plain noodles. Also the number of people in my cohort also placed in the south.

10: number of kilograms I’ve list since arriving in Rwanda. This is not surprising as my activity level has increased and my caloric intake had decreased.

Numbers 15-100

15: % number of women who currently seeking prenatal care at my health centre.

23: Number of people remaining in our cohort. One person left about two weeks ago.

49: Days since I left South Carolina.

86: Currently the number of children that suffer from malnutrition registered at my health center. My goal is to reduce it to 0.

101-1000

148: Number of current Peace Corps volunteers in Rwanda serving in health and education. The distribution is about 2/3 education and 1/3 health.

~500: Words. My approximate Kinyarwanda vocabulary. This is a gross estimate and may be more or less.

725+/-: Days remaining in the Peace Corps assuming things go as planned.

1001 and more

36700+/-: The number of people in my cachement area. A cachement area is the geographical area a specific health center serves. My cachement area is the largest in Rwanda.

42000: Rwandan francs I receive every two weeks. It’s approximately $40 and I use it to buy lunch everyday as well as fabric/clothing, phone credit, data package, and anything else that pops up.

One way or another by Blondie

Pre-Service Training

June 24, 2018 Peace Corps

For those of you who like my soul searching [baring?] posts, this is not one of them.  Stay tuned next week for more of that.  This one is about pre-service training.  What exactly is pre-service training?  Glad you asked.  If you thought, like I did at one point, that as soon as I got on the plane, I was an official Peace Corps Volunteer, you would be incorrect.  At this point, I am a mere trainee.  So what exactly am I doing right now?

Pre-Service Training [aka PST, but what I will mostly call training because I think documents with too many acronyms suck]

  • PST is the Pre-Service Training that Peace Corps Trainees [me!] undergo before being sworn-in as official volunteers. It typically lasts 10-12 weeks and takes place in the country of service.  My training will last 11 weeks and will occur in the town of Rwamagana.  ,Rwamgana is a city of about 47,000, located in the Eastern part of the country.  It’s located at 5000 feet above sea level [think Denver], and is about 30 miles east of the capital.
  • The entire 10 weeks of training is scheduled with the exception of Sundays.
  • Kinyarwandan class runs most days from 9-1
  • Afternoon classes include technical topics like ‘hand washing’, ‘pooping in a hole’, ‘making Oral Re-hydration Salt’, ‘lighting a stove’, ‘taking a bath in a bucket’, ‘washing clothes by hand’, and other exciting topics like ‘preparing your Peace Corps reports’, ‘grant-writing 101’ ‘understanding the Rwandan genocide’ [side note:  can anyone really understand genocide? I have visited Auschwitz; I’ve been to Bosnia [and other countries of former Yugoslavia]; the location or the ‘reasons behind it’, genocide is something I’ll never truly ‘understand’.]
  • There are field trips!
  • And chances to feel like kitties at the shelter [see ‘meeting the host family’ and ‘site announcement’ coming soon]

Essentially training is like going to summer camp where you know no one and being a freshman at college where none of your friends went all at the same time. Then you make friends, get a little comfortable, and then the rug is pulled out from under your feet again.  This is training. And this is where some people quit. In Peace Corps’ parlance, it’s called early termination, and it essentially means you resign from your position as a  ‘volunteer’.

In general, I’m not to suffer from test anxiety. In addition to the standard barrage of testing one does while in k-12 , I’ve taken the SAT, ACT, AP subject exams, GRE, MCAT, 2 respiratory licensing exams + one specialty exam, TEAS, an entire nursing program full of ATI exams, and NCLEX. However, the one thing all of these exams have in common is that they are computerized.  No talking required.  I very nearly didn’t graduate from my first go around in college due to the ORAL PROFICIENCY EXAM.  I have always suffered from a crippling fear of public speaking/performance, and while I’ve gotten better as I’ve aged [matured?], it is still one of my least favorite things to do on the entire planet.

One of the requirements to be sworn in as a volunteer is to achieve a certain level on the language exam.  It varies from language to language and program to program, but essentially one must score somewhere between novice-high and intermediate-mid depending on the difficulty of the language. The exam usually takes place in the next to last week of training and is essentially a recorded interview in the target language and is graded to determine a person’s fluency.  [Side note:  Google translate does not have Kinyarwandan as an option.]

Pre-Service Training concludes for everyone on the day of Swearing-IN, [for me, this occurs on August 14, 2018] which is a big ceremony with government officials and TV crews and fancy clothes. After taking our oaths we officially become Peace Corps Volunteers. Immediately after the ceremony we travel to our permanent sites and begin the two years [more or less] on our own. It’s an intense day.

And here I am thinking Peace Corps’ would be fun