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!