My Site!

Two weeks ago, we got our site assignments, and we visited our sites last week. My site is (drumroll, please)… Nyagatare, in northeast Rwanda! Nyagatare is Rwanda’s largest district by area and the most sparsely populated (an appropriate site for a Montana girl, I think!). According to the guidebook, the town of Nyagatare has about 9,000 people. My partner organization is EPR, the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda, which has an office in town and conducts various education, health, business, and community development projects in town and throughout the district. My direct supervisor, Néhémié, is the manager of the community development programs, though I expect I’ll be working with the health and education managers as well. My assignment falls under the umbrella of a USAID-funded project called Higa Ubeho (Be Determined and Live), which is being coordinated by CHF International and implemented by about 20 organizations throughout Rwanda. The project offers holistic support for people affected by HIV/AIDS by providing access to healthcare and education and implementing nutrition, agriculture, savings, income generation, gender mainstreaming, and prevention activities.

We Trainees and all of our supervisors went to Kigali for two days last week to meet each other and participate in a Peace Corps-sponsored conference about our assignments and our expectations of one another. On Tuesday afternoon, I left with Néhémié to visit my site. The town of Nyagatare is about a three-hour bus ride from Kigali and is very close to Rwanda’s borders with both Uganda and Tanzania. My closest Peace Corps neighbor will be a current Volunteer, also named Jen, who lives about 30 kilometers (a 40-minute moto ride) away. She’ll finish her service when I’m about halfway through mine.

Though it’s not quite what I had in mind or what I would have chosen, I liked Nyagatare a lot and my visit went great. The town is somewhat spread out, making it feel more rural, which I love. It has a market on Thursdays, several little shops similar to the ones here in Nyanza, a post office, and an Internet café. There are also a few bars and restaurants, as well as a store that had a big case of alcohol and such luxuries as Pringles and Snickers. To keep in line with both cultural norms and local standards, though, I will probably be mostly avoiding all of that.

During my few days in Nyagatare, I walked all over town and met about a zillion people, all of whom were extremely friendly and incredibly excited about my (very limited) Kinyarwanda. We went to the mayor’s office, a secondary school, the health center, and the market. We also took a moto out to visit some cooperative members and a family in a nearby village, which was the highlight of my visit. Moto trips are always fun, the countryside was beautiful, and the people were wonderful.

Anyway, that was my first taste of Nyagatare. Now, I’m back in Nyanza for five more weeks of training, until I head to Nyagatare permanently!