NICU Babes

Huddled in the corner of the tiny NICU the heat is smothering. Sweat is running down my neck and my rolled-up shirt exposes a glossy sheen of sweat coating my arms. I stand over the sink, washing my hands and savoring the cool water splashing up on me. The mamas are busy with their babies, adjusting their covers, preparing feedings, or changing their tiny cloth diapers. The baby on the end has been abandoned by his mother with mental health issues and his high-pitch screaming has been ignored for the past five minutes while the other mamas are busy with their own babies. I reach into the bassinet and arrange the baby boy in my arms, wrapping his blanket securely around his tiny body. Standing in the corner I gently sway in place and watch the mamas, absorbed in the rhythm of the room. The mamas are hot, tired, and ready to go home. At night they sleep on the floor of the NICU while the lucky few share a wooden bench. They spend all day in this tiny room, separated from their other children and family members. And yet they are completely dedicated to their little babies. They have learned how to prepare the syringes to  feed their babies through feeding tubes, how to remove the oxygen from their noses when the power goes off, and are constantly “pumping milk” which involves harshly squeezing out breast milk, by hand, into tiny plastic containers, a process that makes my chest ache just watching.When one mother leaves the room and her baby starts to fuss another mama will place her hand on the child to soothe him. There is a sense of community so deeply embedded within the walls of this room that it can be difficult to identify the true mama of each baby. A few minutes pass and the baby in my arms is sleeping quietly. The sweltering heat seems to increase by the minute but the mamas are welcoming and I cannot imagine putting this baby back into his bassinet. I settle into the corner, breathing in the thick warm air that is laced with the chattering voices of mamas and the mechanical breathing of oxygen machines, enjoying the feeling of overwhelming peace that only sleeping babies seem to bring. 

I had the pleasure of spending the past weekend (Thursday-Sunday) visiting the hospital in Kibogora, a small town down in the south of Rwanda. It was a beautiful location and there are great people there but my favorite part was spending time in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) with all of the babies. It may sound like a bizarre way to pass a vacation, but for me it was heaven. I was able to go on rounds with the nurse practitioner and observe as she examined all the babies and sat in on a neonatal resuscitation course. There were happy moments when mamas were told when they could go home the next day and they threw their arms in the air with ecstatic prayers of joy and gratitude. There were moments of sadness when a mother found out her baby had a mass in her lungs that would require a surgery outside of her financial means in order to survive. There were moments of insanity when a mentally ill mother tried to kidnap her preemie, was chased down by the guards, and later abandoned her baby. And there were moments of pure joy and peace, snuggled up in the sauna they call the NICU, holding babies and chatting with the mamas.

The top photo is of some adorable triplets. I love how they are arranged by size. They were teaching the mama how to feed the smallest first so I think it was easier for her to remember if they were all lined up in order of size. She already has a toddler and her husband left her for another woman so she will have some very long years ahead of her with four young children. If you are at all religious I ask that you keep this mama and her babies in your prayers because I worry about their future success at home.

Here are some other pictures from the weekend:

This is a picture of the NICU from the door. The far side is lined with incubators for the babies struggling to self-regulate their body temperature and the middle has cribs for the babies who still need oxygen, close observation, and maybe an IV, but are able to keep themselves warm. Unlike a NICU in America, babies who are not related often share cribs or incubators because the hospital lacks resources to provide more equipment. This is a risky practice because it could spread infections form one baby to another but it is the only option they have so they make it work! There are two wooden benches that the mamas squeeze onto and the pathways are often obscured by IV lines or the cords of heating lamps. It was a little scary trying to navigate down the aisles without tripping on anything.

Here are some of my new friends from the pediatric ward. The little guy with crutches was just too adorable! 🙂

This little guy was super tiny and his mother was not in the NICU to care for him. She had eight other kids at home so she sent her young house girl, Olive, to take care of the baby. When I was there I watched Olive prepare his formula (a mixture of NIDO-powdered milk-water, and sugar) and attempt to feed him with a tiny plastic cup. Luckily the nurse practitioner was there to assist because she didn’t seem to be overly confident with the whole process, but I am guessing she will be soon since he needs to be fed every two hours.

These last few are shots of the area where we stayed. Kibogora is a beautiful place and I had a wonderful vacation!

Kibogora

 

 

I am spending the weekend in Kibogora, a small town about 6 hours south of where I live. The place where we are staying is right on Lake Kivu with beautiful views any direction you look. Yesterday Grace and I left on the 6am bus and ventured down through Nyungwe Forest National Park and then a car from the hospital came to pick us up to take us to Kibogora. We are staying at a guest house for the local Methodist hospital that is just a few minutes from both the lake and the hospital. Yesterday I went down to the hospital to see their NICU, which was a room the size of a large closet with a row of incubators and a row of bassinets and the mothers sleep on the floor at night. There are also no monitors for the babies so even the micro-preemies have pretty basic care and then they just hope they can catch signs of distress in time. A nice dose of reality for the quality of medical care here. There are currently triplets in the NICU and they were sleeping yesterday so I am excited to return again today to get some cuddle time in. The mother of the triplets also has a toddler and her husband left her for another woman so I can only imagine the struggles she will face in raising four young children alone. It was a nice reminder on Thanksgiving that I have a lot of things to be grateful for, even the smallest of privileges that I often take for granted.

The is a mixture of doctors and nurses staying on the compound who come from America and England and we all shared a fantastic Thanksgiving meal together. All twelve of us sat around a table and shared a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, ham, green bean casserole, three different kinds of pies (lemon, pumpkin, and chocolate) and even homemade ice cream. It was hard to believe that I was still in Rwanda last night.

I am currently visiting a 5-star hotel, Nyungwe Forest Lodge. One of the nurses was teaching a CPR class for the staff so we tagged along to tour the place and use the internet. The hotel is surrounded on one side by tea fields and the lush rain forest on the other- amazingly beautiful and very swanky. As Grace put it, “The only thing we can afford is the free internet.” There are adorable stuffed animals in the gift shop that are $35 a piece. I think a room is somewhere around $200 a night- per person, and there is a helicopter landing pad for guests who don’t want to make the drive through the forest. It is a very different world than the one I live in. I don’t think I will be staying here anytime soon.

Well I think that is all for now, I hope everyone back home had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!! I am so incredibly grateful for my amazing family and friends and all of the love and support you have shown me during the past 15 months.

Murakoze Cyane!!!

Merci Beaucoup!!!

Thank You!!!

Surprise Party!!!

On Sunday my friends (with the help of my fabulous mother) threw me a surprise birthday party at the Mille Collines! I arrived with my friend Meredith to see that Heather had spent the morning decorating a table with all the necessary birthday accessories! They had even invited other volunteers who I am close friends with and we spent a perfect day together. It was a rainy morning so we were pretty much the only ones there for a long time but we didn’t let the rain stop us from swimming. We spent the morning playing in the pool, taking silly photos and just sitting together talking. Around 12 the food starting coming out for the buffet and it would probably shock/disgust you if I described how much food we consumed as a group. At one point towards the end of the meal Sara told Meredith to put all of her empty butter packets on plate so they would get taken away. When Meredith asked why Sara replied, “Because it is embarrassing.”

We spent a few hours eating and I will say that most of us focused on the salad and meat tables because those are the things we can’t really get out in the village. I ate three delicious chicken brochettes- I love eating meat that I can actually identify and is cooked to the point where you no longer question if it might come back alive and jump off your plate. After we finished our meals I figured that was the end of the party but then the live band sang to me and they brought out a real birthday cake that Heather had ordered that morning. For the first time in 15 months we tasted real cake and it was amazing! It was incredibly sweet and after the first piece we all started to wonder if we would be able to make it back to our sites after all that food since it seemed possible that we might just all lapse into sugar comas and fall asleep at the table!

I am so grateful to have amazing friends here and even more grateful that I have a mother who can plan a birthday party for me even when I am living in Africa.It can be hard to spend special days so far away from home but I guess I never really needed to worry about that part since my superwoman mother can organize my life regardless of physical proximity. That woman never ceases to amaze me.

Here are some of the photos from the day:

 

Amazing fruit selection!

 

I think Sara was a lion, not really sure what animal Heather was…

 

Meredith, Sara, Suzi, Kim

 

Fabulous birthday cake!

 

Heather, Suzi, Sara, Meredith, Kim

You know it’s a good party when this is how everyone looks at the end! 🙂

 

A big thank you to my amazing friends and of course my wonderful mother- you are the best!!! 

Adventures with Mountain Gorillas

Once you look into the eyes of a mountain gorilla…..you are forever changed!

-Dian Fossey

 

 

 

Don’t run. Don’t scream. Just stay calm and slowly walk away. The guides repeated these instructions frequently throughout the morning and the words sounded simple enough. It turns out they are really hard directions to follow when a 300 pound mountain gorilla is beating his chest and then charging towards you like he wants to tear you limb from limb. I kept reminding myself that gorillas are vegetarians but as the guide beat off a particularly aggressive blackback  with the blunt side of a machete it was harder and harder to remember the crucial instructions to not run or scream. My heart rate was increasing with every charge and by the time his massive hand was reaching out to grab my leg I could hear the rapid pounding of my heart resounding in my ears. When his fingers finally made contact I found myself thinking, “Is this really the end? Am I meant to die on the side of a volcano with an enormous gorilla flinging my body about like a rag doll?”  It turns out it this adventure was not destined to be my ultimate demise, which is good because I am really fond of living and pretty attached to the idea of having all my limbs connected to my body!

 

We started the day at 6:00am when our driver, Francis, came to pick us up from the hotel. While most visitors showed up at the park office in snazzy jeeps from tour companies we rolled up in a rusty old pick-up truck. Most of the other participants also looked as though they had just stepped out of an Eddie Bauer or REI catalog. The amount of khaki in the group was shocking. I, on the other hand, was clad in a quite fetching ensemble that involved long black yoga pants, shorts over the pants, a Cornell Volleyball practice shirt from college, and a red headband that matched nothing I was wearing. Style has never been a strength of mine.

 

Francis helped us navigate the process and we were able to request a hike that would let us see gorilla babies. I didn’t share my secret fantasy of holding a gorilla baby with the man organizing groups (they frown upon the idea of physical contact between gorillas and humans) but I was able to emphasize the fact that I really wanted to see babies. We ended up being placed on the hike to see the Sabyinyo family with five other visitors. The name of the family comes from the Sabyinyo volcano, which means “old man’s teeth.” We all found this particularly interesting considering one of the men in our group was a dentist-it was meant to be! One of our guides passed around a sheet with pictures and names of all of the gorillas in the group and I was thrilled to see babies on the list and it turned out there were even newer babies born after the sheet was printed!

Another great feature of this family is that the group is lead by Guhonda, a 43-year-old silverback who is the largest mountain gorilla in the world. The only drawback to being placed in this family is that the hike is usually pretty short since the family comes down the slopes of the volcano during the rainy season but it was totally worth the shorter trip to see them! After a short briefing we crammed ourselves back into the tiny truck with Francis and took off to start our adventure. We drove for about 30 minutes on an awful dirt road that was littered with rocks large enough to practically qualify as boulders and finally pulled up to a small grass clearing just in time to avoid losing our breakfast in an unpleasant manner. We hopped out of the car and our group headed out to walk to the edge of the forest. It was a beautiful walk through open fields with  women farming potatoes with babies tied on their backs and children herding goats and cows and waving to us with massive grins on their dirty little faces.At the edge of the park there is a small stonewall that is meant to separate the animals from the local villages and also to keep the farmers from expanding into the forest.

At this point we had two guides (equipped with machetes), a soldier with an AK-47 and four porters with bags. The porters climbed the wall first and then helped the rest of us over and then we were off! We only hiked for about 10-15 minutes before they stopped us to give us the last lecture on how to behave around the gorillas. It was hard to focus on the guide at this point because we could hear the crunching of bamboo sticks breaking and the rustling of leaves in the tree behind us and we knew they were very close. I don’t really know how to describe what it was like when I saw the first gorilla. It is awesome to see animals in a zoo but to see one up close and in their natural habitat is simply breathtaking. Within a few minutes of finding the group one of the mama gorillas came walking by and brushed my leg as she ambled up a trail to search for a tree to rest under. It was incredible to be that close to such a magnificent animal! We watched a new baby play in a pile of leaves while the mother lounged nearby, casually leaning against a tree and occasionally turning to check on her baby. Eventually he crawled over onto her lap and she decided it was time to move and grabbed him by one arm and swung him up onto her back.

The babies are absolutely adorable. They look just like little black fuzzy stuffed animals and even though I know it is really wrong I would still very much like one to keep as a pet. Wouldn’t you want one of these as a pet??? 🙂

After about 10 minutes the real fun started when a rambunctious blackback started causing some trouble. At first he would beat his chest and run at us but then run away when the guides would wave their machetes at him and make gorilla sounds. This worked for a while but then he started getting physical, which is when I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into. We stayed in a tight group behind the guide but it seemed that someone would always get separated and that was the worst feeling in the world. One of the women was actually grabbed around the waist but luckily the guide was there to beat the gorilla off. According to the guides the young males are often “drunk on bamboo” during rainy season, which alters their behavior. Finally he went to rest after 10 minutes of chasing us around in circles and we hiked further up the volcano to track the rest of the family. At one point I was able to get a video of two babies playing and climbing a tree together although the quality is rather poor because my hands were still shaking from the adrenaline rush of being charged. It was amazing to see the gorillas but difficult to get good pictures for a few reasons. Since it was an overcast and cloudy day the lighting in the jungle was not great and you are forbidden to use flash so most of my pictures turned out dark and blurry. They also move around a lot which can make it tricky to get clear photos. At one point we tracked them up into an open meadow and that was a great spot to take pictures. Guhonda came up the path and into the meadow and it was incredible to stand so close to the world’s largest mountain gorilla.

He is estimated to weigh well over 400 pounds and everything about him is just massive. In stark contrast to the hotheaded blackback that seemed content to terrorize us for most of the hour, the silverback was quiet and observant. The meadow was the perfect place to take pictures of us with the gorillas in the background but I wasn’t too pleased with how many of my pictures turned out. The best one shows my head and then a gorilla splayed out on the grass behind me with his legs strewn in opposite directions. He might be pleased with his fantastic crotch-shot but I was less than thrilled.

At least I will always remember the day even if the photos didn’t turn out like I was hoping! For the last 10 minutes of the hour (you are allowed exactly one hour with the gorillas) we followed them up into a dense portion of the forest with muddy trails and prickly plants that stuck to my pants and shoes the rest of the day. We were able to watch the lead silverback have a short lunch of leaves and grass while a baby played in a tree nearby. Eventually the guides told us it was time to say goodbye and we were about to head down the trail when our “friend” from our stressful game of tag was jogging up the path. We all immediately began moving behind the guide and my poor friend Alisha was left isolated on the opposite side of the trail. She did everything right (no running or screaming) and he ran by her, pausing only to slap her chest with his hand, leaving a smear of dirt across her shirt and a petrified look on her face. The last image we got of a gorilla was this obnoxious blackback ambling up the trail at a leisurely pace, passing gas, grunting, and grabbing leaves from the lower shrubs. When we made it back down to the meadow (the one where my friend captured the lovely crotch photo) the forest suddenly erupted in sounds of gorillas screeching and grunting. The guide told us that sometimes the lead gorilla will hand out punishments to the gorillas that misbehave for visitors, which seemed unreal but he said it is really true.

We hiked back down to the edge of the forest, jumped over the wall, and after a short walk back to the cars our adventure was over. Once we left the park it didn’t even seem real anymore. From what I gather our experience was very unusual and the gorillas almost never touch people and are rarely violent. I suppose there is a first time for everything but I am happy to report we all survived the trek and it was positively amazing! I would highly recommend this adventure to anyone coming to Rwanda. The prices just went up this year and it is now $750 for one permit if you are visiting and $375 if you live here. Luckily we bought our permits the day before the prices changed so we only paid $250- still a lot of money but a steal compared to $750. My pictures are not great but one of the men in our group had a very nice camera that took beautiful pictures and he and his wife generously offered to send us their photos. I won’t have those for a while but for now here are some of mine:

Sabyinyo volcano

Final group shot! From left to right- Soldier with AK-47 to protect us from buffalo or elephants, our guide, Alisha, me, Meredith, adorable couple from Canada, quiet but nice couple from Switzerland, awesome guy from Canada who had a Scottish accent and was super funny, and our second guide. It was a great group and we had a lot of fun together and made it out of the forest just as the rain clouds rolled in- perfect timing! It was the adventure of a lifetime and I feel so blessed to be living in a country that offers amazing opportunities like tracking mountain gorillas!

I will end this post with another Dian Fossey quote that I love. Dian lead a life dedicated to researching and protecting these beautiful animals so I feel it is necessary to honor her in some way. This is her last diary entry that she wrote shortly before she was murdered in her cabin in Rwanda:

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

24

Well another birthday has come and gone and I am now 24. I don’t really feel different but 24 does seem to get me new results when people demand to know why I am single and have failed to reproduce yet. It appears that 23 was a more forgiving age but by 24 I really should get my life together. I am pretty sure the majority of the old women in my village have me on the top of their prayer list since they are convinced I will never find love since I am still single at my age and express no interest having them introduce me to every eligible man in their extended family. I have met a few progressive women lately who have encouraged me to wait until I am at least 30 to marry and I met a feisty young shop keeper who informed me that all boys lie and I should just stay single. So overall 24 is producing mixed results.

The actual day of my birthday (November 9th) was cold and rainy. I woke up early and looked out my window and couldn’t even see the gate 5 feet from my door because the fog was so thick. I promptly decided it would be wrong to waste this gloomy day weather on exercising and instead rolled over and covered myself back up in my quilt. It was my first of many birthday gifts to myself throughout the day. Eventually around 7am I got up to get dressed because it was the last day of the term and I had no idea what time the ceremony started at my school. I texted one of the nuns who teaches chemistry at my school to check the time of the event and she immediately called me to sing to me in French. It was a lovely way to start the day. I went to eat breakfast and a group of nuns sang to me in three languages (Kinyarwanda, English, and French) and they had filled my plate with chocolate squares- another wonderful addition to the morning. I discovered that the ceremony was supposed to start at 10:00am so I went back to my room to enjoy some free time. Around 9:30am it started raining so I crawled into bed and put a movie on. The nice thing about rain in Rwanda is that you can count on it to delay everything by at least a few hours.

After my movie the weather was clearing up a bit so I headed over to school and waited around while they tried to recover from the rain delay. Eventually we started the ceremony and it was nice but a little speech-heavy for my taste. When it started raining and we had move inside I wasn’t exactly heartbroken. I kind of assumed that was it and I would go home soon but much to my despair they managed to shove all the kids into our biggest room (cramming 5 kids into each little desk) and we continued the ceremony inside. Finally, about 3pm, it appeared to be wrapping up. Of course it wasn’t actually done and the teachers and Senior 3 students stayed to share a meal together. Since it was so late in the afternoon the food was freezing cold and I spent the next 30-minutes doing my very best to choke down cold beans and cabbage without vomiting. Eventually I stood up, said goodbye to a few people, and left- that was my next second birthday gift to myself- freedom.

It was a quiet afternoon and then I went to dinner around 7pm. When we finished eating the nuns presented me with a cake (including 24 candles) and a birthday card. It was a very dramatic presentation since they turned off all the lights and four of them came out dancing with the cake held high in the air. It was a great way to end a birthday!

I don’t have a lot of pictures form the night but here are a few:

Sidewalk Chalk

 

I forgot just how fun drawing with sidewalk chalk could be! It was really fun to see the kids experiment with different drawings and fun activities like tracing their bodies or writing the alphabet in chalk. There were lots of airplanes and flowers and towards the end of the afternoon a few of the little boys drew some anatomically correct stick figures that proved to be very popular with the other kids. I gracefully ignored their requests to come view said drawings- boys will be boys and I suppose if nothing else it was a lesson in anatomy for all of the future doctors in the group! I had a wonderful three days hanging out with the kiddos at the orphanage and wanted to share some photos of them in action during our afternoon of sidewalk chalk fun- enjoy! 🙂

 

 

 

1 Month

 

In exactly one month I will be boarding a plane to come home for the first time in over a year! It is crazy to think about how fast this past year has gone! Sometimes the days go by so slowly I think they will never end but the months have disappeared in the blink of an eye. I will be home for the last three weeks of December before I return to complete the second year of my service and I have lots of people to see and things to do in a few short weeks. I must say that these beautiful faces better be at the airport to greet me. I really want Stephanie (my amazing sister) to show up with Josie (the puppy) in her purse- preferably dressed in some type of festive little Christmas sweater. I am not even really an animal person but Josie is just too adorable to not love.

I mean look at this little face:

 

Absolutely adorable.

Shortly before I left for Rwanda I convinced Stephanie to let me dress Josie in a baby outfit. We found it hilarious, Josie perhaps a little less so. I have never really had a pet of my own so Josie is my pretend pet. I once had a newt but kissing him goodnight was linked to my nasty case of Giardia when I was five and my lack of ability to draw physical boundaries with reptiles meant I finished out the remainder of my childhood pet-free.

So this doesn’t have a lot to do with my recent experiences here but I am incredibly excited to be home for a visit next month!!!!

 

Life Lately

Here is what I have been up to lately:

1.Paperwork for school

2. Spending time with my BFF Goreth (Gogo)

3. Working at the orphanage

4. Visiting the local inclusive preschool

5. Working on my Peace Corps dictionary project

1. The paperwork has been endless and monotonous to a point of feeling like I was going insane but I think (hope) it is now all finished. I fortunately did not have to supervise exams but had to mark all the exams for my three classes, which took me forever! I don’t even want to admit how many hours I spent marking (grading) 90 exams- it was pathetic. I would put on Disney movies for background noise and made it through pretty much an entire childhood’s worth of films. After completing my marking lists I had to start on report cards for Senior 2A since I am their class tutor. This process is especially painful. I collect the marking sheets from all 18 subjects and copy their grades for term three and their final exam onto their report cards. And, since it is the end of the year, I also had to calculate their final percentages for all their courses. It is simple math and not at all difficult but very time consuming! Once I finished all the report cards I made a final sheet that ranked them based on overall percentage for the year and brought all of these papers to our deliberation meeting. I won’t go into great detail about this meeting because it would probably just turn into a rant but it was a long and, for the most part, pointless gathering. Each class tutor reports on their class and all the teachers vote on how many marks the class should get for discipline and then the class tutor reads (yes reads out loud) the marks for all of their students. It was painful. Another interesting part of this process is that each teacher gets to decide what is passing for their subject and it was decided that 40% was passing for English. At one point the physics teacher proposed that his class should be lowered to 30% but he was shot down. I think he just didn’t want to grade a bunch of exams for second sitting (since a lot of kids fail physics) but the idea that 30% in a course would mean they passed is somewhat appalling. Anyways, it was long and boring and conducted primarily in rapid Kinyarwanda. After six hours I couldn’t take another minute so I asked my headmistress for permission to leave and she told me, “Yes Suzanna, no problem, go to be free.” And that is what it felt like- I left the stuffy teachers room and breathed in the fresh air and it tasted like freedom. Life was good once again. Since no one failed my course I am done marking exams but I did get roped into supervising second sitting exams tomorrow for all the students who failed math or physics. So close to the finish line!

This was my life for a few days while I marked exams

I like how he wrote, “God help me!!!” down the side of his exam

My favorite paragraph about love. I especially liked his last line: Love is number one in all things.

One of my marking lists- note the lack of red which indicates less than 50%. You would think this would be a good thing but the other teachers give me a hard time about it.

A typical marking sheet from my school- a sea of red.

2. I have been really blessed to find my best friend Goreth, or Gogo, who I spend a lot of time with. It was her birthday last week so I pulled out a box of cake mix sent from home and put my minimal cooking skills to the test. Her cupcakes actually turned out pretty well even though I didn’t measure out the oil and could only find two eggs instead of three. We ate lunch, had cupcakes, and then studied together for the afternoon since she is my Kinyarwanda tutor.

This is just a random shoot of my pile of clothing that I used in a desperate attempt to minimize flooding- it has been pouring rain the past few days and my room has a tendency to turn into small lake during the big rains.

3. I continue to visit the orphanage once a week to run library time but next week I am helping the old director, Grace, with a week of activities for the kids since they are done with school. Pretty much a summer camp- crafts, music, sports, and lots of other fun stuff! I am really looking forward to it and I hope the kids are too! When rainy season starts there are suddenly an abundance of these creepy bugs that we called “flying worms” during training. I am completely grossed out by them but the kids love it because they catch them, pull of their wings, fry them, and then eat them as a delicious snack. I try to remind myself that it adds protein to their diet but I am thoroughly disgusted when they stuff their pockets with handfuls of fried bugs to munch on during the day. Ughh.

4. I have also been visiting the preschool near the convent- they are just too adorable for words so I included some photos! 🙂

She was leading the other kids in the daily prayer- a very intense prayer face!

5. I have been working on a small project for Peace Corps to make a Kinyarwanda-English picture dictionary. One of my biggest frustrations during training was the lack of resources for visual learners. Since we are a new post (PC only returned to Rwanda in 2008) they are still in the early stages of gathering resources and materials. This can be annoying but it is also cool because it provides a lot of opportunities for creating our own resources and the staff is really receptive and encouraging. Hopefully my book can be a tangible contribution that I leave behind when I come home. If you ever need a copy let me know and I will send the PDF your way! 🙂