Amakuru? I'm a haiku!

Nachos, beer, cookies
One word in Kinyarwanda:
Umudugudu!

Greetings big wide world!  The past weekend has been a time for lazy indulgence and brave culinary adventures.    I headed up to Rulindo for a few days to chill out and take advantage of friends with computers and electricity.  After two days of hiking, Gleeing, and frisbeeing, Keira and I made a nacho-fueled decision to stay up way past our bedtimes and make cookies.  Warning to the faint of heart--the following account contains a scene of graphic egg-cracking.  Some of you may wish to skip to the end...

We started out with a recipe.  It was a good recipe, the sort of soccer moms from Ohio gave unanimous rave reviews on allrecipes.com and the like.  Simple chocolate chip cookies.  Simple and delicious.  Simple, and fool-proof.  Simple, but not Rwanda-proof.

We should have known that any recipe that called for a preheated oven and the use of an electric blender was doomed to failure.  While the flames of the imbabura gently flickered, creating a (in retrospect) glow of warm foreboding, I began to assemble the ingredients.  Surprisingly, we had everything we needed, aside from white sugar, an oven, a blender, and a cookie sheet.

It was all going so well.  The Blue Band was creamed into the sugar, and the splash of vanilla helped to mask the offensive ambiance coming from my unwashed socks.  I felt accomplished.  After an eight month hiatus, I was Baking again.  Those of you who survived the Great Muffin Invasion of 2010 will appreciate how difficult it has been for me to not putter around the kitchen on a lazy afternoon.

Then disaster struck.  Refrigeration in not exactly common in the country (my school actually has a P6 science text book that describes a refrigerator the way a zoologist might describe an exotic species of bird).  Although most food keeps far longer than I would have believed possible back in the states, you still run of the risk of getting the occasional bad egg.  Literally.  I suspect that a bad egg was the inspiration for the original stink bomb.  Within a few seconds, my sweet, sugary confection had been transformed into a reeking, rancid puddle of fail.  It only took a few more seconds for the smell to permeate the entire living room.

But, in the true spirit of the intrepid Peace Corps volunteer, Keira and I decided to forge on ahead, with new eggs and a more cautious outlook on life.  No more sugar?  Sketchy eggs?  Lack of measuring utensils?  Suddenly that simple recipe, so revered by housewives the world over, became simply laughable.  This is Rwanda, and we don't need no stinking recipes.

Fast-forward three hours, when the first batch of cookies was finally removed from pot-in-a-pot-on-a-charcoal-fire of an oven (prior to tonight, it was my firm belief that any device requiring that many hyphen won't be successful.  It just didn't seem possible).  Then something miraculous happened.  These hybrid cookies, these disastrous love children of misfortune and stubborn persistence, were...good.  Betty Crocker, urabesha cyane.

Oh, and before I forget, here's a shout out to Dennis DeVerna.  Those candy bars you send Heather a few months ago were amazing.  Thanks for raising a daughter who knows the value of sharing (or that a lack of sharing can lead to a revoking of bathroom privileges...).

The Adventures of Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach

I'm not so good at keeping updated with blogging. I'm just going to get that little warning out of the way early so that you know what horrors await you in this, my quarterly update. So steel your backbone, stiffen your resolve, gird your loins...ready to begin?
The season of rain has officially ended, and I've been told that the season of sun will last until the end of August. So if any of you all want to come and visit, I would highly recommend the summer months! Of course, when water becomes scarce, we all must make sacrifices on the altar of personal hygeine. I was originally resolved not to shave my legs until the end of the term in July, but I'm beginning to have an increasingly vivid fantasy in which an Oregonian backwoodsman shoots me after mistaking me for the rare African ginger Sasquatch.
Last weekend, I braved death and ran in the Kigali Peace Marathon. Okay, that makes me sound so much more in shape than I am or ever will be. I actually ran one leg of a Peace Corps relay team, so I only went 10 kilometers instead of the full 41. But I lived to tell the tale, which is the important part. And Kigali seemed so wonderfully flat after 'training' in my village, which sits atop a mountain with a 75 degree gradient. I'm currently planning to run a half-marathon in July, assuming my sense of self-preservation doesn't intervene in the next month or so.
Time for a dark confession: I have started drinking coffee. This is quite possibly the most disturbing lifestyle change I've encountered in the past few months. I'm not even sure how it happened. One day, the cup was there, and I took it, and I drank. And now I can't stop. Eight months in Rwanda has done what even four years in Seattle never could. And it isn't even good coffee either. I suspect that my brain wants the quick jolt of caffiene so much that is has assassinated my tongue's taste receptors.
Well, one of the more interesting things that has happened to me over the last three months was my trip to Ukraine, which I have utterly failed to blog about thus far. Not only to I fail at writing blogs, I fail at communication in general. So, first things first: if you ever feel the spirit move you to travel anywhere via Kenya Airways...reconsider. I ended up getting delayed for a full 24 hours in Kenya, much to my annoyance. As a matter of fact, I was beyond annoyed. I was peeved. Still, Nairobi was a fun place to be stranded for a day. I got to pet giraffes, see baby elephants, go to the national museum, visit an awesome Masai crafts market, take my first hot shower in six months...truth be told, the shower freaked me out a bit. There was so much steam! I spent the first five minutes laughing hysterically, and the next five minutes feeling suffocated and claustrophobic. And I still had a baseline level of grime on when when I was finished. I am like Siberia. I am permagrimed.
As my plane landed on Ukrainian soil, I was greeted with flurries of snow. I had been hoping to see some snow, but from a more warm, congenial distance. I was hilariously underdressed for the weather, to say the least. Flip-flops are great for Africa, but in the former Soviet Union, flops flip you! And then there was the fact that I was wearing actual colors. The Rwandan way of dressing involves piling on as many different and often clashing patterns as possible. Even so, my outfit was completely tame by African standards: only five different colors, and all of them in solids. But there I was, aboard a plane of vampirically pale Europeans, all dressed in black and looking like they hadn't seen the sun in six months. Which they hadn't. Because they live in Eastern Europe.
My lovely sister met me at the airport, and there was much hugging and rejoicing. Two years was far too long to go without seeing each other. And thus the sisterly hijinks began. If an artist with too much free time were to make a cartoon about our escapades, it would have to be titled, "The Adventures of Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach." Like I said earlier, I was about as inappropriately dressed for the Ukrainian April as possible. Margaret lent me what was been affectionately dubbed "the smurf hat" (there are far too many pictures on facebook), and then we were off to see the sights and sounds of grand ol' Kiev.
Probably the most distinctive aspect of the city is all the domed churches. Kiev's architects went through a very pronounced dome phase, when they roamed the streets, stroking their bushy beards and wonder what, what could possibly make that church more ornate? Someone must have had an old copy of that architectural best-seller "Our Domes, Ourselves" lying around, and the solution soon became obvious. The churches are all incredible, both from the inside and the outside.
By the end of the day, I'd seen more white people,gold, products of the insane Polish mind, and WWII monuments than my brain could handle. I was also freezing, and my body was going into some kind of shock about the face that it was seven at night and the sun showed no signs of setting. Needless to say, I was a bit overwhelmed when we stopped off at a cafe to get coffee. Yes, a real cafe! With toilets! That flush!
Now it's time to welcome our second erstwhile protagonist. Moog, smurf hat firmly on head, left me to bask in the warm anonymity of a European cafe while she headed over to the Peace Corps office to retrieve a pea coat that another PCV had left behind in the free bin. The coat was warm and toasty. It was also ankle length, too big, and unrelentingly pink. Thus bedecked, Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach left the cafe to face the cold Ukrainian night.
In short, the trip was a blast. One night we went to the ballet (Zorba the Greek, and you know he's Greek because he's so jaunty). Even after looking up the plot on wikipedia, we still couldn't make sense of what we'd just seen. Who was that man dressed all in black? The music seemed to suggest that he was evil, yet everyone danced so sadly when he died. And did he actually die, or was that merely an overly artistic interpretationof the indigestion that follows eating too much Greek food?
And on the subject of indigestion--after eating a steady diet of rice, beans, potatoes, and pineapple for six months, Kiev felt like the promised land of culinary delights. Ukraine in general had more food options than I knew what to do with, in so many ways. From ice cream to Oxana's borscht to that sushi in Odessa, well let's just say that the Giant Peach got a bit more giant, and Smurf Hat got to have an awkwardly hilarious conversation with a poor pharmacist one day. But hey, sis--if you can ask for that in Ukrainian, then I'd say you're pretty well fluent...
We stopped off at Sofievka gardens on the way to Moog's village of Chechelnyk. Nothing much was blooming, but the scope of the place was still impressive. We only got to spend one full day in Chechelnyk, but it was action packed. Her host family made some of the most amazing food that I've eaten in a long while, and there were many toasts, which did little to help my heavy eyes stay open. One of the lesser known perils of living on the equator is that your body becomes frighteningly in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. When it gets dark, that means it's bedtime. It took us four tries for me to make it through the latest Harry Potter installment, and we were ultimately successful only because we watched it in the middle of the afternoon.
The next morning we got up dark and early and went to Moog's school. The English teacher that she often works with wanted me to give a presentation about Rwanda to some of her classes. Being in a Ukrainian school was such a change of pace for me. Ukraine's population is shrinking, and the class sizes reflect that fact. The students were all blown away to learn tha there are over 1000 students at my school. They loved seeing all my pictures, especially the ones with animals. I was tempted to tell them that I wrestle lions every morning, but I settled for regaling them with tales of my cricket-eating days instead.
After school, we went to the town bakery and wandered the slushy streets of Chechelnyk eating the loaf with our bare hands. At this point, I'd traded in the giant peach coat for my sister's much more normally hued green coat. Still, a few people did stare as Smurf Hat and the Giant Pea munched their way around the church grounds, the war memorials, and the derelict sugar beet factory.
We headed out to Odessa the next morning, that beautiful city on the sea. It was definitely my favorite city in Ukraine, and not just because of the delicious sushi. After a day of museums, sight-seeing, dithering about on the Ptomkin stairs,and other such delights, Smurf Hat and the Giant Pea donned their finest tiaras for a night at the opera. I can't actually remember the name of the show that we saw, but the opera house is a spectacular sight unto itself.
And then suddenly it was time to return to Rwanda. Of course, Kenya Airways wouldn't let me go without a fuss, and I got delayed in Paris just long enough to get irked. And yes, I went to McDonald's while I was in Ukraine--for the cheap coffee and clean bathrooms. And to watch Ukrainians eat ice cream at eight o'clock on a blustery morning. And then I tried to imagine the concept of fast food in Rwanda. And then I laughed.
So that's kind of a briefly long-winded summary of life over the last three months. Obviously, other interesting, exciting, perplexing, and intriguing things have happened, but let's keep the mystery alive a little longer, eh?

A little bit of life...

Hello out there, friends! Today I played the piano and was accompanied by a Rwandan man with an accordian. I think it's about time to get some ibitengi lederhosen made.

The term is almost finished—we have one more week of actually teaching, then a week of review, and a week of final exams. Then three weeks of holidays! It's gotten to that stage in the term when the students have begun to check out, and I'm having to remind myself not to mentally wander. Sometimes my reminders are less successful than others.

Last weekend I went on a whirlwind trip up north to visit my friend Heather. She was on a mission to acquire a kitten, so Operation Baby Cat successfully launched under the cover of darkness late one Friday night. Our target was not happy, especially after being transported back to her house wrapped in a blanket and stuffed into a box. As one of her colleagues remarked, “I think it is somehow difficult to grow a baby cat!” But it was really great to be around a fuzzy animal that I knew was not going to be served for dinner sometime in the near future.

Speaking of dinner, Heather has a convent right behind her house, and we took over the kitchen to make pizza one evening. The nuns are crazy about pizza! They are not so crazy about Jesus jokes. I learned that one the hard way.

I'm going to be off jet-setting for the holidays, heading up to Ukraine to visit Margaret for part of the break. She has promised me a hot shower. It's been five months. I'm ready. Hopefully I won't have a massive panic attach when I am surrounded by buildings that are taller than one story. I might need a day or two in Kigali before I leave in order to acclimate myself once more.

Mk, I'm up in Muramba right now, hanging out with Alanna and petting cows. Umunsi mwiza!

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!