Do you have your digital?...No, but I have my words!

Happy weekend, friends kure kandi hafi!  First, an apology.  I have yet to post a single picture from Rwanda on my blog or on facebook.  I could offer up a litany of excuses: people stare enough already, I have no electricity, the internet is slow and sporadic, etc.  Actually, those are pretty good excuses.  But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words--and as a word nerd, I have quite a few words stockpiled and ready for use.  So today, I'm going to take you all on a tour of my village.  With a little imagination, hopefully you can see where I live!
     Let's start at my house.  Walk out of the gate (and be careful about the bridge--people have  been known to slip and fall...goons...) and look left.  The rutted, dirt road heads almost straight up into the mountains.  Right across the street, there will probably be a few men hanging out, laying the foundation for a new house that is being built.  Past that, the hill drops off dramatically into the valley.  If you squint, you can make out women in dusty ibitengi cultivating sweet potatoes.  There are a few little goat paths that go down into the valley; you will probably spot children carrying yellow jerry-cans of water or sugar cane on their heads.  My favorite are the kids that carry bean vines on their heads.  The vines are so long and rambling that you can barely see the child beneath all the vegetation.  It looks just a like a giant mutant bean plant lumbering slowly up the hill.  Disconcerting at first, yes, but now just hilarious!
     Alrighty, let's head left.  We're going to have to climb up some pretty steep hills if we want to go all the way to Rusumo, the market town 5 kilometers away.  First, we'll pass the pasture behind my house.  Various livestock show up there.  I swear to god that the goats like to peep in my bathroom window while I pee.  There are also a few chickens that run around mindlessly and occasionally come to visit my back porch.  If you're lucky, the cow will be out, swishing his tail and mooing contented.  Or, there might be a mismatched collection children playing soccer with a ball made out of twine and plastic sacks.
     Keep walking up the hill, if you feel up to it, and you'll pass more sweet potato fields, banana groves, and children shouting "Komera!"  You'll also see lots and lots of maize.  People will ask, "And this, does it exist in America?" You will reply in the affirmative, but you can tell that they don't quite believe you.  Then you will tell them that we call it "corn" and lose all your tenuous credibility.
     There will be an endless parade of women coming and going to the market or to the village.  Their ibitengi wraps are dazzling, even the ones that look to be years old.  They will stare at you inscrutably, until you stop and greet them in Kinyarwanda.  Then their eyes will light up and their faces will break into the most brilliant smiles you've ever seen.  Some of them will shake your hand, some of them will hug you, some of them will try to drag you into the forest to visit their house, but they will all walk away softly murmuring to each other "Kinyarwanda arakize!" (She speaks Kinyarwanda!).
     Further up the road is the Pentecostal church.  If you peer off the side of the road to the left, past the pine trees that grow tall and perfume the air, the valleys and hills will roll on forever into the distance.  The church is a happening place, and you will often hear drums, singing, and the rhythm of dancing feet drifting out of its open windows.
     By now you're beginning to wonder if the ground is ever going to level out.  It doesn't, but you're almost to the top of the mountain.  When you finally reach the top, you can continue along the road down to Rusumo for another 3 K or so, or you can turn left and wander along the ridges for awhile.  If you go left, you will probably hear something like this:
    Child on hill: "Umuzungu!"
    Child in valley: "Ari he?"
    Hill: "Umuhanda!"
    Valley: "Ehhhhh.  Ni Katerina!"
    Florence and her brothers will come running from their hut in the valley to greet you with a rousing chorus of "Komera" and "Good morning!"  Anton knows to say "Good afternoon," and will correct his siblings if they get the greeting wrong.  After spending five minutes chatting in a pigeon of KR and English, you continue on your way, and the little kids follow you down the road for awhile, dancing and singing.  The road runs out after awhile, but if you venture up into the hills again, you can walk along another ridge and eventually come to a flat stretch of grass with the most amazing tree.  It'll probably remind you of Rafiki's tree from the Lion King.  Sitting beneath it, you can look out and see a large percentage of Rwanda's one thousand hills, as well as the winding curves of the Nyaborongo river.
    Now let's go back to my house.  It is only a ten minute walk to get from my house to the school.  The village itself is in a tiny dip between two hills, and in the mornings the fog settles in a thick blanket over everything.  Turn right from my gate, and start walking down hill.  On your left is the health center.  In the mornings it is very busy, and the gentle buzz of Kinyarwanda will fill your ears.  The village center itself consists of a few shops, a barbershop, and a few houses.  Past the last shop, you can take a road down into the valley and eventually arrive at Cyome, another market town.  Make sure to stop and greet people as you walk to school--even the drunkypants that hang out in front of one of the shops.  If you're lucky, you'll be walking at the same time as the preschoolers.  They'll see you and start to spread their arms wide.  Stop, and open your arms wide.  You won't be able to help but smile as you are swarmed by a giggling mass of tiny Rwandan children. 
     The school is literally where the road ends.  It is on top of a hill, with yet another million dollar view.  In the distance, you can see a few other schools perched atop hillsides, their blue roofs glinting in the sunlight.  School is just starting, so you linger outside with the other teachers while you "wait the learners."  There is a teachers' room, but it dark and filled with unused desks and broken glass.  Your first class is in local one, but you have to wait twenty minutes for the students to finish sweeping out the classroom.  This is just as well, as the workmen installed glass panes on the windows earlier this week (while you were teaching) and there were shards everywhere.  But now, the fog no longer creeps in during your lessons and obscures the chalkboard!
    After you finish teaching, you can head back outside to schmooze with the other teachers or correct lessons in the teachers' room.  If you walk past the primary school building, you will see the cow, the maize, and the latrines.  You know enough to avoid walking very close to the latrines.  There will always be a child or two (or twenty) wandering around the school grounds, or hanging out of the doors, ready to shout "good morning!" at you.
    So that's my village!  I'll take ya'll with me all the way to Rusumo one of these days, so you can get a feel for the market madness and meet the man who tells me that I am beautiful like his cow.
     Weekend nziza!

Good morning, white man!

    That's right, folks, Rwanda has done what Disney couldn't and made a man out of me.  That everpresent word "muzungu" translates into English most closely as "white man."  My favorite moment thus far was late one afternoon, as the sun was setting, when an old guy came up to me, grabbed my hand, and joyfully exclaimed, "Good mornning, white man!"  He was 0 for 2, but I still smiled and shook his hand in return.
    So how has school been thus far?  My students have their moments of brilliance, and their moments when I want to throttle them.  Of course, they are teenagers, so that is to be expected.  I have to be careful, though, lest the weremango get me and transform me into a deliciously juicy fruit.  According to one of my students, "yesterday I had been mangoes."  Thus the legend was born!
    My favorite Rwandlish turn of phrase is "not!"  I'm not entirely sure where this originated, and at first it really drove me crazy, but now I like it.  Perhaps this is an example of linguistic Stockholm syndrome.  Rwandans don't just say "no," or at least if they do, I have yet to hear it.  The nearest explanation I could get is that they are taught that "no" is used with other words, while "not" is used as a negation.  Thus, I have had interactions like this in class:
    "And in America, the temperature can be below freezing for weeks at a time!"
    "Teacher, not! Not!"
It's actually really adorable, especially when fully grown men say it.  Occassionally, I ask ridiculous questions just so I can hear a resounding chorus of "not!"  They are nothing if not emphatic!
    Everyone at my school is crazy about football, and for good reason.  Our girls team has won both their games thus far this season, and has a chance to go on to compete at the district level in Gisenyi.  I was so proud of them, even though my entire contribution to their winning season has been to stand on the sidelines and cheer.  But perhaps the other team was so distracted by the site of a white man that they couldn't properly concentrate?  I already have big plans to teach my classes some cheers and songs to sing at the next match.  Any good suggestions?
    I've been in to Kigali a few times recently, and it always makes me feel like a starstruck hick from the boonies.  For one thing, women in the city actually show their knees.  I was scandalized.  Going into Nakumatt, the Rwandan equivalent of Wal-Mart is an experience in and of itself.  In my village, there are two shops where you can (sometimes) by airtime, pineapple, fanta, and paper--assuming the shops are open, which is always a hit or miss prospect.  There is also a lady that sells tomatoes and avacado from her doorstep.  Sometimes.  So walking into a store that stocks twenty varieties of pasta, real electronic appliances, and refrigerated milk, is a bit of a shock to the system.  I always have to remind myself to keep breathing while browsing the overflowing aisles.
    Earlier this month, I made it over to Rulindo to visit a few fellow PCVs.  I have now officially watched Lion King while in Africa.  I'm not sure if this makes me a good person or a bad person, but it certainly makes me a zen person! And yes, hakuna matata really does mean no worries. Ni byo.
     Okay, friends! I am running low on internet time, and everyone in the internet cafe is watching me type and congratulating me on my speed and efficiency, so I'm going to call this post finished and go to the market to get some avacado and carrots!

Life in the mountains...

Hello friends!  First of all, Merry Christmas and happy New Year!  Sorry that I haven’t updated in awhile—I promise that I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth (or off a mountainside, which is far more likely in Rwanda).         

                I got a bit of a surprise right before Christmas, when I was informed that I was being moved to a new site, not the one that I visited in November.  I got shifted from the deep south up to the mountainous northwest.  Once a northwest girl, always a northwest girl!

                My village is called Rubona, and sits perched atop  a rather steep mountain.  The views are spectacular, and I’m a fairly easy walk from the Nyaborongo river which is, as I’ve been told on many occasions, the source of the Nile.  But despite what some Rwandans will say, there are no crocodiles lounging on its marshy banks.

                The phrase “easy walk” is quite relative here.  Distance is an illusion—as the crow flies, many places are actually pretty close to each other.  However, to get anywhere, one must trek down little goat paths (and then back up them again).  The goats, of course, just laze by the side of the path, munching on grass and flicking their tails contentedly.  The practical upshot to all this hiking is that my calves have become downright spectacular.  I’m also rapidly achieving thunder thigh status.  But I am not yet to the point where I can go vertical up a mountain with ten kilos of potatoes on my head and a baby strapped to my back.

                I really like living out in a more remote area.   It’s hard to get a variety of food in my village, but there are two larger towns nearby that have markets twice a week.  Going to the Cyome market can be a slightly harrowing experience, at least for someone as clumsy as I am.  You must ford a decently large stream by hopping from slick rock to slick rock until you reach the equally slick mud on the other side.  I, in true form, failed miserably and all my oxen drowned.  It was a tragedy that resulted in mud up to my knees.

                At least it was a good show for the Rwandans who were hanging out by the stream.  I am rarely without an audience—the other day, I was running late for school and skidded down the hill outside my house, falling and bruising my knees.  The only witness was an elderly man who paused and shrieked, “yes!” with a completely disproportionate amount of enthusiasm.  I felt like the Rwandan judges had just given me a perfect ten.  And deservedly so: it was one of my more graceful falls.

                Even when I’m not falling down mountains and into streams, people love  to watch me.  The children here have excellent eyesight…it must be all those carrots!  I can be walking down a deserted road, all alone, with no one else around, when suddenly I hear it echoing through the trees:  “muzuuuuuuunguuuuuu…”  It’s a good thing the Catholic church no longer uses castrati choirs, because these kids have some of the most naturally harmonious voices that I have ever heard.  And I rarely see the children, but they certainly see me, often from another mountain.  I blame my Irish ancestry for making me so conspicuous.  Trying to explain freckles has been another interesting undertaking.  One person thought that the water was making me orange, while another assumed I was covered in mosquito bites.

                But there really aren’t any mosquitoes up in my village, thankfully.  There are, however, lumberjacks.  I was absolutely floored when I saw that my village has both banana trees and pine trees.  We’re definitely at a pretty high altitude if pines can grow so close to the equator.  And where there are pine trees, there are also lumberjacks.  I am beginning to suspect that mountain men are the same the world over.  Rubona is the first place in Rwanda where I have seen men with beards.  I want to teach them the lumberjack song from Monty Python…is that an acceptable form of cultural exchange?

                Right now we are in the short dry season, which lasts for most of February.  The downpours here are brief but torrential, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning.  In the mornings, it is often so foggy that you can hardly see more than five feet in from of you.  Some mornings, I get up early and go running, and it’s almost a surreal experience.  But don’t worry—I stick to the main road so I won’t accidentally run right off the mountain.  And running here is a challenge!  There is virtually no flat ground.  I now understand why African runners always win marathons; after these hills and altitude, anything else would be a cakewalk.

                I share a house with two Rwandan women who work at the village health center.  Rubona doesn’t have running water or electricity yet, so we do all our cooking by the gentle glow of the Imbabura.  I have developed a love/hate relationship with Rwandan food.  On my first day at site, I told them that I liked pineapple, and this was somehow translated into the firm belief that I must eat an entire pineapple every day.  The housekeep is a bit of an inanasi nazi, and once chased me around the house with half a pineapple skewered on a fork until I gave in and ate it.  At least I’m in no danger of getting scurvy!

                However, my most shocking food choice is to drink tea without sugar.  Possibly my favorite quote from the last month: “but we cannot make tea!  There is no sugar!”  It took a few weeks, but they now accept that I really do like my tea unsweetened.  But now I am introduced to new people as: “This is Katerina.  She does not put sugar in her tea!”  As far as notoriety goes, this seems like the mostly harmless variety.

                Being a vegetarian has also raised a few eyebrows.  I had a roomful of doctors kindly offer to cure me of my “meat allergy.”  I politely declined.  Rabbit tends to be the meat of choice, as I discovered one day when the housekeeper brought in a fuzzy bunny for me to admire.  Then she took it out to the back porch and slaughtered it.  So, I eat a lot of rice, beans, and potatoes.  I’ve promised to make mashed potatoes one day, because I’m pretty sure they didn’t believe me when I explained that Americans like to put butter and milk in their spuds.  One day, I’m going to rock their worlds with grilled cheese sandwiches.   There is a bakery in Rusumo (about 5 k and one mountain away) that makes decent bread.  Sometimes the loaves are shaped like starfish or dinosaurs.  Cheese also makes sporadic but highly anticipated appearances in town.  It’s no Vermont sharp cheddar, but with a little onion and avocado, it sure does hit the spot.

                One of the more intriguing foods I’ve encountered thus far is ubugare, or cassava bread.  It’s incredibly simply to make—you just mix cassava flour and water together over the Imbabura, then stir until it forms a thick dough.  Then you eat it by pinching off chunks with your fingers and dipping it in sauce.  It’s not bad, especially if you’re in the mood for something quick and easy.  And I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer spill copious amounts of sauce on myself when I eat it.

                One Rwandan specialty I have not yet tried is urwagwa, the local moonshine made from bananas.  Frankly, the stuff scares me.  It is literally made by fermenting bananas in a canoe.  I’ll try it one day when I have a whole weekend to devote to being horribly ill.  So I stick to water instead, a beverage that almost no one here drinks.  My big hit as a standup comedian is to say “water bottle” with an outrageous American accent: “wadder boddle.”  It always brings down the house.  I’m saving the Texan accent for when I go on tour.

                Callie, you will be please to know that the jeans you gave me are regarded as “smart” by all Rwandans who see me wearing them.  I wear skirts to teach, but it’s nice to come home and thrown on a pair of trousers, not in the least because they disguise my sasquatchy legs.

                I know I’ve blogged about it before, but the clothes here deserve another mention.  I’m determined to acquire a pair of “Obama new style” jeans no matter the price.  But I suppose I could settle for the Obama flip-flops instead.

                The men here wear shiny shirts and short ties on special occasions.  I went with a colleague to the Pentecostal church one Sunday, and shiny shirts were in abundance.  Red is usually the favored color, but I’ve also seen silver and black.  Pentecostal church was certainly an experience—ten hours of singing, dancing, shouting hallelujah, and watching the shiny shirts shimmer in the African sun.

                I haven’t gone ibitengi-crazy yet, mainly just from sheer laziness.  Ibitengi is the Kinyarwanda word for fabric—you can buy it at the market and bring it to a tailor to be made into virtually anything.  A lot of women also use it as an apron wrap or a baby sling.  The best part about ibitengi  is the variety of colors and patterns.  One of my coworkers has a pink and green shirt with a toothpaste motif.  It reminds me of mod art.  I’m just biding my time until I find an Obama ibitengi that I can have made into a cocktail dress.

                Keeping clothes, and myself, clean can be difficult.  Because we have no running water, we use basins that function as combination bathtubs, washing machines, and dishwashers.  Keeping your clothes looking presentable is essential—kindly old ladies have stopped me in the street to pint out a tiny speck of mud on my pants.  And the old ladies here?  They take the Rwandan custom of shaking hands to a whole new level and shake your boobs.  I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it had something to do with the fact that I am not yet married.

                My standards of hygiene haven’t taken too dramatic a plunge—at least, that’s what I thought until I noticed an odd rash on my neck.  I was freaking out, until I realized that it was, in fact, a thick layer of dirt.  I now refer to my neck as “the permagrime zone.”

                The lack of electricity means that I go to bed not long after nightfall.  Staying up until ten?  That’s a wild and crazy night!  I have developed a nighttime bathroom song, to be sung to the tune of singing in the rain:  “peeeeeing in the dark, I’m peeeeing in the dark!”  Unfortunately, no amount of musical theater can save me from walking into closed doors at the ends of dark corridors.

                Okay friends, on that happy note, I will end this mammoth blog post!  I promise to update again soon, and fill you in on school and, of course, my students.  One of them is a weremango.  Stay tuned.

Shakespeare goes to Africa...and doesn't like the food...

There are many incredible, amazing, wonderful things about Rwanda.  The food is not one of them.  The other day, after yet another meal of rice, plantains, salt, and oil, I decided to vent my frustrations in an iambic fashion.  Yup, it's another hate sonnet, this time dedicated to Rwandan cuisine:

They lie upon my plate in disarray,
twix pools of grease and oily sauce unknown:
Potatoes, carrots, beans-day after day,
And what I hope are only chicken bones.
My fork, the only weapon I possess,
seems not enough for this enormous task;
I must now change what I would call success-
Yet would raw veggies be too much to ask?
So here I sit, in heat that steals my breath,
Sweat from my brow, the only seasoning,
Adding some salt on cabbage cooked to death
And fried beyond all human reasoning.
What's this? Some strange new goop, perhaps a soup?
Oh, but alas, it still won't help me poop!

TMI? Absolutely.  Let's just say that a lack of Western plumbing, and a traditional Rwandan diet, quickly dissolve all bathroom taboos.
That's all for now, friends!

Holidays and hard work...

Turkey Day shenanigans have been had.  I will always remember this as the Thanksgiving that I walked a mile carrying ten liters of milk on my head.  And because this is Rwanda, it was most definitely an uphill journey.  So what was on the menu?  For the most part, we managed to scrounge up all the traditional dishes and trimmings: turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, gravy, apple crisp, pineapple cake (maybe that’s not so traditional…), chai, and apple cider.  And with a little creativity, we concocted a delicious cranberry-esque sauce out of the plum jam that boldly proclaims itself to be “for human use.”  I used it well.

There were about fifty of us cooking over the span of two days.  It seems a bit ridiculous to have that sort of manpower, but we cooked the entire meal without the aid of electricity.  Believe me, producing enough food to feed over 100 people, using only small charcoal barbeque contraptions is no mean feat.  It was most definitely a two-day operation that required much ingenuity.  By the end of it, most of us had contributed at least some blood, sweat, and tears.

To cook the turkeys, the guys dug a giant pit in the backyard of one of the houses, and we roasted those birds luau-style for about twelve hours.  It was a beautiful moment, seeing the fully cooked fowl being brought up from the depths of the earth, roasted to perfection!  Well, I think we may have surpassed perfection just a little and moved into the realm of slightly dry, but we were all just so glad to see meat that was not unidentifiable or trailing entrails that nobody cared.  The birds came special delivery all the way from Kigali, and it was well worth it for that little taste of home.

The residents of Nyanza probably thought that all the abazungu had gone completely insane in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.  We went to the market to purchase onions, and none of the vendors would believe that yes, we really did want 13 kilos of onions.  My favorite statistic, though?  90 kilos of potatoes.  It took an army of us to peel them all on Wednesday night.  We also had quite a time transporting all the food from our various houses to the training center; we attracted quite a crowd, walking down the road carrying charcoal barbeques and giant pots of stuffing.  And the word for “pot” has now been burned into my brain forever: isafuriya!

Some things, unfortunately, did get a little lost in translation.  As many of you may already know, my favorite ingredient in virtually anything is butter.  Well, we ran out of the butter we bought in Butare, and had to scrounge around Nyanza for a suitable substitute.   Here’s some helpful advice to anyone traveling to Africa: if you can’t find the word for butter, do not ask for “amavuta y’inkwa.”  We thought we were being so clever, asking for “cow oil.”  Well, what we got was…interesting.  It gave the stuffing a certain parmesan cheese flair that ,while not entirely unpalatable, was a bit of an unwelcome surprise.    But overall, this Thanksgiving was a smashing success, even if we didn’t buy the one pumpkin in all of Rwanda.

And now, insects.  Africa has not had nearly as many terrifying critters as I had been mentally steeling myself to encounter.  That being said, there is a certain bug that looks very similar to a giant worm with wings.  Louise, my resource family mom, explained to me that they are especially prevalent during the rainy season.  They are talented swarmers, but that is also their downfall.  One night, I was visiting Louise when the bugs got so bad that we decided it was time to take action.  We turned off the lights, lit a decoy candle, and waited patiently in the dark.  Soon, the bugs were all landing around the candle ands mesmerized by its glow, staggering drunkenly about the table.  Then it was an easy task to grab them, fling then on the floor, and squish them.  They make a satisfying crunch.  Afterward, we turned the lights back on, swept the bugs into a neat little pile, and lit them on fire.  It was a productive evening.

YesterdayI also got the chance to be productive in a more useful sort of way.  The last Saturday of every month is designated as "Umuganda," which is a time when the whole community gets together and works on clean-up or development projects.  Our task was to clear grass out of the dirt drainage ditches beside the road.  Our weapons of choice (or necessity, as the case may be)? Hoes.  Yes, there were many bad hoe jokes.  Let's just say that, being the talented hoer that I am, I definitely tapped that grass.  I now have blisters on my palms as proof of my morning of hard manual labor.  That makes up for me not being around to rake leaves, right mom and dad?  Those blisters make a nice complement to my laundry blisters.  In Rwanda, your hands are your washing machine, and the laundry soap is roughly the equivalent of acid.  My hands smell fresh and clean for an entire day after I do my laundry…you can always tell when someone has cleaned their clothes that morning, because the delicate scent of Omo powder swirls gently around them for the rest of the day.

Oh, and I finally got around to figuring out what my address is! It will probably change once I move to Higiro, but for now, it is:

Peace Corps Rwanda

BP 5657

Kigali, Rwanda

Amahoro! (That means "peace" in Kinyarwanda…and yes, it is pronounced exactly like you think it is.  New favorite word? Absolutely…).

One month later...

First of all, a few words about socks and toothpicks.  I was expecting there to be huge culture shocks when I moved to Rwanda.  After all, how could there not be? But what’s really been most surprising to me has been the little things that catch me off guard and remind me again and again that I’m not in Kansas anymore.

            Rwandans are immaculate dressers.  I don’t know how they do it.  It’s like they have an aura about their pant cuffs that repels the ever-present gooey red mud.  I can barely walk ten feet without looking like I just trudged my way through an episode of Dexter, while the Rwandans manage to always look freshly pressed and ironed, even during the rainiest of days.  More than once, I’ve felt as though my entire wardrobe is completely inadequate, especially for any sort of professional setting.  Then I discovered The Socks (and yes, this is a phenomenon that deserves capitalization, even when spoken aloud).

            The Socks cannot be purchased in a neatly wrapped ten-pack, the way we do back in the States.  Instead, you go to the market and delve into a pile of used (some more obviously than others) clothing, trying desperately to find a matching pair.  The matching is important, but the actual appearance of The Socks does not seem to matter all that much.  For example, I was sitting in a bar with my one of the teachers at my school and some of his friends.  One of these men was the lieutenant in charge of the army outpost near my village.  This was not a man to be trifled with.  In fact, he was a bit intimidating.  Then I looked down and saw something bright pink peeking out from the top of his shoe.  Closer inspection (done with the utmost tact and subtly, of course) revealed that his socks were not only pink, but decorated with a frolicking kitten motif.  Suddenly, I felt a little more at ease.  I’m pretty sure that The Socks will continue to be an ongoing source of quiet enjoyment for me over the next two years.

            Dinners here can sometimes be somewhat awkward.  There’s the language barrier to deal with, and the simple fact that the food is occasionally completely disgusting.  Thankfully, toothpicks are able to alleviate some of the uncomfortable silences that I’ve experienced over the last month.  I never used toothpicks back home, aside from testing to see if my muffins were finished baking.  However here in Rwanda, toothpicks are a big deal.  After each meal, we sit around the table, filling the postprandial silence by picking our teeth and avoiding eye contact.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but there is a definite lull in the conversation, when everyone arms themselves with a little stick of wood and starts digging away at their teeth.  And each person has their own unique technique--some people start from the back and work their way forward, some go right to left or left to right, some hide their actions behind one hand, some chew and spit, and still others sporadically pick between sips of the traditional after-meal icayi.  I’ve yet to find the technique that feels right, but I’m sure I’ll know it when I do.

            And now on to more important matters!  I’ve been in Rwanda for an entire month!    Training has been intense, not only due to content, but also owing to the fact that I have very little free time or alone time.  Last week, though, we got our first taste of what life was going to be like come January, when we spent five days visiting our permanent sites.

            My village is called Higiro, and has about 3000 people in it.  It’s in the Southern province, seven kilometers from the Burundi border.  That’s right...I can see Burundi from my house.  It’s about 45 minutes away from Butare, which is a large college town containing ice cream and peanut butter.  And the easiest way to get from Butare to Higiro?  Motorcycle taxi.  Yup, I am now officially a bad-ass biker chick.  Or as bad-ass as I can manage to be, while wearing my giant Peace Corps issued moto helmet.  The moto drivers perhaps lean a bit toward the lunatic end of the spectrum when it comes to driving skills, but that might also be partly due to the fact that the road out to my village is unpaved and could kindly be called rustic.  At one point, we got delayed for several minutes behind a herd of cows.  And because it’s Rwanda, everything is on a severe incline.  One of my moto drivers would slow down and make the sign of the cross every time we successfully made it to the top of a hill.  I’m pretty sure that many a Muzungu has found religion on the back of a moto taxi...

            Higiro was just starting a week of umuganda when I arrived.  Umuganda literally means “community work,” and the entire village was out planting flowers, fixing roofs, constructing latrines, and actually building a new addition to the primary school.  The district council tries to plan umuganda so that it coincides with the trimester breaks for school so that the kids can all be involved.  And they were out in full force, digging, planting, and just generally schmoozing. 

            The school that I’ll be working at is a secondary school, grades S1-S3, which roughly translates to 6-8th grade.  The ages of the students varies greatly, however: some are teen-agers, but there are a few that are older than I am.  Due to the genocide, many kids my age had their schooling severely interrupted for many years, and are just now trying to take advantage of the increased government emphasis on education.  Plus, many kids can’t afford to pay the school fees each year and drop out for awhile, or simply have to stay home some trimesters to take care of domestic obligations.  This is, of course, especially true for the girls.  Many of the students I talked to were extremely interested in starting an English club, and I would love to also be able to spearhead a creative writing, poetry, or journalism club.

            My village does not have running water or electricity.  I have now officially learned  how to bathe (and wash my hair) while using roughly two liters of cold water.  Yes, I feel accomplished! And not entirely clean.  I might have to go into Butare once a month or so  simply to have a real shower.  I was told that Higiro was supposed to have water and electricity last year, but that the government funds never materialized.  I was also told that this should be fixed by January.  Then again, I was told that a lot of things were going to be happening in January.  I have a healthy degree of skepticism about all that--maybe next, Rwanda will join the E.U. in January!

            My house is right down the road from the school.  It’s also directly across from the medical center, which I find reassuring.  There are already potatoes planted in my backyard, so the leprechaun in me did a little happy jig.  And my view is absolutely spectacular.  I get to look out across the rolling hills and valleys, filled with misty banana groves.  Of course, my view is especially amazing right now due to the fact that it is unobstructed by such trifling obstacles as walls.  Yeah, my house is still under construction.  In fact, I think they started building it after I can to visit.  I distinctly remember walking by that way earlier in the week, and I’m pretty sure that there was no house there...So we’ll see what happens in January!

            Okay, I was going to write about what it takes to cook and do laundry here, but I’ve already written a ridiculous amount and will save that for another time.  So goodbye for now, far-away friends! And happy Thanksgiving!

Upate!

Hello friends, from the land of a thousand hills!  Already, my calves are becoming my most well-used muscles.  By the end of the next two years, I'm sure my they will look disproportionately toned.

So what's been going on in my life for the last week and a half? The quick answer is: a lot.  We arrived in Kigali last Thursday night, after 16 hours in airplanes, and a surprisingly painless layover in Belgium.  Walking across the tarmac into the airport, I didn't feel like I was in a foreign country yet, much less halfway across the world.  It was a bit of a shock, however, going from a cold and wet autumn to a warm and humid spring.  My system has mostly adjusted now (and don't worry mom, I haven't gotten a sunburn…yet…).

Kigali has a distinct smell that I noticed right away as soon as I got off the airplane.  There's a constant haze that hangs low over the city, and the whole area is permeated through and through with the aroma of woodsmoke.  But that's been no problem for me--I've survived more than my fair share of wildfire seasons!

The days here start early.  Because we're so close to the equator, the sun rises around five thirty and sets again around six at night.  I pretend to complain like everyone else, but the cheerfully obnoxious morning person in me is secretly rejoicing.  Where we stayed in Kigali is very near a mosque, and more than one day I woke up to the morning call to prayer.  It was nice to lay in bed and just listen, then wait while the sounds of the city slowly emerged with the sun.  Rwandans are very big on cleanliness, and there was a constant stream of women out sweeping the sidewalks each morning with their twig brooms and chattering softly in Kinyarwanda.  The roosters were not so quiet.  I have a very satisfying sense of personal vengeance whenever chicken is served at dinner.

I've gotten my first experience sleeping under a mosquito net! Malaria isn't nearly as prevalent in Rwanda as in many other African nations, but we still have to take anti-malaria drugs and use mosquito nets at night.  The anti-malaria drugs have given me some of the strangest dream in my entire life; at least I won't be lacking for any sort of entertainment while I'm here!  Everyone is feeling a bit under the weather from a combination of stress, medication, and vaccinations.  I've lost track of the number of shots that I've had to endure since getting here, but it's almost made up for by the fact that the doctor is French beyond belief. Almost, but not quite.

We were only in Kigali for three hectic days before heading out to Nyanza, so I didn't get a chance to see too much of the city itself.  We were able to go for a few walks, but mostly just stayed at the training center.  Whenever we did venture out, we got stared at.  A lot.  This, more than anything else, has taken a lot of getting used to.  The old women especially have this look that they give you--it's not necessarily antagonistic, it just seems to say, "why are you here?"  The little children, on the other hand, will run up to us and grab our hands, chanting "Muzungu!", which is their word for foreigner or white person.  It's not a derogatory term, but it took me a while to stop flinching every time someone shouted it at me.

And now for what you all really want to know--how are the bathrooms?  Well, better than I expected!  I haven't taken a hot shower yet, but it's warm enough outside that a cool shower is actually kind of refreshing.  At least, that's what I keep telling myself.  All the roads, even the paved ones, are covered in a thin layer of red dirt, and the dust gets everywhere.  Every time I wear flip-flops, I come home to find my feet coated in the stuff.  It's already stained my khaki pants.  And when it rains, all the dust turns to a thick sludgy substance that gets everywhere. The rain here is incredible.  We're not in the rainy season yet, but there have still been a few torrential downpours.  Unlike Seattle, though, it will only rain for a few minutes, then the sun will come back out and bake the land back into submission.  I managed to get caught in a downpour the other day--it lasted for the entire five minutes I was outside, then stopped as soon as I made it to my destination.  In the late afternoons and evenings, there is often lightning and thunder, thanks to the heat and the humidity.  And the stars at night are incredible.  Often, the electricity fails by mid-afternoon, so the town is mostly dark and the stars are out in full force.  Next time I'm in Kigali, I want to track down a star chart so I know which constellations I'm looking at.

We spent most of our time in Kigali doing the standard orientation rigamarole.  At one point, a small group of us went down into the more central area of town, where merely crossing the street is an exercise in recklessness.  You have to be willing to simply step out in front of oncoming traffic and stare down anyone who looks like they aren't about to swerve.  It's especially tricky because the main form of transportation is the motorcycle taxis that weave in and out of traffic at breakneck speed.  The buses, however, are hilarious.  They're really just glorified vans, stuffed full to bursting with people.  The best part about them is their names, and the random English slogans they have printed on their sides and back windows.  There's the "Sorta Tours" buses, the "Volcano Tours" buses, the "Beyonce" bus, and my personal favorite, the very sage "No gain without the pain" bus.  I want to ride that one, but I'm afraid it might hurt me.

For me, the most difficult part of our time in Kigali was when we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial.  It's actually two structures--the memorial courtyard outside and then the museum exhibits inside.  Unlike most of the other genocide memorials in Rwanda, this one isn't built on a site that has any special significance; instead, the government and the people decided to bury all the people who were killed in Kigali during the genocide at that spot and have it serve as a memorial.  It was sobering to walk into the courtyard and know that there were over 250,000 people buried around me.  The coffins themselves, most of which hold the remains of multiple people or entire families, are covered by giant raised slabs of concrete.  One of the concrete slabs had a glass window in it so you could look down and actually see the coffins below.  I didn't look long, only for as long as it took to put a red rose on the grave and move on.  The museum itself had three different sections to it: the first part focused on the events of the genocide in Rwanda, the second part focused on other notorious genocides throughout the 20th century, and the last part was dedicated to the children that were killed in Rwanda.

I think it would have been easy to leave the memorial feeling completely disillusioned and hopeless.  And in a way, I did.  It's hard to see some of humanity's worst moments neatly cataloged and displayed.  The most moving part was the room dedicated to the children, where family members had donated pictures of the victims to the museum.  I think it really hit me when I realized that these children would be my age right now if they hadn't been killed.  It made me feel both incredibly lucky and incredibly overwhelmed.  But what's even more overwhelming is talking to Rwandans and learning how their country is healing and moving forward.  Obviously, I can't even begin to speak for them, and I'm sure that some of the things I heard have been broad generalizations, but there is such a feeling of hope in the country right now.  Maybe it sounds silly and corny, but I'm really proud that I get to be here at this time, to work with these amazingly resilient people, and maybe even do my small part to continue the healing process.

We're doing our actually training in the town of Nyanza.  The drive up here from Kigali was only about 80 kilometers, but it took about three hours.  I'm still getting used to African time, and the rather more fluid sense of scheduling that seems to operate here.  Schedules are a polite fiction that we all pretend to adhere to.  It's cute the way that it gets posted on the wall at the beginning of each week.  Anyway, the drive to Nyanza was long but absolutely stunning.  As I learned in Kinyarwanda, "Rwanda ni heza!" And it's true--the land is ridiculously green.  It looks like everything is just bursting with life and the desire to grow.  I've had the most amazing pineapple while I've been here.  And those of you who know of my tortured history with pineapples in foreign lands will understand the real impact of that statement…the best thing, though, might just be the avocados.  They are at least twice as large as the wimpy little things we get back in the states.  I could pretty much just live on them, and I might, as cooking is a very involved process.  There aren't ovens here, at least not in the sense that we would think of.  Instead, we've been using charcoal grills to cook everything.  It's a delicate balancing act, getting a pot of rice to cook over hot coals.  Even more fun is the fact that the cutting board is an exotic tool here.  Each trainee has been assigned a "resource family" who is supposed to help us learn more Kinyarwanda and acclimate to Rwandan culture.  The other night, our assignment was to cook dinner with them.  Suddenly, I was five years old again and bumbling about the kitchen.  But let me tell you, when someone hands you a carrot, a dull cleaver, and instruction to peel it by slicing toward your thumb, you begin to think inappropriately passionate thoughts about microwaves and peanut butter.  My resource family, though, has been pretty wonderful so far.  They have two little boys, Willy and John, and on my first visit, we discovered a mutual love of strange animal noises and karate chops.  I'm proud so say that I taught them to call me "Peace Corps Ninja."  This might be my best moment thus far…

We've been given mountain bikes and giant dorky helmets to help us get around.  It was funny--the people were finally not gawking at us very much, and then we got bikes and became a spectacle all over again.  In a moment of frustrated cultural insensitivity, I dubbed mine Sir Arthur Muzoomgu, the Muzungu-mobile.  I call him Arthur in public, and reserve his full name for special occasions only.  I haven't seriously ridden a bicycle in years, and the hills around Rwanda are not going to be forgiving on my poor, weak legs.  I'll definitely be working up to full mobility--but it was rather reassuring to see Rwandans walking their bicycles up the hills instead of pedaling furiously.

On an more technologically advanced note, I acquired a cell phone!  My number is 2500782848522, so y'all should call me sometime if you feel like hearing from another continent.  I don't have a Skype account yet, and since I don't have a computer, I probably won't bother.  So goodbye for now, and I shall try to update again when I have a trifecta of time, energy, and interesting news!