First week of School + Project FatNick

My students are back! Hooray! As I’m writing this blog post, it is Wednesday, the third day of our first week of school for 2012. Our students (or half of them, anyway) arrived on Monday, and since then my life has been pretty hectic. I’m teaching a total of 15 hours each week- 10 hours to our KCCEM students, and another 5 or so in the evenings to staff members of the school and Nyungwe Park. I’m doing a lot of work to prepare lessons as well as working on a long-term curriculum for the semester. When I get a chance, I’m also helping to develop the catalog of our library, especially by registering for online databases and downloading digital copies of relevant journals.

It’s nice to be busy again. For those of you who don’t know me well, I’m something of a workaholic. I’m also glad that campus is more lively now that the students are back. A number of the my coworkers leave the school every weekend to visit their families, so weekends have been especially quiet. Most of our students will remain on campus, though, meaning weekends won’t be as lonely as they used to be.

The downside to having more to do on campus is that I am spending much less time out in the community. As I’ve noted in previous blog entries, I was spending 3-5 hours a day out playing cards, walking around, and chatting with people for most of the last two months. This week, however, I have been so busy either teaching, cooking, or preparing lessons, that I haven’t really been able to leave school at all. I’m going to have to make a real effort to continue spending time with the people I made friends with over my first months at site.

The pull away from the community and towards my school isn’t only because of my work schedule, though. It’s also just easier to stay on campus. In general, I feel like I relate better to the students and staff here than I do to many people in my community. Part of this is obviously that many people here speak relatively good English, so it is easier to be myself on campus. But I worry that part of it is socioeconomic, too. Out in the community, there is the perception that because I am a foreigner, a muzungu, that I must be rich. This means people treat me differently than they would a Rwandan, and although this is to be expected, I don’t much like it. On campus, I don’t have to deal with any of that. I feel like I am perceived as just another person, which is refreshing. Nonetheless, it makes me uncomfortable to think that I may get along better with KCCEMers than villagers just because we come from more similar socioeconomic backgrounds. There’s something faintly elitist and distasteful about the thought.

Anyway, the point of all that is: I like my coworkers and students, and I like my community, and I don’t like having to choose between them. So I will just have to work harder to make time for both groups.

Meanwhile, my other major activity is Project FatNick. The Peace Corps Docs tell us that something like 99% of men lose weight during their Peace Corps service, and I am no exception. In an effort to keep on what little weight I had, I have initiated Project FatNick. The project goes as follows: buy and cook more carbs than I actually want to eat. Then eat them. Start buying eggs, lots of them. Eat those too. See an avocado? Buy it. Eat it. Add an extra tablespoon of oil to everything. Start eating breakfast. So far I haven’t noticed any difference, but from what I hear these things take time.

Oh! I almost forgot, I got a package from Dad and Grammie this week. It was sent around Christmas, and there was worry that the homemade peanut butter chocolate fudge inside wouldn’t be good when it arrived. I am happy to report that my Grandma’s fudge is indestructable, and remains delicious despite long periods of nonrefrigeration. The fudge, along with the rest of the goodies that were in the package, will soon be a tasty part of Project FatNick.

Cha-Cha-Changes

Lots to report since my last post! First, I managed to find some running shorts at the Nyamagabe market a couple of weekends back and I have started running again. I am planning on training for the Kigali Peace Marathon, which takes place in May. I’m trying for the half marathon this year, and maybe if it goes well I’ll try to finish the entire thing next year. If anyone out there has training tips for half-marathons, send them my way!

Second, and more importantly, I met with the Head Teacher at the local primary/secondary school. The teachers there seem very excited to have me help them improve their English, and have also asked me to help out with an English Club for the students. I am very pleased about this, because I feel like helping improve the teachers’ English skills will allow me to indirectly help more people, since it will improve the teachers ability to educate their students. Improving the competence of people here on the ground is, ultimately, the only way to make a lasting impact at my site. While I haven’t started any of this yet (and, naturally, have no idea when I will start), having had this meeting means I will eventually start, which makes me feel like I have accomplished something.

I also had the chance to sit down with the director of my school and hash out what priorities he has for the English program here. Currently, the school has a sort of skeleton curriculum, which I will be responsible for fleshing out over my two years here. It seems like I have a lot of leeway in terms of curriculum development, and may even be able to select a class set of textbooks for the students. If I do a good job, this is another potential for lasting impact.

The school has also hired a bunch of new staff members who arrived this week. I get the impression that the school has been plagued by high staff turnover, but the our new staff seem very excited to be here. For the first time in a number of years, we will have three permanent lecturers for the Wildlife Management Program, and we also have a number of new support staff, including a librarian for our fledgling library. The library is pitifully small, but I have already starting thinking about getting books donated, helping set up a real card-catalog, getting shelves and chairs, and hopefully getting permission for the local community to use the library as a resource as well. I am already way ahead of myself.

I now have confirmation that two of our new staff, the accountant and the head of procurement, will be my future room mates. They are both Rwandan, which will give me a good chance to practice my Kinyarwanda. Although I have gotten used to living alone (and kind of like the privacy), I also think it will nice to have the company of room mates. I will still have my own room, of course, for when I need some time to decompress on my own.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of news to report is about the guests we had this past weekend. Three of my site-mate’s Health Volunteer colleagues came to visit our site, one with her parents and a married couple with a brother visiting from the states. I also had a guest- a friend of mine from college and my semester abroad in Morocco happened to just outside Kigali on a service trip teaching English, and came out to visit for the weekend. Everyone stayed here on campus, where there are a number of guest lodges. It was nice to have everyone so close by, and we all cooked and ate dinner together at my house four nights in a row. While living in DC I got in the habit of hosting small dinner parties, so it was nice to be able to do a similar sort of thing here. Having guests was also a good excuse to cook slightly more elaborate meals than usual, which was also nice. We talked, played cards, and also played the “Inglorious Basterds” game, where you guess the name of the famous person another player has stuck to your forehead.

It was very interesting getting to know some of the Health Volunteers, and to hear the problems they struggle with at their jobs. Hearing about the similar lack of structure, the frustrations, the hardships but also the bright spots of service from Volunteers who have put in 6 more months in-country than I have helped to put my life in perspective. Subconsciously, I had been thinking that there would come a point where everything would click and I would be magically “integrated.” That there was some plateau or place I would reach where things would become clear and make sense. But just like the rest of life, integration is never really done. It is a continuous negotiation, not a static state. Being integrated means reaching a certain level of comfort with the daily navigation of cross-cultural life, but it doesn’t mean the end of that negotiation. I get the impression that, for most volunteers, the better part of the first year is spent figuring out what concessions to make to our host culture’s sensibilities, and what ways we are willing to stretch our communities’ cultural boundaries in order to be ourselves and remain sane. I feel like so far in my service, I may have been leaning to far towards host-culture norms, and it is good for me to have the reminder that it is okay to carve out some space for myself.

A final note- I finally got my furniture! I have a dining room table and chairs, as well as four chairs for my living room. There was some confusion with the carpenter, so the chairs are smaller than I had anticipated and he did not make a coffee table, but I am just happy to have furniture after a month that I don’t really mind. I think maybe I will ask my room mates to cover the cost of the coffee table, and perhaps cushions for the living room chairs since I paid for the furniture itself. We’ll see though.

 

Before I sign off, I want to answer some questions from previous posts:

Q: What is the daily temperature like? Highs and lows?

A: I don’t have a thermometer, but I am guessing on sunny days it can get up to high 70’s or low 80’s, and on rainy or windy days or nights it probably gets into the 40s or 50s. Because we are at about 8000 feet here the nights tend to be cold.

Q:When will you post pictures of your house? Or site? Or anything else for that matter?
A: Soon.

Q:What are the local religious sects?

A: This varies by region. Traditionally, Rwanda has been heavily Catholic since Belgian colonization. However, because of the church’s role in the events of ’94, many other denominations have become popular. At my site, we have Pentecosts, 7^th Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, Anglicans, and maybe Presbyterians. There is also a sizable Muslim minority in Rwanda, but very few Muslims at my site. Explain to people that I am Jewish is always interesting, since very few people have any idea what that means.

What do I DO all day?

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.