The Cyangugu Experience

 

Last weekend my friend Katie and I decided to venture down to the far south of Rwanda to an area called Cyangugu. You can see on the handy map above that the town is very close to the Congo, and my site is in between Kigali and Gitarama. Katie lives in Kigali, since she is a 3rd year volunteer running the judges teaching program, so I spent the night at her house Thursday night. Friday we woke up nice and early to catch a bus to the bus station and we were welcomed with a rude surprise that the usual bus had been replaced with one of the awful big buses. Three seats on one side, the world’s most narrow aisle down the middle, and two on the other side. So many people on one bus. I knew it was going to make for a rough trip since the big buses take the curves just as fast as the smaller ones but with less stability. We left the bus station almost an hour late and the driving was crazy as usual, but the first three hours were not too bad. Once we got closer to the forest (where the road becomes a twisty vomit-inducing race on crumbling paved roads) people started getting sick. Over the noise of the blaring music videos you could hear people retching and vomiting into their tiny plastic bags.

We stopped at the “pea stop”, an area well known for their pea production, where men climb up the edges of the bus and thrust bags of peas in your face while fervently negotiating prices despite your annoyed silence and attempts to slap their hands away. It was at this break that perhaps the most horrifying event of the entire trip occurred. A man walking from the back of the bus to the front dropped his entire vomit bag on my feet. Yes, on my feet. It was so utterly disgusting that even now I feel a little ill writing about it. I am a person who has no problem changing diapers and cleaning up vomit when children are sick, but having a full grown man drop his bag of vomit on me was just so gross. I had to spend the rest of the break dumping my bottled water on my feet and picking vomit chunks out from between my toes. Memories in the making I tell you.

Once we started again things only got worse for the poor passengers on our bus. As we raced through the forest more and more people started throwing up, and the awful turns and pungent smell of vomit started to take its toll. Of course I didn’t bring a bag because I usually don’t get car sick so I had to refer to the Rwandan method of pulling out my piece of fabric that I use as a towel. I spent the rest of the trip with my head down trying my very best to not through up in my make-shift bag. I successfully arrived on the other side of the forest without vomiting and after another 40-minutes we arrived at the stop for Kari’s site. When Katie and I went to get off the bus we had to skate along a sea of vomit to get down the aisle and still managed to slip several times. It was such a relief to get off the bus that we just sat on the side of the road for a few minutes.

Kari’s site is a 30-minute motorcycle ride from the main road along a beautiful rural road and the fresh air was wonderful. We spent the night at Kari’s beautiful house next to the boarding school where she works. She is a teacher at a Catholic boarding school for girls and has a really nice house where we spent the night cooking and hanging out. The next day we caught a small bus from her site to the biggest town in the area, but before leaving we had to wait for the bus to fill up. There was a crazy man dressed in a blazer, with no shirt underneath, and a pair of dress pants rolled up to his mid-thigh, dancing around with an umbrella and coming to greet us every two minutes. He was always very cheerful so we pretty much ignored him until at one point he put his in the window and spit in my face. Another wonderfully disgusting experience. The locals on the bus were horrified and a couple of men chased down the guy and proceeded to confiscate his own umbrella and beat him for a while. When the bus finally filled up we took off and saw the man on the road and the driver chased him down until he ran off the road, screaming at the crazy guy how he was going to beat him. Always an adventure.

We spent the day at the lake and the Congo was so close it was hard to believe. In the picture below the left portion is Rwanda and the right side, across the blue bridge, is the Congo. Pretty cool experience. It was a nice time and even with all of the spit and vomit it was a wonderful trip and a beautiful area to explore!

Flowers

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals.  Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again are plain, honest and upright, like the broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock. 

~Henry Ward Beecher

 

Cooking in Rwanda

 

Cooking in Rwanda can be really nice and also really annoying at the same time. I am blessed to live in a country where I can easily buy fresh vegetables and fruit, which is amazing considering some Peace Corps countries have very limited options in terms of produce. The actual process of cooking has never been a great interest of mine and here it takes four times as long to make anything. As a general rule of thumb you should always start cooking before you get hungry because if you wait until you are actually hungry you end up eating all the ingredients raw… or at least that is what people tell me.

I alternate between using a small charcoal stove and a hot plate when the electricity is working. You can only cook one thing at a time and preparation is slow. It also takes forever for me to cut vegetables because I value all ten fingers and when I try to rush there is usually blood. The little blue knife (featured in the bottom picture) is from the dollar store and is surprisingly sharp, so if I do come home with only nine fingers that little knife will be the culprit.

Sometimes I enjoy sitting outside listening to music and preparing dinner, but for the most part it is not my favorite chore. I much prefer to take more of a supervising role when it comes to food production, providing moral support and company for the actual cook. I suppose cooking is a good life skill to learn, and if I manage to come home in one piece I can say it was all worth it!

 

Hiccups in Rwanda

 

 

 

 

The local remedy for hiccups in Rwanda is to lick a piece of paper and stick it to the child’s forehead, like you can see on Tom’s forehead in the picture above. I have always found this practice interesting because all mothers do it, even the ones you would expect to not buy into the idea of a scrap of paper possessing healing abilities. For example Tom’s mother is perhaps the most progressive Rwandese woman I know yet she still abides by some cultural practices that seem to exist in conflict with more recent adjustments to the culture here . Rwanda is such an interesting country to live in because in some ways they are on the fast track in terms of progress and development but certain traditions are so ingrained in the culture that they have a strong presence in life today, even if common sense dictates they should have vanished long ago. The first time I saw this remedy applied to a child I was visiting Alice, the woman who teaches biology and chemistry at my school. It was at this time that I realized even educated professionals find comfort in certain cultural traditions that, to me, seem contradictory to logic. Every time her baby yawns Alice squeezes his cheeks together. This is another thing that all Rwandese mothers do. Finally I had to ask and the answer was surprising- they don’t want the babies to dislocate their jaws. This coming from a culture where you pick children up by one arm and swing them onto your back but no one ever contemplates dislocated shoulders. I asked Alice if she really believed this since she knows the anatomy of the face and jaw, and I even reassured her that babies in America yawn all the time without people immediately pinching their cheeks and they turn out just fine. She gave a noncommittal shrug and that was that. An American nurse also once told me that a mother’s solution to a baby choking in Rwanda is to blow on their face. Not  to reposition the child in any way but to simply blow air on them. Not the most helpful remedy I have heard of.

The culture in this country is so universal that people are afraid to deviate from the norm. There is one way to wash clothing. One way to peel potatoes. One way to write notes in class. One way to bathe a child. Anything different is just not the Rwandese way. I think it will be very interesting to watch as this country continues to develop and grow because in many ways they are resistant to change, so the path to the “future Rwanda” that Kagame envisions will most likely be a difficult journey. It will be exciting to come back years after my service to see the continued progress and I look forward to seeing if the local remedies I have witnessed survive the road to development.

Pre-chewed Gum Delight

Here is a little story from my life to give you a glimpse into dealing with primary school children here. I wrote in second person so hopefully you can really get into the story. Enjoy! 🙂

 

You are walking down the dirt road to your compound, a gaggle of children surrounding you, hanging off your arms, examining every inch of your clothing, and fighting tooth and nail to connect their tiny sweaty hands with your body. Two available hands does not mean you hold hands with only two children, for once your hand is occupied they simply continue to reach out and hold onto your wrist and arm until you have three children clinging to you on each side. Cute? Sure is. Also annoying? You bet. Because with this adoration comes the barrage of constant questioning and begging. “Akabonbon, ndashaka bonbon.” They beg you for candy with a perseverant desperation and tone unmatched by any other event in your life. The sea of blue and khaki uniforms is composed of children stunted in every language they study yet fluent in the universal language of whining. You try your best to deflect the questions by asking every child their name and age, and yet it is not sufficient to distract them from their mission. It all comes back to the candy. You insist you have no candy to share, and they pounce on you in a moment of weakness. The crowd viciously points out that you do, indeed, for the first time in your service, have a piece of gum in your mouth while out in public. Shouting ensues and your defense is shattered. Feeling a bit persnickety you reach into your mouth and grab the piece of pre-chewed mint gum and raise it high in the dusty African air for all to see. You declare in Kinyarwanda that this is all you have. This one measly piece of gum that cannot possibly be shared. The leader of the child gang is thrust to the center of the drama circle to investigate your evidence. In a matter of seconds you watch in horror as his small hand descends upon yours and with a look of sheer determination and glee his nimble fingers pluck the gum from yours. In the blink of an eye he is now chewing your mint gum, strutting proudly down the road after an injection of swagger that apparently comes from eating the white girl’s gum. Bon appétit, young one, you win this round.