Training is coming to an end, and can’t believe we’re already here. Monday starts our last week before we go to Kigali on Sunday, and then we swear in as Peace Corps volunteers on May 5th. We have about a week in Kigali to chill out and buy things for our houses, then we’ll be moving out our sites after that. I found out that I’ll be living with Arielle, which is exciting. My house is pretty big to be living in alone and she’ll be fun to live with (plus she’s a really good cook, so bonus for me! Maybe I’ll return to the states with some cooking skills…).
As excited as I am for the move to site, I have to say, thinking about the end of training and moving has made me kind of home sick. Something about leaving what I know and am comfortable with is making me really wish I could see and talk to everyone at home. But I have gotten a couple letters from people, which has been fantastic! Thanks so much!!! Training has become a pretty predictable routine, and as such seems to have flown by. (Which is also kind of irritating how closely your feeling mirror exactly what the Peace Corps told you would be feeling…stupid training manual predicting everything correctly…). Plus the fact that I was out for a week with amoebas made training seem even shorter. But let me explain that story.
A couple weeks ago a few of us decided to go to Butare for the day on Sunday so we could get out of Nyanza, go to the Muzungu super-market and have some good western food. Amy and I both decided on pizza, and then later on some vanilla ice-cream with hot fudge (delicious, I know!). Well, after almost getting stuck in Butare since it was memorial week and there weren’t many busses going back in the afternoon, we made it back and I went to go visit my host family. I wasn’t feeling great, but I felt bad that I hadn’t seen Mama Queen in ages so I went anyways. I had planned on leaving in time to go to dinner, but then as I was leaving, I felt terrible and so decided to go home and skip dinner. Once I got back, I started puking and didn’t stop until sometime mid-afternoon the next day when the PCMO (medical officer- aka, our doctor) gave me anti-nausea meds. I thought it was just me that got sick, but then later found out that Amy had started puking that night too. Our first thought was food poisoning, but the PCMO put us on Cipro for bacterial dysentery just in case. I won’t go into the details, but it was pretty awful and became clear pretty quickly that the meds weren’t helping. By Thursday when we still weren’t better, it was decided that we should go to Kigali to get checked out. Turns out that I definitely have amoebas, and Amy probably does (hers never showed up in the tests, apparently they’re fickle) so we were given another type of meds to wipe out our amoebas. By mid-week this past week we were feeling much better and now I’m pretty much back to normal (thank goodness). Amy’s doing just fine too- so no worries. Saturday night we even had a celebratory drink with dinner.
Now I don’t want this post to be all negative, because training overall has been wonderful, and I’m going to miss seeing all the wonderful people here everyday, and I am also really excited to move to site and get started working with my organization and meet the community.
Also, I realized that even though I’ve only been here a couple months, I’ve already missed tons of birthdays, so I’m sorry for that and to Hannah, Katie, Laura and Al (and anyone else I might be forgetting now) Happy Birthday! I hope that your birthdays were wonderful! I’m so glad you were born and that you’re my friends!
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