As my Peace Corps service draws to a close and I prepare to leave Rwanda, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the things I’ll miss about living here, the things I won’t miss, and the things I’m just dying to get away from.
The Good: Things I’ll miss
- My close friends in Nyagatare
- My fellow volunteers
- Teaching
- The abundance and variety of plants, shrubs, trees, and flowers
- The view of the hills as I walk from my house towards town
- Speaking multiple languages everyday
- Riding motorcycles
- Dancing in church
- Getting really excited about the relative luxury of the city
- Open-air markets, where you never know what you'll find
- The sense of being/living in Africa
- Villages
- Fanta
- African tea
- The peanut sauce my best friend in Nyagatare makes
- Homemade French fries
- Passionfruit
- Tree tomatoes
- Avocados that cost less than $0.10 a piece
- Zaaffran (former volunteers who are now back home say Indian food in the States doesn't compare!)
The Bad: Things that really aren’t terrible, but that I can’t say I’ll miss
- Cooking over my little kerosene stove on the floor in the doorway
- Washing dishes in a bucket
- Hand washing my clothes
- Bucket showers
- Having lizards, roaches, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and spiders in my house
- Power outages everyday
- Constant water shortages
- Slow and unreliable Internet
- Unreliable cell phone service
- Crowded matatus that stop every five minutes
- Stumbling down rocky dirt roads in the pitch dark
- Church services that last 3+ hours
- Pre-paid cell phone and Internet credit – and inevitably running out of credit at inopportune times
- Wondering if what's served to you will be anything like the description on the menu
- People screaming “SORRY SORRY SORRY” every time you trip or drop something
The Ugly: Things I cannot wait to get away from
- Being called “muzungu” every time I leave my house, even by people who know me and know my name
- Being insulted and made fun of every single day
- Being laughed at for making an effort to learn the local language
- Being stared at
- Having every single I do be judged by the people around me
- Being poked, prodded, rubbed, and grabbed
- Having children screaming right outside my house at all hours
- Seeing my fence become more destroyed each time I'm gone overnight
- The way Rwandans make fun of other Rwandans for being friends with a muzungu
- Having people get irritated and angry every time my phone is off or miss a call
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