8 months, for super serial?

Shnazerfrazzle!

How am I supposed to keep up with all this? I have 15 topic points and I can’t even remember what one of them was about. I think it was when I had to plug my hard drive into African computers to print something and it came back with literally hundreds of copies of a virus. SO glad sean taught me about Microsoft Security Essentials.

I tried to write an entire post full with legit Africa observations (culture and daily life and things) and it turned out to be Way more of a rant than I intended, so I’m gonna try and clean it up a bit before I send it out.

Until then, you still get to hear about what’s going on to/around me.
The last weekend of April was a little crazy. 4 people went home including one of my roommates from training. The weather mourned their loss too as it Poured all week. We made luau-flavored kabobs and fun-fetti pancakes that weekend (check out the pictures on facebook). It was pretty classy. Made for a great May Day.

Despite my calorie gorging weekends, I have managed to drop down to a size 8 in my jeans. To make sure this was more muscle building than just slow starvation; I copied some P90x files from my friend and added abb work-outs to my morning schedule.
Yes, I know. Shush you. I am not on a perfectly consistent routine yet, but I’ve worked out 2 weeks of the last 3 and I fully intend to make this a permanent pattern.

My parents called the other day and asked about my ‘community’ English classes, and what was ‘keeping me’ from getting those going. My completely honest (and reasonable) answer was that I was too lazy and selfish. If I forced myself out of my comfort zone and gave up more of my weekends, I could probably set up a time for public classes and they would soon quickly be over-run by varying levels of adults who mostly don’t really need to learn the language since it’s not like they’re helping their children with their homework anything.
I have always worked better on a small scale – tutoring v teaching, organizing v cleaning, few friends v large parties. I figure my ‘community’ is my host family. After that large shipment of books, I spotted one that I had loved as a child and grabbed it to take home and use in my nightly English lessons with Bosco. 3 pages into “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble”, I knew it was the right idea. The flow of a language is much different in a textbook for ESL than what natural speakers would read, and honestly, much more enjoyable. Bosco loved the new vocabulary he could pick up, especially when I pointed out that often writers will repeat ideas in a sentence, or he could use the pictures to help him remember certain words. He also loved that All the characters were animals. He thought it was hilarious that the neighbors were chickens and the police were pigs. My favorite part was his automatic ‘critical thinking’ jumps. He made inferences, predictions, made the story personal (what would you wish for if you could have anything?), and was Really excited to see how everything was going to play out in the end. That my friends is when the joy of teaching really hits you.
In return, I was so happy I started singing more. The babies have colds because of the changing seasons - turns out, the “dry season” really means “cold season”, we’re all very chilly and wearing lots of layers. Anyway, they both climbed into my lap one night and I sang them to sleep – every soft sweet song I could think of. Best night in Africa.

Side-bar – CONGRATULATIONS!!! To Andy, Casey Megan, Kelsey, Elise, Matt, and all the other high school and college graduates. Also to PCV-RW/H2! All those letters mean the new class of health volunteers is officially sworn in and at site. We got 2 on the north with us, one living with Jen and one in the main town where we have our post box, cyber café, etc. American day that weekend was a blast – total of 6 girls on moto parade out to Scott’s for – check it – Mexican seasoned food (burritos). Avery and Devin fit in rather well and we’re excited to have our crew growing.

However, first day Michele and I went to visit Avery’s house, I lost my phone. That is, one minute I had it and the next it was gone. It’s very possible it was stolen, but I don’t really even remember where I had put it – pocket, bag, hand only? Who knows, but my number is now different and has been changed on facebook. If you have the inclination to call me and need my number, email me and I’ll get it to you.

Work:
I am officially working in all 4 secondary classes. My S1s are incredibly eager and willing to try and make mistakes. My S2s vary between stubborn and sullen. One class can be coaxed to participate sometimes, but other times they seem a little lost. My other S2 class is like teaching in opposite world. Quite a few of them are Really smart, so I know it’s not because they don’t understand what the program. But if I say ‘don’t talk’, they either read on top of each other or confer with their friends (standard, I know, but when combined with the rest of my list here…); if I say ‘discuss this question with your desk partner’, they stare mutely at the desk; if I say ‘read and discuss’, they copy everything into their notebooks; if I say ‘take notes’, they blink a lot. I can’t even get them to answer if they understand me or not. Last week, I was inclined to say “you’re killing me Smalls!” every minute or so, but I felt it would be tragically underappreciated. (to those of you who are a little lost right now, find someone between the ages of 23 and 33 and ask them about a baseball movie called “The Sandlot”.)
My co-English teachers are actually doing really well keeping up with our syllabus and taking time to plan lessons with me. The other secondary teachers are warming up more to asking me to help explain / translate things.
I have made an official schedule of when I will be at school so the teachers can find me for language questions etc. We’ve also started language classes for the teachers. We start with a short focus on phonetics and pronunciation, and then I walk through some vocabulary. The questions they come up with stemming from even simple topics like ‘family terms’ can leave me a little confused sometimes, but it’s nice that they’re really interested in learning. I’m working up to including current event articles and pushing for more language produced by the teachers than by me.

Bits and pieces:
I finally gired someone to help me with my laundry. Washing everything by hand is just becoming overwhelming and I do Not have the self motivation to do it. Most stuff isn’t too bad, but when you add in the jeans, sheets, and towels, it wears you out! And I’m getting scars on my knuckles… so she comes over once a week and washes my over-wear and sweeps up the paths and the yard. She’s very good at what she does, and she’s working to support her 3 kids as she is a widow.

I’m still working on keeping my budget and came very close to empty this quarter in my bank account. But I could NOT resist the Batman: Dark Knight UNO deck. #1 – it’s UNO. #2 – it’s Batman UNO. I’m very excited to incorporate UNO tournaments over our American weekends. =D

Picked up another package from the CA Fam a few weeks ago – awesome drink mixes and pics of my beautiful cousin. Thanks again guys!


Books:
Ok, last section. There is an NGO that supports sending books to Africa and only asks for money to pay for the transportation costs. Clever people that they are, it’s called Books for Africa. (I think they hired the guy who came up with Coke II to help them) They coordinated with USAID and there was a pallet of books (a little over 20,000 I think?) that needed homes and MINEDUC didn’t really know where to send them, so all the ED PCVs were asked if their schools could use some books. Most of us jumped all over this and we received our shipment of ~350 (+/- 50) books a few weeks ago. Some people have been enjoying helping their librarians stamp books and find room for them in the libraries. Some people have been looking for primary schools to share the books with. Some of us (myself included) have been trying to figure out how to get a library started at all. We don’t have rooms, we can’t afford shelves, and our teachers are really too busy to take on the extra responsibility of running a library such that the books don’t just get stolen. I’m excited as this represents the true first Secondary project I could be involved in. It will take a while, but there is some funding opening up at the end of the summer that I can apply for to get this started. In the mean time, I’ve contacted the other schools in the area to see if they would be interested in also receiving books. Now, as the first shipment was coordinated with USAID, our schools didn’t have to pay anything and the books were delivered to us. Standard procedure involves a group of schools so they can split the books and the 20% of the cost they have to raise. There are about 14 schools involved in this next round and we will all be contacting people from home to help donate for the rest of the cost. (again, standard procedure) if you want to help, I’ll provide the info as soon as I have it.
This was actually a big step for me to get other schools involved. I had to step out of my comfort zone and go to other schools and try and communicate with a new set of teachers who don’t speak English very well and pitch the idea while explaining all of their responsibilities if they participate. I don’t have to write the whole grant proposal, but all the volunteers who are involved have to help.
Anyway, it's my first official active project and i'm very excited.

next month:
- this week's training experiences
- cool people I've met here
- stuff that hasn't happened yet.

thanks for reading!

my friends like to torture me. but i love them anyway.

It’s been nice, jacking the school computer. Bosco charges it for me during the day at the World Vision office, and I pick it up in the afternoon and use it. This enables me to do things like; type up my favorite passages from the books I’m reading, fill out the survey for our mid-service training, watch almost every DVD that has been sent to me. ;D
One would think I might do something productive, like write more blogs, but I find myself in an odd position. I feel like I have been very busy, but I can’t really tell you with what. And I’m not entirely sure what I have to show for it. This must mean I’m adjusting – experiences no longer stand out, I’m caught in the day to day activities and feel like they’re important.

I had to re-read my last entry to see what I had shared with you; where I left off. Looks like it was right before exams. I enjoyed helping write the exam for the S2s, which they say was way to easy. You can tell because most of them passed it. I am endeavoring to push them harder this term – they just act like they don’t understand what I’m saying. During exam week, I also got to participate in one of my absolute all-time favorite activities – organizing books. I flipped on an upbeat music mix on the borrowed ipod and stayed in the library for hours. We received our new books in the last week of April, via a truck that was entirely too large for the transport. They are mostly children’s books donated from America and it’s nice to see some familiar characters – so far I’ve seen Sesame Street, Lamb Chops, Veggie Tales, and Barney. A lot of these books will be good to expose the younger students to more English early on. A lot of these books will be like alien literature. I was excited to see some ‘baby’s first word’ books as they are easily translatable (pictures), but the words are “telephone; traffic signal; car; stove; kitchen”; none of these things exist to my students.
We also received boxes of elementary textbooks for math, reading (literature), and science, complete with accompanying teacher’s guides. I hope I can help the teachers learn enough English by the time I leave to use them even minimally.

Some of my friends went to Kampala and had a great time river rafting and bungee jumping. I was anticipating taking off more time after break, so I opted to stay in town and see if I could get some work done. Also, I wanted to be available to my community to see how this memorial week would go down. My friend Penny went to her opening ceremony and stood for 4 hours as they went through speeches and lectures and dances. But, I think that her site, like mine, was too far north for much genocide activity. I checked with my host dad and he suggested that since I wouldn’t understand what was going on anyway, I might as well stay at home. I did a lot of laundry and picked up around my house for a few days. I hope y’all don’t mind, but I really don’t have a lot to say about memorial week and the 1994 genocide (as they all refer to it, date included). Some other PCVs have great blogs about it here:

http://jacinrwanda.blogspot.com/2010/04/never-again.html

http://amandarwanda.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-does-16-years-mean.html


I’ve been learning about genocides since 5th grade. I have done extensive research and taken semester classes on the Holocaust; I have studied the Rape of Nanking, the Killing fields of Cambodia, Stalin’s massacres; I have been involved in discussions of the definition of genocide that reach even to the slow eradication of culture and population of the Aborigines in Australia and the Native Americans of the US. All my reactions have been honed to see these things clinically and academically. I can’t force myself to shift now and take these things personally, even when I see people with scars and maiming injuries on a regular basis. The strongest emotion I can name is a reinforced desire for good education and the coming of the Kingdom. The world will be warring on every level and every scale because we are all filled with sin. People emotionally separate themselves from others across the world enough to invade their land for conquest; people use jealousy and desire as reasons to hate their neighbors and their brothers; people allow fear of the unknown to breed distrust and blind spots of new cultures they encounter whether tribes sharing a nation, ethnicities sharing a city, or students sharing a lunchroom. We can combat this on an individual level, and in a way, we all have that responsibility. But people will find reasons for their anger and their violence if they want one.

Wow, totally wasn’t expecting to write about that, but there you go. I guess I can’t avoid it forever…
ANYWAY, after a few days of hiding out in my house, I went to Kigali to hold a room for a friend returning from her vacation (at midnight) and work with electricity and interwebs at the PCV office. Actually, Penny and I had very clear objectives to accomplish – and then everybody else showed up too and we ended up being the social creatures we are. Not that I’m complaining – it was Great to see so many people and share in our own culture for a while. Oh yeah! And we met the sweetest girls from Norway who had just finished volunteering in Tanzania and were traveling through East Africa. Just in case you were wondering – the world really does want to know if American HS is like One Tree Hill and OC. We were also kinda celebrating being in Rwanda for over 6 months. That means 1/4th of my time here is already gone.
It’s the trimesters, I’m telling you, they make time fly.

But you know what Didn’t fly? Most of the planes in Europe. Because of a volcano in Iceland. Seeing as Sean was in London on business / convenient layover on the way to Rwanda, he was also stuck. We are both dealing with this by acknowledging that God had the timing to bring us together before I left for Africa, he must have a reason why Sean wasn’t supposed to visit me in April.
One that I can see would be to keep Sean from getting fleas, as they back en force. I don’t think I’ve mentioned them here yet because I didn’t want an audience of you going ‘ewwwwww’, but I’ve decided it’s time you knew. There are fleas everywhere in Rwanda, and they seem to gravitate towards me. None of my other friends have been plagued by them since training (and the only girl that I knew had them there slept in the bunk above me). Over last weekend I fumigated my bedroom with my sheets and all my clothes. Twice. While I am sitting here in bed writing this, I have just been bitten again. Twice. It’s getting to be quite a burden.
Also, I think I’m breeding crickets in the house. Not sure why or how. Not that they bite, but they are annoyingly loud. And there are a LOT of them.

When we established that Sean would Not be coming, I decided that I had already scheduled a bunch of free time, so I should take advantage of it. I went to spend a few days with Jen (who has electricity and internet and PANCAKE MIX and maple syrup) and we had a blast together over the weekend. We watched episodes of Avatar – the last Air Bender, Bones, and a variety of movies we now have on disc and hard drive. Monday I spent picking up the mail and bumming around the house. (more on what was In the mail will follow) On Tuesday I was already bored, so I went to school just to see what was going on. Turns out, there was a problem with the class schedule, so I decided to use my nifty-difty spreadsheet skills to make a new one (and fit myself in where I wanted while I was at it). I used Wednesday as an opportunity to day trip into Kigali (learned that if I want to do that, I have to start pretty early to get anything actually Done). Thursday was truly productive, as I showed the schedule to the teachers (who love that they didn’t have to remake it themselves) and planned out 2 weeks of lessons with both language teachers.
Friday I left in the morning and went up the mountain to see Michele. I have decided that when people start talking about something difficult or unlikely, I will now come back with “yeah, well try taking the good road to Bungwe”. Because there isn’t one. I was taking the alternate route she told me about, hoping it would be better than the straight vertical road up the mountain. Well, this was more horizontal, but it certainly wasn’t flatter. I was carrying stuff for my whole weekend (including things to leave with Michele) , so after this hour long moto ride, my back was sore. I have also debated whether or not it counts as a moto ride or a flight considering how much time my butt was on the bike and how much it was in the air. Consequently, my entire rear region is bruised, and my arms are sore from trying to hold on so tightly. To top it off, the helmet was so loose that it bounced around on my head, mostly succeeding in bruising the vertebrae on the back of my neck. But we enjoyed a chill afternoon and sang 2/3 of the hymnbook Saturday morning. After which I took the moto down the mountain the normal way, and headed over to Scott’s for American Saturday with Pad Thai and Tommy Boy. It was pretty classic. And since this was, again, the weekend, I went with Jen back to her place and we made more pancakes and watched more TV. Including the Christmas episode. Point of fact – not a good idea to let 2 girls in Africa watch the Christmas episodes of American TV. Unless you feel like you too need a good cry. Finally, I got word that Sean had made it safely back to the US. Which, all things considered, was still a good ending to his travelogue. Monday morning I went back to school to check in and discovered that the schedule I made still had some “problems” in it, but I had just enough battery in my computer left to fix it that evening.
This week I also started my official teaching schedule – S1s Tuesday morning, and S2s Wednesday morning. Both classes went fairly well, although we’re 3 textbooks short of a class set. Hoping to pick those up sometime soon. I think it will be good for the students to be reading more and will save me time from writing things on the board.


On an up note, in the mail I got a box which was half of my birthday present from my sister. Those of you who don’t know her are missing out. Those of you who have sisters you adore have an inkling of how much this has made my last week. Those of you who don’t know Me very well are about to learn a lot about me based on what makes me excited here. Those of you who are sick of my repetition can just deal. =)
First and foremost! Char sent me books. Not just any books, mind you, but some of the world’s best classic children’s literature. 2 sets of Reader’s Digest novel collections including Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Huckleberry Finn, Call of the Wild, Madame Curie, David Copperfield, The Prisoner of Zenda, and others. Also, she sent a beautiful copy of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ which has become my absolutely all-time favorite classic children’s book second only to ‘Peter Pan’ which is simply not allowed to be demoted. Coming soon on anotherpieceofmy.blogspot.com , extensive descriptions and exposition on why I love this book. For now, let me just say that I have never read such beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the seasons, friendship, and the emotions that tie them all together. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ sounds like a tragic inversion of this book. The images portrayed here could Never be captured in a photograph or even an illustration.
My second favorite thing in the box has to be the cookies. Oreos, chips ahoy, and Nutter Butter. I’m very proud that they’ve lasted longer than a week, but they probably won’t last two. Nutter Butters – graham cracker cookies with sweet peanut butter. It doesn’t get much better!
I’m also excited about the seeds. It’s almost the end of the rainy season, so I will probably have to wait a few months on starting my garden, but that’s ok. It’ll probably take me that long to clear a patch of earth. I have determined – weeding the garden, actually pretty fun – de-rocking the garden, pain in the butt. Fortunately, most of the big rocks are on the surface, but all the dirt has a gravel-like quality to it.
Finally, to support my odd spurts of creativity, I now have a nice, large box of colored pencils. Not that I have much to color here, but it’s nice to have them available.
But the thing that made EVERYTHING adorable in this box was that my sister put post-it note memories on every item: remember when we used to eat peanut butter popsicles? remember when we used to color on every trip – planes, car rides, anything? remember when I wasn’t allowed to have 2 cookies unless I finished an entire sandwich? Yes. Yes, Charlynn, I do remember. And those memories make me very happy. =)

That actually rounds out my last month. Sorry if the blow-by-blow was tedious, that’s now life goes sometimes, isn’t it? And like I said at the beginning, everything is starting to run together. I’m hoping it will continue to as I have a solid schedule now. The only thing I’m becoming bored / annoyed with is doing my laundry by hand. It’s annoying, and I just don’t want to most days. But that means things pile up, and we all know that’s not good either.

Miss you guys. Miss TV. Miss washing machines. Miss eating meat more than once a week. Love that I’m in a place to miss these things and appreciate them all the more. Especially the people. =)