Rwandan Host Family

Unlike in most Peace Corps countries, Peace Corps Volunteers in Rwanda do not live with host families during Pre-Service Training. We’re told the reason for this is that Rwandans are much more closed off to Westerners than most people in Africa, because the world’s lack of response during the genocide created distrust and a feeling of betrayal among Rwandans, not surprisingly.

I was disappointed when I found out I wouldn’t be living with a host family, though sharing a house with other Trainees has been a treat. And, we all have host families that we visit a few times per week, which has been very helpful in beginning to understand familial relationships and daily life here.

My host mom is 33 and works as a secretary at the Ministry of Justice office in Nyanza. My host dad used to work as a vendor and volunteer as an elections coordinator, but he was recently promoted and is now working full-time for the government. Rwanda is having a Presidential election in August, and my host dad is evidently responsible for ensuring that everybody in this area is registered to vote and has an official identity card. My host parents have two sons, aged five (Carson) and nine (Cady), who are adorable! I don’t see Cady very often, as he doesn’t come home from school until around 6:30pm, but Carson is usually there when I come over, though I don’t think he’s quite sure what to make of the mzungu.

The family has a houseboy who works for them, which is extremely common, nearly universal, here. (This is also the norm in Senegal, but I’ve never heard of a boy doing this job there, so I was surprised to find that houseboys are as common as housegirls here.) As in my host family, the umukozi often lives with the family they work for, and their responsibilities include cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, babysitting, running errands, and doing whatever else the family asks. In Nyanza, an umukozi normanlly makes 10,000 Rwandan francs (about $17) per month, in addition to food and lodging. The boy who works for my family is 16 and is trying to earn enough money working as an umukozi this year to go back to school next year. He was evidently walking through the neighborhood, knocking on doors, looking for work, and it turned out that my host family’s previous houseboy had just left, so they hired him!

When I visit my host family, I normally practice some Kinyarwanda and then have more substantial discussions in French. They insist on feeding me almost every time I come over, usually tea or coffee with samosas, eggs, or bread. One Saturday afternoon, I was at the house during lunch and had my first taste of ubugali (similar to fufu). It’s essentially unleavened bread dough made out of cassava flour, milk, and water, and is used to scoop up meat or vegetables. Ubugali is extremely popular among Rwandans, but I haven’t quite developed a taste for it yet…it reminds me a lot of what hay might taste like…

Because my host parents work more consistent 9-5 jobs than the average Rwandan, I haven’t had the opportunity to spend as much time with the family as I’d like to. The experiences I’ve had with them, though, have been great. My host mom is super friendly, my host dad loves helping me learn Kinyarwanda, and the kids are so cute!

A Day in the Life

Here’s a glimpse at what exactly I’m spending my Pre-Service Training days doing…

I usually wake up around 6:30am and take a bucket bath (when the electricity is on, I use an electric kettle to heat some water to mix in with my bucket of cold water… 1 kettle boiling water + 1 bucket cold water = 1 pleasant bucket bath) and brush my teeth with filtered water from my water bottle. Around 7:15, we head over to the training center for breakfast, which consists of bread with peanut butter (!) or butter with honey or jam, coffee or tea, usually either eggs or fruit, and, every once in awhile, cheese!

Our sessions begin at 8:00, and from 8:00-10:00, we typically have a Kinyarwanda class. Our classes only have three people, so we have lots of opportunities to practice and ask questions. The 12 teachers rotate among classes, so we have different teachers everyday, which is really nice. From 10:00-10:30, we have a break and are served coffee and tea with samosas (meat and/or veggies fried in a crust), chapati (fried flat bread), or amandazi (beignets – fried balls of dough). None of us are too happy that we’ve been conditioned to want fried food at 10 in the morning! One time, we had cheese instead, and it was glorious!

After break, we have another session from 10:30-12:00. That one’s normally either language or technical (training on health issues and community development projects). Our nice long lunch break goes from 12:00-2:30, and lunch is normally some type of starch (potatoes, fries, or plantains), fried fish or meat (goat or chicken) of variable quality, hard-boiled eggs, vegetables (usually pureed greens) and either passion fruit or tree tomatoes. The break after lunch is a good time for studying Kinyarwanda or heading into town to buy fabric, yogurt, cold beverages, or chocolate. The walk into town also entails greeting about 50 people (in a combination in French, English, and Kinyarwanda – hello, how are you?, where are you going?, what is your name?), being watched, and avoiding the reckless moto taxi drivers who fly through the traffic circles.

Our afternoon sessions run from 2:30-5:00 and usually focus on cross-cultural training (Rwandan history, gender roles, norms in the workplace) or personal health & safety issues (how to treat water & food, self-treat illnesses, reduce the risk of assault and theft, etc).

After the last session ends at 5:00, I usually go into town or visit my host family. I’m usually served tea at their house – I consider myself fortunate, because some of the other Trainees have faced chucky milk! We have dinner at 6:30 or 7:00, which usually consists of a starch (potatoes, rice, or noodles), meat or beans, vegetables (often cabbage and carrots), and passion fruit or tree tomatoes. Every once in awhile, we have guacamole, and it’s amazing!

After dinner, my housemates and I hang out, study, read, or watch movies until about 10:30, which has become my new bedtime!

On Saturdays, we usually have an excursion to another town, a park, or a memorial. Sundays are our free day, and I normally spend mine studying Kinyarwanda, doing laundry (in a bucket in the backyard), and visiting the Internet café (where the Internet is very slow, but fairly reliable, as long as the electricity is on).

And that's the very busy but very enjoyable day of a Peace Corps Trainee!

Outskirts of Nyanza:

Day Trip to Butare

Last weekend, we went on a day trip to Butare, Rwanda’s second-largest city, which lies 45 minutes south of Nyanza.. Home to Rwanda’s first secondary school, which opened in 1928, and the National University of Rwanda, established in 1963, Butare is often considered the country’s intellectual center. It also hosts a few very mzungu-friendly restaurants and a supermarket that sells peanut butter, cheese, Nutella, many varieties of Cadbury chocolate bars, and bread selections such as “brown,” “healthy,” “special brown,” and “sliced.” It’s basically heaven!

While in Butare, we visited the National Museum of Rwanda, which opened in 1988 and was a gift from Belgium. The museum houses exhibits on Rwanda’s geology, history, handicrafts, sports, customs, and cuisine. Most interesting was the detailed instructions on how to brew banana beer!

Following the museum, we visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial. It was difficult and overwhelming, to say the least. Here’s the excerpt on it from the Bradt travel guide to Rwanda:

“The genocide memorial at Murambi is one of Rwanda’s starkest: over 1,800 bodies, of the 27,000-odd exhumed from mass graves here, have been placed on display to the public in the old technical school. They people the bare rooms, mingling horror with poignancy, as a mute but chillingly eloquent reminder that such events must never, ever, be allowed to recur. During the genocide, under orders from the prefect and with the support of the church authorities, between 40,000 and 60,000 inhabitants were assembled together in and around the school on Murambi hill, supposedly for protection; there were 64 rooms crammed full with people. Then the interahamwe attacked, throwing grenades through the windows. Within four days, most of those on the premises had been slaughtered. Later, French soldiers were installed on the site as part of Opération Turquoise, and a volleyball pitch was built over one of the mass graves.”

Inside one of the rooms:

Villages dot the hillsides surrounding the memorial, and locals greeted us enthusiastically as we passed through. While waving back at them, I couldn’t help but wonder if their family members had been killed at Murambi and how difficult it must be for them to live their lives with such a harrowing memory visible everyday.

A Brief Introduction to Rwanda

A landlocked country in East Africa, Rwanda lies just south of the Equator. Practically invisible on a map of Africa, it measures about 10,170 sq. mi., making it slightly smaller than Massachusetts – and less than 1/14 the size of Montana! Rwanda is home to about 10.7 million people and is the most densely-populated country in Africa. Population density may become an even bigger problem in the future, considering that Rwanda has the world’s 14^th-highest population growth rate.

Ruanda-Urundi (present-day Rwanda and its neighbor to the south, Burundi) was a German colony from 1884 until the end of World War I, when Germany lost all of her colonies in Africa (including present-day Togo and Cameroon in West Africa, Tanzania in East Africa, and Namibia in Southwest Africa). In accordance with a League of Nations Mandate, Rwanda and Burundi became Belgian colonies (joining Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium’s only other former colony in Africa). Rwanda attained independence from Belgium in 1962, and Grégoire Kayibanda became the first President of independent Rwanda.

The most pivotal point in Rwanda’s history since independence was, of course, the 1994 genocide, which has been documented in a host of books and movies. In the years since, Rwanda made tremendous strides in development and governmental accountability.

Despite its recent progress, though, Rwanda still faces a number of development challenges, ranking 167 out of 182 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. As is most African countries, health problems in Rwanda include HIV/AIDS, malaria, and typhoid. Rwanda’s women also face a number of reproductive health issues. Further, the average woman here has over five children, and the country’s infant mortality rate is 67.18 deaths per 1,000 live births (compared with 6.22 in the U.S.). Rwanda is also, of course, plagued by poverty – a majority of the population lives below the national poverty line of 250 Rwandan francs (approximately US$0.43) per day. As 80 percent of Rwanda’s population lives in rural areas, the majority of Rwandans work primarily in agriculture. The country’s primary crops are coffee, tea, and plantains, and its main resources are gold, iron ore, tungsten ore, and methane. Rwanda’s biggest earner, though, is its currently thriving tourism industry, which rests largely on opportunities for gorilla trekking.

President Paul Kagame, leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, has been in power since 2000. The country’s next Presidential election will occur this August. The government is extremely decentralized. Rwanda has five provinces, or intare - North, South, East, West, and Kigali City. Each province is divided into six districts (akarere), each district has about 12 sectors (umurenge), each sector has about eight cells (akagari), and each cell has about 7 villages (umugudugu). Each of these levels has an elected or appointed leader, all of whom are paid by the government, except the village leader, who is a volunteer. On a somewhat unrelated note, Rwanda’s Parliament is over half women!

Rwanda is currently in the process of changing its official language. Until last summer, the country had three official languages – Kinyarwanda, French, and English – but English was spoken very little. Last year, however, the government decided to drop French as an official language and switch everything to English. (See this Christian Science Monitor article for a discussion of why.) Where most education and government business used to occur in French, everything now occurs in English. This presents huge challenges, because few people in Rwanda speak fluent English. It’s hard to say what effects this change will ultimately have, but it will certainly be interesting to see! Meanwhile, Rwanda has obtained membership in the East African Community (made up of exclusively English-speaking countries) and the Commonwealth (making it one of just two Commonwealth members without a British colonial background).

Anyway, that’s Rwanda in a nutshell!

First Two Weeks in Rwanda

As many of you know, I applied to the Peace Corps and was assigned to serve in the East African nation of Rwanda. Known among travel agents as a hotspot for gorilla trekking, among Africanists as a story of relative prosperity, and among the general public as the setting of Hotel Rwanda, Rwanda is a beautiful, complex country. Surprisingly modern in some ways (tall buildings in the capital! cell phone service throughout the country!), seemingly archaic in others (life expectancy is just 50 years), Rwanda faces a host of complex problems but has also recently enjoyed relative economic success.

Along with the 36 other new Volunteers, I arrived in Rwanda about two weeks ago. So much has happened since then, and we’ve been so busy, I really haven’t had time to process everything. But, I’ll try to share some first impressions and some highlights of the experience so far.

Before coming to Rwanda, the group met in Philadelphia for a two-day Orientation session.

Billboard in the Philadelphia airport (the airport in each city that hosts Peace Corps Orientation has one):

Our group consists of 31 girls and seven guys. Most of the group is around my age, a lot of us are right out of college, most have experience abroad, a handful of others have lived in Africa before. There are people from all across the U.S. and with a variety of educational backgrounds, including public health, international relations, English, social work, biology, nursing, and public relations. The group includes one married couple (serving together), three girls who are engaged, and several others with significant others in the U.S. We also seem to represent nearly the whole spectrum of religious beliefs. On the whole, and I don’t know if my group is unique in this, we don’t exactly seem to fit most of the stereotypes of Peace Corps.

We spent our first weekend in Rwanda in the capital, Kigali, a remarkably clean and modern city, home to about 800,000 people. Having had to spend most of my time at our hostel and at Peace Corps headquarters, I haven’t yet gotten a very strong impression of the city. I was extremely impressed, though, by the presence of functioning traffic lights, which are essentially non-existent (or at least completely disregarded) in most African cities.

View of Kigali from the Peace Corps headquarters:

We visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, which was incredibly interesting, if overwhelming. The thing that hit home for me more than anything was the scope of the genocide. Literally everyone who was in Rwanda at the time witnessed violence. Parts of many towns were completed destroyed. There was utter lawlessness throughout the country. What’s even more astonishing is to walk through Kigali today and know that all of that happened right here, just 16 years ago.

Courtyard at the Genocide Memorial:

We left Kigali for Nyanza, a 60,000-person town southwest of Kigali. Our group of Volunteers is spending 10 weeks in training here. It’s a nice little town with a couple paved roads, a post office, two Internet cafés, an open-air market (where all manner of random things can be found), a handful of shops (à la the Senegalese boutique), a couple bars, and one sorta Western-style restaurant. Nyanza is known for having been the capital of Rwanda’s traditional kingdom. Attractions around the town today include the king’s former palace, a pottery workshop run by a group of Batwa people, and Rwanda’s national dairy.

Outskirts of Nyanza:

The group of Trainees is living in houses in Nyanza, I’m sharing a house with seven other Volunteers and two Peace Corps-hired Rwandans. We have electricity almost all the time, cold running water on rare occasion, water tanks behind the house, one indoor bathroom, and one outdoor latrine. So, I’m back to sleeping under a mosquito net, hand washing my clothes, showering with a bucket of water, and occasionally reading by headlamp. I’m loving it!

Front room of our house:

Much requested picture of the latrine:

Peace Corps Training consists of several elements: language (Kinyarwanda, the local language throughout the country), culture, technical training (health & development issues), personal health, and safety & security. Training is conducted by Peace Corps staff, current Volunteers, guest speakers, and 12 Language and Culture Facilitators (young Rwandans hired by Peace Corps to work as language teachers, cultural liaisons, and general guides). To me, the most interesting aspect has been the technical training. Sessions so far have included a current Volunteer’s discussion of the healthcare system in Rwanda and guest speakers from the Centers for Disease Control talking about HIV/AIDS and malaria in Rwanda. These sessions have been fascinating, and I’ve learned so much already!

The bulk of our training is language – we have around three hours of class per day, and generally study another couple hours on our own or in groups. Though many people in Rwanda speak French or English, few people outside the major cities are really fluent in either. Even in Nyanza, a medium-sized town, so few people are proficient in French or English that it’s difficult to get around. Plus, it really is essential for Volunteers to speak the local language in order to gain respect and trust of the community.

To put it simply, Kinyarwanda is incredibly difficult. There is even a Kinyarwanda word translating to “No foreigner will ever master our language.” How encouraging! Anyway, Kinyarwanda has 16 classes of nouns (English has two – singular and plural), a multitude of “exceptions” for verb conjugation, phenomenally long words (“umukorerabushake” is the word for “volunteer”), a plethora of sounds English speakers truly cannot make (such as “ntu,” “ndu,” and “rwa”), and many words that sounds nearly the same. I was anticipating something of about the same level of difficulty as Wolof (the local language spoken in Senegal), but Kinyarwanda is something else entirely. Despite all of this, though, we really have learned an incredible amount for having started less than two weeks ago, and many things are already becoming clearer. It has also been really inspiring to see current Volunteers communicating successfully in Kinyarwanda.

So much more has happened during the past two weeks than I’m able to put into words, but that’s the beginning of my Peace Corps experience in a nutshell!

Rwandan sunset - la vie est belle: