President Paul Kagame Speech

I have completed Peace Corps Training and the real work is about to begin. The past three months have been a blur, time has been moving at its own pace. When I moved to Africa three months ago I felt like a child again. I had to learn how to speak again, I had to learn how to cook, and even showering became a challenge. After many hours of studying language and lots of help from the language and cross cultural facilitators I am ready to use the language on my own. Also after many cold mornings, I believe I have mastered the art of taking a bucket bath.  This weekend we will head to the big city of Kigali and the US Ambassador has graciously opened up the embassy to hold our swearing in ceremony. We then are immediately taken to our villages where we will no longer have the presence of other volunteers or language facilitators. Our hands will no longer be held and we will begin to take our first real step to Peace Corps service. The school year begins January 10^th so immediately upon arrival to Mamba, my village I will begin teaching. 

          Even after living in Rwanda for only three months I have felt the tremendous aid of the Rwandan people in helping me integrate and learn about their language and culture.  I hope that as I begin teaching I can continue to learn about this vibrant country as well as share my own culture. Upon the reentry of Peace Corps into Rwanda, the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame wrote this;

A Different Discussion about Aid

 The United States of America has just sent a small number of its sons and daughters as Peace Corps volunteers to serve as teachers and advisors in Rwanda. They have arrived to assist, and we appreciate that. We are aware that this comes against the backdrop of increasingly scarce resources, of budget discussions and campaign promises, and of tradeoffs between defense and domestic priorities like health care and infrastructure investments. All that said, I believe we need to have a different discussion concerning the potential for bilateral aid.

The Peace Corps have returned to our country after 15 years. They were evacuated in 1994 just a short time before Rwanda collapsed into a genocide that killed over one million people in three months. Things have improved a lot in recent years. There is peace and stability throughout the nation. We have a progressive constitution that is consensus-driven, provides for power sharing, embraces diversity, and promotes the participation of women, who now represent the majority in our parliament. Our economy grew by more than 11% last year, even as the world entered a recession. We have chosen high-end segments of the coffee and tea markets in which to compete, and attract the most demanding world travelers to our tourism experiences. This has enabled us to increase wages by over 20% each year over the last eight years -- sustained by, among other things, investment in education, health and ICT.

We view the return of the Peace Corps as a significant event in Rwanda's recovery. These young men and women represent what is good about America; I have met former volunteers who have run major aid programs here, invested in our businesses, and I even count them among my friends and close advisors.

Peace Corps volunteers are well educated, optimistic, and keen to assist us as we continue to rebuild, but one must also recognize that we have much to offer them as well.

We will, for instance, show them our system of community justice, called Gacaca, where we integrated our need for nationwide reconciliation with our ancient tradition of clemency, and where violators are allowed to reassume their lives by proclaiming their crimes to their neighbors, and asking for forgiveness. We will present to them Rwanda's unique form of absolution, where the individuals who once exacted such harm on their neighbors and ran across national borders to hide from justice are being invited back to resume their farms and homes to live peacefully with those same families.

We will show your sons and daughters our civic tradition of Umuganda, where one day a month, citizens, including myself, congregate in the fields to weed, clean our streets, and build homes for the needy.

We will teach your children to prepare and enjoy our foods and speak our language. We will invite them to our weddings and funerals, and out into the communities to observe our traditions. We will teach them that in Africa, family is a broad and all-encompassing concept, and that an entire generation treats the next as its own children.

And we will have discussions in the restaurants, and debates in our staff rooms and classrooms where we will learn from one another: What is the nature of prosperity? Is it subsoil assets, location and sunshine, or is it based on human initiative, the productivity of our firms, the foresight of our entrepreneurs? What is a cohesive society, and how can we strengthen it? How can we improve tolerance and build a common vision between people who perceive differences in one another, increase civic engagement, interpersonal trust, and self-esteem? How does a nation recognize and develop the leaders of future generations? What is the relationship between humans and the earth? And how are we to meet our needs while revering the earth as the womb of humankind? These are the questions of our time.
While some consider development mostly in terms of infusion of capital, budgets and head counts, we in Rwanda place equal importance to relationships between peoples who have a passion to learn from one another, preparing the next generation of teachers, administrators and CEOs to see the exchange of values and ideas as the way to build the competencies of our people, and to create a prosperous nation.

We will do this because we see that the only investment with the possibility of infinite returns is in our children, and because after a couple of years in Rwanda, working and learning with our people, these Peace Corps volunteers will be our sons and daughters, too.

Color Outside the Lines

Site Visit

          We had the opportunity to spend a week at our sites. I have been placed in the Southern Province, in the district of Gisagara.  I will be living and teaching in a small village called Mamba, which is about 15 kilometers from Burundi and a little over an hour Moto ride from Butare. I am the only volunteer and the only white person in my village.  Visiting my site was a bit of a culture shock, during training we have been living in a decent sized city, we have large houses, our meals are cooked for us and we always have instructors to assist us with language or cross cultural problems. The site visit was the first time being alone in Rwanda and it was definitely an eye opener to what the next two years are going to consist of.  Upon my arrival in Mamba, I discovered that my house is not yet complete so I spent the week with my neighbors who graciously opened up their house to me all week.

I also got to spend time with my head master, who showed me around my village and school. My school is a secondary school that has senior 1, 2 and 3 which is the equivalent to 8^th,9^th and 10^th grade.  The school is set up with two wings with a large dirt courtyard in the middle and the school offices in the back. Only one of the wings is complete and the other is still in need of doors and windows. The town of Mamba has no electricity or running water so the school has no computers,  photocopier, printer or running water.   After visiting the school the concept and difficulty of teaching with limited resources has really hit home. I will have myself and a blackboard as resources. The Rwandan school schedule runs in trimesters, the school year begins in January, and ends in October.

Seeing my village rejuvenated my reasons for being here, it enabled me to see a sliver of the difficult living and working situation that I am going to be in but it also instilled in me a renewed bona fide effort for training.

In training we are going to begin model school next week which will enable us to teach our own class. We are broken up into groups and will have three other Peace Corps Trainees watching and observing our teaching.  We will have children from the community of Nyanza as our students and we will be teaching at a local school.  The classes will last for an hour and there will be about 40 students per a class that we will be teaching for three weeks. Along with model school training is also going to incorporate intensive language training, where we will increase the number of language classes a day, we will have three, two hour language classes.  Kinyarwanda is an extremely difficult language; it is a Bantu language that is spoken in the entire country of Rwanda. The language has many long words and strange sounds as well as a complex grammar system that has nouns, verbs and adjectives divided into 16 different noun classes. There are also tonal words that look alike but have different intonation that is difficult for an English speaker to hear. Here is an example of Kinyarwanda:

Ndi Umukorerabushake wa Peace Corps, Ndi umwarimu ecyongereza. Mfite makumyabiri na biri imyaka.

(I am a Peace Corps Volunteer English teacher. I am 22 years old)

I moved to Africa...

I moved to Africa….

I am currently living in Nyanza, Rwanda and undergoing a 10 week intensive language, technical, and cross cultural training to prepare for serving 2 years in the Peace Corps. In October of 2009 I stepped onto a plane bound for East Africa and stepped off it with the hopes of fulfilling a successful and fulfilling two years of service under the United States Peace Corps Rwanda. Rwanda is an extremely small country in the heart of Africa, it is smaller than the state of Maryland. Although just south of the equator because of its mountainous landscape the temperature is rather pleasant, with an average of 50-70 degrees year around. Rwanda is bordered by  Uganda on the north, Tanzania on the east, Burundi on the south and Congo on the west. The little bit of Rwanda that I have seen so far on my journey has made me appreciate and understand why this tiny idyllic country is named the “land of a thousand hills.” Most of the landscape seen thus far has been lush green hills full of vegetation mixed with tiny villages built into the hills hidden along the rolling countryside that is flourishing with plants.  

            Moving to Rwanda is a great adventure as well as a wonderful opportunity. Rwanda is a post conflict country but is rapidly and successfully rebuilding. As part of its restructure the government of Rwanda has implemented that the school systems switch from French speaking to English speaking.  My job as a Peace Corps volunteer will be to not only teach my own English classes but also assist the school and teachers in the transition to an English speaking institution.

            My first weeks in Rwanda have been a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. A new land, language and people is exhilarating but also extremely exhausting. I live in a house with 9 other Americans and two Rwandans that serve as language and cross cultural facilitators. All day, everyday I am in class, I have language class multiple times a day, technical training, cross cultural, guest speakers, safety and security and medical sessions.

            Another key component to Peace Corps training is host families visits. Two nights a week we are required to spend the evening with our assigned host family that lives in Nyanza.  Although extremely awkward and nerve racking at the beginning I have begun to enjoy my evening out with my host family. My host family consists of a mother and father along with 6 children with whom 4 still live at the house. Carine who is 5 has a boisterous personality and has become fond of me and my silly sounding Kinyarwanda. Dorine and Willy who are 11 and 12 are not so sure about my presence but still find most things that I do very humorous. Serge the oldest boy, recently came home from boarding school and has relieved much of the silent tension by helping translate a few words of Kinyarwanda into English . The family has been very welcoming to me in their house and every visit runs smother as I start to pick up more language and culture. My host mother has started to teach me to cook and I now understand why cooking a meal or even getting a meal at a restaurant is at the very minimum a three hour extravaganza. Cooking a meal for an entire family on a charcoal fire, without running water or many utensils is even harder then it sounds.   

Although in the market there seem to be a variety of different food choices, it seems that the same thing is eaten everyday and always prepared in the same manner.  There is some starch, some more starch and some more starch. Potatoes, bread, rice, beans, and plantains are guaranteed to be at most meals. Everything tastes somewhat similar and could be called “mush.”   Fruit is eaten at the end of meals which is my favorite part of meal time and always delicious. Avocados are also in abundance here and are served with many meals. Tea is served at most meals as well as a tea break is given at around 10:30 everyday.

The way the Rwandan time system works reflects their day. They have a 12 hour system with 7 am being the start (0 hour) and ending at 7 pm being 12 (hour).  Before class at around 6am I run most morning and by this time the sun is up and the town is awake and bustling. The sun sets at around 6pm and most people are then retired to their houses. Although Nyanza has electricity, some street lights, cars and motos, the darkness here seems much darker then at home. The street lights are very limited, and if they are working which seems to be sporadic, they produce very limited light. Walking at night which is anytime after 6pm is difficult and a flashlight is a necessity.