December?

Wednesday, December 1^st, 2010

So it has been nearly six weeks since I arrived in Rwanda. It’s weird to think about, and in many ways the passing of time here has mirrored the way time passed during college; it’s hard to believe I’ve been here such a short time, but then again, it feels like only yesterday I was riding along on a bus through Kigali at night, still a little stunned that I was actually in Rwanda. Even after a real Thanksgiving meal here (all of us trainees cooked a pretty baller meal, including turkeys which were roasted underground in a huge pit dug up and then recovered to roast them), I still feel like it's October.

I know everyone wants to know more about what things are like here, and I wish that I could provide an adequate overview of my life here. The truth is, sometimes the idea of trying to relate everything can be so overwhelming that it discourages one from even trying. I think a lot of fellow PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees…After we swear in we’ll be PCVs – Peace Corps Volunteers) feel this way, it’s difficult to explain.

I will continue to try and make an effort though, and hopefully I can offer some glimpses of what my life is like. However, the other truth is that this period of my experience in Rwanda is quite temporary, because my life will drastically change in January when I move to my site. But for now, I’ve pasted below a sample schedule (for anyone who actually cares ha) of my days right now. However, it’s worth noting that I will begin teaching in “Model School” starting next Monday. Half of the entire trainee group (there are 68 of us still here, 3 of the people on the plane from JFK are no longer with us) already started teaching this week, and the other half of us will start this coming Monday. What Model School refers to is a three week “practice teaching” simulation at a real school in Nyanza with real students from the community. How does this actually work you must be wondering? Well, right now all Rwandan students are on break from school, and they start back in January (which makes sense, since I’ll start teaching at my real school in January). In order to pull off giving us some practice teaching, the Peace Corps recruited students from the Nyanza community who are currently on break from school, but jumped at the chance for some free additional English/Science/Math classes. As PC (Peace Corps) Staff told us, these kids are thrilled to be in school and not at home helping with chores or something like that. That fact aside, here’s a sample schedule of my life up until kind of recently (though there is often variation and random other sessions or outings or whatever else).

- 7am: Breakfast at the center (my house is absurdly far away, so a van picks us up in the morning at 650am ish…it can vary a lot, time is elastic here as our training manager Mupembe likes to say).

- 8am-10am: Language Session (occasionally a Tech Session or something else, but usually always language).

- 10-1030am: Tea/coffee and snack break. Usually we get some sort of fried bread as our snack.

- 1030a-12p: Language session, or occasionally a Tech/Med/Safety and Sec. session

- 12p-2pm: Lunch. Usually I’m finished with lunch by 1230p and I do any number of things until 2pm. Sometimes I do homework often due for Tech class, sometimes I read, sometimes I go to the internet café, but now there is internet at the center so I usually just waste some time on the web, though it is absurdly slow for the most part…Gchat doesn’t even work, though sometimes Google Talk does.

- 2pm-330pm: Usually a Tech session.

- 345p-5p: Either another Tech session, or it could be Cross Culture or a Med session or a Safety and Security Session. But this week we are having language application sessions.

- 6p: Dinner at the center. Dinner used to be at 7p, but thankfully they just switched it to 6p starting this week.

- 7p or anytime thereafter: The bus picks us up and drops us back at our house. When this actually occurs can vary a lot, and in the beginning we were walking the full hour back to our house…

As I said, this will all change next week once I start teaching in Model School. For starters, every morning M-F I will be teaching until 12p. Now, I won’t actually be teaching the entire morning, I’ll be rotating between actually teaching, and observing other people teach. I’ll stop short of explaining the entire system of this practice teaching program, but suffice it to say that I’ll be teaching real students in a real classroom in a real school, but not in my actual school, or my actual students, or during an actual school year…

In terms of the rest of my daily schedule, it might be helpful to mention that I wake up rather early and go to sleep rather early. Jed (my roommate) and I have grown accustomed to our standard 5am wakeup call, which is a bird that starts chirping right outside our window at around 5am. In short, I usually rise with the sun, and depending on the day, I might get to sleep anytime between 830p and 11p. On the bright side, this will probably be a good schedule to keep since I won’t have electricity at my site in Musange. It makes the most sense to be conscious during all daylight hours. That brings me to something I mentioned before, which is that the sun rises and sets at nearly the same time all year round (I mean, we are basically on the equator). I wouldn’t mind this so much if there was more variety in the seasons here, but I’m just thankful it’s not incredibly hot here.

I suppose I don’t have any other mundane things to add right now, so I’ll end with a few observations in bullet points and bid everyone a fond farewell.

• Right now we use an electric kettle to boil water in the mornings, which we mix with cold water in buckets to make somewhat warm water for bathing. The bad news is that I’ve gotten used to this luxury, and at my site I’ll have no such luxury (since I won’t have electricity for an electric kettle ha).
• Dental floss has not been introduced here, but toothpicks are ubiquitous and are common to use after every meal.
• The weather changes here incredibly fast. One minute it’s hot and sunny, and then suddenly clouds start rolling through. However, I think it’s less variable in the dry season (as if you couldn’t have guessed that).
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That’s all for now...I'll try and throw up some more pictures soon

- Dylan