Dear America, I miss you dearly, but…

I’m staying in Rwanda another year! That’s right, two years wasn’t enough for me; I am knowingly subjecting myself to the challenges and struggles of another full year in Rwanda. Though I will be staying, I will not be continuing as a teacher at G.S. Rango. I have been accepted as a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) for Women and Development and Gender and Development (WID/GAD) and will be moving to Kigali in about 3 weeks to start this new adventure. I’m pretty excited about this new position and am even more excited about moving out of the village to the “big” city of Kigali.

“So what will this new job entail?” you may ask. It is a combination of PCV support and gender and development (GAD) programming development. To support PCVs, I will travel out to their sites to visit, attend regional meetings, and help them with project planning and implementation. There are so many volunteers and limited staff to give them all the support they need throughout their two years of service, so myself and a fellow Ed2 volunteer will be helping to improve the lines of communication and support between the Peace Corps office in Kigali and individual PCVs. I’m really excited about the PCV support side of things because during my two years of service, I received one visit from the PCMO (doctor) to inspect my house and never got a call from a staff member to just check in or give me feedback. This often left me feeling abandoned out in the bush without anyone at Peace Corps knowing about or recognizing all of the hard work I was putting in. As a PCVL, I hope to keep PCVs in the loop about what is going on at Peace Corps and give them the pat on the back and recognition they all so rightly deserve.

In the GAD programming realm, I will have a lot of work which will keep me super busy. After two years of 15-20 hour work weeks, it’s definitely time for me to go back to working 8 hours, 5 days a week. Peace Corps Rwanda has identified GAD and ICT as two of their Cross-Sector Programming Priorities (CSPPs – I think that’s what their called. In layman’s terms – initiatives), so myself and another Ed2 volunteer will be sticking around to work on those to projects. I have been a member of the GAD Committee since its founding earlier this year and have become extremely interested in the subject. This job will allow me to learn more about it and do a job that I think I will genuinely enjoy. I will chair the GAD Committee and coordinate projects and planning from the national level. I will work with the WID/GAD specialist at Peace Corps Headquarters in D.C. to get materials and learn about best practices. I will acquire and develop new resources and materials related to GAD, especially those that address the Rwandan context. Finally, I will be working to develop partnerships with other organizations who could help support GAD projects at PCV sites or who PCVs could help with larger projects. There is a lot of overlap in the area of NGO objectives and projects, so by working together we hope to increase the impact and decrease the redundancy. Also, PCVs often have great ideas, but no way of executing them due to lack of resources or PCVs want to help with other projects, but don’t know what other projects are out their needing free labor, so by talking with other organizations working within the GAD sector we hope to find solutions to these problems.

So, that’s a brief summary of what I’ll be up to next year. I’m really excited; if I could move to Kigali tomorrow and start, I think I would. I will be living with the other PCVL in Kigali. We found a house a few weeks ago and Peace Corps has approved it, so now we just have to sign the lease. It is 5 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, and an outdoor kitchen. It’s definitely a step up from what I’ve been living in for two years. Water in the house is a HUGE luxury for me. I think if we decide to cook with gas or a hot plate, we will change one of the bedrooms into a kitchen. We do plan on getting a refrigerator, so I’m pretty psyched for that too. The house is brand new and not completely finished yet, but once it is I will upload some pictures. It’s in a great neighborhood, right by the bus stop to go to work, a HUGE market that has basil and cauliflower (WHAT?!), and a bunch of shops. Only problem I may face is that I will be broke. Peace Corps does not give us a raise for living in Kigali, despite the fact that food and transport are more expensive, so I’ll have to be extra careful in the spending department. Oh, also, Peace Corps is giving us a car to use to go visit volunteers – like a car that I get to drive :) We still have to go through some sort of training and pass a driving test (I have to relearn how to drive stick) and then hopefully we will be good to go.

Though there’s lots of exciting stuff going on, I’m still really looking forward to coming home. Peace Corps is kind enough to send 3rd year volunteers home for a month between their 2nd and 3rd years and give us a per diem. They will buy my ticket and give me a whopping $12 a day (does that even buy dinner anymore?), but I guess something is better than nothing. I have put my request in to come home from Dec. 12 – Jan. 17, so I’ll keep you all posted on the approval process. I told my mom last night on the phone that when I get off the plane, she is to have a chocolate chip cookie from the Cookware Shop in Chatham and on the way home we are stopping at the Cheesecake Factory. Oh boy, how I miss America…

The Family Takes on Elephants, Gorillas, and Ruhuha

On August 17th, 2012, history was made – Mom and Abby touched down in Africa. After being delayed in Boston and New York, and dashing through the Brussels airport, they landed and a whirlwind week and a half adventure in Uganda and Rwanda began.

We started our journey in Uganda at Lake Bunyoni – a beautiful lake surrounded by terraced fields. We stayed at a hotel on one of the islands in a geodome – an open thatched hut with a porch overlooking the lake. We spent 3 days there so Mom and Abby could recover from their journey. One day we decided it would be fun to rent a dug-out canoe and paddle around the lake for a bit. Well, fun may not be the sentiment we all had during the first hour of spinning in circles, but we got it together and made it around a neighboring island and back. I don’t think any of us will jump at the chance to go canoeing together again anytime soon. After a few days of rest and good food, we headed off to Queen Elizabeth National Park for a safari.

Upon arriving at the park, we were greeted by the sight of elephants off in the distance. We got to the Safari Bush Lodge where we could unpack and clean up from a morning of travelling. The lodge was beautiful. It was a cluster of individual safari tents raised on a platform overlooking a lake. There was an outdoor shower with the nozzle attached to a tree branch and the floor made out of loose soft stones. We could sit on the porch and listen to the hippos and elephants down a the lake. From there we went on an evening cruise in the Kinazi channel, where we saw hippos, elephants, buffaloes, water buck, impala, alligators, and a million types of birds. You always know when you’re doing doing something right on vacation – Abby starts taking a million pictures. With her going crazy with her new fancy camera, Mom enjoyed the view through her antique binoculars which she took down off the display shelf at home, attached a Canon SLR strap to them, and called it good. Anywho, there is a still a functioning fishing village (a little more rustic than Chatham) in the park and they do their fishing at night, so we were lucky enough to see them launching their boats and paddling off into the lake at sunset. It was beautiful. From the boat launch we headed back towards the lodge, taking a slight detour to see if we could find any animals roaming about late in the day. We found A LOT of elephants, which our driver was more afraid of than I thought possible. He kept hiding the car behind bushes so the elephants couldn’t see us and at one point he thought one was going to charge (not sure how bathing in the mud signaled a stampede), but he floored it and the Mama elephant reared up, blew her trunk, and ran into the dust cloud in the road behind our accelerating car.That night we had amazing hot showers under the stars and then headed off to an amazing 4 course meal under a large safari tent lit by lanterns.

The next morning we went chimp trekking in a gorge – this was rough. You basically descend down over a cliff via some steep, slippery, not-made-for-short-people steps. Once we made it to the bottom we started looking for chimps. It had been raining so they were still sleeping up in the trees, but after an hour or so started to play and jump around in the trees. One was kind enough to start throwing his breakfast at us. Thinking we would return the same way we came, I mentally prepared to climb up the cliff via the same awful steps we took down. Well, it was just our luck that we went a different direction out that was a million times more grueling. It required us to scale the side of the gorge by holding onto vines and sticks and pulling ourselves up a mud faced wall without any real support. At some points the walking path was less then a foot wide, where one false move and you were falling down the side of the gorge into the river. There was also this lovely huge true that had fallen across the path – you couldn’t go under it, you had to go over it. Unfortunately for me, the tree trunk went up to about my chest, so getting over it wasn’t pretty and at one point I started falling back and screamed, “Mommy, help,” thinking I was going to fall backwards to my death, in a gorge, in Uganda.Well all 3 of us made it over the trunk, our quads starting to burn from the serious off-roading we were doing. Every time we thought we were getting to the final ascent, we were proven wrong. Eventually, by the grace of something powerful, we all made it to the top and the guide was kind enough to point out how nice it was that we made it out with no broken bones. The steep, slippery, not-made-for-short-people steps would have been so much better.

The rest of the safari was without any major catastrophes. We saw lions, elephants, cob, hippos, buffaloes, and more. We saw one lion that had been caught in a snare, which was sad. Because the park still has people living in it who want to protect their crops and villages, they set up these snares, which prove to be a big problem in the realm of conservation and animal protection. After the safari, our driver took us back over the border to Rwanda, where we met up with Gordon and prepared for an early morning gorilla trekking adventure.

We arrived at the Volcanoes National Park office at 7 AM, where we watched traditional dances performed by a local group and were split up into our trekking groups. They assign the groups by fitness level – there is always one group full of grey haired old men and women who have an easy 30 min walk on flat land. We felt better about ourselves when we saw that group and knew we weren’t a part of it. We were assigned the Titus family, which was an hour and a half steep hike up Karisimbi volcano. I was lucky enough to trip a million times and step in buffalo poop en route. When we were 100 yards away, we left our walking sticks and bags. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing gorillas for the first time. They are huge, fluffy, big black eyes, and could totally rip you to pieces if they so pleased. The silverback was HUGE and walked right in front of us a few times – Abby was not a fan. you get such an adrenaline rush when this beast of an animal walks so close you can nearly feel its fur. There was a 7 month old baby gorilla, whose mother was very protective. Every time we got a sight of the little fur ball, the mother would take her farther into the bush. At one point we could actually sit down a mere 5 feet from a lunching gorilla. The official rule is that you are supposed to stay like 8 meters away, but the terrain we were working with didn’t allow for that. We were never more than 3 or 4 feet away from them. After an hour, we began our descent down the mountain. Honestly, being able to do such an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime thing with my family was awesome. I won’t forget my sister’s face when the silverback walked right next to her or the look on my mom’s face when she saw the baby gorilla.

From the gorillas we made our way to Kigali where everyone’s exhaustion finally caught up with them. Gordon and I went to get burritos for everyone while they washed the bud and jungle grime off and climbed into bed with their respective kindles. After a night’s rest in a guesthouse, we made it to Ruhuha – my home in Rwanda. To say Abby and Mom were champs would be an understatement. They rolled with the punches, bounced along the road in an over-packed minibus, visited all of my close friends and the school, went to the market, drank local beer, squatted over a hole, took cold showers, and cooked outside – almost all of which was done with a smile.

After nearly two years in Ruhuha, it was really nice to show them how I live and how different it is from the U.S. It is easy to talk about Rwanda on the phone and explain how I live, but before they came I often felt like they didn’t completely grasp how challenging my life here is. Sometimes I would get a “suck it up” sentiment when I talked about how I was frustrated or something didn’t go well. With their visit here, I think they get it now, which is great. When I return to America and people ask “How was Peace Corps?” I can’t really say anything more than “great and rewarding” because they’ll lose interest. Now I know that at least the people I love know what I did, where I did it, and how difficult it was to survive the two years, despite how “great and rewarding” it all is.

To say the good-bye was difficult would be an understatement. I love my family dearly and miss seeing them and doing things with them on a regular basis. Bringing them to the airport, knowing they were going back to the comforts of America, while I had to return to the village was tough. I love them for taking the time to visit me on the “dark continent” and living to tell the tales. The support and love they showed me while they were here really gave me the energy to make it through the last 3 months in the village. I sincerely look forward to getting off the plane in 2 months and seeing them again.