Fetching water

Our cistern is empty. The dry season has been in session for almost two months. Up till now we have been making it by with the water that collected on our roof, but now even that has gone dry. My worst nightmare has become a reality. Some things have gotta change. Devin and I talked about it a little bit before how we are going to have to only have Anualnita – our maid wash our clothes once a week and also find someone fetch us water from the spring every day.

Finally this morning I was let in on why my clothes that I put out to be washed on Monday were not. Anualnita decided that she wants to wash our clothes all day on Fridays at the spring. I don’t have any problem with this except that its already been over a week since my clothes were washed and since getting here I have lost a bit of weight and I don’t have much that fits me anymore.

Today is my day off so I stayed home from work while Irene and Devin both went to work. After they left I decided that I wanted to see where this mystical water is. I asked Devin earlier in the morning and she told me about two that I would have walked past a hundred times, but never noticed, neither sounded too far away so I wanted to go get it. After I finished washing my underwear I told Anualnita that I wanted to fetch water. She didn’t want to do that though.

In Kinyaranda –

me – “Let’s go fetch water.”

Anualnita – “It’s very far.”

me – “I want to see where it is.”

Anualnita – “Down there.”

me – “I need you to show me.”

Anualnita – “Okay, I’m coming.”

I then went into my room and changed my clothes to get ready to fetch water, but when I was doing this I noticed that the clothes that I was putting on were really dirty. So I changed it up and decided that we would do laundry down there.

me – “We must do laundry there.”

Anualnita – “No, I will do it here.”

me – “No we can do it there.”

Anualnita – “It’s far.”

me – “I understand.”

Anualnita – “I need to cook and Irene said to _______.” I’m not sure what she said here.

me – “Let’s go.”

Anualnita – “I’m coming.”

So I changed clothes again and we left for the spring. The spring was a fifteen minute walk downhill away from my house. Anualnita carried my clothes and I carried an empty jug. Everyone on the way there thought it was hilarious that I was going to fetch water. White people don’t do that, another chance to disprove a stereotype and feel guilty for being white. The worst was a guy who told me that I should carry the water in my car and Anualnita agreed with him. I don’t know why people assume that I have a car. I have never given any indication that I own a car. It would be pretty hard to hide if I did have one. Even though I don’t want people to think that I have a car. I would love to have a car and I would put my and everyone else’s water in it.

We arrived at the spring and did my laundry. Anualnita laughed when I started helping wash my clothes as well as everyone who came by. It didn’t really matter though because everything that I washed she washed a second time. When she was rewashing my clothes I started talking to a guy who was filling up his jugs. His name was Kenety. Kenety fetches water for people for 150 franks a jug (a quarter). I then hired him to bring us two jugs of water every day starting tomorrow.

Once we finished the laundry Anualnita packed it up and I grabbed the full jug of water. This jug of water I think is twenty liters and weighs fifty pounds when it is full. At first I tried carrying it on my head like I see everyone do and I went about a hundred steps and couldn’t go any further. Remember that I said that I said that the path to the spring was all downhill therefore the way back is all up. I have gotten used to climbing up this mountain because I do it every day on my home from school, but I don’t do it with a fifty pound jug of water on my head. I could barely walk with this weight on my head sloshing around. I moved it to my shoulder, then to my hand, then to my other hand, then to my other shoulder. This continued the entire way home switching about thirty times. The fifteen minute walk to the spring took about forty coming back.

I was exhausted when I made it back. Anualnita who carried my wet clothes on her head went right back to work cooking and whatever Irene had told her to do. My back hurts now.

I like finding out more about people’s lives here. Most people don’t have someone to fetch their water or have a cistern to hold it so they have to do it themselves. I couldn’t do that every day, but no one can. I’m sure that I would get really good at it though if I did. I’m happy I went and did that though because now I know what I’m paying for and it is really worth it, both Kenety and Anualnita.

Koboyi watching me walk away with a water jug.

“You’re fetching water? Use your car white man.” If only I had one.

I think I lost more water than what I carried up.

Kenety making his living.

Anualnita making hers.

Where is the Love

I have been in Africa for nearly nine months now and I miss less of America all the time. I used to crave a burger a lot, but now even though I will always take meat when it is available, I don’t think about it anymore. The best part of restaurants anyways is being able to spend time with friends. For a while I was obsessed with keeping up with the NFL and on the day of the Superbowl I tried to download the Steelers and Ravens playoff game, but after purchasing it on itunes I saw that it was 1.75 GB and would take 50 hours so I gave up on it. I was able to get my hands on some unlimited internet last weekend thanks to Lucy and finally downloaded it. I really enjoyed watching it, but not like it would have been if I was in America with other fans. I used to miss the whole celebrity scene, but that’s really only because I miss making fun of it with my friends. I love keeping up with what is new, but that really isn’t all that hard to do here. Everything that I miss about America really points to who I miss in America. I love going to Pirates games, but I wouldn’t do that alone even if dinner was given to me and I could meet the players after the game. Life is meant to be shared

The things I would have loved to go to America while I have been here include the weddings I have missed and my sister’s graduation. Weddings are so much fun. Drinking and dancing to celebrate the joining of two people. Graduations are also a lot of fun. I love to celebrate others: weddings, graduations, birthdays, and any other ceremony. However Rwandan ceremonies are slow and not fun from my experience. My problem is I couldn’t love myself in America even though I was always surrounded by people who loved me. At my own graduation from college I was discontented. I didn’t want my parents to take me out to an expensive restaurant because I didn’t feel like what I did was that great. I did order something expensive once we were there though. I’m not competitive because I don’t want to win. I don’t want the praise. On my own birthday I avoid telling people that it is happening. That way when people don’t show up to it there isn’t the disappointment. I would rather make it possible for someone else to have fun than the other way around. I think if you can’t love yourself you can’t love anyone else. I had to come to Africa to learn how to love myself. I realize this now because of what is missing. I still don’t have it figured out and I would be willing to bet something else will happen next week that will make me hate myself again. I just don’t find myself loveable.

I haven’t found a lot of love in my village. I try to express love for them, but I don’t feel like I get it back most of the time. Simon is my best friend by far. We joke around a lot and I really enjoy his company. We play sports and watch movies and sing Taylor Swift songs together. I feel like I can also connect with him intellectually better than anyone else I have met here. My roommate Irene is also amazing. She is a lot of fun to hang out with because she is so chill. I think that is because of what happened to her when she was eight. I wish she could walk. I can’t help but think about what she would be like if hadn’t been literally crippled by bigotry.

The love I do get is from other volunteers. Devin is awesome. She has great insight on all kinds of things and we get along great, but even though I think we could have been friends had we met in America I don’t think we would have gotten to know each other too well. That’s part of Peace Corps though – you force yourself to do things that you wouldn’t normally do. Lucy is awesome too. I already see a lot of her, but I wish it was more. She is always helping me to put things into a more realistic perspective. They have both become really great friends. I’m happy to serve so close to them. I don’t get the chance to see the other volunteers as much as I like either. The Peace Corps puts us all together for two and a half months for training and then set us to work at a reasonable distance from each other and we are supposed to never see each other. Whenever we get together we talk about how we wish we could spend more time together like this and complain about the problems we face in our villages. However I do feel loved by them more than I do from Rwandans, and I am tired of excusing that with culture.

The other place I find love is from packages from America: food, games and whatever. BP 50 Byumba Rwanda. Thanks Mom, Jessica and Chris and Christian.

For two years before coming here I lived with Jesύs. He is a really great friend. He would throw really big parties in our apartment and invite over all of his Latino friends. These parties would go until the cops shut them down. We spent a lot of time together when we were living together and I now that I have another great roommate that isn’t American I can really say that I love living with people who are not American. It just adds a fun aspect that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Even though Jesύs and I had a lot of fun together I always felt like he enjoyed his Latino friends more. I am the same way though. I had more fun with my American friends. I always tried to include him in whatever we did and he would often come, but he didn’t always have fun. The one time we went camping and he disappeared into the woods. We didn’t find out where he was until the next day which worried everyone until we found out. Turned out he called a friend to come pick him up. I think I understand what was going on that day a little better now. I like my Rwandan friends, but I would rather be with my American friends. The excitement of being here has worn off. I guess I like being a tourist because when you are a tourist you always feel like doing something exciting. I still feel like doing exciting things, but I’ve run out of things to see in my village and if there are things yet to see I’m not excited about them. And the administration doesn’t want me to travel outside of my site.

Two months ago I expressed my interest to another volunteer that I met a few weeks after coming here. I noticed her immediately because she presented a session to our training group about integrating into the culture. She was joyful and friendly and spoke the language incredibly well. I talked to her at dinner by using the Kinyarwanda that I had learned earlier in the day. I asked her if she had any children and why she didn’t. She then went into a long Kinyarwanda explanation which she had to tell me what it meant in English after she had finished. She said that I should pick a girl and that I could choose whoever I wanted because I’m white. She was still teaching me culture I guess. I thought to myself ok here is my choice. She told this story to someone else when she was explaining how she knew me.

After that we only hung out a handful of times, but I always had a great time. At In-service training I had gotten the idea that she might have feelings for me when she kissed my cheek one night. That at least told me that she isn’t repulsed by me. The next month I told her that I told her that I had been crushing on her, but she didn’t give me an answer right away. In fact she wanted a week to consider it. I thought that wasn’t too much of a request and we still had a great day together, but it turned out to be really hard to wait for her. I felt like I had to keep my composure and do whatever I could to convince her that I was worth being her boyfriend. Also that week I fell off my bike and had a concussion. Also her friend gave birth to an unhealthy baby. We talked about it at the end of this exhausting and painful week. She told me about how she doubted herself when she was with me, and that made me feel pretty awful. She told me no to being my girlfriend but she would like to get to know me better. I lost the composure that I was trying so hard to keep after this and started crying. She wasn’t very comforting, but neither was I.

I then called her periodically to either talk or try to meet up with her, but it never worked out until a month after the last time we talked. In the meantime I talked to some friends about her and what happened and I got a lot of advice about it. The best advice was probably the one that I didn’t want to hear the most from someone who knew her a fair amount better than me; to give up on her. We spent an afternoon together finally but she had a meeting to go to and after took off without saying goodbye. The next weekend I called her for some advice, as someone who has been here longer, with something new that I am going through which I might write about here after it plays out. Her advice didn’t really help me at all and then she told me that she didn’t think it would ever work out between us and I admitted that I felt the same way at this point even though I didn’t want to admit it. I guess she had gotten to know me well enough by then and didn’t like what she saw.

I wanted her to fill the emptiness that I was feeling. I wanted someone to show me the love that I so desperately need here. I turned her into something she’s not. I made her my Jesus. She could never live up to those expectations. I have such high standards and I will never find a girl that meets them. One of those standards is that she needs to love me back.

I imagine I sound really love and homesick at the same time. I have something else that I can’t get out of my head right now. I think that I just wrote this because I wanted to get my mind off of that. All of my sadness is leaking through that into this though. My relationship maturity has a long way to go. So does every other part of me.

The President accepting his urn.

Field Day

I am not an athlete. I do love sports though. I just downloaded using Lucy’s modem with unlimited internet the Steelers and Ravens game from January. In college I went to about sixty basketball games and only missed about four home football games. I am asked a lot what game is my favorite and I tell them golf. Every time that I tell someone that I like golf I hope that they will play it too so maybe we could play together, but that hasn’t happened yet. In elementary school I played little league and would never swing and when I was in the outfield I would sit on the ground and pick dandelions. In middle school I played one season of football. The daily practice killed me. I really had no idea how to play football even at the end of the season. I didn’t even know the rules until I started watching it in high school. In high school I played the base drum as well as other assorted percussion instruments in the marching band and I was also a boy scout. I learned a lot in boy scouts including a love for hiking, but I spent a lot of hiking trips at the back and even alone because I couldn’t keep up with everyone else when we hit those hills.

Last weekend Mulindi visited Rushaki on Saturday for a field day. Rushaki is the school where Lucy works. I was told that I would be playing basketball, also that I needed to bring my camera. Because I work for the school and own a camera I have become the schools photographer. It is easy to feel like I’m being taken advantage of, but I realize that cameras are rare here so I’m just the friend of convenience that they never had before. No different than if I was to ask my friend to help change the oil on my car because he knows something about fixing cars (that is if I had ever owned a car). All the same I still don’t like it when people ask me if they can have my camera or computer or to give them pictures but that’s because I don’t know how to explain that I can’t print them.

After they told me I would be playing basketball with them I kept getting asked if I knew how to play. I told them yes and they would respond with “we will win.” I don’t exude confidence on the court by any means so I don’t know where they got the idea that having a big uncoordinated white guy on their team would give them the win. I told Lucy about this and she expressed what they were thinking by saying that having an American on your team is like having an NBA player. I on the other hand was thinking about all of my experience of playing ball in America that I don’t stand a chance playing with all these black guys. I’m pretty bad among white guys.

I thought that the game would be the teachers of Mulindi versus the teachers of Rushaki, but students were playing too. Before we started I could already tell that we were going to lose because other than everyone thinking that I would be their best player, my team was taking pictures while the other team was doing layup drills. When we did start the coach asked me which position I was and I told him I could play center, but the positions that they were using were more like soccer than basketball positions. There were two “defenders” under the hoop. The center was at the foul line and then the “offence” was at the three point line. According to the coach I was in the wrong position as soon as the game started because I was standing too far back and I was blamed for giving up the first basket and taken out of the game after a minute. I watched from the bench as my team got destroyed because of in my opinion our terrible zone defense. At half time the score was 24 to 6. The coach kept trying to be the gym class hero by taking outside shots and had about ten air balls.

During half time the coach was yelling at his players, which I couldn’t understand so I tried to encourage them to change to a man defense which I had to do in English because I definitely don’t know basketball terms in Kinyarwanda. I asked them if they understood which they said yes, but if they did they ignored me because they did not “man up” like I told them to. I got put back in and this time I bodied up with whoever was near me. I made my presence felt the best I could. I feel like I was playing pretty good defense, but they wanted me out again after five minutes. I told them no because I felt like I probably wouldn’t go back in. I kept getting fouled as well so I started performing for the ref who called maybe five fouls the whole game and three were because I elicited them. I went out at the end of the third quarter after we went 8 – 0. Even though we didn’t score in that quarter we played our best defense.

The final quarter we bled points. The coach finally made one of his desperation shots though. I took over the substitutions at this point to try to give everyone else some more time and get the coach out of the game because he was taking this friendly game way too seriously. The final score was 66-9 I told my friend Sera about this and she asked me the only logical question – “Were you playing the Globe Trotters?” I of course replied with yes and then started humming the song.

After that we got some food with all the teachers and I endured some criticism for not scoring. The ref thought I was a good player though. I told him that he was probably the only one who thought so. I wasn’t the worst player out there but far from the best.

Being so bad at sports has made me very uncompetitive. I used to be pretty competitive at video games, but I gave that up when I started losing at that a lot too. I do enjoy pretending like I’m competitive sometimes, but I rather congratulate whoever beat me than gloat when I win.

The Lakers?