Murokose Rwanda!

Africa has been so wonderful so far. As it has been a while, I'm not exactly sure what I have and have not shared in my blog thus far. But to start...

My days are so crazy. Monday through Friday I have class from eight to five and since I get home around five, I only have one hour of light left in the day, which is usually spent being confused about Kinyarwanda and trying to help my family with chores, like cooking over a wood fire. Then on saturday I have class from eight to 12ish but this is usually practical language lessons. The first saturday I learned how to wash clothes by hand, and then (being that it was my birthday) I got to go do some birthday laundry followed by a quest for some birthday pineapple! Which, was totally amazing!

This past Saturday we were ordered to buy things at the market, so they drove us there, dropped 11 muzungus (foreigners) off and left. It was intense but I drive a hard bargain. I bought all the fixings to make homemade spaghetti sauce and it was SOOOO amazing. I probably should of prefaced that by what my usual meals are here. Every meal has some combination of beans, rice, potatoes and cassava. Literally every lunch and dinner. There's also sauce, but it's not super flavorful and sometimes there's meat, but it's not my favorite. Not bad, but I don't often opt to eat it. Anyways, that day I went home and took a very long time to prepare spaghetti but it was so worth it! It was nice to have diversity.

The next day we went to Butare in the south of Rwanda, which was nice because we got phones, so I have a cell phone, not that it is cheap for anyone in the states to actually call me. We also went to Murambai Genocide Memorial which was really really intense. It's hard to explain, especially if you know nothing about the genocide, but to generalize, it was brutal, it was violent and it included an entire population. Neighbors killed neighbors. People killed other people brutally and tortuously because of cultural differences. If you want to know more I can recommend some reading, but anyways, back to the memorial. It was so intense. There were hundreds upon hundreds of mummified bodies laying in rooms at this school where over 50,000 people and students were massacred in 1994. We entered each room and saw the bodies and went on to the next one. There was no glass between us, there was no protection from it. It still makes me feel physically ill to think about it. It was so informative and so intense. I will leave it at that.

That night I slept horribly as I also had come down with bed bugs. The past few days have been intense as I had to wash all of my clothing and bedding to try and get rid of them, also had to wash my bed with bleach to kill mold and leave my mattress in the sun to kill the bugs! OY, then I had to go back to Butare as I needed to replace my phone charger because the one I bought didn't work. That was an exhausting day and turned out to be a horrible representation of both cultures as cuss words were thrown around and insults were passed back and forth. This was not on my part, but it was a pretty stressful experience. We did get passion fruit flavored ice cream afterwards which made my day so much better!

I realize that this is relatively vague, but to do a blog affiliated with an experience had in the peace corps comes with much more awareness and more visibility. Anyways, I feel constantly busy, which is nice, but is catching up with me. I feel very tired. I have had so many cross cultural experiences and it has been amazing. I live across the street from the church so all hours of the day, night and everything in between I get to hear singing which is awesome, and also vaguely reminiscent of living across the street from Max's bar in college. Sometimes the singing has been ruined by technology as it's almost as if certain people were never taught how to use the equipment they have and therefore the music is often drowned out by static, poor electronic musical instrument playing and too loud of speakers. But the dancing is always fun.

I am still having trouble uploading pictures on this connection. I do have some up on facebook so if you'd like a link to that and don't have a facebook, e-mail me so that I can send that to you, so you can see them. As always, you are missed and know that Rwanda welcomes all of you! More to come as always!

Mwiriwe from Komonyi, Rwanda

Mwiriwe!!! Which means hello, good afternoon and a pluthera of other things I haven't learned so far. But, either way, hello from Rwanda. It is beautiful here, reminds me a lot of Indonesia but that should be slightly expected because of location in the world. My journey has been amazing so far. Even the things I expected to be really hard like bucket showers and squat toilets have proven much easier tasks than I expected. Kinyarwanda on the other hand is a very hard language to learn. But, it's easier living with a family and learning all the time. Some time soon I should learn how to get water and how to cook over a fire.

It has been crazy since I got here. They held the flight for us in Belgium because we sat on the runway at JFK for three hours so were running slightly late, but because of the close flight, they didn't get anyone's luggage on board. Therefore we got to stay in Kigali another night. Training has been very shotgun. Lots of training, then we were trucked an hour outside of Kigali to Kamonyi where we live with hosts familys. Mine just happens to be the family of the pastor, so when I was dropped off there were hundreds of people outside which was a little overwhelming, but my family is amazing!

I have seven Rwandan brothers and sisters and they all help me learn different things. The two youngest help me go over numbers, body parts and whatever else we can think of. The four girls are in the middle and they teach me chores, how to take care of myself and other words. And finally the oldest is Nafta, a year younger than me and speaks enough English to communicate with me and translate at times which is really nice. My Rwandan Mama is very sweet and I want to get to know her but there is a definite language barrier. Papa Bonkey is really nice and sweet, but he does ask me at least once a day if I pray. It's definitely a positive place though. Every time I'm successful at something, they all clap and cheer. It's almost easier being with my family than in class which is kind of draining throughout the day.

I've learned so much in only a week! OY! Now I can say, I want sleep, I want food, I have this, I have that! Simfite Inzara is a common phrase of mine, I don't have hunger! They're always feeding me! But it's good. I've been eating lots of carbs, beans, rice, cooked green banana, greens, unknown meat, but it's good. And I love the tea! They drink it just like in Ireland. It's only been a week. I have nine more to go with my host family and if I pass the tests and make it through, I will be sworn in to the Peace Corps as an official volunteer in July. We've very unfortunately already had two people terminate early and go home and they will be very missed. It's definitely an intense experience, but I'm happy so far.

Anyways, there will be more later, I promise, this is just an initial blog to let everyone know that I exist, and I exist well so far in Rwanda. I miss my friends and family very much and I love you all. More to come soon and know that in my times of sadness, you are my comfort! Pictures to come!