Wednesday morning I woke up to a knock on the hotel room door. Charissa answered it, which was good because I had no intention of moving in any event. “Yeah, she’s fine I think,” I heard her say. “She’s still sleeping. I’m just going to let her sleep until lunch. She’s gotta eat something eventually.”
I went back to sleep only to be roused what seemed to be minutes later by a much louder knock. “B-F-F”. “B-F-F, AR’HE YOU SLEEPEEN?”
“Not anymore… Good Morning.”
“It is Noon.”
“Seriously?”
“B-F-F, I think you are sick.” He said.
“No, I’m not sick. I’m just very tired.”
He lumbered over and laid horizontally across the foot of my bed.
I was still half asleep and it took a moment to register whether or not I was actually conscious. Am I dreaming, or is there really a large black man laying on my bed? No, no. I’m awake. Felicien is trying to talk to me.
“B-F-F, I think you are very sad”.
“Yes, I am very sad.” I replied.
“I think someone at home has told you a bad story.”
“Well… It wasn’t great.”
“N’iki?”
“Yes, someone at home told me something sad.”
He picked up my hand and squeezed it. “Komera”.
Be strong. I always feel bad when Rwandans tell me to be strong. Yeah, like I need to be strong. You survived a holocaust and go through each day like nothing was ever wrong, and here I am acting like the world is ending because of a relationship.
Charissa walked in shortly afterwards and shoo’ed him out of the room. Saved by the Peace Corps Mom. I went back to sleep until dinner.

IST passed pretty uneventfully. I had some emotional ups and downs but I went to the rest of the sessions and tried to be as attentive as possible. We passed through Kigali for a day to recollect before going back to site. I thought it was going to be a deal breaker. How am I going to commute back to the Dark Ages while I’m dealing with all of this? The answer? It’s not what I thought it would be. I asked my doctor for some anti-anxiety medication to help me through the week, but it turned out that the best Xanax was just being back at my site. Coming home was more cathartic than I could have imagined. Everyone was asking about me and wondering when the next classes at the factory would begin, and my kids… Wow. I never thought it would be such an ordeal to come back to the school.
I walked into my Senior 2 class to have a 5 minute standing ovation complete with cheers.
“I told you I would be back today. Why are you all so surprised?”
“We are just very happy to see you, teacher.”
+10 life points right there.
In my Senior 1 class one of my favorite students actually began to cry when I walked in and demanded where I had been.
“I told you. I had a conference I had to attend in Gisenyi and I was going to be back today, so here I am. Honey, why are you so upset?”
“Someone told her a bad story.” An older student explained.
Ouch. The memory of my conversation with Felicien was triggered for a minute but I shook it off.
“What kind of bad story?” I hugged the girl and tried to console her a bit.
“Well, a student in upper levels said that when Muzungus say they go on vacation it means they are not come back.”
Double Ouch. Is this about the genocide? Is this because all of the white people left before? Is that what they really expect me to do?
“Well, I am not a Muzungu. I am Umuyarwandan and I will not ever go on ‘vacation’ and never come back. When I leave, I will tell you and you will always have a way to contact me if you need me. Rahira.”
[Insert victory music here] Umutoni, Jennifer has leveled up.
The immediate rush of determination that completely flooded my soul was more than enough to force all doubts from my mind. I’m not leaving you. I’m never going to abandon you. I’ll always be here for you whenever you need me.

Take THAT crappy month of May.

These last few weeks have been a doozey. Well, let’s not play it down. These last few weeks have constituted as some of the worst days of my life. The kind of bad days you never forget. The kind of bad days that has your friends nicknaming you “slim” when they see you at In Service Training, and keep your eyes accessorized with some ever fashionable dark rings.

I should probably explain for those of you who didn’t catch it, that I got published in a Rwandan propaganda article. The reporter took many of the words I had posted in my blog and used them out of context to support whatever it was he was trying to say at the time. I had to delete my blog and ran into some trouble with administration. The good news is they didn't fire me. When I thought all of it was over and I had pulled through all of the worst parts of the month, I got sick. Really sick. I rolled up to Gisenyi with a fever that topped out at 102 degrees. Thank god I was staying at a really nice hotel with all the normal Western amenities one could ask for.

We kept the fever down with Tylenol and I got better for the most part… But then things at home started to fall apart. “It’s hard to invest your emotions in a Ghost,” he told me. Maybe if I were the cool crime-fighting, gun-slinging variety he wouldn’t have left me. But that’s neither here nor there, because the fact of the matter is all of these things happened, and for a while I couldn’t breathe, and for a while it felt like I might drown. Eventually it occurred to me that regardless of how I felt, minutes, hours, and whole days were still passing. My environment was still the same. My friends were still the same. This country was still the same. The only thing that had changed was the way I felt at that very moment. The only thing that had stopped moving was me.

I still don’t think I’ve started moving again. I feel like I’ve been hit by a mac truck after all of this and I’m more like twitching road kill than something that moves with the ebb and flow of the world. But I’ll get there. I’m still resolved not to leave Rwanda. After everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve done, it’s going to take the end of the world to take me away from here. While I’ll admit, sometimes it feels like the end of the world, I know better. I just have to give it time. One day not too far away all of this is going to make sense to me.

So... I have a new blog. Hopefully I can keep this one as far away from things like Peace Corps Journals and the Administration as humanly possible. More on all of that later. My site is still wonderful and I am preparing to depart to In Service Training in just a few days. This totally works for me because I am due for a bit of a vacation. I think a little tanning by the lake is just what the doctor ordered.

Cheers.

At 4:45am the day after Easter I woke up at St. Pauls to prepare for my 5:30 bus departure and subsequent 9 hour trek to Kampala. It seemed disturbingly quiet after the celebration the night before. Rwandans strike me as incredible peculiar people in the way which they celebrate holidays. In American we jump at any chance to have a party and drink. New Years Eve, Halloween, Birthdays, 4th of July, President’s Day, it really doesn’t matter what the occasion actually is, we just like getting together with friends and cutting lose. Except for Easter. Easter is like this unspoken sacred cow. You never see anyone inviting you to their “Insane Easter Bash” on facebook because we, as Americans, don’t find it to be appropriate. Easter is a day Christians who haven’t be particularly faithful church goers to go to church, spend time with their families, and share a quiet day thinking about Jesus, or gigantic bunnies breaking into their homes and leaving candy eggs around the house. Rwandans, on the other hand, completely shed their composure on Easter. Right after midnight they start the party, complete with drinking, singing, dancing and music. The entire process was reminiscent of frat kids getting behind their favorite university team but instead of screaming “ROLL TIDE” they were shouting the Kinyarwandan equivalent of “WOOOO!! JESUS CAME BACK DUDE!” Like I said; peculiar.

When we got to the bus station I discovered that the administration at Kampala Coach has failed to write down my reservation. They also failed to recall the reservations of Marta and Colleen. It seemed that one cannot actually call in to make a reservation with Kampala Coach (despite what you may read on the internet and their own website), but instead must show up the day before to buy your ticket if you desire a seat. I threw a veritable American conniption fit right in the center of their ticket office.
“What do you MEAN you’ve LOST my reservation?”
“No, I don’t want to take your 12:30 bus. I have things to do.”
“How could YOU let this happen? This is not how you do business.”
Eventually one of the owners came out and told me he would walk me to another bus line and find me a seat. Then he offered me a free breakfast. I was moderately consoled. We were still on a bus to Kampala at approximately the same time and the man seemed to understand that his employees had jerked us around. However, this new bus did not have reclining seats, we were crammed into the back, forced to sit next to this woman who only paid for one seat, but had an additional two little puke factories (or children as the case may be) half shoved on her lap as if they were hand bags as opposed to people who required their own space, and seemed to have the driver from hell who enjoyed hitting speed bumps and pot holes at 90 miles an hour. Frankly, I’m surprised we’re alive. But, I suppose the point is we are, and Kampala was well worth the ridiculous trip up and then some.

First of all, we stayed at a place called the Red Chilli Hideaway. This is supposed to be set up like a hostel but they’ve got some options that remind me more of a hotel. You can get single, twin, and double rooms in addition to a dorm and a camp ground where you can pitch your own tent (the cheapest option by far). Though financially advisable, we’ve got some interesting wildlife on the premises, including monkeys, so I’m not sure if I, personally, would choose that option. The café here is completely legit and better than most of the upper range hotels I’ve seen in Kigali. You can get a BLT here. A for reals BLT. With bacon that doesn’t have the consistency of rubber or the taste of sawdust. In effect, the place gets my recommendation even if it is located a little ways outside of the centreville. The cost from the center of town by regular taxi is approximately 15,000 shillings. The exchange rate to dollars is about 2,000 shillings to 1 US dollar. This makes shopping exceptionally feasible. It’s a nice change of pace from Kigali where everything is double the amount you would anticipate paying in an African country.

It’s also incredibly easy to just use dollars in Uganda. I went on a rafting trip and they had all of their prices listed in dollars and charged my credit cards in dollars as well. That means I wasn’t hit with a conversion fee by my bank and made me all the more enthusiastic to be giving this rafting company my money. From what I can gather, there are two main companies for rafting in Uganda. There was my company (Adrift) and some other company (Raft the Nile… Or something like that?) and they are appropriate color coded blue and red respectively. This spawned a nearly constant flow of red vs. blue jokes. I really enjoyed my trip with Adrift and I didn’t find it to be expensive for everything that was provided. I went Bungee Jumping, White Water Rafting for 5 hours, had a free lunch which consisted of sandwiches, potato salad, a ton of beer, a BBQ provided at the end of the trip, and a free shuttle to and from my hotel. The guides were all very experienced, funny and considerate. I was the least lobster colored of my group by my guide continually forced sunscreen upon us throughout the rafting trip. The trip was also incredibly Veg friendly and never failed to provide vegetarian options each time there was a pause for food.

The day started with Bungee Jumping. It’s not required, and if you opt out of it you can simply watch all of the people who have clearly lost their minds throw themselves from a 185 foot platform from the safety and comfort of the lodge’s riverside bar. Nevertheless, I recommend being one of the crazy people that jumps. I believe the jump master is American (and way cute) and he makes the entire process seamless. As with most things like this, the hardest part isn’t the jumping, or the falling, but rather just the standing at the top of the platform. It’s hard not to have shakey legs while you’re standing over the Nile waiting to potentially throw yourself to your death. They count you down with 3,2,1,BUNGEE! And then you jump out away from the platform with your arms wide and fall for about 4 seconds. When the cord pulls you up you barely feel it. For an instant I forgot I was even connected to a cord. All of the tension connects in the rope instead of your back or knees and you lightly float up and down a few times before a boat comes out to collect you. I’m making it sound more relaxing than it actually is, but the point I’m trying to convey is that the experience is far from life threatening. People look at Bungee Jumping as this X-treme sport that only X-treme people sign up for, but I think it has the potential to be far more accessible to a variety of demographics. In short, you ought to give it a shot before you completely write it off.

Between the two, White Water Rafting was infinitely more terrifying than Bungee Jumping. The way Adrift introduces you to rafting is pretty much a “learn as you go” methodology. They gently brief you before each rapid but there were several times at the beginning where they intentionally flipped the boat or hit a rapid so you would pop you just do you would know what it felt like. I kind of liked it that way. It made the experience much more natural and properly prepared you for what falling of the boat was actually going to be like. Talking about it doesn’t cut it. I remember the guide quoting that you could be under the water for about 8 seconds and that it happened a lot so you shouldn’t panic. I looked to my left and saw my friend Colleen counting.
“One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…”
By the time she got to eight I wanted to throw myself out of the boat and swim to shore. Eight seconds seemed like and really is an ungodly amount of time to spend underwater by force. Luckily, we were able to keep the boat upright all the way until the last rapid, which is aptly named “the Bad Place”. The last rapid is a level 5 rapid and the meanest thing I have ever seen in the form of water. We practiced flipping the boat over and floating below it at the beginning of the trip.
“Don’t panic,” the guide told us. “Panicking will only make it worse. As you can see, you can breathe under here. So, just relax.”
When we went down “the Bad Place” the raft flipped and I went under. At first I practiced taking the guides advice. Don’t panic. I relaxed a bit and tried to let the water take me through the rapids.

Has it been 8 seconds yet?
10?
I need air.
Get me out of here.

I started to struggle against the current and popped up under the over turned raft. “Perfect! We can breathe under here.” I remembered.
Except that I couldn’t. Either I was spending too much effort trying to keep my head above water to catch my breath, or there really wasn’t an air bubble under the raft anymore.

Panic.
I’m going to die.
How did this even happen?

I tried to pop out to the side of the boat, but when you’re underwater you lose your inner compass. Left, right, up and down completely disappear. I ended up under the boat again. I tried again in a different direction and found air. It was hard to breathe in, but I found it, and then my guide found me. He was trying to grab me and laughing at me. I probably looked fairly hilarious.
“It’s okay. I’m fine. Just let me float.” (I needed the space.) We had passed The Bad Place and I could easily stick my feet forward and float down the river. I stayed in the water for a really long time. Even after we had flipped the boat right side up again and were promised all the beer we could drink, I stayed in the water for a few minutes longer.

When we got to shore we hiked up a small hill and were served really delicious kebabs, tortillas, water and beer. We hung out at the top with everyone else and talked about how insane the experience was and after a few minutes we all pilled back on to our respective busses and were taxied home.

Today I’m rather sore, but feel practically invincible. Like, I might be able to stop a bullet with my face. I just threw myself off a platform attached to a rubber cord and managed to survive a class 5 rapid that I am convinced was particularly out to get me. I’ve never felt like more of a superhero and that’s pretty fabulous.

Happy Birthday to me!

“This is going to hurt,” he told me. Despite that sad reality, I appreciated his frankness. I always hate it when doctors or authority figures try to play down something bad. I would rather know I’m about to experience something unpleasant than be horribly surprised halfway through. So, I should probably start this story from the beginning. Two weeks ago I came home from a shopping trip in Kigali and burned my leg on the tailpipe of a moto. I will never again forget to note which side of the motorcycle the tailpipe is on. At first I thought it would just go away. It just seemed a little red. Then a few days later a blister about the size of a silver dollar formed inside of the red patch and it started to hurt. My medical officer just told me to cover it, watch it, and make sure not to pop the blister. However, the burn on my leg was a little too big for any of the band aids in our med-kit, so I covered it with gauze one night and left it there until morning. It never occurred to me that doing that would severely impede my ability to function for the following few weeks. When I took off the gauze in the morning, the top layer of my burnt skin came with it. Ouch. I’m sure you can imagine how that one felt.

A week later the pain wasn’t going away and there was a silver dollar sized mushy yellowish spot on the burn. I sent pictures to my med officer and she told me I had to come to Kigali to get it checked out. It ended up not being infected, but I had this weird thing where the skin from the blister was never fully cleared away and was making it impossible for the burn to heal up. So we had to clear out all of this dead skin… With sponges, tweezers, and scissors. The first round of scrubbing got us to the exposed nerves of my leg, which would explain why it had been hurting for so long. That was when I was told the rest of the procedure was going to be fairly disagreeable. After the first five minutes of scrubbing I noticed the noises in the room were getting muffled and my vision was going a little spotty. “Huh,” I said. “I think I’m going to pass out.” My tone was so blasé that the staff didn’t initially react. Then they had me bent over with my head between my knees until the world stopped spinning, and found a place for me to lay down for the rest of the procedure. I apologized for not being able to keep it together, but the doctor assured me that the reaction was entirely natural, and proposed that had I been a boy, I probably would have crumpled after the first 30 seconds. It was nice of him to try and make me feel a little tougher than I felt. So, I have to go back in for a check up again tomorrow but hopefully it won’t be quite as bad.

In better news, I’ve begun teaching. It’s been a bit of a learning experience for me oddly enough. The practices of the Rwandan classrooms are diametrically opposed to those to which I am accustomed in many ways. First of all, I am expected to be 3 – 5 minutes late to class everyday. This means I don’t get any immediate prep time, but it allows the students to enter the classroom, clean the blackboard, take their seats, and most importantly it ensures that they are all present to stand and greet me in unison when I enter the room. This was startling at first, especially because they remain standing until I return their greeting and tell them to be seated. I am also expected to write the name of the class I am teaching in the corner of the blackboard where teachers in the United States normally write the date. I have now come to the understanding that students are not privy to their own schedule, as my S2 English class was lead to believe that I was teaching them geography when I did not indicate the subject on the board. Professors routinely come in and out of classrooms, teach whatever subject they are prepared to teach, and the students follow the lesson without question.

This would not bother me if not for the fact that they never ask questions. At all. About anything. Students here take orders very well, but always fail to visit the intentions of the directions given. I’m about to institute a policy that adds extra points to the weekly quiz if a student asks “why” when I tell her to do something. The problem is, many other teachers would be less than enthused with my student’s new found audacity in the classroom. I want my kids to think more critically, but I don’t want them to be disrespectful because of it. Walking that line can be a bit precarious.

Additionally, I start clubs next week. We had a meeting with the Headmaster and he agreed to let me have the American Culture club and a Test Prep club, but he also told everyone he wanted me to have an English club for the teachers. My initial and standing impression of this request is that it has not been very well accepted. Most of the professors are men and in their 40s or older. Culturally speaking, having me (a 23 year old girl) as an authority figure in a class which is primarily comprised of men in their 40s is a bit insulting. But, my ever visionary Headmaster quashed most of the complaints stating that “No one is too old to learn”. No one argues with the Headmaster, so we’re moving forward with it. It should be fun to see what kind of social backlash I get from this. I think I’ll be fine as long as I just try to think of this period of time as a social experiment instead of a social engagement.

Lastly, I would like to issue a blanket request to all of you that you STOP GETTING MARRIED. Seriously, guys. I’ve got about 23 months of service left. If you love each other enough to get married, you will still love each other in 23 months when I am home and able to attend your wedding. Yes, I am talking about YOU, Meghan Fitz—Wehe…
Another alternative could be a late November or December wedding. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year because school is out in October, and I’ve got lots of time off. Can we all agree to that?

January was marked by “difficulty”. I noticed that my problems lessened in some ways but grew in others since staging. It was nice to have some space again; to have a place I could retreat to when I wanted to be alone and think. However, at staging I had the luxury of living without expectations. This is not just to say that I had any to begin with, but also that no one had any of me. A major obstacle this January has been reconciling my abilities with the expectations my village has of me. I’m not so concerned about teaching. I am more concerned with the cultural expectations, the need to speak Urchiga, sensitivity to habitual norms, knowing what is polite and impolite by Rwandan standards, and homesickness.

I had a particularly difficult day when I accepted the offer of my counterpart to visit her church. She is a Pentecost and I had heard from my friends that their services were modeled after some of the more standard southern gospel parishes. “Yes,” I thought. “What a fun and unique experience”. However, unique would be a more accurate description than fun. After the 6 hour mass and rather peculiar private prayer session that followed, it occurred to me that some denominations of Christianity are just too different for me to identify with. I spent half my bus ride home staring at two numbers on my cell phone. One read “Figgy” and the other read “PC Medical Duty”. One could have me home in a day and every struggle I have had here would be behind me, and one would tell me that my struggles are the most intrinsic part of me, and that I have to embrace them thoroughly. I called Bob. I asked him to remind me why I shouldn’t ET and he responded with such casual confidence, “You’re not going to ET, Jenn”, that I believed him almost immediately. I woke him up. It must have been near midnight in Mongolia, but he took the call anyway, talked me out of my head, reminded me that I was here for all the right reasons, and pointed out how funny my story was going to seem in a few days time. “Rwanda can’t send you home, Jenn”. He didn’t mean that they were trying to, but rather, that my country, and all of its challenges weren’t so massive that I couldn’t take it. So I got my strength back, and I’ve been all right for the past few days.

My homesickness comes and goes. My memories of the United States are much more vivid then I remember them being in France. For the first time, when I think about home I get slight pangs in my chest. Just thinking about sleeping in my own bed, and seeing my old friends, and being able to go out to a bar and have a cosmo makes me a little nostalgic for my old life. There’s a lot to appreciate when it comes to an American lifestyle and it’s not just how convenient everything is. Hopefully I will be able to share some of that with my village and make some sort of incremental impact.

In other news, the comic drive has really taken off. My partner here has sort of fallen off the face of Rwanda so I’m assuming the project as my own. I probably shouldn’t say “my own”, because my spectacular wifey, Julia, has compiled a team of people who intend to help made this project happen. We now have a website! Can you believe it? My secondary project has a website! If you want to check it out it’s www.heroeswithoutborders.org. I am so grateful for all the support this drive has received and I know it never would have happened without Julia and all of her hard work. Love, you are amazing.

Today is the first day I’ve done absolutely nothing in a very long time. Yesterday, I went on a two hour hike across the mountains that create the Rwanda-Uganda boarder (Ugwanda) with my headmaster to delivering a book to another volunteer in my district. Initially, when I inquired about how far Rushaki was from Mulindi I got some variety of vague hand gestures to the series of hills opposite my school. “It’s over that hill,” they would tell me, but what they failed to mention was that there were several other “hills” behind the hill we could plainly see. I honestly shouldn’t be surprised. I live in the land of a thousand hills after all. I did not plan on having my Headmaster follow my all the way to Rushaki, but he has been incredibly protective of me ever since I arrived. Generally speaking, I have ample amounts of time alone when I am in his house in my room, but if I am walking anywhere he usually insists upon someone being with me. I ended up taking a moto taxi back to Mulindi because it started to rain. The way the road curves through the valleys, it is actually about twice as far to take a moto than it is to make the bee-line hike over the mountains. Good to note.

I asked if I could help at my school at all today, but my headmaster told me no. He mused that there would probably be something for me to do with the computer lab on Monday, but that I should just relax as much as possible today. However, for those of you who know me well, I don’t relax easily. I have so many ideas and I know I can do so much for my village, but I’m constantly hindered by the “slowly but surely” attitude of my superiors. I’ve been told on many occasions that I am a very “eager” and “tenacious” person. Maybe I’m suffering from leftover Western ideologies, forcing me to feel like my inactivity will somehow be construed as laziness. I ought to understand that pushing the envelope and attempting to force my way isn’t going to win me any friends. If they want to take things one step at a time then who am I to argue? I’m here for them after all, and I can only figure they will use me when they feel it is necessary. Still, I’m concerned about being a burden. I feel, and have felt, so taken care of since I arrived in Rwanda. I’m trying to convince myself that this is just part of the cultural differences that exist in Africa. If I were to ruminate on this for a moment I would realize it was like this in France too. I feel disheartened sometimes at the American mentality with which we’ve been raised—this perpetual “can’t stop, must work, must produce, must do” something, anything, so that we might procure some semblance of inner quiet. I’m beginning to have a hard time believing that everyone else in the world is wrong when they tell me that I work too hard; Americans work too hard. Why are we the only ones who refuse to recognize that it’s okay to take a break and just not worry about things for a minute? It’s our culture, sure, but maybe it’s about time to apply a modicum of adjustment to said culture.

Today, I’m just going to try to integrate into my society. It is one of the goals I’m supposed to meet by Peace Corps standards. On a walk back from town the other day, I asked my headmaster whether or not everyone in my village spoke Kinyarwanda. He told me everyone spoke a regional dialect that, when described, sounds absolutely nothing like Kinyarwanda. Supposedly, most people still understand Kinyarwanda so I shouldn’t have too much of a problem speaking to people in the community. This suddenly explained why whenever I stop to say “Amakuru ki” (How are you) to anyone on the road they simply responded with “Yego” (Yes). I learned the traditional greeting in the dialect, “Agandi”, to which one would typically respond, “Ni’ge”, but I’ve heard some four other variations to it, so I’ve got a ways to go. I still want to learn to use it. I like the reactions I generally get when I try to use the dialect. Sometimes my headmaster will laugh and translate things like “they are shocked and saying it is impossible”, “they are saying you are only a foreigner on the skin”. I would love to be a foreigner only in appearance. If learning the local dialect is all it takes then sign me up. I’ll start classes today.