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:
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