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.
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