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.