And then middle school happened

I’m coming up on the one year mark here in Rwanda.  With that in mind, I think it’s time for a serious, introspective look back at the last 10 months.  What have I learned?  How have I changed?  Well, if part of the Peace Corps experience is about finding yourself, then I think I would have been better off leaving certain waters uncharted.  I’ve been in Rwanda for a long while now, getting to know the people and the culture, meeting with incredible challenges, overcoming obstacles—all those sorts of things that are supposed to lead one to a fuller understanding of oneself.  So here’s what I’ve come to understand about myself thus far:  I am a 12-year-old boy.  And I’m kind of okay with that.

I can picture you now, leaning away from your computer, scratching your head or beard in consternation, contemplating just how this gender-bending regression came about.  The short answer?  When you live in a place where the thought “I wonder if this means that I have dysentery” is a weekly occurrence, certain things are just inevitable.

The life of a 12-year-old boy is oddly liberating.  Let me give you an example:  back in America, going about my life as a 20-something woman, I would never have even considered waiting a week between washing my hair.  Fortunately, a 12-year-old boy has no such qualms.  Of course, the teachers at my school did manage to call me out on it: “Eh, Katerina, you hair is so smart today!  You have washed!”  It’s a good thing they didn’t see me over the last break.  I had to beat back the OPEC inspectors that kept showing up at my door, battling over the drilling rights to the oil field that was my scalp.

Of course, not all my regressions have been so obvious.  Some I prefer to keep well hidden.  Did you know that you can wear the same underwear four days in a row, using the NI-BI method?  For the uninitiated amongst you, that’s: Normal, Inside out—Backwards, Inside out.  And as far as socks go—well, when they can stand up on their own, it’s probably time to wash them.  Unless I have something better to do, of course.

Food hygiene is another area of my life that sometimes strongly resembles a middle school cafeteria.  Time moves more slowly in Africa, and Rwanda is no exception.  Thanks to this mystery of equatorial gravity, the five second rule has become transformed into the “hmmmm…there are no ants on it yet…” rule.  And that’s not even a rule.  It’s more of a guideline.

During training, we were taught to religiously bleach all of our fruits and vegetables before eating them, preferably while wearing a Haz-Mat suit.  Raw foods were completely out of the question.  Now, I’m not suggesting that it’s a good idea to buy a cabbage at the market and chow down right then and there—although the reaction of the locals would be priceless—but there’s caution and then there’s just paranoia.  I lovingly wash and pineapples and grudgingly rinse my carrots.

On a serious not, maybe that is one of the most important things that I’ve learned in the last year—compromise.  What’s really important?  What’s really necessary?  What do you actually need to do to not just survive but enjoy life in a place that’s so far removed from everything you’ve ever known?  In short, how do you cope?!

That’s when a 7^th grade mentality comes in handy.  Peace Corps does require an incredible amount of maturity and ability to navigate the unknown.  But getting by here also requires that you  acknowledge the absurdities of this life and laugh about things like explosive diarrhea.  I know that the day I can no longer laugh about things like that is the day that I need to go home.  And honestly, I think that 12-year-old boys are best equipped to find the hilarity in otherwise difficult situation.  And I’m proud to be one of them.

Let’s talk about latrines.  When I first got here…well, that scared me.  I thought “no way.  There’s no way I will ever get used to using one of these.  I will simply not pee for the next two years.”  Yes, latrines can be completely disgusting.  But not to the mind of the adventurous 12-year-old male!  After visiting many volunteers, I’ve found that it’s easier to view a latrine not as a petrifying plunge into the unknown, but in the way that an anthropologist might examine a unique or rare artifact.  Thus far, I have encountered:

            --The leaning latrine of Rusumo (Chris)

            --The “Martha Stewart would be so proud” latrine (Ally)

            --The “oh wait, you’ll need a headlamp” latrine (Heather)

            --The “only hobbits can enter here” latrine (Allister)

            --The “go ahead.  Just try to make it in that tiny hole.  I dare you” latrine (Andrew)

And that, my friends, is when a little immaturity goes a long way.

Not that my life is filled exclusively with potty humor.  That’s only roughly 80% of what I laugh at.  The other 20%?  Well, myself.  Coming to Rwanda, I definitely expected to be confronted with a fear of the unknown.  And that hasn’t been so hard to manage.  More difficult to face has been the fear of being the unknown.  That might sound contradictory, but let me explain.  I am the unknown quantity in my village.  I’m white, I have freckles, I speak English, I hike, wear pants, and have a tattoo.  Basically, I’m weird.  I’ve been in my village since January, and some people still look surprised to see me when I walk to school each day.  Some days it can be difficult to even leave my house, knowing that I’m to be stared at, or harassed, or treated like a zoo attraction.  But other days, I barely leave my gate before a preschooler runs up and hugs me, or an old lady greets me with an enthusiastic “Komera, Katerine!”  Being the unknown is so much more terrifying than facing the unknown.  Talk about stripping you down to your most basic insecurities—the last year has been filled with those sorts of encounters.  I’m still figuring out how to deal with it.  I’m sure I probably will be until the day I leave.

So I take those little moments of ridiculousness and embrace then.  I’m immature.  It helps.  A few weeks ago, I attended a three hour mass celebrating assumption day.  After being crowded in a church, on a hard bench, the smell of incense clogging my pore and sinuses—well, I think all my fellow PCVs know exactly how I was feeling.  Then Chris and I discovered something magical, the sort of thing 12-year-old boys revel in the world over.  According to the calendar, the German equivalent of Mary’s Assumption day is…Maria Himmelfahrt.  Say it aloud a few times.  We sure did.  And we laughed.  A lot.  And when it’s time to Himmelfahrt again next year…well, I’ll be ready.

Because it is that one there

There have been certain times in Rwanda when I have thought to myself, “oh dear god, I am about to die.”  Up until last weekend, all these moments involved public transportation, cows, cows interfering with public transportation, lit charcoal stoves interfering with my left foot, and a small tube of what looked deceptively like toothpaste but, upon closer inspection, was most definitely not.

On Saturday, however, I took doom into my own hands and headed up Bisoke with a group of other PCVs.  For those of you with scant knowledge of Rwanda’s geography, the northern region of the country is more ruggedly mountainous than the others and is home to Rwanda’s five volcanoes.  We set out for Virunga Park early Saturday morning, with high spirits and a zest for adventure.  I imagine the Donner party felt the same at the beginning of its expedition.

Waiting for us at the information center was tea, coffee, traditional dancers, and an eclectic mix of white tourists is various states of serious hiking gear.  I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt.   I did not wear a hat.  My pants were not duct-taped into my tube socks.  I do not own tube socks.

While guzzling cup after cup of coffee (partly because it was so cold, and partly because I wanted to be able to say that I have peed on top of a volcano), we turned our attention toward watching the dancers.  Or, more truthfully, we watched the tourists watching the dancers.  It was meta-tourism at its finest.  I’ve come to a conclusion about white people in Rwanda: we’re awkward.  At the end of each number, the tourists would give a hearty round of applause.  This is not how we clap in Rwanda.  In general, we do not clap.  But when we do, it is in perfect unison, often accompanied by soft trilling.  The essential thing is that every claps at the same speed and volume.  As a colleague once told me at a ceremony, “In Rwanda, it is important to crap together.”  Even after nine months of living here, the easy interchange of “R” and “L” always finds new ways to amuse me.

We eventually got our guide and ventured forth into the park via the worst road ever created in the whole history of human existence.  At the trailhead, we picked up a couple of armed guards whose job it was to keep the wild buffalo at bay.  For the record, I did not see any buffalo.  However, there was ample amounts of buffalo poop along the trail.  At least someone in this country is managing to get fiber in their diet.

The trail begins easily enough, passing through pyrethrum and potato fields, gently sloping upwards and filling you with a sense of outdoorsy benevolence and general well-being.  It’s not until you clamber over the stone fence and begin the real ascent that Bisoke starts to show its true colors.  Its true colors are pain. The guide told me that the park remains open year-round, but I can’t imagine doing that hike during the rainy season.  I slipped several times and had very much the dirty on my pants.  And ankles.  And shoes.

When I wasn’t busy becoming one with the mud and actually got a chance to check out the surroundings, it was pretty spectacular.  For most of the hike, the vegetation was dense and jungle-like.  The occasional viewpoint/ “oh dear lord I’m about to die whose bright idea was it to make this mountain so tall” viewpoint provided spectacular vistas of the Ruhengeri hillsides.

Then we reached the cloud-cover near the top.  Until this point, it had been sweaty work going up, and I know I looked a hot mess.  As Deverna so astutely observed, “I feel like I’m struggling, but then I look over at you and feel so much better about myself.”  I would have been offended if it hadn’t been so true.  But once we got under the cloud cover, things got cold.  I never thought my lips would turn blue while living on the equator.

We reached the top, or as near it as we were allowed, and stopped to rest and admire the crater lake.  With the sparse vegetation and rolling fog, the area looked oddly like the Scottish highlands.  I kept waiting for a bagpiper to come wandering out of the mist because really, who hasn’t fantasized about shoving a bagpiper off a volcano?

After a few photos and snacks, we began the treacherous descent.  I’m fairly certain that every person fell at least once.  I think that even Matt’s pants had so much the dirty by the time we were finished.  Near the bottom, we got to see some wildlife.  The guide stopped us and pointed out the ten or so golden monkeys romping about in a nearby field.  Then it was back in the car and back on the worst road ever created in the whole history of human existence (which had somehow managed to become worse during the last five hours).  Back in Musanze, there were showers (hot), beer (cold), food (Italian), and dramatic apologies to muscles (sore).

So in conclusion…was it fun? Yes.  Will I take my family when they come to visit?  No.  Will I chuckle with malicious glee when other PCVs say that they are going volcano climbing?  I think we all know the answer to that…

My attempt at the creativity

We all have one in our life.  It’s the place on the main road where you go to catch a bus.  It’s the place where you wait for hours and hours, and then for a few more hours.  It’s the place where the hot sun slowly drains away your will to travel, and you begin to doubt your reasons for ever leaving your village.  It’s the place that makes you happy to squeeze onto a twegerane and put up with the vomit therein entailed.  My place is Cyome.

Today’s post is the end result of the worst day of travel I have ever had to endure.  Any day that starts with a two hour wait in Cyome is bound to go badly, and fate did not disappoint.  In an attempt to alleviate our boredom and save our sanity, Alanna and I started singing the blues.  Literally.  So, readers, here’s a rather poetic slice of life up in Ngororero district.

The Cyome Blues

Been sittin’ in Cyome for a long while.

Gonna be sittin’ in Cyome for a long, long while,

watching the crazy guy wanderin’ by,

swingin’ his level and scythe.

His shoes don’t match:

sandal on the right

rainboot on the left,

ready for anything,

but only halfway.

Waitin’ in Cyome, not a car for miles.

Watchin’ the river flow by for miles and miles.

Watchin’ the people watchin’ me.

Kids playin’ football in the street,

avocado pit ball—

Saturday’s market

bouncin’ quick off pavement

and cracked bare feet.

Sittin’ in Cyome beneath that sliver of shade.

‘Safe journey’ ‘Welcome to the west’

faded letters above my head.

Sun on my shoulders

sunburn on y mind

women with umbrellas go walkin’ by.

Down in the fields,

idle gossip busy hands,

no breeze to be found,

sweat and turned earth in the air

clingin’ the bicycles pedalin’ past

on tires worn bare.

And time shimmers still in these afternoon miles

the way life’s gone on in Cyome for a long, long while.

In other news, I discovered yesterday that I am in horrible shape.  This was not necessarily an unexpected revelation, but the timing could have been better.  Learning of your incredible patheticness while climbing up a volcano is not pleasant.  But I'll blog about that another day...