Address!!

Here is my address at my site, where I'll be starting December 16th:

Kari Rogers, Peace Corps Volunteer
BP 541
Cyangugu, Rwanda
East Africa

If you send me a card now, I'll probably get it in time for Christmas:)

November 4- November 27

How crazy is it that I only have two more weeks of training!!  Time definitely began to fly with all the work that went into model school.  Kim and I had a great experience with all of our classes.  We worked with two secondary level one classes, one S2, and one S3.  The majority of our lessons were very successful and the kids had fun with the interactive ways we presented them, using lots of games and visual aids.  Kim even did a lesson on decision-making, having them come up with multiple solutions to problems and then weighing the pros and cons of each.  We were really happy with how well the students got it, because this is not a skill that is practiced often in the Rwandan school system.  It is clear where challenges lie for us as teachers, because creative thinking is rarely encouraged at school, and students are used to mindlessly copying and memorizing never-ending notes.  S1 posed an extra challenge because the kids were just out of primary school and knew very little English, but at site I will be teaching S5 and S6 so I won’t have to deal with that at all.  Overall, model school was a great opportunity for trying things out and I am going to feel so confident walking into my first classroom of actual school in January.

Things with the host family have been improving a ton also.  Two of the sisters who were away at school are back now for vacation, so there are five girls in the house, and we have a lot of fun together.  I sit out in the kitchen with them most nights while food is prepared, helping as needed, but mostly just learning popular Rwandan songs and teaching them the lyrics to American songs they have heard on the radio.  We even came up with singer names for each other: for example, Synthia is “50 Cent-ia”, Christine is “Chris Brown”, and I am “R Kerry” (because they pronounce their r’s like l’s).  Kim, who is my nearest trainee, also has a ton of sisters and they are friends with mine, so we all spend a lot of time at each other’s houses, watching movies or having mini dance parties.  

The language, with its sixteen different noun classes, is still a struggle, but is getting better every day.  To become a volunteer, we will be taking a Language Proficiency Indicator test, which is basically just a conversation that incorporates different everyday topics and example situations.  You are given a score between novice low and advanced high, and we are required to achieve intermediate low in order to be recommended as volunteers.  Last week we had a practice LPI and I scored intermediate low, which is huge relief, because now I have two weeks to build on that and hopefully be able to score even higher on the actual test.  My language teacher, Nonci, is really pushing me, which is good, but also puts me in lots of uncomfortable situations, like when she makes me approach a random group of men on the side of the road and converse with them for an hour.  I still have a lot of trouble understanding people who are not Peace Corps staff or my host family, because they don’t know my level and don’t know how to simplify and slow down their speech for me, which leads to many frustrating encounters.  I just have to remind myself that putting yourself in positions that may be above your level is the best way to push yourself forward in the language.

One thing that is going to be tough when we go to our sites will be separating from my training my class.  We have all become such good friends now.  On Thanksgiving, we planned an extravagant feast for ourselves and our language teachers.  We bought eight turkeys and some of the guys killed and plucked them and then roasted them in a hole outside our training building.  The rest of us worked on mashed potatoes, stuffing, and macaroni and cheese, making enough for sixty people over small charcoal stoves.  It was a very fun day.  While food cooked, we played football and made hand turkeys.  It really did feel like Thanksgiving, even though I really missed family and friends back home.  The food was so delicious, and the night ended perfectly with a call from everyone in my family who had gotten together in the US.

I think it’s also necessary to tell the story of the critter who has been coming into my bedroom at night.  It wakes me up almost every night because it knocks things over or just makes so much noise rustling through my stuff.  One morning I woke up to find my laundry soap missing, and another to find my toothbrush missing.  I thought maybe I was just misplacing things, but I bought a new toothbrush and that disappeared too, as well as a pair of my underwear.  I finally decided to tell my host family about it a couple days ago, and my mother gave me rat poison to leave out, but it refuses to eat it!  Today Synthia and I searched my room for it, but we didn’t find it and we can’t figure out how it’s getting in.  We did, however, find my toothbrushes, soap, and underwear piled up behind my trunk!  Are these normal things for a mouse to hoard? 

That is about the extent of the excitement that’s been going on in my life the past few weeks, but I do want to answer some questions that people have been emailing me about.  First of all, how do I wash my clothes?  Well, it is a process that requires three basins, which I fill up with water.  In the first bucket I scrub the clothes really well with my laundry soap.  Then I wring them out and put them in the second bucket where I check for any remaining dirt and scrub any problem areas.  The third bucket is strictly rinsing, and from there I wring the clothes out and hang them on the line.  As the water gets dirtier, I will pour the water out of the first bucket, then pour the water from the second bucket into the first and the water from the third into the second, and put new water in the third bucket.  I wash about every two weeks, and the entire process takes around two or three hours.

How do I get around?  In Kamonyi, I walk everywhere.  My house is not too far from the Peace Corps training Hub, and it is about a twenty minute walk from there to the main town where there are restaurants and shops.  Walking to the market takes about half hour.  To go to Kigali, we can take an express bus, which is basically an overcrowded van that actually runs on a schedule, unlike most transportation here.  There are also taxi vans that will stop sporadically on their routes to pick up more people, so you never know how long it will take you to get somewhere, and there are motorcycle taxis that you can ask to take you anywhere.

How do I wash myself?  We have a shower room in the backyard, which is a small concrete room with a small hole in the floor for the water to drain into.  My family heats water at night after dinner and keeps it warm in a jerry can, inside a bucket, surrounded by fabric.  In the morning I pour the warm water into my bucket and take it to the shower room.  I have a plastic mug that I use to pour the water onto myself.  That’s about all there is to it!

Hope that sheds a little light on my daily life in Rwanda!  If you have other questions for me, post them as comments here on my blog, because I don’t get to check my email too often.

October 13- November 3, 2011

Once again, I am super behind with the updates!  A lot has happened in the last few weeks.  The biggest news is that I now officially know where I will be teaching after I swear in as a Peace Corps volunteer in December.  My school is called San Francois and is a Catholic all-girls boarding school in the Nyamashake District, in the village of Shangi.  Two weeks ago we had the opportunity to visit our future sites, to see where we will be living and meet the people we will be working with.  I went in with low expectations because I realized I was seven hours from Kigali and two hours from the nearest volunteer in my training class, and also was not thrilled about being with only girls for the next two years.  However, having a slightly negative outlook turned out to be a good thing, because I was then completely blown away by my site.

Another trainee who will be in my region, Tim, left with me from Kigali on Wednesday morning to begin the long journey to our sites.  We took an express bus together for about six and a half hours, two of which were through the rainforest, which was awesome.   I got off at the road to my school, where my headmistress, Sister Edith, was waiting to pick me up.  We travelled half an hour up a dirt road, with an increasingly amazing view of Lake Kivu and the mountains of the DRC.  We arrived at the beautiful school campus and I went with Sister Edith to the convent to meet the rest of nuns who work in the school.  They were all so friendly and funny, and greeted me with cheese, which obviously made me happy.  The volunteer I will be replacing, Christa, also met me there.  She then showed me around the school campus and took me to the market about fifteen minutes away.  We came back to her house where I met her English conversation group for teachers, which I will be taking over next year.  Christa shared a lot of her experience and insight with me, and hearing what a valuable service she has had really made me excited.

On Thursday, Christa and I went to the school to meet more of the teachers, who come from not only Rwanda, but also the DRC and Uganda.  It was great to meet the people I will be living and working with come December.  We also visited a couple of Christa’s classes.  I found out I will be teaching English to secondary levels five and six, which is basically the equivalent to juniors and seniors in high school.  Christa showed me the curriculums she had developed so I could get an idea of what I would be doing.  Even though most of our Peace Corps training is geared toward lower levels, I am happy I will get to teach S5 and S6 because I will get to do fun things like reading books and doing debates. 

We walked to the sector office to meet some of the officials in our area.  On our way back, Christa showed me where I can walk down to the lake, which is about an hour hike, and I’m excited to explore down there.  Back at school, we met with two of the student clubs that Christa works with, English Club and Girls Leading our World (GLOW) Club.  The students seemed enthusiastic and I am looking forward to working with them.

My headmistress showed me where I will be living when I come to teach.  I will be in teacher housing, in a duplex-type situation.  I have my own house with a big main room, two bedrooms, and an indoor shower space.  If I walk out my back door there is a small patio that leads to my kitchen and my latrine, and an awesome panoramic view.  The nuns at the school apparently have great connections, and Christa asked for and received an oven, so I will be inheriting that, which is pretty much unheard of for Peace Corps volunteers in Rwanda, most of which have to cook over a fire.  This is great for me because I’m not exactly an experienced cook, so taking the open flame element out of food preparation is probably a good thing.

On Friday, Christa and I headed in to Kamembe, the city that is about an hour from my site.  I took my first motorcycle taxi ride and I enjoyed it.  In Kamembe there is a Peace Corps regional house since we are so far from headquarters in Kigali.  The house is run by a volunteer who extended his service an extra year and is a great meeting place for the volunteers in the two southwest districts.  I figured out where the bank is, where I will go to get my stipend from Peace Corps, and where the post office is.  Tim and I stayed the night at the regional house with some of the awesome volunteers in our region, and then headed out early the next morning, back to Kamonyi. 

Last week was a little rough coming back to the structure of our host families after a much freer week at site.  We had long training days that included around six hours of language class.  One bright spot is that I am finally getting more comfortable with Kinyarwanda.  We had a practice speaking test with our Language Culture Facilitator, and I was able to carry on a semi-natural thirty minute conversation using present, past, and future tenses.  I am definitely able to get my point across better at home as well, but there are still many, many frustrating moments when I just can’t understand or make myself understood.

Last week on Saturday, two of the trainees who live near me, Michelle and Kim, came over and helped me cook dinner for my family.  We managed to make spaghetti with delicious fresh tomato sauce, mashed potatoes, and garlic bread, all over the fire.  We cooked enough for about fifteen people and still had leftovers, and I bought all the ingredients for around eight dollars!  Everyone really enjoyed the meal and it was a wonderful break from rice, beans, and cassava.

This week we began our “model school” training.  Students are on vacation right now, so Peace Corps rounded up a bunch of kids to come attend a few hours of class each day for the next four weeks so we can practice lesson planning and presenting.  Kim is my partner so we’ve been creating lessons together and presenting an hour each.  It has been really fun!  This is great, because after my site visit I was so excited but still really nervous about teaching, but getting up in front in a big group of teenagers did not end up being nearly as scary as I’d expected.  Our class is awesome and they have been great participators.  We introduced “trash”ketball today, and they loved it and got so into it.  We asked introductory questions such as “What do you like to do?” and “What is your favorite food?” and whoever was the first to stand up and give an answer had an opportunity to shoot a ball of paper into a box to score one or two points for their team.  The kids were competitive and we had a lot of fun with it. 

Model school also makes the days go by faster because we are so busy planning and giving lessons, which is awesome, because it makes site seem much closer!  It’s good that I’m so ready for site, because it makes me so excited for the next two years of my life! 

September 26- October 12

It has been a while since I have been able to do an update, so I’m not really sure where to begin!  The past couple weeks have been very intense.  Not only has training been difficult in and of itself, but we also have been getting very deep into the matter of the genocide.

Last week we visited the genocide memorial in Kigali.  The main exhibit is dedicated to the history in Rwanda leading up to this horrific event and straightforward facts about what happened, accompanied by pictures and videos of interviews with survivors.  Although I of course knew the main facts, it was so disturbing walking through, being flooded with all the information and hearing personal testimonies.  If anyone had managed not to cry throughout that part of the museum, they certainly did not in the children’s exhibit.  This portion displayed blown-up photos of children, each with a description of things such as their favorite things to do or their best friends, and ended with the way in which they were killed.  It made the horror of the genocide even more real to me.  The memorial is also the resting place for a quarter of the people who were killed during the genocide.  Mass graves hold over 250,000 bodies.  The extent to which the genocide wiped out a generation is just mind-numbing.

The complexity of emotions and the disturbing reality that this monstrosity occurred only seventeen years ago makes it impossible for me to really express myself in such a public forum, but it is clear that this is going to be an ever-present ghost in the room during my two years here.  Everyone we come into contact with was affected in some way by the genocide, but hardly anyone talks about it.  Peace Corps had a man come in to talk to us who has provided interviews for books and speaks to groups about his personal and the overall Rwandan experience.  He shared with us the fact that there were events, mindsets, and planning leading up to the genocide fifty years before it occurred, yet the extent to which the country suffered was still completely unfathomable to him.  Dealing with the fact that the people of Rwanda have been through something that is so impossible for me to understand is clearly going to be the biggest challenge of my post here.

On a much lighter note, this past weekend we visited the national museum of Rwanda in Butare.  We got a lot of information on the more distant history of Rwanda, including life-size models of a historic home compound, which was pretty cool.  The best part of the day, however, was getting to eat something besides rice and beans!  Butare is the second biggest city in Rwanda, a crazy concept, considering that it is nowhere near the American concept of a big city, but this did mean that there were some Western-style restaurants.  I couldn’t decide between my two favorite things, burgers and pizza, so I got both!

Technical training is going well.  We have had several current Peace Corps volunteers come to speak with us, which has been very helpful and given us tons of information.  One thing has become very clear: every volunteer has a very unique experience.  It is impossible to predict what our time in Rwanda will be like, how we will interact with staff and students at our schools, or how we will be integrated into our communities.  We do find out our sites on Friday, which will at least give us an idea of what is in store: what province we will be in, what kind of school we will be working at, and which volunteers we will be near.  We’re all very excited to find out!

The language, however, is still a huge challenge.  Every time I start to feel like I’m getting it, some new surprise comes up, like the fact that there are sixteen different noun classes, each with different conjugations of the same verb and different prefixes for the same adjective.  I am definitely missing the now, by comparison, simplicity of Spanish.  I am doing a better job of getting my point across in Kinyarwanda, but I still don’t have much I can talk about with my family, which means the homestay is still pretty awkward and uncomfortable, although my relationship with the eleven-year-old daughter is very good.  She has taken on the role of my Kinyarwanda tutor, and we also have lots of little games we like to play together, like hide and seek and thumb wrestling.

I hope that soon I can get some pictures up of the gorgeous place I am living, but right now I don’t have enough internet strength for them to load.  One thing is for sure, I am not going to get tired of the panoramic views of rolling green hills and valleys, which is the backdrop almost anywhere you look. 

It is crazy to think that I have been here for almost a month now.  The strange thing that all Peace Corps volunteers agree on is that time passes both quickly and slowly during service.  The US seems a lifetime away, yet it is still incredible that I am already on my fifth week here, and that we are a third of the way done with training.  I am starting to get into a routine and to get really comfortable with the other trainees, which is a great support network.  We are all going through the same things, both positive and negative, whether that be struggling with the disconnect from friends and family back home, or enjoying learning a brand new culture.  We definitely keep each other sane!

In the coming weeks I am going to continue language and technical training, visit my site, and start working with a “model school” to practice teaching.  There is a lot to look forward to and I am very excited to see where this adventure is going to take me!

September 20- September 25: Getting accustomed

Tuesday was a Hub day, so all the volunteers got together at the central site for safety, medical, and technical training.  We were all very happy to see each other after our exhausting first couple days with our host families.  It was nice to be understood and to understand what was going on for a change.  In the afternoon we had more language training.  By now I was able to at least say “Hi my name is Kari.  I’m a Peace Corps volunteer.  I’m from the state of Michigan in the United States” in Kinyarwanda: “Muraho.  Ni twa Kari.  Ndi umukorerabushake wa Peace Corps.  Ndi umunyamerika; nturuka muri leta ya Michigan”.  

The rest of the week was back and forth between Nonci’s house for language lessons and the Hub site for group sessions.  I was really enjoying training time and felt like I was learning a lot quickly.  A volunteer from the previous training class was here to explain the Rwandan education system and how our work fits into it.  She seemed very confident and happy with her teaching job, which makes me so excited for getting my assignment in three months.

The homestay has been a real struggle for me because I hate feeling clueless all the time.  It gets dark here around six so I am stuck inside from then until I go to sleep.  The family is so incredibly nice, but I just feel so overwhelmed all the time.  I know I am learning the language quickly, but it is not fast enough to be able to share myself with them or to even understand most of what they say to me.  Also, I have never been the type of person to just sit around the house for hours, so the evenings really drag as we just sit around the lantern night after night.  The most difficult thing, though, is the constant comparison I feel with the previous trainee that lived in the house.  She was very much a part of their family and they talk about her constantly, and I think she must not have been as reserved as I tend to be when I first meet people, so they seem confused that I am not more outgoing.  I talked to one of my training staff about this, and he was very understanding and told me I need to just stop comparing, be myself, and don’t be so concerned about how the family reacts.  That’s what I’m working on now!

Saturday we got to experience our first umuganda.  One of Rwanda’s policies for promoting peace and forward-thinking is a day of community service where all people of a village are asked to pitch in with some sort of work.  About ten other volunteers and I headed out with shovels and hoes to build a new back road.  It was so much fun working alongside the Rwandan people and making new friends.  I was able to use the introductory Kinyarwanda I had learned during the week and had a good time learning new vocabulary and teaching some English vocabulary to those who asked.  We finished the entire road and then gathered together in a big field to listen to some very, very long speeches given by some community leaders.  After two hours of talk that we understood none of, the other volunteers and I set out in search of food.  We had a great afternoon together relaxing, telling stories about our homestays, and just unwinding for once.  We were able to pick up our bikes from the Hub site too, which we were very excited about.

Today I had the opportunity to go to church with my family.  The service was very lively and I loved the music.  A family friend did some translating for me.  However, after about three hours of service, Synthia and I left and headed home, because one of our cousins was coming into town.  He is an English teacher, so we talked a lot about our shared profession and language learning in general.  I’m planning on taking a bike ride this afternoon to see some of the villages where other volunteers are living.  Later I will study my Kinyarwanda work so that I’m ready for lessons this week!

September 13- September 19: Getting started!

Peace Corps staging is a time for volunteers who will be training together to meet each other, get a debriefing on their project, and find out logistical details about the twenty-seven months they will be serving.  I was incredibly nervous in the days before training, thinking that the other thirty-six volunteers would know much more about Rwanda and English teaching than I did.  However, when I arrived at the conference center in Philadelphia, my nervousness disappeared.  I met a group of awesome, adventurous people, some of whom did know way more than me and others who knew even less than me!  Together we were able to discuss our expectations, anxieties, and fears, which made everyone realize that we were pretty much all in the same boat and made us very comfortable and relaxed with each other.  That night a group of us went out for the perfect last US meal: bacon cheeseburgers.

The next morning, we bussed to New York for our flight to Brussels.  After eight gate changes and an hour delay, we finally were able to board.  However, due to some problem, we had to stay put for another three hours!  Because of this, we missed our connecting flight, and the next one to Kigali wasn’t until the following day.  Being the flexible people that all Peace Corps volunteers must, we were ready to take full advantage of our European detour.  As soon as we checked into our hotel, we headed out to the Grand Plaza to have fries, chocolate, and waffles.  We had the chance to tour the beautiful basilica and to take pictures with the famous Mannekin Pis.  I was happy to now be able to say I’ve been to Europe!

On Friday we flew out of Brussels to Kigali, this time with no problems.  When we arrived, Peace Corps staff was waiting to take us to headquarters, where we would be staying in their hostel.  We enjoyed two more days of electricity and running water while we went through interviews with the doctors and training staff.  It is so beautiful in Rwanda; everything is so green and flowers are in bloom everywhere.  There are breathtaking views of rolling hills anywhere you look.  We really enjoyed our stay in Kigali, but had not yet gotten a taste of rural Africa.

On Sunday we loaded up the vans and headed to Kamonyi, where our training takes place.  As we travelled further from the city, the views became even more beautiful.  We climbed higher and higher into the hills until children began to stare and chase our vans because they so rarely see Americans. We arrived at our Hub site, where we met our Language and Culture Facilitators.  I was placed in a group with Janay and Charlie, with our awesome LCF Nonci.  She taught us key Kinyarwanda phrases, so that we would at the very least be able to greet our host families.   Groups of three volunteers were scattered throughout the district up to four kilometers away, but we were placed right down the street from the Hub site, about a five minute walk.

I met my amazing host parents, Francois and Benilde, and three of their nine children, Diane, Rosani, and Synthia.  The others were older and had moved away.  They greeted me with much enthusiasm, beginning with a prayer.  I felt bad that I could not communicate more effectively with them as they chatted away to me in Kinyarwanda.  Synthia, who is eleven, is at an intermediate English level, so she could translate some things and give me some instructions.  My family is so nice, but it is hard to get comfortable when you have no idea what is going on, so I got overwhelmed very quickly.  The family and I stayed together in the living room until dinner time at eight. They taught me numbers and body parts and kept trying to quiz me, and I continuously failed.  Dinner consisted of rice, beans, vegetables, and a tiny bit of goat meat.  I am proud to say I ate it all, despite only liking about ten percent of it.  The food will take some getting used to!  For dessert they gave me pineapple and boiled, sweetened milk from the cow that lives in the backyard.

Many of the families here are very poor and live in tiny houses, but mine is better off, as my father is chief of the village.  I have my own room which is only a little smaller than my room in the US.  The kitchen and latrine are in the backyard.  Most of the homes do not have their own water source, but mine does, which is nice, because I don’t have to leave to fetch my water.  The house is wired for electricity, put currently it is not running, so we use kerosene lanterns at night.  I also will be taking bucket showers for the first time in my life!

Today we began our intensive Kinyarwanda training, and I can already see why past volunteers have said these are going to be the most difficult three months of my life.  Charlie, Janay, and I met at Nonci’s house at eight to begin our studies and took a lunch break at noon.  From one to two thirty we went to the Hub site where we learned about what we will be doing for our technical English teaching training, and then we headed back to Nonci’s until five.  At the end of our language lesson, she had us go try to talk with some boys in the street, and they clearly thought the abazungu (foreigners) trying to speak their language were pretty ridiculous.  However it is very fun to greet everyone to greet everyone in the streets with a “Mirirwe!” or “Amakuru?”  They like to see us attempting to integrate.   I especially love the little children who run up and think it is the most amazing thing just to touch my hand.  It is pretty disconcerting to always have people staring at me like I’m a freak though!  Back at home the barrage of vocabulary continued but today it was not as overwhelming.  Mama and Synthia taught me a song in Kinyarwanda and I sang a song for them in English.  Their homestay daughter from a previous training class called and I was able to talk to her, and she was very encouraging.  Again after dinner I was exhausted and headed to my room to relax for the first time today.