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...

Cock-Blocked!! And other animal adventures...

Last week, some nice folks from Engineers Without Borders posed this insightful question: what is the most exotic animal you’ve seen in Rwanda?  The honest answer is, of course, other white people. But Rwanda is not without its own unique set of creeping, crawling, flying, scuttling, and bleating creatures.  So it’s time for an all animal edition of my blog!  For those of you who are not such fans of the cute and fuzzy critters…well, you’re in luck.  Those do not exist here.

Many of my fellow PCVs have adopted kittens or puppies. I too have acquired a pet.  His name is Brandon, and I spent the first week of our cohabitation making futile efforts to stab him with a knife.

Imagine a large brown strawberry.  Now picture eight spindly legs coming from it.  That basically describes Brandon.  The first time we met was when I rolled over in bed one morning and found my nose mere inches from whatever passes for a nose on a spider.  Needless to say, I tried to kill him.

After several days of increasingly Shakespearean stabbing attempts, my arachnicidal tendencies began to move in the direction of blunt force trauma.  I had the perfect shoe for it.  It had recently been washed, all the better to show the splatter.  There was one slight problem.  Despite his size, Brandon is fast.  I quickly realized that there was no way I was going to get him.  Instead, we soon fell into a comfortable routine.  Before blowing out my candle at night, I would pick up my shoe and make a few half-heartedly swipes in his general direction.  Brandon would just sigh heavily, and saunter nonchalantly to a new location a few inches away.

Right now, he is hanging out next to my shopping bags.  He doesn’t even pretend to move when I grab one of them.  We’ve basically become an old married couple.  As least I don’t greet him with a resounding “Honey, I’m home,”…yet…

Four-legged animals are mostly limited to goats, sheep, and cows.  Back in March, the mama goats started popping out babies, and the hills were filled with frolicking little goat kids.  There is nothing cuter than two little baby goats curled up around each other in a sunny meadow.  It’s so sweet, it might even make Walt Disney vomit.

There are a few varieties of cow in mooing around Rwanda.  In my village, we have the more traditional variety: stick-thin, with giant horns and a thirst for human blood.  I was walking home from school one afternoon, innocently enjoying the warm sun, when a little girl ran past me, screaming.  Now, my presence does sometimes provoke reactions  of terror  from children, but this seemed excessive.  And the fact that the dudes in front of the barbershop were yelling too…well, I figured that something bad was about to go down.  I turned, just in time to jump out of the way of the young bull that was barreling down the road, horns blazing.  Following him, shouting wildly, and waving a giant stick, was the village cattle wrangler.  Fortunately, the bull was caught before he did any damage other than the psychological kind.

Occasionally, the pigs appear in the compost pile.  There are also rabbits, but I mostly only see them as Alice is hacking one to bits on the back porch.  That doesn’t really bother me so much…although, I do wish she wouldn’t look quite so happy while doing it.

We also have geckoes in Rwanda, but not so many live in my village.  One day, during umuganda, some girls found a chameleon lurking in the bean field at school.  Batiste, one of the science teachers, showed the students (most of whom wouldn’t get near the thing) how it change colors depending on the background.  I was tempted to hold it up to my skin and see what would happen, but I resisted the urge.

So, those are the major land animals that live in or around my village.  But Rwanda also boasts an amazing variety of birds.  Most of them are quite small, and come in almost every color imaginable: bright orange, emerald green, dark blue, electric yellow—you can always  catch a glimpse of some spectacular hue flitting around amongst the trees.

There are also larger birds like hawks and ravens.  I have a bit of a personal vendetta against the latter.  They like to sit outside my window and pontificate at all hours of the day.  “Gwark?” one will inquire.  “Gwaaaaaarkkkkk!!!!” the others will agree.  Then they will fly up onto my roof and riverdance for awhile.  Just try to sleep with a group of ravens stomping around above your head.  Just try.

However, because I have roughly the matury of a 7^th grade boy, my favorite animal in Rwanda is the cock.  Oh, the times I have explained to Rwandans that “rooster” might be a better word to use.  Of course, then I would lose the opportunity to hear things such as “Does the cock exist in America?” or “I think, in America, the cock grows larger.”  One day, as I was walking to school, a rooster ran into the road in front of me, impeding my progress.  I had to laugh, because I had literally just been cock-blocked.

So, on that delightful note, I think I’m going to wrap things up for now.  But readers, I have a question for you!  What do you want to know about my life in Rwanda?  I feel like so much happens in my life here that to really explain it all would take ten pages and be painstakingly tedious.  So, aspects of Rwanda do ya’ll want to know about?  I have no shame, so ask about any topic.  Food? Religion? Markets?  Things I have used for toilet paper?  Let me know what you want to know, and I will do my best to answer your questions in my next post.

p.s. I wrote most of this blog while wearing a Burger King crown.  Thanks mom and dad!

From point A to point B, with mild detours to points C, G-P, and R-Z: A tale of Rwandan transport.

I've heard it said that it's the journey that counts, not the destination.  Such a statement was probably made as a sort of desperate rationalization of the Rwandan transportation system, given that here, the destination is not always reached, and the journey can stretch so long as to provide one with the opportunity to indulge in the entire pantheon of human emotions.  Excitement, hope, awkwardness, frustration, rage, exhaustion, despair, and finally resignation--just try to travel anywhere in this country without experiencing at least half of these emotions.
I've blogged a bit about the buses here before, but today I want to take you all with me on the harrowing, uncomfortable, and often hilarious trip from my village into Gitarama.  Every time I travel this route, something happens to surprise me, scare me, or just plain bewilder me.  There's never a dull moment, that's for sure!
The average bus here might not be quite street legal in the U.S.  There are larger, Greyhound-esque buses that run between the major cities, but they very rarely venture out to my main road.  Instead, I usually take a twegerane (translation: "we squeeze") as far as Gitarrama, where I can get a slightly more reputable mode of transportation into Kigali.  As much as I dislike riding on the twegeranes--they are more than aptly named--they certainly do provide ample opportunity for entertainment.
All the twegeranes have the same basic body.  They are more or less glorified vans, with 20 seats.  The number of seats is in no way related to the actual number of people that can fit in side.  One of my favorite things about twegeranes is the way that they are decorated.  I can't believe I was ever capable of functioning in a country like America where public transport didn't involve tassles and wall-paper and beads.  Some of the decor looks disconcertingly like the inside of a slightly seedy New Orleans brothel.
Obviously, each bus has its own name plastered across the windshield in bright letters.  About half of the names are religious themed, and most are in poorly conceived English.  Jesus is caming? Er...sure.  Many of the rest have something to do with celebrities or sports.  I am still waiting for the day when the Chris Brown bus crashes into the Rihana bus.  And my life will be complete the day I see the Kanye West twegerane cut off Taylor Swift in traffic.
Legally, the buses can only hold as many people as their are seats.  Side note: it was very difficult for me to type that last sentence, as my fingers were hampered by my spasms of uncontrollable ironic laughter.  Space is an illusion, bus space doubly so.  This leads to an interesting litte conspiracy between the bus drivers, the bicycle taxis, and the traffic police.
As the buses trundle recklessly down the road, usually with passengers practically hanging out the windows, the drivers signal to each as they pass, especially if there is a police check point coming up.  If there is, the bus pulls over and unloads passengers until the legal limit is no longer exceeded.  Often, these excess passengers will hop a ride with a bike taxi, or be forced to jog down the road and meet up with the bus again once it passes the check point.  It's quite possibly the most obvious things in the world, and makes me laugh every time.
There's usually about a fifty percent chance someone will vomit on the bus, an old lady will start screaming about her smashed tomatoes, the entire bus will be delayed several minutes while passengers bargain for pineapples out the windows, or you will either sitting on someone or having someone sit on you.  The one advantage to this form of transportation?  It's cheap, and it sure makes you appreciate walking!

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?