Tanzanian Vacation

Zanzibar, Tanzania. It's the closest beach vacation a Rwandan PCV can get, made infinitely better by the fact that they're a PCV. This is where a few friends and I chose to spend our first leave days since we arrived in Rwanda 10 months ago and I had to say, transportation complications completely aside, it was perhaps my most appreciated vacation yet.

Tanzania and Rwanda share a border, as well as a membership in the East African Union, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Just across Rusomo Falls, the landscape transforms from lush, green Rwanda hills to Tanzanian savannah. The excess of houses and children that makes Rwanda Africa's most densely populated country fades away and you can look out the bus window without seeing a single sign up human life. That is, until you hit a bus stop where Arabs, Indians, Rastafarians, and Masai warriors mingle freely without a second glance towards the abazungu because, frankly, difference isn't nearly so uncommon here as it is in Rwanda.Street food, illegal in Rwanda, is everywhere. You can even buy a potato omelet and have it bagged with a toothpick to eat it on the road.  And you might as well get a couple because it's going to be a long ride.

The bus ride from Kigali to Dar es Salaam is 36 hours. 36 hours of watching your feet, but mostly your stomach, swell to twice the usual size while you do nothing but sit and eat as you cross an entire country.  By the time we reached the ferry office to cross over to Zanzibar, we were sick of traveling and more than willing to pay the ridiculous $170 round trip fee to just get to the hotel waiting for us on the other side. It's a good thing we did too. Just behind us was a ferry full of people who couldn't afford the $170 on a ship unauthorized to go as far as Zanzibar and well over capacity. Somewhere halfway across the Zanzibar Channel, the people on our ferry started panicking. At first, I thought someone had fallen overboard. I turned to see a tiny, white speck in the distance and the man standing next to me mimed something breaking in two. We would soon find out that that speck was a capsized ferry and that our boat would go to rescue them only after they had taken us safely ashore. By the time all of the passengers had been rushed off the boat, military personnel had been able to board, and the ferry was able to fight the current that makes going back to the mainland take approximately twice as long, almost 200 people had drowned, unable to make it until a rescue was attempted. The Minister of Transportation resigned a week later and most of the Tanzanians we talked to on our trip seemed to believe it had something to do with lax monitoring of the ships going out from Dar es Salaam. Either way, it didn't prevent the unnecessary deaths of those too poor to pay for a nicer ferry or to go to swim lessons like so many middle-class children in the developed world. What can you do?

We arrived at Baby Bush Lodge on Kiwengwa beach with a nasty reminder of how lucky we were to be there literally ringing in our ears as we took a phone call from the Peace Corps Country Director of Tanzania called to make sure we were all accounted for. We spent a few days on the beach, not exactly sunbathing, but just enjoying and making friends with a few locals. Just down the beach, we found Obama Bar. The owner, Peter, was a Masai who had studied tourism in Italy (which coincidentally bought up most of the beach property in Zanzibar while it was still cheap) and loved Americans. We got the local price for Happy Hour and met a crew of Masai who all of whom had learned several romantic words and sayings in Italian and how to say “I love you," "yes," and "no" in English, which had apparently been enough for them up until that point.  During the day, we met merchants who, for the most part tried to charge us infinitely too much and Dida, who invited us into her home to cook for us during Ramadan (all the restaurants not connected to a hotel were closed during the day) and introduced us to her baby girl, Leila, over delicious coconut curry.

Just south of the beach was the true highlight of the trip, the Stonetown night market. The best way too describe the happiness this experience brought me is to recall a night nine months ago when I sat under the mosquito net of my bed, lifted just a few inches off the floor of my host family's home, waiting for yet another meal of rice and beans that wouldn't be ready until 10:30 pm and decided to watch Ratatouille. Five minutes into the movie, Benny starts describing seeing flavors in color and I started to cry over food. Zanzibar was just like the movie, but with all of the food right there at my fingertips. There was cane juice, pressed in a machine and mixed with ginger and lemon. There were battered potatoes in a tomato-based soup with lemon and chilli sauce. There were delicious chapattis; there was tea full of spices; there was ice-cream and brownies and milkshakes! There was the Zanzibar Pizza. The Zanzibar Pizza, by the way, is God's gift to Rwandan PCVs who make the 36 hour journey to Zanzibar. Wonton dough filled with all of the delicious savory toppings of a regular pizza and then fried to perfection, you would think that the Zanzibar Pizza could not possibly be any more amazing....until they make it with nutella.

Fully satisfied with our trip, it was time to make our way home. We spent the night in Dar es Salaam, which we discovered had a Subway in a strip mall. Foot long sandwich and milkshake successfully polished off, I headed to the grocery store and stocked up on snacks. On the island, eating in public is forbidden during Ramadan just the same as it is year round in Rwanda. However, in the rest of Tanzania, it was still perfectly acceptable and I was not going to lose any precious munching time. In fact, I polished off half of my snacks before we even boarded the bus the following morning and proceeded to buy more as soon as possible. Destination: Moshi, the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

In Moshi, we stayed at Twiga Home, a sweet little hotel just outside of town with a free shuttle service and honestly the best customer service out of anywhere I have been since I left America. They helped to arrange a tour of some nearby rice fields, which just might have been one of the most beautiful places on Earth and a little venture to some waterfalls at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. But I'm not going to lie to you, the highlight was still the food. Twiga Home made delicious grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches that we well stocked up on, but they also introduced us to a coffee shop in town full of American food we don't get to have too often and, you guessed it, really good coffee.

As our glorious days of eating came to a close, we realized one, rather unfortunate, thing. Moshi had no bus to Rwanda. We had to go to Arusha to catch a bus, where we spent the night in the Seven Eleven Hotel literally right in front of the bus park. From here, we spent half a day traveling on bumpy roads and at high speeds to Kahama, about four hours from the Rwandan border. Our bus tickets said we were going straight to Kigali so we assumed that we would make some kind of connection here. We had not assumed that we would be making it the next day because buses refused to risk heading towards the border as evening was approaching. It was three in the afternoon when we found this out. One more night in Tanzania spent sharing what was supposed to be a room for two people between five girls at a cheap truckers' hotel later, we were on our way home.

The delay just so happened to work in my favor! I was able to spend the weekend in Kigali to take care of some last minute errands and to go to Guma Guma Superstar, a huge concert featuring Jason Derulo, who I saw play live for 5,000 Rwandan franks or $8. It's good to be back!

The Right to Vote

Independence Day. On this day in America, we reflect on our history, pride ourselves on our democracy, have a barbeque, drink cheap American beer, and set off some explosions in the sky. Rwanda also celebrates on this day, just without the fireworks. However, in the same way we celebrate our liberation from England, Rwanda also celebrates its liberation from colonial rule (50 years on July 1^st), followed by Liberation Day, the end of the Rwandan genocide, which marked its 18^th year, today on the 4^th as America celebrated its own 236^th year of freedom.

In 50 years of freedom, Rwanda has taken great strides. It has created its own democracy, created national parks, put itself on the map for eco-tourism, joined the East African Union, transitioned from a Francophone to an Anglophone educational system, and dramatically increased the number of students enrolled in primary schools across the country. But 50 years is still just a short time in the life of a country. The class-system first introduced by colonial rule has yet to dissipate entirely and has the habit of making small appearances at the least expected of moments. For a class assignment on traditional storytelling, one of my students chose to write the story of the genocide of 1994. He made no effort to soften his words, writing:

Long time ago, Rwanda was a good country, but when the white people came in Rwanda they begun to destroy the Rwandan culture. Before white men, Rwandan had the culture of granting cows, eating together, visiting... All these culture were ruined by the white men.

At a recent Kwita Izina, a naming ceremony for all of the baby gorillas born in Volcanoes National Park in the past year, foreign dignitaries were invited to join in the celebration. They were given special invitations and sat in a separate, shaded area of the field with seating, a view of the stage, and free refreshments. They were allowed access to separate, better maintained latrines, a fact we discovered when an African American volunteer tried to go to the bathroom. Part of the price of catering to tourists is not being able to cater to your own citizens. I wonder how my student would have felt standing, packed side-by-side with other Rwandans in the sun behind the barrier to the visitors' section at the Kwita Izina watching white foreigners sit eating chocolate-covered pastries and sip coffee while snapping picture after picture on their high-end digital cameras and occasionally relieving themselves in latrines painted in the colors of the Rwandan flag, their right to do so hardly coming in to question as status here can be assigned with more ease than it can be earned.

Things are changing with the next generation and there is nowhere that change is more obvious than among my students. Before we were even able to start printing, my Media Club had managed to stir up quite a bit of trouble. Unbeknownst to me, my newsies started drafting articles and reading them out loud in front of the morning general assembly. One of my students did a bit of investigative reporting and shared a story on the unwashed potatoes in the school refectory. When he was confronted by the school's cooking staff, he didn't ask for help, but stood up for himself by walking into the kitchen and informing the staff of the role and importance of journalism:

If you think you can do a bad thing, like give us those potatoes that are not washed and we will keep quiet, you are wrong. If something is bad, the media is going to say something about that.

Later, the same student ran into more serious trouble. He was called before his class by his mathematics teacher who proceeded to call him a dog (the deepest of insults in Rwandan culture) and tell him to stop writing because he was only doing it to try to make himself look smart. When he asked the teacher to take back his insults, he was suspended for three days for talking back. Both my Headmaster and Prefecture seemed fully aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, but the fact of the matter is that a teacher is an authority not be crossed by a student here, no matter what the circumstance. My student was forced to go and beg for imbabazi (forgiveness) before he would be allowed to write again. He had to accept the authority of his teacher even when he knew it was wrong.

The term for this is ndiyobwana. It means, I accept, Mr. My teacher tell me this word is Swahili, but it applies just about everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa so just about every language in Sub-Saharan Africa uses it. It means that you accept someone because you have no choice, that it doesn't matter if they are wrong or right, but only that they are above you. I am told that, even now, authority plays a large part in local politics. It is unheard of to state your opinion because it is something people still fear they can be beaten for. When I casually mentioned that I would vote, again, for Barack Obama in the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election while chatting with my students at a football match, they all gasped, looked over their shoulders, and shushed me. The fact that the crowd of Kinyarwanda speakers around us were hardly likely to have understood what I said, let alone cared, did little to comfort them. I had to explain that it is not common practice for Americans to beat each other over their choice of candidate.

Student candidates gave speeches in front of the general assembly and each student was able to cast their vote in the refectory afterwords. Students and teachers worked together to tally the votes, making it clear that there was no corruption taking place. Since students in S6 were not allowed to run for office this election, I set my S6 journalists into motion documenting the event. They used my camera to take pictures, sat in on the count, recorded candidate speeches, and even conducted interviews.

This is a new concept here, students and teachers working together. My students informed me that last year's election took place behind the closed door to the teacher's lounge and that the students that were selected hadn't even wanted to run in the first place. This is something I've determined to change, starting with the newspaper. I insisted on having my students prepare a meeting with the Headmaster to propose their ideas instead of bringing them to him myself. I think they were somewhat blown out of the water when he agreed to fund everything we asked for, including a digital camera without even batting an eyelash. They had never had the chance to ask for what they wanted so directly before. With this and many other changes on the horizon, this year I am proud not only to be an American, but also to be (however honorarily) a Rwandan.

Mind over Matter

My students and I are discussing ideas for short stories. Considering the fact that the majority of them are in their late teens, love is first on the list. I write “Romance” on the board, draw a heart next to it, and am instantly bombarded with questions.

Teacher, what is the meaning of that symbol?

It is a heart. You don't draw hearts like this in Rwanda?

Not. A heart is for pumping blood. That is what we study in biology.

Rwandans believe that love is in the mind, not in the heart, a point I tangentially contested for a good 10 minutes of class as I asked my students if they had ever been in love and whether or not they could feel it in their heart. Only a few of them said yes, but I feel like they might have done so to humor me. The rest were quite clear. Love is something you think about with your head, not feel with your blood-pumping organ. That is something else entirely.

This isn't the only physical or biological function that Rwandans and Americans seem to disagree about. Yawning is another. Every time I open my mouth to yawn, I am told to eat something. It doesn't matter if it is 6:00 in the morning or 10:00 at night or even if I have just eaten. If I am yawning, I am hungry. I assume that this is because food does, in fact, give you energy so it is possible that one can be tired from lack of food, but I'm constantly bemused by the fact that an involuntary bodily function can be perceived so differently in our two cultures. What is even more bizarre is that I have started to associate yawning with hunger myself, which has caused a sharp increase in the amount of snacking on amandazi (Rwandan fried bread) that occurs when I have to stay up grading papers.

Other times, my Rwandan friends are intrigued by some of the the simplest behaviors. Saying “Ow!” has no meaning, despite being my own ingrained response to pain. “Ah!” works perfectly well, but isn't something I react with naturally. I've also found that none of my cures for the hiccups work on my students, making me wonder if my students just like having the attention they get for having the hiccups or if they actually only work if you believe in them.

I gotta wonder, is culture the main determinant in how we understand the way we physically feel? If we say that love is in the mind, do we feel it in our heads instead of in our hearts? Is yawning really from hunger and Western culture has just been fooling itself all of these years? Or is it the other way around? If I grew up in a society that believed sneezing was a sign of the stomach flu, would it make me feel nauseous? At our core, we're all human and we all experience the same basic feelings, but it seems the power of the mind is strong enough to change the way we comprehend them.

Kigali International Peace Marathon

“You can become tired from walking, but not from running. When you walk, you think only about how tired you are, but when you are running, it is for pleasure so it is impossible to become tired.”

A couple of months ago, I was telling one of my friends how tired I was from running that morning when he imparted this brilliant piece of wisdom. In the past few months, I have learned the incredible truth of this statement. If you love what you are doing, you almost never become tired, whether it's running or anything else you choose to do with your life.

The Kigali International Peace Marathon was founded in 2005 to commemorate the genocide of 1994 and to draw people from around the world to Rwanda. This year, it also marked the first anniversary of the first real race I had ever run in unless you count a Free Tibet 5-K in my freshman year of college that I ended up having to walk partway because I was so out of shape.

Not having any real distance running experience, I googled a training regimen to work with. Running turned out to be a brilliant way to work my way into my community without ever really even having to carry on a conversation. People were so amused to see me huffing and puffing up a hill that they didn't care that I was rarely about to exchange more than a few short greetings and soon began to call me “the girl who likes sports,” which, if not my name, is still a step up from muzungu and they did eventually get it right. That's not to say that training was easy. Each time I pushed myself to run a little farther was a new time that I had to re-introduce myself and deal with being called muzungu all over again. It was also pretty hard to figure out how far I was actually running without an accurate map or the assistance of google (my village doesn't actually show up on google maps). I ended up asking people in my village approximately how far different landmarks were and running to them and thought I was running about 20-K every few days when one of my priests told me he thought it was more like 12-K and I ran my brains out the next day. I think in retrospect that I was probably right. I didn't always stick to my schedule, but I worked pretty hard at it, and by the night before race day, I felt fully prepared and completely entitled to a full pizza all to myself at one of Kigali's finer Italian restaurants.

The race began at 7:00 in the morning at Kigali's Amahoro Stadium and it was full of abazungu. In one morning, I saw more white people in that stadium than I think I have seen in the past eight months, all wearing under armor, running shorts, sweat bands, and iPods. Most of these people were connected to an NGO in some way or another. World Vision, an international Christian development organization was there in force, wearing bright orange team t-shirts and helping to organize the event. I was decently relieved to see that the race was also popular with local Rwandans as well as internationals. Before the race started, we spotted a group enthusiastically circled around doing a team warm up and stretch that seemed to be making use of every part of the body the facilitator could possibly think of. I'm not sure what some of their exercises were meant to accomplish, but they were having fun. Not too far from them, tiny, sinewy runners from Kenya were doing sprints.....as a warmup. The last group was comprised of kids. Some were there just to watch, but quite a few were in it to race. A few second year Peace Corps Volunteers had pulled together a grant to bring students from their school to Kigali as part of a health and nutrition project and to run the relay, in which each runner runs approximately 6 miles of the race. They wore matching t-shirts with their names creatively painted on the back and were just as happy to cheer on PCVs from the sidelines as they were to cheer for each other. Ideally, I would like to be running the full next year, but seeing those kids at race day has inspired quite a few other volunteers to get their students together to do the same thing next year.

We had been told to expect the race to start late, so when it was ready to go at 7:30, only half and hour after is was supposed to, a friend and I were scrambling to get to the starting line after searching the stadium for an unlocked bathroom with toilet paper (there were none, by the way). Once the runners took off, a good deal of the diversity separated itself out and turned into a race between Kenyans and a race between everyone else. It turns out that the sprints I thought the Kenyan team had been running prior to the race weren't sprints at all. That was the pace they intended to run the full marathon. Thankfully, the racing organization was prepared for this. They had hired motorcycles to lead the pack and honk to get other runners off of the load as they lapped them. I'm pretty certain that the first Kenyan to finish the full marathon did so a couple of minutes before I finished running the half and the second runner-up overtook me literally thirty seconds from the finish line.

My own race went well by my own standards. I finished in 2:13.04 and ran the entire way and, for my first half, that's good enough for me. The people that came to watch made the race a lot of fun. The race organizers gave out bottled water, bananas, and some pretty nasty looking sponges to cool off with at specific checkpoints and they were filled with kids there to snatch peoples' bottles when they dropped them. They got a pretty big kick out of the muzungus that could speak to them in Kinyarwanda. Besides the kids, there were a bunch of World Vision volunteers there to cheer people on, which was particularly helpful up one of the larger hills, a group of senior citizens handing out cups of water by the stadium (a good idea since a lot of the water checkpoints were running out), a dread-locked and spandex leotard wearing American there to cheer on his girlfriend, and a few early-bird PCVs who stood by the sidelines and took pictures for the runners.

After I finished my race, I hung around the stadium, waiting for friends to come in and eating the free bananas and biscuits they were giving out at the finish line on the ground. Just before the last runners came in, it started to downpour and they decided to give out the awards. They had a film crew there to project the event onto the large screen in the stadium, but they unfortunately had not placed their cameras too well so they ended up showing the backside of a woman from Sweden for well over 5 minutes as she gave her address to the crowd. So, it wasn't the best of closing ceremonies, but we still managed to have fun taking pictures on top of the podium with a bunch of kids and waiting for the stragglers that got stuck in the rain.

For the first time in Rwanda, I really felt like I deserved to treat myself so I ended the day with a buffet lunch complete with macaroni and cheese, pita chips with guacamole, a delightful fresh salad bar, french toast, bread rolls, fruit tarts, and drinks by the poolside at the Mille Collines, the ultimate in PCV and post-race bliss.

Disparity

“Abazungu (white people)! Agacupa (water bottle)! Abazungu (white people)! Agacupa (water bottle)!” were the cries that filled the air on the road leading to Bisoke, a 12,000 foot volcano in Volcano National Park. Bisoke is home to Crater Lake, a pool of water floating in the clouds, half a day's climb from where we were walking. It is also home to several gorilla groups, one of which we were fortunate enough to see despite not having paid the price for an actual gorilla trek, a far pricier experience that makes for an excellent source of revenue for the government of Rwanda. It is hard to understand that, somehow, on the road between the park's beautiful tourist lodge from which all of the guided tours are based, and the border to the actual park, there can be such abject poverty.

Of course, this is not due to a lack of effort on the behalf of the park to make conservation benefit the local community. Over complimentary coffee and tea in the morning, we were entertained by traditional dancers. Gorilla trekkers, armed with thousand dollar cameras, foot-long lenses, and tripods, snapped pictures the same way they would later capture the gorillas. Rwandans love to share their culture (not to mention, they were being paid to do so), but those snapshots will hardly begin to be able to cover it. In the weeks that they are here, dance may be the only thing those tourists really intentionally learn about Rwandan culture, but it's only a small part of the whole thing, and, after eight months here, I know that even I am just beginning to scratch the surface. I wonder if the photographers will go home with these images and think that they have somehow managed to gain an understanding of Rwanda.

However, some will get more of a taste than others. Disgruntled, the German tourist who climbed Bisoke with our group, parked his fancy rental car a few miles from the park parking lot for fear that the bumpy road would damage the suspension. He cursed at having to pay someone to watch his car so the tires wouldn't be stolen and grumbled about being ripped off and behind schedule for the rest of the day, not even attempting to keep it under his breath. He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand what it feels like to have something dangled in front of you, knowing that it is something you will never have. His car is an object of wealth that the people surrounding the park must be forced to look at every day knowing that they will never possess anything like it. I wonder if he saw it: the difference between himself, a well-groomed, well-fed tourist, in good enough health to climb a 12,000 ft volcano just for leisure, and a tiny Rwandan child, covered in dirt, pant-less, with a distended belly and fluffy, red clown hair from malnutrition. It is disparity like this that is the reason it is considered rude to eat in front of others in this country. It isn't like in the states where you can safely assume that anyone that observes you snacking at the bus stop has the opportunity to go and buy themselves something at the closest convenience store if they so choose.

Maybe we weren't eating in front of them, but we might as well have been. The children ran alongside us, asking for money and water bottles with the justifiable expectation that we should be able to give them these things. My friends and I tried to mitigate this by greeting them and explaining ourselves in Kinyarwanda, but there is only so much you can do to diminish the expectations that have been upheld for generations. In my own community, I am the sole person responsible for building or not building the expectation of free handouts. However, I find this particularly challenging on the days when missionaries visit my church only to hand out candy and biscuits before they disappear again. On these days, I find myself faced with new demands and I am forced to explain, yet again, that I am a person and not a bank and that candy is bad for your teeth anyways. These are not fun days for me.

I must constantly remind myself of the reason for days like these. Rwandans didn't wake up one day and decide to start making ridiculous monetary demands of foreigners for no reason. Those expectations were put in place long before I arrived here...and they will likely be in place for long after I leave. In some parts of the country, like in Kibuye, where I recently attended a training, tourists are so common that they are virtually ignored, making for a blissful past week. Now, back at site, I am faced, yet again, with the challenges of being the one muzungu in my community. While it is comforting to be home where everybody knows my name, the reality is that they wouldn't know my name if they didn't associate it with my status as a foreigner. There is no reason that every child in town comes running to the road screaming when I come home on a moto, no reason except for the fact that I am white. In the next couple of years, I have the opportunity to try to undo some of the stereotypes associated with my nationality. I only wish those stereotypes hadn't been so firmly put in place by so many generations before me.

The Rainy Season

The rainy season. We have so much to do in the rainy season. The kickoff to Memorial Week is our reminder: a funereal procession following a man with a distorted microphone, driven in the back of a blue pickup truck with a broken windshield, who stutters so rapidly in Kinyarwanda over the sound of a generator that I am sure that I am not the only person who cannot understand him and that, perhaps, he doesn't mind this. His speech is punctuated by statements of Never Forget, Never Forget, our reminder that, this week and this week alone, we will be given no choice.

However, the Resurrection of Christ will have to take precedence. We are in Church. We are in Church all evening until well after the rain and well past the time that most people are normally in their homes after dark. We are in Church in the morning too, being constantly reminded by our priest to liken Christ to our loved ones. To look to rebirth and renewal, rather than to the horrors of our past. This is a time of year we need the prayer and Easter is more enjoyable than Memorial anyways.

We have a whole week of state-mandated mourning to perform, most of which, thankfully, is cut short by the rain. If not, it is cut short some other way. This is no time to talk about the past. This is the time to talk about gratitude. A district official makes this clear as she stares, bewildered, at an elderly man, drunk off too much urwarwa who comes to the microphone and begins to tell us the details of his past. Not today, she says, gingerly snatching the microphone from his quivering fingers. Not this moment. This moment we will discuss why we are thankful. That will be all for now and all that we will hear for all of the days.

Each meeting is so much like the next. On one day, guest speakers touch briefly on the crimes against the bodies of women, another on the crimes against the minds of our children. Crimes of ideology are the worst kind of crimes we really care to discuss. On most days, we end early, on account of the rain. Rain that we are grateful for after long hours spent on wooden benches, trying to drown out the sound of the speakers without any success until the sound of the rain, the same rain that unfortunately failed to end the crimes against this country we are now forced to discuss in the rain every year.

18 years of discussion. 18 years of well-contained mourning, if you can call it that, meant to make sure we never forget, but also that we never have to remember. Nothing is more frightening than having to remember. For 18 years, the 3,000 bodies in the Red Zone have lain, unburied, where they died and 18 years the mourners have been there, asking for their burial. And, after 18 years, we are still forgetting them. The world is forgetting. Like it forgets and forgets and always forgets even though the word in front of forgets, we are told, was always supposed to be never.

A day after remembering, my community is resurrected from the dead. We are in Church again and it is time for Baptism. Crying babies are subjected to cold water, dripping down their faces in a rush to cleanse them of the sins of their ancestors before it is too late and beaming parents smile into camera lenses in an attempt to make this a moment never forgotten. The ceremony is tight, contained, which each ritual step memorized collectively by the whole. At the last final clanking of the bells we proclaim Dushimiye Imana (Thanks to be God) and it's raining again with nothing to do, but let loose and dance in it.

A Sliver of Rwandan Insight on Kony 2012

When I first heard about Kony 2012, it had already been viral in the states for a couple of days. I didn't get a chance to watch it until about a week after a friend posted a link to it on my wall, or until controversial screenings of it were quickly called off after a riot in Lira, Northern Uganda.

My personal opinion on the video was that it was well-intentioned, but paternalistic by focusing so much on the efforts of American do-gooders and so little on the opinions and desires of actual Ugandans. The video also dumb the issue down pretty significantly, thus failing to emphasize the fact that Joseph Kony is currently in the DRC (although, if you watch closely, he does mention it) and that ending violence in the DRC is a much more complicated and monumental task than the mere capture of one man....but that's an entirely different topic and different 100 blogs in and of itself.

However strong my own opinion on this video was (and is), I decided that a more valuable voice to add to the conversation was the voice of my students. While they are not Ugandan, my students are mostly of an age in which they have witnessed violent conflict within their own lifetimes. They also live in such close proximity to the Congo where Kony is said to be hiding that many of them are Congolese or have family that live in the Congo so I figured their opinion was more relevant than my own.

I was also happy to see that the organization I first volunteered for in Africa, The Real Uganda, had posted Ugandan reactions to the video, giving a voice to the people that the film claims to be helping. They were outraged. Following my expectations, Ugandan bloggers said that the video was lacking vital information, demeaned the power of Ugandans to act for themselves, and failed to address real Ugandan needs for post-conflict development. I expected my students to have similar views.

They did not give me the answer I anticipated. Despite the fact that I had prefaced the video by saying that it had sparked massive controversy in Uganda and that it was OK for them to criticize the film, they had a fairly positive opinion of it. They were happy to see Americans paying attention to an African issue and agreed with the sentiment that Kony should be made famous. Angie, who at first needed help with some of the facts, was of the opinion that "People are people. Where they are should not stop others from giving help to them." In what seemed to mostly be an attempt to satisfy my urge to criticize the movie, Patrick mentioned that perhaps the people in Uganda who do not like the video are politicians who don't like the fact that the movie makes them look like they are powerless to catch Kony on their own. I mentioned that the movie glossed over a lot of important details about the conflict in the DRC, but their response was that maybe now that people were paying attention to Kony, they would do their own research and come up with better solutions. I didn't have the heart to tell them how little people actually use their access to information technology.

I was initially convinced that I had failed to explain the situation of Uganda and that that was the reason my students weren't more critical of the film. However, after a little reflection, I think their response can be attributed to Rwanda's own, very different, history. In 1994, the United States did precisely the opposite of what it is doing now in Uganda. Instead of intervening in what was clearly a genocide, American policy makers refused to acknowledge the tragedy occurring in Rwanda for what it was. Now, in the aftermath, my students frequently point to the US to say that it should be doing more to intervene on crises taking place in Africa. While discussing how the lack of US aid to the Somalian famine was due to America's own weakened economy last week, Faustin said, “I think that, if I have a house with three chambers, and one of those chambers is destroyed, I might want to rebuild that third chamber. But, if you have a house and all of your chambers are destroyed, it is better that I use that money to build a chamber for you because you have nothing and I still have a house." Politics aside, he said, it was always the responsibility of those who have even the smallest ability to help those who are suffering.

Granted, Kony 2012 isn't about Rwanda, but it is about stopping a man guilty of significant crimes against humanity and that's something I trust my students to have a fairly good understanding of. Take their opinions with a grain of salt, knowing they come from a different place than the Ugandan rioters who were so vehemently against the film, but also that their opinion comes as a result of Americans doing nothing. My own opinions on America's responsibilities as a wannabe global superpower are constantly on shaky ground and my conversation with my students has done nothing to solidify them.

It Takes a Village

You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child? Well, here in Rwanda, it also takes a village to raise a...well, I guess I'll go ahead and say it...a muzungu. Actually, it takes several, which is due to the fact that a village is approximately 10 households around here so my community as a whole is easily made up of four villages outside of my own. And man, do my villages have some collective parenting skills! They know when I'm sick; they know when I'm tired; they know when I'm cold and when I'm hungry....of course, they always think I'm hungry and frequently remark and the sad fact that I have not, in fact, gained any weight since arriving in Rwanda, which is really something I ought to remedy as soon as possible. From my basic physical needs to my education as a proper umunyarwanda (Rwandan citizen) my villages have all the bases covered.

I realized this for the first time two days ago as I was about to enter the school grounds to teach. I was stopped by Sister Patricia, who wanted to fix my hair and to try to wipe something that turned out to be a bit of dead skin off on my face. This is fairly common practice for the nuns, but here, in front of my place of work, I realized for the first time how much I was being mothered. However, it's not just the nuns that seem to think I need looking after. It is the personal responsibility of every mama in town to make sure I am doing well. If I don't wear a sweater, I'm told to go home and get one; if I wear a sweater, I'm told to put my hood up; and, if my hands are cold, I must be sick and there is a good chance someone will come by my house later with tea and bread...not that I mind. Even my all-male staff refuses to allow me to walk in the rain, a doting tendency that borders on the absurd when it's sprinkling and I need to make my way from the teachers' lounge to the classroom. Last week my headmaster spent so long running around the grounds to find me an umbrella that it had virtually stopped raining by the time he handed it to me so I could go home.

In addition for monitoring my physical well-being, my villages are heavily invested in my education and each person I talk to during the course of the day is a teacher. On some days, my glowing parents are thrilled that I seem to have learned a new word (although it's often an old one that I simply haven't had the occasion to use yet) and even happier to try to teach me something new. Beyond my ongoing language education, the mamas that run the co-op with which I work are raising me to be the perfect Rwandan bride and constantly comment on the good fortune of my future husband when I do something as mundane as pulling a weed or sticking my hand in a puddle of cow manure to plant a sweet potato. And these skills actually do equate into my appeal for marriage. I was recently informed that several men have, in fact, been by to visit the priests (my surrogate fathers for the next couple of years?) to ask for my hand in marriage. Thankfully, the fathers had the sense to tell them to ask me, knowing full well that none of them would muster the courage.

A few months ago, I would have found all of this undeserved attention rather undesirable. I would have assumed that people treated me with so much deference due to some sort of horrible socially-constructed racial divide, the precise barrier that I am trying to break down in being here. However, it seems that the doting is more of a result of my villages getting to know me than it is that they see me as a foreigner. They certainly wouldn't have been so comfortable commenting on my choices in fashion (earrings are a big deal around here) or grabbing my hair to fix it in the middle of the marketplace if they still saw me as a complete outsider. Buhoro buhoro (slowly by slowy, as they say here), I am working my way into this overgrown family of mine.

To Explain Why I Came from America

Ah! The joys of teaching. Today marked the official beginning of my World Wise Schools (WWS) correspondence program with students in America. I brought in letters from a 6th grade class that, conveniently enough, my mother teaches at the school I went to growing up in Evergreen. The chaos that ensued was too precious not to take some time away from marking papers to record it.

Right off the bat, my students were dumbfounded by the difficulty of the task: to read a letter and to write a letter. While their English is definitely at a level where they were able to understand the assignment, their self-confidence is not. After I explained the instructions for the task in each of my classes, there were absolutely no questions...that is, until it was time to begin. Suddenly, my instructions were completely unclear and my students were telling me they had no idea what I could possibly expect of them. When we went step by step through the instructions a second time, I found that they actually understood each word perfectly, so I asked the what the question was. The only response they had for me was, “It is difficult, teacher.” It wasn't that they didn't understand what I expected of them, it was that they were terrified of actually doing it.

Eventually, I did manage to calm them enough to break into groups to read the letters, but then I found that they wanted to write back in groups. Of course, we all know how the story of the group project. One person does all the work, the rest learn nothing, and they all end up with the same score. I had to vehemently deny this option and insist on the fact that my students are in fact separate entities and could, in fact, write a letter about themselves all on their own. I had overcome my second hurdle.

Once they began writing, the results were magnificent. First, Innocentos in my S6 class just about cried when he came to the end of a letter and found that the author had ended it by saying, “I can't wait to hear from you.” He started dashing madly around the classroom to ask each of his peers what it could have possibly meant and was convinced that it meant his pen pal was not looking forward to hearing him. Even after I had identified the problem, forced him to sit down, and explained that “I can't wait” is a common English phrase that also means “I am excited,” he didn't believe me and ended up including the following in his letter:

I'm not happy for you because at the end of your letter you wrote “I can't wait to hear back from you!” I will be happy when you will tell me why you wrote it.

Who knew such a harmless and well-intentioned phrase could cause so much damage?

On the whole though, the results of the letter writing project were phenomenal. Sure, some students copied their pen pal's letters word for word, which led them to write that I had once been a student at their school and that my mother is their teacher or that they had recently gotten a few inches of snow....none of which are true, but some of the other results were both hilarious and heartwarming.

One student had just been reading an entertainment section of The Denver Post in Newspaper Club on a day that I had introduced them to comics, crosswords, advice columns and letters to the editor. This particular student was completely shocked by what he read and just had to ask a student in America about it. He wrote:

Dear my friend: John

How are you Me I'am OK Because I have life.

I Had to ask you a few question

I have just read the letter from Disgusted in last week's copy of your news paper in it she makes very wild remarks about the youth of to day and suggests that we are all noisy selfish violent

Where is his evidence

I have met some very disagreeable adults even in my own short life, but know people young and old, are different

Remark like that of Disgusted help no one I am surprised that you found space in your paper to print it and promote his views

My GOD bless you

So there you have it, the opinion of a Rwandan youth on the opinion of an American adult on American youth. That's what this dialogue should be all about: asking questions about a different culture and thinking critically about differences of opinion. Students at the Montessori School of Evergreen are in for a real treat when those letters arrive.

They will also be receiving a huge dose of gratitude. One student wrote:
"Do you eat every morning break fast? How it can be possible?" serving as a reminder of how lucky many of us are to be eating three meals a day. My students' gratitude for having both parents or for having a family with siblings, coupled with decently awkward questions about the marital status of their pen pals (a perfectly normal topic of discussion, here in Rwanda) spoke volumes about the importance of family in this country as their questions about whether or not there are animals like cows and gorillas in Colorado were a good indicator that a correspondence program was a perfect choice to both break down some of the mental barriers constructed from leading an isolated, village life and teach them about life outside of their tiny country. Of course, they will probably also break down some of the barriers of living the sheltered and privileged life of Evergreen, Colorado.

Of course, reading through their letters tonight has also told me how appreciated I am...something a former English teacher of my own has recently reminded me is far too rare an occurrence in the life of an educator. One of my students wrote:

Catie is my teacher explain why she came from America to teach in Rwanda? But for school Catie is best teacher We love so much.

That's the thing about being a teacher, especially here in Rwanda, the benefits always outweigh the costs. Yes, I have come a long way from home to do this, and yes, one some days it has been challenging. Today itself was a challenge just to pull my students' teeth and get them to write a page-long letter a piece, but by the time I got down to reading those letters, it was all absolutely worth it.

Club News

Off the bat, one of my favorite things about teaching at a boarding school was the club life. It's a rare thing for students that go to day school in Rwanda to have time for extracurriculars, but the kids at my school are blessed with plenty of free time and, man, do they know how to use it. Completely without the assistance of any of the staff, the students run a slew of clubs ranging from Anti-SIDA (AIDS) to Chemistry Club. I have now become an active participant in two of them.

The first was English Club, which I was “obliged” to join by my headmaster and which, I must admit, I was somewhat reluctant to take on at first because it seemed like just more of the same of what I was already doing in class and I am not a fan of monotony. However, English Club has turned out to be a great place to try out all of my game ideas and to get students really engaged in dialogue (as opposed to lectures on articles or verb agreement) and, in the past week, has made a huge turn for the better by transforming from English Club in a student-run newspaper. Now this is my kind of club. In high school, I used to spend hours after school editing The Claw (or satirical Flaw), taking my position as the Editor-in-Chief of a high school journalism learning experience far too seriously. This is exactly what I intend to do with my new project. Thus far, we have just started organizing. There isn't really a lot that happens around here so I was didn't want to get my students' hopes up to write a bunch of feature-length articles full of ground-breaking news each month. Instead, I decided to focus on the fun stuff by introducing the idea of a monthly survey of student opinions, a club update section, and an advice column. Just for kicks, I also decided to encourage them to include a comic strip and crossword that I will help to write so students can practice their English. It might just be the nostalgia, but I walked out of our newsie meeting today with a huge smile on my face, feeling like I was 16 again.

Of course, nothing can bring back high school like a good fist fight can. I noticed Karate on the club list during my site visit (months before I was even officially sworn in as a volunteer) and knew immediately that I wanted to join. On my first day of school, I started asking my teachers about it every day over lunch. When my students asked me what my favorite sport was, I made a point of telling them that it was Tae Kwon Do, which is a lot like Karate and then went on a martial arts tangent, listing all of the different styles (Tai Chi, Judo, Krav Maga, etc.) and expounding upon the awesomeness of various Kung Fu movies. They got the hint. About a month into teaching, one of my students chased me down as I was leaving school and asked me to come and “play Karate.” Playing Karate turned out to be much more intense than it initially sounded. Even without any equipment or a formal instructor, my students manage an intense practice, complete with drills, forms, and unpadded sparring. To be honest, I was a bit intimidated, but somehow managed to gain my students' respect and ended up teaching a class of entirely Tae Kwon Do and being asked to be their new master so they can compete in tournaments in Kigali. I'm not sure if I deserve the title of “Master,” but I am really excited to help out. I started by bringing my yoga mat into practice so they could all get a feel for kicking a real target and pairing them off so they could practice blocking in a more realistic format. However, the real issue comes down to padding. My students spar completely void of any equipment, on a concrete floor, surrounded by precariously stacked desks. Considering the fact that they're all decently intelligent young men, I really feel that it would be ideal if they had something to protect their craniums with. So, here it comes, my shameless plug of the week: Send old sparring gear to Rwanda! I know it would be really expensive to ship, but my guess is that a decent portion of the people reading my blog have dabbled in the martial arts and might have an old helmet or chest gear they're willing to get rid of and I really only need enough equipment for two people to spar at one time. Let me know if you think you can help out.

A Baptism

Last week, Christine invited me to her baby, Benine's, baptism. Christine is one of the women I work with in the nun's co-op and she is also the primary caretaker of the rabbits, meaning that we end up spending a lot of time together and we were really starting to develop a friendship. So I couldn't possibly turn down her invitation.

Sunday Mass was like any other, crowded, hot, and sweaty and full of singing, standing up, and sitting down. Thankfully, my Kinyarwanda has come along enough at to the point where this is fairly tolerable since I can understand some of what is being said if I really apply myself.

Halfway through the service, it was time for the baptism. The mothers, who occupied the first couple of rows of seats in the central part of the Church and came forward together. First, the priest dabbed oil on the foreheads of all the babies in a row and then went back in the same order to pour water on their heads. None of the babies were too happy to be a part of that. I always feel sorry for babies at baptisms because it's meant to be their special day, but it always seems like it is one of the least enjoyable days they could imagine. But after the water, the hard part was over for them. The priest walked by and placed a cloth briefly over each of their heads while several attendants walked around to light the candles that the mothers had been given beforehand. Again, this seemed like a part of the ceremony that had given little thought to the feelings of its infant participants as most of the babies instantly tried to stick their hands in the candle flames that were right in front of them as their mothers sat back down and tried to pacify them.

When Church was over, I took photos of Christine and the nuns, as promised, outside. Little Shimwe, Christine's first child, did not look happy to see his baby sister getting all of the attention. Granted, despite being quite sweet, he always looks a bit disgruntled, which I have attributed to the fact that I have been told that he drinks beer already. The nuns picked him up and tried to cheer him up and I ended up taking a bunch of pictures and, in the hubbub, I got way too comfortable and my phone got stolen. At Church! When I was taking pictures for a baptism! This was not one of my warm, fuzzy Rwanda moments. I made a huge fuss in front of the entire congregation and made it clear that I felt like my trust had been broken. Here I was, alone, having given up an entire life in America so I could try to help people, and, in the midst of doing so, one of them had stolen my connection to my family from me.

Thankfully, everyone wanted to help. Father Vincent tried calling my phone several times and invited me over for lunch to calm me down. He seemed to not want what had happened to my phone to reflect badly on his community and kept on making the point that 99% of people are good, but it only takes 1 person to do a bad thing, which is true. I had momentarily forgotten that it was my confidence in the goodness of people that had driven me to do Peace Corps in the first place. In fact, the reason my phone had been so easily stolen was because I had grown so comfortable and trusting with that 99% that is good.

After lunch, I was invited to a bar and restaurant by my house to celebrate with Christine and another family that had just had their daughter baptised. Rwandan parties mostly consist of sitting around drinking soda and beer and eating meat and fried potatoes. I couldn't drink because I am a girl (unmarried women are all considered to be girls here) and I couldn't eat the meet, but it was a good get together anyways. As part of custom, everyone in the group got up and made a speech. Christine's husband made sure to include me in his own, extending an invitation to me for every family event they would have in the future. I really felt like I was a part of the family. Later, more of my friends showed up. Sister Rukundo handed Benine off to me and I sat, bouncing her up and down, while Marigo got up and danced, and Laurence, my Kinyarwanda tutor-to-be sat and chatted with me. It's good to be starting to have people to celebrate with here in Rwanda, even if it does just mean sitting around eating soda and fries.

"To Study Football"

Even more than I am a fan of soccer, I am a fan of African soccer fans. So, after hearing that my school had a TV, I had asked my students to tell me the next time there was a game in the Africa Cup so I could watch it with them. I thought the games were on Saturday though so I was caught off guard when Faustin was waiting for me on my porch on Friday afternoon when I was coming home from a walk with Beans. Apparently, Tunisia and Niger had started playing 12 minutes ago! It hadn't rained all week, but of course it started at that exact moment so we ran to the school under a couple of umbrellas only to find that there was no reception because of the storm. All the boys were crowded together in the cafeteria with their eyes fixed to a black screen while the one boy with a raincoat stood outside in his rain coat trying to adjust the satellite dish. Finally, the game was on and the teams were tied 1-1. My boys scooted around to make room on a bench for me in the front. The reception went in and out a couple of times and the image was fuzzy, but it was football! On TV! In the middle of nowhere, Rwanda! My students crowded around to explain Kinyarwanda soccer terms to me (of which, I only retained the off-sides rule or “kwiherera” that translates literally to mean “to be alone”). My students predicted Niger would win, but they would have been excited no matter what the result because they ended up cheering for just about everything. Tunisia ended up slaughtering Niger, scoring twice in the last 20 minutes, leaving the final score at 3-1.

It was time to eat. It was already 8:00 so those boys piled out to get their food FAST. I made my way out of the school to make my own dinner and overheard the girls singing in the dormitories, which made me realize that not a single one of them had been in the cafeteria. I guess it's not considered very feminine to take too much of an interest in sports.

The Call to Prayer

I meet Karim at the cowboy shack and wait for him on a small, wooden bench while he washes his arms and legs in a basin outside and retreats quickly to change into his ikanzu (dress) for Mosque. I play with one of the dogs, whose name is Naga and talk to another of the cowboys, while I wait. He asks me what my religion is. Uri Catolica (are you Catholic)? No. I just live by the Church. Uri Musilim (are you Muslim)? No. I just want to know Islam. Karim is ready to go. He is wearing a white dress so clean and bright that I am amazed that he has managed to keep it that clean in the cowboy shack, a white hat, and a red and white scarf that he changes intermittently to cover his head or his shoulders. As we pass the school, a few of the students shout “Assalamu Aleikum” and I can't tell whether or not they are being serious. It dawns on me then that the reason the Muslim community here is so welcoming to me is might be because they, too, understand what it feels like to be treated differently. Past the school, the village is almost silent. I guess noon isn't a busy time of day because most people go home to eat lunch. But not if they need to pray, and that is exactly what we are headed to do. Karim asks me if there are Muslims in America and if I know any. There are and I do. I tell him that I used to live directly next door to the Mosque when I went to university and it strikes us both as odd that I never thought to venture inside. The Mosque is a small, but beautiful white building with green trim standing on the top of a hill behind the marketplace. By the time we get there, I am already sweating a bit from wearing a a long dark skirt, long-sleeved back shirt, and wrapping my hair up in a scarf. Karim introduces me to a few of the men out in the front. They don't seem to know what to do with me, but the man in charge figures Karim should take me around to the other side of the building. I don't think Karim has ever been back there, but he takes me around to a door in the back and hands me off to one of the women. I take off my shoes and enter to sit on a mat behind a large, gold curtain that divides the women from the men. There are only four of us in the room. I am happy to see Mama Fatuma, whose husband, Ruru, is one of my favorite vendors. I sit down and the woman next to me covers my feet and hers with an extra piece of igitenge cloth she is wearing. The prayer begins, although none of us can see the man singing it. We just sit quietly and my legs start to cramp. A few more women trickle in, along with their children. A girl around my own age sits down to my right, where there is a gap in the curtain and spends the rest of the service mischievously peeping into the other room. I find out later that her name is Haciza, which means tomorrow or future. With the children there, it feels more like an over-staffed day care than a place of worship. The women pass off their babies, silently break up a couple of minor scuffles, and crinkle their eyes when their children sit, handing each other pieces of bisqui (cookies) and giving each other baby kisses. At only one point do we need to get up and pray, transitioning between standing, bending halfway with our hands in our laps, kneeling, and placing our foreheads on the ground. I have to focus a bit on getting the routine down correctly. After the prayer has finished, they lift the curtain. They are having an election and everyone needs to participate, including me. I'm not sure what positions people are vying for, but I can understand some of what they are saying. Ruru stands up and explains that he is a hard-working shop-keeper and that he has a wife and a child, signs of prestige in Rwandan culture. Everyone raises his hand for him when he is finished. Several others speak, most with unanimous votes. I'm struck by the smallness of the Mosque compared to the humungous Mass on Sundays. This feels more like a family gathering. Everyone knows each other; everyone has a turn to speak; and everyone is supported in doing so. When the elections are over, their attention turns to me. They are asking about the visitor. Karim tells everyone what he knows about me. He says that I am not a Muslim, but that I know Muslims in America. He tells them that I am a volunteer and I will be here for two years. Only. He also makes a point of telling them that I have a boyfriend, a welcome part of any introduction. After Karim has finished introducing me, an umugabo munini (fat husband, which I've come to understand almost always means a man of power) approaches me and asks if I want to convert to Islam. Right this second. I politely tell him that I cannot be Catholic or Muslim because I believe that all religions are good. He seems to be appeased by this response, but still wants to bring me books on Islam in English, which I thank him for. It's not the first time I've been offered religious material in this country and I am interested in reading it. After our conversation, they put the curtain down again and end the service with another prayer. Haciza and I are the first of the women to stand so we can stretch our legs outside , but before long, Karim finds me and takes me by the arm to walk me home. He is somewhat protective of me and I wonder if he even thinks I could find my way back home on my own (which I could, no worries) or if he is simply fulfilling his role as a host.

Now, when I walk to the market, there are so many more people that are happy to see me. Granted, this has forced me to learn yet another set of new greetings, but the effort has been entirely worth it. I also realized that one of my students was attending the Mosque service, which made me realize that students aren't excluded from having a high quality (or Catholic) education just because of their faith, something I am happy to know.

A Brief Tribute to Cowboys

Cowboys are awesome. This is why.

Having lived in Colorado for most of my life, I would have thought that I had a pretty firm handle on what it means to be a cowboy. However, what it means to be a cowboy in Colorado and what it means to be a cowboy in Rwanda are almost entirely different things, the only similarity being that they both have cows. For one thing, Rwandan cowboys do not have horses. For another, they do not have land. Your average Rwandan cowboy is therefore a man (or little boy) with a stick, chasing their cows around on foot all day. Fortunately for them, there are so many of them that they have practically become institutionalized outlaws since there isn't the funding to actually crack down on the rather non-threatening act of illegal grazing.

I don't know if it's because of their lawlessness or because of their poverty or what, but the cowboys are some of the most generous people in my community. Despite living three men to a shack with no door, they're less interested in asking me for things than they are in sharing, whether it's that they offer to take me to Mosque when I ask or they offer me a seat and some milk (which is fresh from the cow and unpasteurized so I can't actually take it, but it's the thought that counts) when I stop by to visit, they always go out of their way to make me feel welcome. The one time they did ask me for anything was when they tried to sell me a puppy, but now that I know them better, I think this was less because they wanted the money and more because they thought it would make me happy. I think they would have actually been quite sad to give it up.

They have three other dogs of their own, all of which are well fed, trained, and cared for, which means they know better than to be afraid of Beans whereas the majority of people make a point of informing me they are worried she will eat me in my sleep when they see me walking her. Instead they rough-house with her a little bit and let her have some of the milk they're putting out for their own dogs. It's nice to have a place to go where I play with my dog and not feel like I'm scaring the locals and even better to have some friends that are animal people like me.

Questions, Questions, and More Questions

Three weeks ago, I started to do what I actually came here to do: teach. That's three weeks that I have been running around with my head cut off, trying to make sense of a world that is simultaneously frustrating, uplifting, thought-provoking, and hilarious. I don't know if I can fit the entire spectrum of what I have been faced with into one blog without doing a disservice to some of it, but I am fairly certain that, the longer I put it off, the harder to will be to do so here it is.

The start of term in Rwandan schools in notoriously chaotic. Students (and sometimes teachers) show up a week or two late to school, the schedule isn't decided until a month in, and even then, no one sticks to it. I think things are a bit different at mine. Besides a steady trickle of additional students coming into the classroom, things went off without a hitch for me. I spent the first day on introductions. I thought this would be relatively simple. And I was wrong. In America, students don't normally want to know a whole lot more about their teacher besides their name and whether or not they assign a lot of homework. In Rwanda, it is a custom for students to spend the first day of each term asking their teachers questions about themselves, a custom I hadn't taken all that seriously because I didn't really think that there were even that many questions to ask. But there are. So, for three straight hours on my first day of school, I got to answer awkward questions about myself, questions about where I'm from (explaining snow was fun), questions about my family, my studies, my university, the American education system, and, most importantly, the big one, “Are you single?”

Soon enough, I was able to turn the heat back onto my students and made them tell me about themselves, giving me only a fraction of the information that had pulled out of me, but valuable information nonetheless. Knowing the names of your students isn't a requirement for Rwandan teachers, but it is a requirement for me so I made each of my students a name tag to help me learn them. This was a completely foreign concept. When I brought the name tags to class (having already explained them the day before), their unanimous question was “Teacher, what is the significance of this paper?” The significance?... the significance is that it's your name and that I'm planning on using it when I talk to you because you should feel significant in your own classroom. I also like learning their names. Some of them are difficult and in Kinyarwanda (Enock, Nadjilla, Bahati), some of them are quaint and easy to say (Jean Peter, Pat, Innocent), and some of them are straight up ridiculous because I told them that I would call them whatever they wanted to be called in my class (Priestartist, 44 shooter, Holy Mafia). There is apparently a lot to be learned from somebody's name alone.

I also made them tell me their age, which most of them thought was unfair because I had made the decision on day one not to disclose my name for fear that I would lose the respect of my students if they knew how young I am, telling them I would tell them when they graduated. This was definitely a good call. I slip and call them kids sometimes in a sad, subconscious effort to make myself feel like more of an authority figure, but half of my students are older than I am, ranging from 16 to 25 years old. Conversations held over the lunch break and after school have informed me that most of them are as old as they are because of opportunities lost in the year of 1994. Many of them now are the “chiefs of their households,” meaning that there are no parents left to take care of their younger siblings so it is on them now. They are burdened with heavy questions, questions they pose like this:

“Catie, in your opinion.......

How may I stop my mind from worrying about my family when I sit down to study?

Can someone be successful in Africa without the opportunity to go to university and no capital or connections?

And.....

Why do the leaders of this world do nothing while other people are dying?”

Answers like meditation and self-initiated job creation can begin to satisfy the need for an answer to the first two, but the latter has me caught up in an existential crisis that I can guarantee will last me longer than the two years of my service. I ended up writing my friend Moses in Uganda and asking him to start up something like an advice column for some of my students because I knew I wasn't the right person to be fielding their questions. Even when they aren't asking questions, my students can be overwhelming. I have found myself in shock this evening when one of my students casually mentioned that he was afraid to swim because his father was murdered on a boat during the genocide and then asked me what ice cream is.

In an attempt to indirectly address some of the issues my students seem to be concerned with, I gave them a lesson on Martin Luther King, which has rapidly expanded into a whole unit on human rights, nonviolent vs. violent revolution, and what it take to make change in the world. One of my classes is so invested in the topic that they actually chose to have a history lesson today instead of playing a game so I'm planning on introducing them to Malcolm X next week and having a mock debate from their two perspectives.

English Club is one of few retreats I can find to have lighter topics of discussion. It's three times a week and run by none other than my fabulous dog sitter Priestartist/Faustin, who, I am convinced, will someday rule much more than English club (seeing as he does aspire to be a Music Superstar/Doctor and spends his free time attending national conferences as a representative of the youth of our district). In the meantime though, he organizes topics of dialogue and persuades even his older peers to humor him in a games like Simon Says over their lunch breaks. English Club is completely optional so its members are confident and enthusiastic, which makes it fun for me to be there and a great place for me to test out new game ideas for my classes.

The teachers also have their own Teacher English Club, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the student English Club. Student English Club is run by students, but Teacher English Club is (apparently) run by me. Student English Club is willing to play games, but Teacher English Club is too serious. Student English Club lets me act any way I like, but Teacher English Club insists that I compose myself in the manner of a Rwandan teacher, which is “to be very serious,” never to use the eraser myself and always exit the class before any of my “students” can leave. Of course, the biggest difference is that my teacher students are actual horrific classroom participants due to the fact that most of them are too shy to actually speak English, seeing as they spent most of their education learning French and only recently have been forced to make the switch to English. They're terrified of actually using English and absorbed in the details of the difference of the simple present and present perfect tense and when it is appropriate to use the word “for.” That's not to say that they can't speak English though. They can and they do when they are one-on-one, but getting them to do it in our mock classroom is a battle.

Despite its challenges, I have to admit that I have a pretty cushy setup as far as my school goes. Burdened as my students are, they are privileged to three meals a day (that's three meals a day more than most schools in Rwanda can guarantee their students), running water, and electricity to study by at night. Discussing the hard stuff pays off because I know that they actually have a chance to take what they are thinking about and apply it when, someday, they are actually leading their country. It's hard to know what they've been through, but it is inspiring to think about where they are going.

Getting My Hands Dirty

I had never lived alone until the past month of my life and I had certainly never lived alone in a foreign and developing country so I was terrified at the prospect of starting my life at site. Probably shockingly to anyone who knows me and knows how much of an extrovert I am, I am ecstatic to have the house to myself. It means that I can do all of the weird American things I want on a daily basis. I can do workout videos in my living room, I can listen to music, and, most importantly, I can eat....things that I can taste. My first ventures into the world of cooking in Rwanda have been more than satisfactory. I stocked up on pasta and learned to make a mean marinara and Thai peanut sauce almost from scratch. I even made my first few batches of french-fries! On top of all my, less-than-healthy comfort food, I've finally been able to make myself a fresh salad with homemade vinaigrette, which has become a staple with almost every meal to make up for not being able to eat a single fresh vegetable during my three months of training. Last weekend, I even learned how to make yogurt, which means that I can have either strawberry or honey-cinnamon (or honey-cinnamon-peanut butter) in the morning instead of my normal eggs with veggies. And tonight, it's time for cheese sauce. I know that to my readers at home, my culinary adventures are probably somewhat less stimulating than my cultural ones, and we'll get to those, but I feel that, to truly convey my experience here I have to be honest about the things that take a priority in my life and quality cuisine is definitely one of them.

But I'll get on to the good stuff since I've done much more than sit around locked up in my house cooking. I do, after all, have to go to the market to buy ingredients and I spend a great deal of each day on foot, greeting people. Rwandans love greetings and nothing seems to make my village people happier than seeing me walk (or run, depending on the time of day) down the street saying “Mwaramutse!” (Good Morning) or “Mwiriwe!” (Good Afternoon) to everyone I see. As another a way to get integrated in my community, I've taken up farming. The nuns down the street from me help to run a farming cooperative, which has turned out to be a great place to make friends in the community. On the first day that I picked up a hoe, is was a huge shock. My friend Marigo was beyond incredulous that I was actually capable of doing the work. She kept on asking, “Azi gukora?!?” (she knows how to work?!?) and I don't think she believed it until she saw me with her own eyes. So farming has gone a long way towards changing my community's initial perceptions of me as an American, as well as providing me with something I like doing to fill what would probably otherwise be painfully dull days. One of my happiest days here was spent just sitting in the dirt, cutting the roots and shoots off of onions with a couple of breastfeeding mothers. I had already cut on one of my fingers (ironically, from chopping an onion the night before) and the juice was making it sting and we were there for so long that I got a sunburn and a callouses on my hands, but the sense of togetherness that comes from making sure that everyone has food on the table when they go home is insurmountable.

Sadly, the same mindset that seems to make people so ecstatic to see me farm has had some negative repercussions in my community. People seem to think that white people don't know how to work, not because they are incompetent, but rather because they never have to do it at home. I am definitely humbling myself by being willing to get my hands dirty. I found that some of the villagers are under the impression that there is a hierarchy of race in which white people don't need to work because they are, by far, the best. I had a particularly heartbreaking conversation with a young man who was convinced of the fact that white people were the best “class of race” and that they were followed by brown and then by black people, who were lowest and least promising of the races because God had created them last (He then asked me for books on the apocalypse). This is, of course, precisely the opposite of any scientifically-based telling of the origins of humans. It might just be me, but I find it ironic that the same people that are convinced of my inherent superiority are also shocked that I can somehow manage to lift a hoe and simultaneously infuriating that someone found it acceptable to brainwash the people of Rwanda into a framework that makes them feel inferior.

Whether I like them or not, these are the perceptions I'm up against and I'm working hard to change them. It's not enough that to that I told that boy about the discovery of the world's oldest human bones in Ethiopia or the multitude of accounts of a brown or black historical Jesus. Everyday, no matter how much of a hurry I'm in, I have to take the time to stop people on the streets that call me Muzungu and tell them my name, explaining that I don't like the word Muzungu because it means the same things as different, but I'm a person, just like everybody else. I only wish I had the Kinyarwanda skills to explain that skin color is determined by one, singular gene in the entirety of a person's DNA. Normally my explanations go a long way, but there are definitely days that I have my setbacks. For instance, days on which missionaries have come to visit the church. Now don't get me wrong, I have friends who are missionaries and I truly believe that their work can be good and the church visibly benefits the members of my community, but it's rather frustrating when I realize that a new congregation is in town only when everybody in my market place starts asking me for cookies and candy because the bandi (other) abazungu had just given them some. I explained the differences between myself and the missionaries by pointing out that they didn't speak Kinyarwanda, live in the village, or work with any of the people there. I said it was nice that they gave out candy, but that I can't afford to do that since I am only a volunteer. What I can afford to do is to give the people of my village two years of my time and hard work in the hopes that, someday, if they want candy, they can buy it for themselves.

However much I disagree with my village's missionary visitors, I still maintain a strong relationship with my church by farming, spending social time with the nuns and priests, and attending holiday and Sunday Mass. It's fairly obvious that these efforts are paying off. Father Vincent had me for drinks to introduce me to some of the teachers at my neighboring primary school and gloated about my Kinyarwanda and farming abilities.

He was so ecstatic that I came and introduced myself to him in Kinyarwanda on my first day here that he made a point of introducing me to the church congregation of thousands on New Years by asking me to make a speech. The service itself was actually so much fun that it wasn't even nerve-wracking to have to introduce myself. It was so large that it had to be held outside because not everyone could fit in the church. There was a sermon-making in Kinyarwanda (some of which I could actually follow, but spent a fair portion of playing with children) followed by several other components than I am assuming come pretty standard at Mass anywhere.....waving around frankincense and praying etc. Father Vincent and the sisters then proceeded to give the sacrament to the entire crowd as they lined up in an impressive and tedious feet of crowd management. But then came the dancing. It was headed off by the same sleepy girls that normally perform at rather solemn Sunday Mass, but it really started to pick up from there with dancers in brilliant costumes jumping all over the place and, eventually, get the crowd to join them. Sister Rukundo, who I am coming to love, got up a shook it with the rest of them.

However, not every day in paradise is so perfect. There are days that I am too tired to play with the kids outside of my house and wish they would stop calling my name. There are also days that I wish they understood dogs the same way Americans do so the kids wouldn't incite Beans to play with them and then run away screaming bloody-murder when she actually does. Granted, her training is going fairly well and I can stop her before she gets too riled up most of the time now. And then there's Alphonse, the town umusazi (crazy man). It's hard to say what's happened in his past, but he's clearly of an age that he would have witnessed the crimes of 1994 and there are no psychological services to speak of in Rwanda to help people to deal with trauma. As a result, he stumbles around each day, rambling into a telephone that may or may not even have someone else on the other end, yelling at people. I'm pretty sure that he's harmless, but that the village people are afraid of him because he's different and being treated differently is something I can emphasize with quite well. I want to reach out to him, but it doesn't help that he's obviously a bit scared of me because of my skin. I actually think he would really appreciate it if I would leave so things could go back to normal, as evident by the fact that he normally follows me around the marketplace trying to scare me when he sees me there. Thankfully, my village people are very protective of me so I rarely need to tolerate this for very long.

For the most part, my village has been extremely welcoming and easy to move in to. I'm excited now that classes have officially started (which I will have to write about later) and I have a distinct purpose, but I am also looking forward to working on my own projects in the village. The priests and nuns want to learn English in exchange for French and my farming friends want to learn yoga after I told them I was more worried about their backs than my own. So much to do and so little time. Two years is already starting to feel like nothing at all.