Banana Bread and Site Visit

My first attempt at baking in Rwanda was a qualified success. Unfortunately, my camera battery was dead, so I don’t have any pictures to share, but I’ll explain the process. I was able to find all the essentials in my village, except baking soda which I bought in Kigali. After mixing all the ingredients (flour, cooking oil, sugar, eggs, baking soda, and bananas), I put the batter in a home-made convection oven created from two pots, two lids, and three empty tomato paste cans. The tomato paste cans are used as supports for a small pot, which is placed inside a larger pot, and the lids of both are closed. The pots are the put over heat (in my case, on a wood stove) where the heat trapped inside the big pot should heat the small pot from all sides. This actually worked pretty well, although I made the fire a little too big and burnt the bread into the bottom of the pot (therefore a qualified success). The important thing is that it tasted like banana bread, and my host family really liked it!
In more recent news, my training class went on our site visit two weeks ago. We all left our training site for Kigali on Tuesday, where we were introduced to the headmasters of our schools for the first time. After spending the afternoon in a conference with the headmasters, most of us stayed the night in the “cas de passage” which is a hostel available for Peace Corps Trainees and Volunteers to use when in Kigali for whatever reason. It was nice to spend an evening with the rest of the training class, especially since we only get to see each other twice a week for Peace Corps policy sessions. The next day, we all traveled to our various sites.
It was only a 2-hour drive from Kigali to Butare, the largest city in Rwanda’s Southern Provence in my headmaster’s car. From there, we climbed 1.5 hours up into Rwanda’s Western mountains towards Nyumgwe Forest. The road got increasingly windy as we approached the Nyumgwe, which is Africa’s largest mid-elevation forest, the source of the Nile, and 20 minutes away from my future home. It turns out that my school, KCCEM (Kitabi College of Conservation and Environmental Management), is actually a junior college for mid-career professionals in Rwanda’s three national parks. My headmaster’s plans for me to teach four separate English classes: one for the school’s students, one for its staff, one for the staff of Nyumgwe National Park, and one for the local ecotourism stakeholders, particularly the villagers working in the various cooperatives attempting to sell goods to the park’s visitors. It doesn’t sound like I will have actual weekly class time, and so it will be up to me to create the structure of my schedule.
The school itself is a small paradise. My house will have electricity and running water, as well as a western-style toilet. I will probably be sharing my house with one or two other teachers at the school, which I am looking forward to. Asides from a handful of teacher’s residences, the campus consists of a visitors’ center, a main office, a number of guest houses for tourists, a student residence, classrooms, and a building that will eventually be turned into a small library. These buildings run down the side of a steep hill, and are surrounded on one side by a tea plantation, and on the other by the forest. The staff of the school that I have met so far are extremely nice and speak fairly good English. Most of them also live in Kigali and make the drive back every weekend, which means I may be one of the few staff members to stay on campus during the weekends. I am a little concerned that I will be living so far removed from the surrounding community- both in terms of standard of living and distance, since it is a 20 minute walk to the village from campus. However there is a current PCV living in the village, and hopefully she will help me integrate into the community a little better, as well as being good moral support. I’m really looking forward to finishing training (five weeks now!) so I can settle into a real routine. And really, I couldn’t have been given a better site to settle into.