This is a question I have had occasion to ask myself often in the last two weeks. Unlike training, where my life had rigorous structure and I didn’t know what to do with myself when I happened to find two spare minutes to rub together, all I seem to have at site is free time. My students are away for the holidays and will not be returning until February. In the meantime, they have a month of training at their respective National Parks. Because I am not teaching a set grade, as are most other Education Volunteers here in Rwanda, I don’t feel like I can do any serious preparation work on curriculum or lesson planning because I do not know my student’s English levels yet. The local Executive ( the mayor of the collection of villages that makes up my sector) wants me to start teaching the shopkeepers in the village center English, but planning for this beyond the initial idea has not been forthcoming. I may begin teaching the staff of Nyungwe National Park and the Rwandan Development Board in the near future, but am waiting to hear what days a week they would like to have class. In terms of concrete responsibilities, I exist in a strange, Han-Solo-frozen-in-carbonite limbo.
The goal Peace Corps has for volunteers in their first three months at site is to work towards integration in the community. How does one integrate into a community you ask? Well, my take on this is essentially to make myself a public figure. I try to spend a few hours a day walking around in the community, saying hi and conversing with people I pass on the road, visiting the staff at the health center where my site mate works, etc. I make excuses for myself to go into the town center- to buy tomatoes, for example, or sometimes for no reason at all. I will be attending church, as I mentioned in my last post, because I feel like it grants me a sense of belonging and ordinariness in the eyes of my community members that I really want to achieve.
I have also been playing a lot of Go Fish.
Go Fish may, in fact, be the perfect integration tool in Rwanda. I have not met a single Rwandan that does not like to play cards, but there are only two widely known Rwandan card games, as far as I can tell. The rules of Go Fish are painfully simple, so much so that I can explain them in Kinyarwanda without too much trouble (seriously though, explaining card games in a foreign language is hard work.) Because the players are asking each other for cards, it is a great way to learn peoples names, especially good because each person’s name is usually repeated many times. Without this repetition, I have trouble remembering Rwandan names. Asides from all of that, everyone here seems to really enjoy playing it! I have made friends with the families that live across the main road from me primarily based on their love of playing Go Fish with me. Every afternoon I don’t have other plans (so at this point pretty much every afternoon) I head over, sit down on the side of the road, and we play go fish for an hour or two. For me this is convenient, fun, and has the added bonus of being on the main road, so that many locals walk buy while I am sitting cross-legged playing cards with my neighbors and their children. I think this shatters the preconceived notions many people have of bazungu (foreigners) as rich, aloof, distant, and uninterested in really interacting with the local people. And really, integration here is about destroying these preconceived notions to the point that I seem just like a regular person to my community.
So, great. Now I’ve accounted for maybe 3-5 hours of any given day. What am I doing with all the rest of my time? For the most part, reading. In the last two weeks I’ve read around 300 pages of Infinite Jest, and listened to a really obscene number of hours of audiobooks (currently listening to Freedom- see “Reading List” for what I’m reading at any given time.) I’ve also been cooking for myself again, and it is nice to have control over my diet after eating what I was served for 3 months. Other than that though? I really have no idea what I’ve been filling my days with for the last few weeks.
Rwandan Nights 