Squat Toilets and Infrastructure

Rather than spending a whole blog post discussing my day-to-day life,which besides the fact that I’m in Rwanda is rather uneventful (except for the occasional run-ins with inebriated locals and a pack of goats running down the middle of the road at you), I thought I would dedicate this post to my new Rwandan lifestyle and the shifts in comfort that have taken place over the last three weeks. Peace Corps has successfully transitioned us from the comfort of modern Western amenities to one step above the typical Rwandan and in a week we will fully transition to living with and as locals. So what does this near-Rwandan lifestyle look like?

I live in a cement house with a tin roof; it is large by local standards, but we also have twelve American girls (four per room – yeah, we have bunk beds) and three Rwandan LCFs (Language and Cross-Culture Facilitators). We have a huge fence around the property, which unfortunately the children have found a way to climb through the barred fence in the front yard and over the cement wall out back. We are lucky enough to have electricity, well most of the time, but we don’t have running water. Rwanda has made a huge effort to rapidly expand infrastructure since the genocide, but unfortunately rapid expansion often means poor quality. Though we have electricity, it goes on and off all day and we often go many nights without it. It’s really cool walking home at night and watching the lights go on and off throughout the mountains, but it really isn’t so great when you get back to a very dark house.

As for the water situation, we had running water for about five minutes one afternoon (some people heard the toilets filling), but besides that we just fill buckets outside and filter it for drinking or use it for bathing/washing. Each bedroom has a bathroom, but sadly mine doesn’t have a toilet; we have a squat toilet (think a hole with a ceramic block on each side for your feet). We all mostly use the latrine outside, which is quite literally a cement floor with a hole in the middle – it requires less maintenance than the one in our room. At the training center we have two bathrooms with real toilets and mirrors on the wall (the only time we actually see ourselves) and five latrines outside. Peace Corps let us use the bathrooms for the first few days, but then strongly recommended that we stick to the latrines outside (woohooo). The bathroom and water situation is always such a challenge, especially when walking around town, so I carry a full Nalgene of filtered water and a roll of toilet paper everywhere I go.

So what’s town like you may ask? It’s about three blocks of cement one-story buildings on the main road and a few dirt off-shoots. You can find just about everything in town or in the market (Nyanza has the largest market in all of Rwanda). Cadbury chocolate has been our most recent indulgence. There are three primary restaurants in town, which are where all 70 of us descend Saturday nights and all day Sundays when Peace Corps doesn’t feed us. Today in language class we started learning how to bargain in Kinyarwanda, which will hopefully help us get food in the market and cook for ourselves (on a charcoal stove) instead of walking forty minutes into town for food. On top of struggling in the market, we also have a hard time starting a charcoal fire in a country that does not have lighter fluid. All of these skills need to be perfected before we go out to our sites because once we are out there we are on our own and if it takes me over an hour to start a fire and another hour to boil water, I will just give up on cooking all together.

Speaking of sites, we find out on Thursday where our sites are. On Saturday we have the day to prepare and figure out transportation, and then next week we go out to our sites for a four day visit to get our bearings and to meet our supervisors and umudugudu (village) chiefs. I don’t have a ton of details about the trip yet, but from what we’ve heard we are responsible for getting to our villages and we will stay in our houses if they are ready; if not we will stay with our counterpart (our mentor during our two years at site). We will have some medical, security, and tech surveys to complete to learn as much as we can about our village and provide Peace Corps with all the information they need in case of emergency (we have to draw a map to the house in case we have to be evacuated and if available we have to note an area where a medevac helicopter can land). It sounds a little crazy, but with 150 volunteers in Rwanda, Peace Corps has to plan and prepare for the worst case scenarios.

 I don't have much more to say except for PLEASE send me emails with info about current events and such (who knew there was a tsunami in Indonesia?!) because the internet is so slow we can't load CNN or BBC websites. Also, please send me emails - I feel incredibly disconnected from everyone at home and though it has only been three weeks, I want to hear about what everyone has been up to!