Love Don't Cost a Thing....Or Does It?

Last weekend was a learning experience in two of the most important aspects of Rwandan culture: money and sex. Not to say that these are disproportionately important in Rwanda, but that they are important everywhere, but different in Rwanda from anywhere else I've ever really been.

Saturday marked our third and final Umuganda (community work day) during training. Last month, most of our families opted out of Umuganda, which meant that most of us spent the morning at home, doing laundry with the door locked for fear that we might be found out. My family was ditching as usual this month, but this time it was because of the legitimate reason that the wall to our compound had mysteriously caved in and they needed to take the time to fix it. Since I wasn't needed at home, I decided to go to Umuganda without them. However, this time was nothing like our first experience when which we built two full roads in the course of a morning. We arrived at the Umuganda site, meant to be the construction of a new district office, to find about 20 men sitting on a mound of dirt watching two others shoveling dirt to mix cement. We stood around being gawked at for a while before we decided to use one of the hoes we had brought with us to teach our audience to limbo while they waited. About an hour in, there still wasn't much to do and it was becoming clear that that wasn't likely to change and, at this point, some of us went home to do laundry. The most productive part of the day came when we loosened some of the soil near the construction site to plant crops, but this was a pretty short lived activity and I was beginning to understand why my family normally seems to opt out of going.

Umuganda is a great idea in theory, but, like many theories, isn't so hot in practice. On some days, like the day of our first Umuganda, having a large labor force put to work for a morning can be a huge driving force in development. However, it is almost impossible to expect that kind of outcome every time because the projects the community has real need for are constantly changing and not always the kind of projects that can easily be accomplished by large groups of unskilled workers. The construction project we were supposed to participate in this weekend is an excellent example of that. It also seems that Umuganda is more for the poor than for the rich. If you are wealthy, you can afford to pay the fine for refusing to attend (not that it's often enforced) and maintain your status in a society that frowns upon getting one's hands dirty. Also, if you are wealthy, there is a good chance you live in Kigali, which has far less need for Umugandas and which is also where I ended up on Sunday.

Kigali is a world already entirely different from rural Rwanda: the roads are mostly paved; electricity is a standard rather than a luxury; and there are foreigners everywhere, which means that people are acclimated enough to Americans that they don't stop what they are doing to watch them like they normally do in the country and like they did on Umuganda. Honestly, I feel like this contrast causes me a little bit of culture shock. A friend of mine pointed out that the vast economic disparity is probably one of the best indications of Rwanda's development. Granted, it is hard to see the inequity just between the nation's capital and the majority of it's citizens outside of major cities (so dramatic that you can find urban Rwandans eating burgers and milkshakes in the city, but only the wealthiest can regularly eat rice in the countryside), but in a few years, the wealth could start to spread.

We came into Kigali with two purposes: to stock up on Western food and to attend a wedding for Kassim, one of Peace Corps' teacher trainers for ESL and the man I will report to when I move to my site.

The wedding was beautiful; it would be hard to find a more brightly colored gathering. Women came dressed in their brightest garments with beautiful wraps for their hair. The men wore Western tuxedos that sparkled in the sunlight, but the color scheme of the wedding were decked out in it. They wore shiny yellow, gold, and bright green with golden head bands that I could have never pulled off in my life, but they definitely knew how to work. As always, the bride was the most decked out of anyone in all of the same colors as her bridesmaids, but with much more fabric and a gorgeous gold-embroidered green hi-jab. The guests were seated (men on one side and women on the other) under giant white canopy tops that provided plenty of shade, but started to overheat from the hot air rising off of all of the guests below them. Everything was decked out in the bride's colors, creating so much of a spectacle that a Western couple in a nearby guest house stopped what they were doing to watch the ceremony from their balcony (I wondered if they were aware of how much of a spectacle they were themselves by wearing shorts and a strapless dress, clothing that is certainly not appropriate by Rwandan standards and especially by Rwandan Muslims). Even the juice that the bride and groom pored for each others' family members in a gesture of coming together was dyed florescent green and yellow to match the theme.

We weren't able to attend the actual wedding at the mosque, but the dowry ceremony which takes place before the wedding when the family of the groom traditionally presents the family of the bride with a cow is a crucial step in getting married in Rwanda. Kassim's family is relatively well-off and urban so they didn't actually present the bride's wife with a cow (as they would in the country side), but they did present them with a large enough sum of money to buy a cow if they wanted and several other gifts as a symbolic gesture. The gift that struck me the most was a bottle of Coca-Cola, which was pretty telling of how rapidly Rwanda is developing, but also of the way that corporate American junk food is taking over the world. After the prayers had been made, the gifts exchanged, the juice pored, every member of each family had been greeted by the couple, and some photos had been taken, it was time to eat. We were served fanta by women in giant, billowy, Aphrodite-like dresses and then helped ourselves to a giant buffet full of food with infinitely more spice than we are accustomed to getting at home (which is none).

It dawned on me how much emphasis the dowry ceremony, as an expected precursor to the wedding, places on the transactional nature of marriage in this country. Certainly, judging by Kassim's smile last Sunday, this particular marriage was more about love than it was about money, but the conversation I had with my host sister later that night about the monetary aspect of Rwandan marriages told me that Rwandans still place a lot of import on the ability of the husband's family to provide which is indicated in paying for the wedding and in presenting the gifts at the dowry ceremony. To a certain extent, the transactional nature of marriage is present everywhere (and it certainly used to be much more prominent in the states), however, the concept is still a bit foreign to me as an American, having grown up hearing people swap vows to love each other “for better or for worse” and “for richer or for poorer” values that naturally extended to the engagement and the wedding ceremony as well.

Of course, the Rwandan notion of romance is pretty different from what I'm used to in general. In an HIV conference we had today, students were asked to relay their expectations in romantic relationships. Before they ever listed love or trust, they listed family, which is the primary expectation of love and marriage. This also provides a lot of explanation for the heavy emphasis on the financial security necessary for supporting a Rwandan-sized family (sometimes with up to 15 children) and why sex and money are thought to be so much one in the same (so much the same that there is a noticeable spike in the HIV positive percentage of males in Rwanda around the age of 44-45, when they most commonly become financially independent and wealthy enough to pay for prostitution). This is changing rapidly. The Kagame administration has placed heavy emphasis, not only on development, but also on health and family planning, which means that family size is on the decline, hopefully creating more time for married couples to enjoy a bit of romance in their lives.

The Thanksgiving Episode

Thanksgiving came the day after we had completed a month's worth of Model School and it could not have come at a better time. I had taught four different classes in four weeks. I had gone from completely failing to execute a listening and critical thinking exercise using a VOA special English news piece on a flying car (and seriously reconsidering whether or not I should ever be a teacher) to being able to successfully teach a lesson on metaphor and ambition centered on “Waka Waka,” the theme song to the World Cup. I definitely felt like I deserved a bit of a celebration.

Celebrating holidays away from home is probably one of the most difficult aspects of Peace Corps. For most of us, this Thanksgiving was the first one we had ever celebrated without family and that definitely made it tough (and made me thankful for all of the holidays I have been able to celebrate at home). However, being around the training staff, many of whom have moved away from families themselves in order to teach us has served as a constant reminder to me that I am not the only one making sacrifices. Our training director, Mupe, has a son who is battling sickle-cell anemia and his longing to be with his family on Thanksgiving were clearly just as strong as anyone else's.

The good news is that Thanksgiving was a hit. We actually managed to prepare dinner for over 50 people using charcoal. The preparation began when Peace Corps delivered 8 live turkeys to the training center the day before. We (and by “we” I mean other trainees that are NOT vegetarian, like me) had to slaughter them with only minimal assistance by a local hired to show us the ropes, scope out their entrails, and pluck them overnight so they would be ready to go in the morning. Then, the turkey crew had to get up at 5:00 the next morning to build a giant, underground coal oven to roast them in. Over the course of one day, we put together enough mashed potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, and mac n cheese to feed a small army. It was awesome to be able to enjoy good, American style cooking, but it was even better to be able to celebrate with so many people. I've never celebrated Thanksgiving with anybody besides my parents and it really felt like being with family to be together as a group this year. That's not an easy feeling to recreate.

After a full day of celebrating, cooking, and dance parties (and having spent the night sharing a mattress at the training center the day before after getting a bit stranded when the Peace Corps vehicles couldn't drive me home until well after dark), I was definitely looking forward to being able to crash in my own bed. It just wasn't going to be that easy. Right as the Peace Corps driver was about to drop me off at my house, the car got stuck in a huge ditch. We got out to investigate and my friend Jon went around the side of the car to see what was wrong and found out by literally falling into the same ditch the car was stuck in. So, instead of going to sleep, we got to spend the next hour trying to help lift and push the car out of a ditch that was literally less than a stone's throw from my house. It might have seemed like a scene straight out of a horror movie, but this was honestly one of my favorite experiences so far. I actually managed to take the situation so lightly that I even got my camera out of my bag to take pictures while we were working (for the sake of your viewing pleasure of course). I suppose the ability to find humor in trying to haul a car out of a muddy pit on the side of a deserted Rwandan road in the middle of the night is up there on my list of things to be thankful for this year.

The Happy List

Adjusting to the Rwandan way of life is a distinct challenge for an American. Rwandans are persistently communal in every aspect of life. Americans are not. This means two things for an American trying to enter a Rwandan community: First, it means that, as an outsider, you will not be trusted until you earn it; Second, it means that you have to throw much of your individualism to the winds in order to fit into the community and to get anything done. Fortunately, we have now been here long enough that the community is starting to recognize us and to appreciate the fact that we do have a valuable role in the community as teachers and that we have been able to gain an understanding of the communalism of the people we are living with and been able to begin to embody some of it ourselves.

The hardest thing for me to adjust to has been to accept that communalism is a necessary aspect of getting anything done in this country. Like showering for example. It is quite the process. First, the family makes multiple trips during the course of the day to fetch water. Then, my host sister heats the water and stores it inside of the house. Then, my host mother fetches the water from inside the house. I rinse my bucket out and she fills it with hot water. Next, she will instruct either one of the children or myself to fetch cold water to add to the hot water. Sometimes I am allowed to pore this for myself, but on other occasions, she insists on doing it for me. Next, she instructs whichever family member is around to open to the door to the bathing room. If I am lucky, I can carry my own water and clothing into the room, but on other occasions, I'm not fast enough. It takes the participation of up to 6 people in order for me to shower. By American standards, this is horrifically inefficient. In Rwanda, it is the only way that makes sense because Rwandans insist on doing literally everything together. An American would never sacrifice speediness in order to include the efforts of the entire family in a task. However, in Rwanda, everything is done together, no matter how slowly, and each family member is included in each accomplishment of the day, regardless of the cost of timeliness or independence. Not many Westerners can claim that they are willing to make the same accommodations simply to be inclusive.

Coming to accept the Rwandan facts of life means that each day gets easier. Small annoyances cease to frustrate me like they did in the beginning and everything is cast in a more positive light. Rwanda is even beginning to smell better. Whereas I used to only smell pit latrines and petroleum, I can now distinguish the sweet scents of wood-burning fires and native flowers. As I'm starting to see more and more of the positives of being here, I thought it might be productive to share a “Happy List” for this weeks post. The following list is comprised of some of my favorite things about Rwanda so far:

1. Sir Bad Ass- The first time we saw Sir Bad Ass, we were all headed to our first Umuganda (community work day). There we were, jam-packed 15 to an 8 passenger Peace Corps vehicle, with all of our tools in tow, and stinking of BO, while we bumped unglamorously over unpaved terrain when, out of nowhere, Sir Bad Ass entered our lives. He was riding a giant, red motorcycle with a matching red helmet...which he had decided to leave on his handlebars instead of wearing. In about seconds flat, he had passed us, but it was certainly not the last we would see of him. Ever since this momentous event, he has continued to surprise us. Often he can be spotted on the original Sir Bad Ass motorcycle. Other times, he can be seen driving a shiny new SUV with his wife, riding in a taxi, or riding on the back of a bicycle. Sir Bad Ass has been spotted with so many different accessories that he's almost like a Barbie Doll. The only major difference is that he gets to pick the accessories and that all of them are bad ass.
2. The Candy Shop- Believe it or not, we can find chocolate in the middle of rural Rwanda! Even better, this chocolate is located in a boutique run by two of the sweetest women in all of Rwanda, who we call the Candy Shop Girls. They not only serve us chocolate (for only 100 a piece!), but they also carry delicious chapati and often have delightfully fluffy bread rolls (which aren't too common in Rwanda). The Candy Shop is the best place to go after a rough lesson to sit in the back room, drink sweet milk tea, and unwind.
3. The Paint Job- Naturally, having a giant influx of Peace Corps trainees has to have an impact on the local economy of the training site. However, I never realized how large this impact might be until Fidel, the owner of the bar we frequent, gave his place a paint job. Over the course of a week, the bar went from ordinary concrete, to white, to orange, and was given an elaborate, green, yellow, and blue trim. That's the power of purchasing.
4. The Chicken Dance (and many others)- As I've mentioned before, I have managed to teach my host siblings a variety of catchy English song/dances including the Hokey Pokey, the Macarena, Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes, and the Chicken Dance, which,thanks to my friend Michele, the kids that live near our training center have also learned. Every day, the flock the trainees making high pitched chirping music to the melody of the Chicken Dance until we stop and dance with them. It always brightens my day.
5. A Goat Called Maybe- I've already written an entire blog post about Maybe the goat, so I won't elaborate here, but she definitely makes the list.
6. Eggs for the Sick- As many of you know, I consider food to be the ultimate form of affection....and at the topmost tier of food-oriented affection is fried eggs. After my first bout of food poisoning, I found that, while Rwandans and I strongly disagree about what qualifies as good food almost 99% of the time, we agree when someone has recently been ill because being ill means you get fried eggs in a salty tomato sauce (and you don't even have to share!). Let's just say that this was by far my favorite meal so far at my homestay.
7. Mwitwande Kid- There are honestly way too many screaming children in my life to differentiate between many of them beyond those that I have in the classroom and those that I know at home, but some of them stand out. One of those stand out children is called the Mwitwande Kid. This poor child only seems to know one word: “mwitwande,” which means “what is your name?” And they never get tired of saying it. Literally every day, there she is on the side of the street to watch us walk to class and every day she's asking us repeatedly what our name is....regardless of our response. The current record is 14.
8. The Definition of Homophobia- It's pretty clear that the majority of clothing worn by rural Rwandans have been donated (and then resold) from America. As a result, most of them have some pretty ironic messages. I can't tell you how many shirts I've seen that read “Hooters” or “Brother of an American Soldier.” But, by far my favorite yet, was one that read “Ho-mo-pho-bi-a: Insecurity about being heterosexual.” Homosexuality is illegal in Rwanda.
9. Host Family- Since I mention them in the vast majority of my posts, I guess it goes without saying that my host family has been one of the better parts of my experience so far. The best part is is that it is always growing. My host mother has had literally 13 children, which means that new family members are always stopping by and sometimes even spending the night. Because it is traditional for Rwandan families to share the task of child-rearing and because my host mother has had so many children of her own, the number of children living at the house is constantly expanding. We went from having Paciente, to Paul and Paciente, and most recently added Samueli to the batch. My life at home has gone from a quiet, calm home with three women to a playground with children running everywhere, screaming, and trying to tickle me when I'm not watching. Life is good.
10. Stars- I don't know how many of you have seen a map of the world at night, but it basically shows a planet with a landmass almost entirely covered in electric lighting...until you reach Africa, the dark continent. Fortunately, while the lights in Africa are virtually nonexistent, the amount of stars you can see to that seem to be the exact inverse. Stars in Africa = Awesome!
11. Flowers from children- As I'm writing to you, I'm sitting here in Rwanda with multiple flowers in my hair that have become a daily gift from the kids on the walk from my home to school. It's good to feel loved.
12. Fresh cucumbers- Yay! Now that they're in season, I can make delicious chapati wraps!















13. The views on my morning run-

Peace Corps Presents: Model School

Our introduction to Model School was something like a parachute drop into a sea of children. Two weeks ago, we were simply thrown into Rwandan classrooms to teach, for the most time mercifully in pairs. However, three days into teaching, it was no longer acceptable to co-teach with your partner and you were completely on your own to sink or float in front of the classroom. And let me tell you, teaching here is simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating battle of my experience thus far.

After a week and a half of teaching, things are starting to fall into place, but it is also becoming clear that we really have our work cut out for us as teachers. Not only will we face challenges in the classroom, but we will face challenges in the education system as a whole. Rwanda only recently switched over to an Anglophone system and it's educational structure isn't quite developed for it. The National Exam is full of errors, some of them as egregious as asking students to answer questions on the feeding habits of elephants....as part of a reading comprehension unit based upon a passage about malaria. But, I suppose that's the same as standardized testing anywhere.

The Rwandan classroom, however, is dramatically different from anything I have ever experienced in America. Of course, this is partially because I grew up in a Montessori school, which is in and of itself, different from any other system of education. However, it seems that most of the credit can be given to the distinct cultural differences Rwandans and Americans have when it comes to hierarchy and respect. American students are rude...and often encouraged to be if it means that they are using critical thinking and engaged in the classroom. However, in Rwanda, manners take the precedent. This means that the typical school day has been starting off with me asking questions to an audience that often gives me a deer-in-the-headlights look, or even worse, averts their eyes, for several minutes before they finally realize that I really do want them to engage in my lesson. Even then, the most noise that is made is the sound of the Rwandan equivalent of a finger snap, which is really just a flick of the wrist that results in a noise that I would equate with the sound of hundreds of small fish being flung against concrete....and is hardly an encouraging sound. And neither is the sound of rain in the morning. It means that all of the crazy American teachers will show up to class on time only to discover that they will not be teaching because too few students have actually shown up to school. Hence, a Rwandan fear of the mud creates a rain day.

Rwandan students are accustomed to a fairly dry form of teaching. They expect their teachers to walk into the classroom, write some notes on the board, and maybe perform a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, before walking back out. However, with the right attitude and lesson plan, the silence can, in fact, be broken. After spending the greater part of a 50 minute lesson to describe what a game is and to ask my students if they liked games and wanted to play one, I was finally able to introduce them to charades. Each day has been a battle to engage them in something to make them think...or even better, to have fun. However, I have proven that Rwandan students can, in fact, complete a crossword puzzle, and do, in fact, enjoy listening to music in the classroom. I highly doubt if any of my students understood how listening to “California Gurls” and jotting down the words they understood was integral to their understanding of the English language, but they were definitely willing to take the class time to do it.

For all of the children there are in Rwanda, there are very few activities that seem to cater to them. It is not considered acceptable to play with them or to be goofy-a reality that hit me with a fellow trainee told us that her host family had informed her that she would need to stop singing and making animal noises at children when she was married and too much of an adult to behave that way anymore, which can only be expected from a culture that has no word for “fun.” As for the stigma, I'll keep my reputation as an immature and crazy white person if it means that the kids will still like me. Nothing brightens my day like going home to the three screaming children who now live at my house and performing the hokey pokey on what feels like repeat. Really. I think that's the ticket to anything in life; maintain a childlike outlook and it all looks good from there.

A Goat Called Maybe

Last night I came home to discover the newest addition to my household, a brand new little baby goat! I was thrilled and instantly started talking to the kids of the family asking what we should name it...to which Paciente responded, "Maybe." Of course, this response was probably due to her misunderstanding my question and trying incorrectly to say the English word for "baby," but the name still has an ominous ring to it as the only reason to own a goat in this country is to eat it. This quickly snapped me back to reality. Or my current reality (as I guess I should call it) and in this reality, goats are for eating, not for adoring and it's totally weird that I was distressed by the fact that Maybe would be spending their first night away from their mother outside, alone, and bleating loudly close to my bedroom window. In Rwanda, there is absolutely no such thing as animal rights as we know it in the states. People don't really own pets so much as they own meat and produce animals. Even those animals are treated dramatically differently from pets at home. A cow is the ultimate symbol of status, but is typically kept in a pen just large enough to turn around in and standing in its own waste. So two nights ago, when I pulled out pictures of my life at home, it was hilarious to my family to see multiple pictures of dogs, most of which were wearing some form of clothing and even funnier to them when I explained that my dog sleeps on my bed with me.

The Rwandan perspective on pets makes perfect sense. It's fairly impractical to have pets here, especially when they're not actually turning the profit. Dogs in particular are taboo because they are said to have scavenged the bodies of the dead post-1994. It just brings to light another area in which I am different here. In my life, animals have largely been a luxury, rather than a necessity, which makes me stand out when I look at animals because I find them cute and everyone else only looks at them when they're thinking about their next meal. Not that I plan on changing anything, my hippie-buddhist ideals and a strong belief that all sentient beings are equal is not really something that I can see ever going away. However, I am going to have to accept that it will be a long, uphill battle to explain the reasons I have decided to have a dog at my site without being culturally insensitive.

Until next time!
Catie