Farewell Nyanza

Nyanza was a beautiful town in which to spend my first 10 weeks in Rwanda. Here’s some photographic evidence:

Musical chairs

At our end-of-training goodbye party for our (amazing, fantastic, incredible) Kinyarwanda teachers, we played musical chairs. All I can say is, a Rwandan could easily become the adult champion of competitive musical chairs. Watch out for the hip check, and when there’s a tie, it’s a battle of strength for who wins the chair.

The envelope please...Gisenyi!

I’m headed to Gisenyi for the next two years! I spent 4 days this week visiting my future home. My hosts were unbelievably kind and my future coworkers are wonderful. The work will be more along the lines of community and business development than health work: my primary project will be helping cooperatives develop capacity and find markets for their projects.

I’m still coming to terms with being an urban volunteer and mourning the loss of the extremely rural Peace Corps experience I so badly wanted. But, urban development issues are complex and interesting, I think I’ll have more work to do in an urban setting, and there are some great perks to Gisenyi (beach, fresh fish, hotels with internet and beach and hot showers I can “borrow,” a daily market with fabulous produce and fabric and shoes).

PC training notes

This will be a long one. For anyone who’s curious about my day-to-day activities during training, here’s a brief rundown.

In a few days I’ll find out my permanent site, and next week I’ll meet my supervisor and visit site for 4-5 days. I’m incredibly excited.

Aside from the week of site visit, the 36 trainees live together in 4 houses in Nyanza, which is a mid-sized town. My house just might be the luckiest – we have padded furniture in our living room (we may or may not have fleas), it’s a very reasonable 8 minute walk to the center where we have classes and meals, and most of the time we are spoiled by running water and electricity.

LCFs (Language and cross cultural facilitators) live with us, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge how amazingly helpful they are. In addition to being great classroom teachers, they are always willing to take time to answer questions about language or culture, so are pretty much on the job 24/7. Plus they are all really great people and it’s a pleasure to get to know them.

A kitchen staff prepares our meals, and I understand that the previous group’s requests have paved the way for our relative variety. Breakfast is bread, butter and fruit, sometimes with peanut butter or avocados or omelets. Lunch and dinner are either Rwandan (some combination of meat or fish, greens or carrots, rice or plantains or cassava or potatoes prepared in innumerable ways, occasionally salad with mayo, and almost always with a runny tomato sauce that I love) or Rwandanized American food (onion-heavy guac with beans and rice, pasta with ground beef but no tomato sauce). From Sunday dinner through Saturday lunch, we receive an allowance to buy food for ourselves (brochettes!).

Breakfast ends at 8. We have 2 hours of class, a half hour tea break with samosas or chapatti, and another 1.5 hours of class. Then we get 2.5 hours for lunch, 2 more afternoon classes that end at 5pm, and either free time or practical lessons (e.g. how to do laundry) before dinner at 7pm. Sometimes the afternoon is set aside as “language application,” either with our resource families or wandering around town. Curfew is 10pm, and in evenings I can be found either studying, grabbing a beer, or with my computer.

We have class Monday morning through Saturday lunch. About half our classes are language classes with 3-4 students. Tech sessions inform us about the Rwandan health system and health challenges here, tools we’ll use as health volunteers, and projects such as kitchen gardens. We also have medical sessions (e.g. food and water safety, causes of fevers), safety and security sessions, and cross cultural sessions.

Other general Peace Corps Rwanda news: Our excellent PCMO is leaving, and being replaced by an expat PCMO and a local hire to accommodate PC’s growth here. The new Rwandan doctor is named Doctor Elite, so I’m clearly in good hands. The next staging class in October with have 70 (!!) education volunteers, both TOEFL and math/science. Rwanda has a huge need for English-speaking teachers because they switched the instructional language from French to English at the beginning of the 2010 school year. The health stage that follows us will be pushed back to the summer of 2011; PC doesn’t want to continue holding training during the genocide memorial period.

Resource Family!

I met my resource father on the second day of training at a party involving beer, fanta, cheese, peanuts. It was a joyful occasion with an impromptu dance party as the whole neighborhood watched us in the training director’s fishbowl/backyard. I was very relieved that he spoke French, although I do find his African accent a little hard to follow.

My resource father runs (owns?) a bar that serves beer, waragi (imported Ugandan gin) and pork meals. It’s located right behind the Catholic church. I’ve been there a few times between class and dinner to go over my Kinyarwanda. Usually he asks me if I want inzoga or Fanta (which they use to mean all types of soda) and I’ll say “whatever you’re having” and we’ll split a Mutzig beer. In some circles it’s a bit taboo for women to drink in public, and the evening when he had several other customers he only offered me Fanta.

This Sunday I was able to go to his village, which truly feels like the countryside despite being a 10 minute walk from Nyanza’s paved road. I was shown how to use the traditional kitchen, fed a delicious meal, and given a workout in Kinyarwanda and French. My host father and I then shared a beer and spicy brochettes in the little shack that serves as the village convenience store, bar and restaurant. I hope in the coming weeks we’ll be able to shift our conversations from French to Kinyarwanda. My resource mother doesn’t speak French, so that should help.

(Toilet) Training: Rwandan Taboos

We had one of our first sessions of training today. The highlight was our training director performing a pantomime of using a so-called squatty potty.  So far I’ve avoided the squatty potty, because we have what appears to be Western-style toilets in our training buildings, which are scattered throughout town.

Photo Caption: This shot from my house displays some of Rwanda’s unique approach to bathroom architecture.

However, the plumbing is not Western, so not only do you flush manually by pouring water into the toilet bowl, but you must abide by the crucial rule posted in all the bathrooms: do not throw paper in the toilet. Instead, you are supposed to put used toilet paper in a trashcan. This isn’t new to me, having had the same situation in Ghana, but it is a hard habit to reacquire. 

After the toilet talk, the training staff talked to us about taboos in Rwanda. To introduce the concept of a taboo, they asked the trainees to share an American taboo, and one guy shouted out “Putting used toilet paper in the trashcan.”

I’m still laughing. The trainers then showed us signs with Rwandan taboos, such as “Don’t overdose in alcohol consumption” and “Don’t buy things in the market without bargaining.”

My favorite was “Be flexible in frustration and discouragement situations.”

Ni kibazo? Si kibazo. Nta kibazo!

Before I left, I printed some Kinyarwandan vocabulary I found online. Today, I was talking to a few of our LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators, one of many PC acronyms). One asked how I found Kinyarwanda. Eager to impress, I grinned and declared it Ni kibazo! (Nee CheeBahZo)

That means “No problem!” Or so I thought.

My comment inspired riotous laughter, which is always encouraging when you’re learning a new language, and an emphatic Oya! (Oh-yah) which might sound like agreement but actually means “no.”

Turns out, ni kibazo means “it is a problem.” I was confusing it with si kibazo (See CheeBahZo), which actually means “it is not a problem” in response to something. You can also say nta kibazo (Nhah CheeBahZo) which means “no problem.” Subtle distinctions.

Ni kibazo and si kibazo now pop up frequently in our conversations, to much amusement.