wanderings

Once again the weeks have slipped by and it’s been over a month since I last posted. (Sorry Dad, I know Amy has probably posted dozens of times since I last did.) Part of this is that things have become fairly routine at site, so it seems as though there is not much to say about it. I’ve started volunteering at the health center in my village on Mondays, which has been pretty fantastic. Even though I haven’t done much there, even just being in the clinic makes me fantastically happy. Although there was one moment that was fairly disastrous. A few weeks ago when I went to the clinic to help with the under-five nutrition program, Mediatrice (the nurse I work with), asked me if I would be willing to come help her with the VCT clinic (voluntary counseling and testing for HIV). On Mondays the clinic is open to pregnant women who can come with their husbands to be tested. Mediatrice drew blood to be tested ansd had me do the patient interviews. Yes, they were in Kinyarwanda, and yes, of course it was a mess. Most of the questions were pretty basic, like name and age, and so went fine. But then we get to the slightly more complicated questions of how many children do you have including the one you are currently pregnant with, which in Kinyarwanda can be asked by saying “inda ya?”. Now, to have a good kinya accent, you should always smash your words together like they’re one word. Well, unfortunately for me, when you say this with “inda ya” and especially when you say it with your muzungu accent you end up saying “indaya”, which of course of all things means prostitute. So here I am, thinking that I’m asking this woman how many children she has, when really I’m asking her “prostitute?” Yikes. At least she and Mediatrice have a good sense of humor and just sat there cracking up, until Mediatrice catches her breath enough to explain it to me, and I just sit there horrified and trying to apologize. Oh, adventures in kinya.

And speaking of adventures, the last two weeks have been full of them. First we had a house-warming party for Emily, who has finally been able to move into her new house. Which is crazy amazing. I thought I had a ridiculous muzungu house with so many rooms, but hers is a legit muzungu house. She has tiled floors and two indoor bathrooms with working showers and hot water and a kitchen with counters and a sink! I didn’t realize such nice houses even existed in the east. Jenny and I had gone to Kigali for the day for some meetings with Peace Corps, and so picked up what turned out to be amazingly delicious mozzarella cheese and made some fantastic baked ziti. Then Friday we went back to Kigali, then up to Musanze to stay with Amy for a long weekend. There was market shopping and good food eating and movie watching and all kinds of goodness.

Wednesday it was back to Kigali for more meetings and then Thursday Nrupa and her friend Jess came in from Uganda. Nrups and I went to GW together and she’d been in Uganda working with TASO for her practicum. Thursday we wandered around Kigali, including the obligatory trip to Bourbon Café, and I took them to the market at Kimironko, where I dazzled them with my kinya skills (um…right). Then Friday morning we got up and took the bus to Gisenyi, which is right on lake Kivu. It was beautiful and even had sand like a real beach (as opposed to Jambo beach by me, which has some dirt, a cliff, and then the lake with the highest schisto concentration in the country). We laid out, attracted a huge group of Rwandans kids, chased them off, and then hung out with some other PCVs that came by. That night we went back to Musanze to stay with Amy. Saturday morning it was back to Kigali so we could go to the genocide memorial. That night I took Nrupa and Jess on a long, wandering walk around most of the city, but eventually managed to find the Chinese restaurant I knew existed…somewhere… thank goodness the girls are so easy going. Sunday morning we slept in, then went to get their tickets so they could leave early the next morning to go back to Uganda. There was a small disaster when we tried to get me tickets for Nyanza, then found out that there were no tickets until 7 that night (which is problematic as I needed to be in Nyanza at 5 for our language in-service training), but somehow Nrupa managed to sweet-talk them into a ticket for 1:30. As it was already 1:15, this meant I had to run with all my stuff to catch the bus, give them a quick hug goodbye, get on the bus, and hope that they would be ok for the rest of the day and finding their bus the next day. Of course I realize that they are both extremely intelligent, capable people and would be perfectly fine, but I worried about them just the same (my gosh, I am my mother’s daughter). So girls, if you’re reading this, give me a shout so I know you made it back to America.

From Sunday night to Tuesday afternoon we had language IST in Nyanza. It was great to see some of the volunteers from my group that I hadn’t seen since May. Monday night I went with Jenny, Sonya and Trude to Jenny’s host family to make dinner. Our first thought was to make them pizza, as Jenny has mastered the art of making pizza without an oven, but though an unfortunate twist of fate the entire town of Nyanza seemed to be out of flour. So we went for egg and cheese sandwiches on baguettes- delicious! Jenny’s family had recently gotten chickens, so they also wanted to cook us some chicken for dinner. Which meant chasing down one of the chickens, killing and plucking it, and all kinds of other things that I try not to think about when eating meat. How much nicer it is in America, where meat comes packaged and doesn’t look a thing like the animal it came from. Almost enough to make me want to be a vegetarian. Almost. Then her family decides that we also need beans and ubugali (a dough made with cassava flour), so even though we went to their house at 5 and started cooking soon afterwords, it was after 10 by the time we started eating, and nearly 11 by the time we got back. Although, we did get to watch an interesting mix of music videos while we waited for the food to be finished, so there was that.

Tuesday our IST finished up, and Jenny, Sonya and I decided to take an afternoon trip down to Butare for bagels and ice cream. I tell you what, it is amazing what you can get in this country. Wednesday morning Arielle and I caught the morning bus back to Kigali and I enjoyed my bagel on the bus. Wednesday was full of more Peace Corps meetings and then back to Kiramuruzi after two weeks away. So on one hand, it’s good to be back in my village, in my house, and on the other hand, we still have no food and no water. But at least today is a market day, so we can fix the food situation. And it’s getting to the end of August, so the rains should come back soonish, yes? Please?

So that’s been my last couple weeks. Pretty amazing, and full of friends, food and fun. Not so full of work, but I’m working on it. I’ve also decided that I need to be spending much more time working on my kinya, so wish me luck on that one. Oh, which reminds me. Yesterday Janvier came over to help us with our botched furniture delivery and we had a great conversation about how kinyarwanda is an impossible language. Even for Rwandans the language doesn’t make any sense and he can sometimes listen to a conversation between two Rwandans and have no idea what they’re talking about. So this naturally gives me lots of hope for my own language skills. Maybe I’ll just tell people that I speak perfect kinya, and they’re the ones that don’t speak the language.

Anyways, that’s it for now. As always, I love you and miss you like crazy!