Rwandan Food

I love cereal. It is my favorite snack. For as long as I can remember I have had cereal every morning for breakfast. In college I started eating it as a snack in the evening. I don’t really care what kind of cereal I eat. I have loved so many kinds of it. I just finished a big bowl of cereal with powdered milk. I do not like the fresh milk (straight from the cow that it is necessary to boil). I was raised on skim milk. So I add a little extra water to my already weak powdered milk. Although I do enjoy the African tea which is made with the fresh milk, but I don’t crave it. Not like I crave cereal.

I visited Kigali last weekend for some business and while I was there I bought a 5000 franks (9.50 dollars) quart of mint ice cream and my friend bought a 7000 franks (13 dollars) box of Froot Loops. We both shared with each other and took great advantage of this rare moment. I have gotten prepared American food plenty of times at restaurants and paid a lot for them, but the only packaged foods that I get are from my mom’s packages. They come pretty regularly and I and I think my roommates are very grateful for them. I am expecting a package from my friend Chris right now too, so that is exciting. My favorite things that I get in these packages are crackers, cookies, packaged meats and just about anything else that my mom puts in there, but nothing makes me happier than eating cereal.

My normal breakfast here is whatever cold rice, potatoes, or vegetables that are left from the night before. Lunch is usually rice and beans or kayunga (corn flower and water it tastes like old stale tortilla chips to me). I eat lunch with the other teachers at my school which is usually a lot of fun. We make fun of each other a lot and even have some serious conversation sometimes. I pay 5000 franks per month to eat with them, notice that that is the same that I paid for one quart of ice cream and less than it costs for Froot Loops.

Dinner is usually at home with my roommates. We just make the rice or potatoes mostly with vegetables and beans. For a long time we were having a housekeeper cook for us, but she was stealing from us so she had to go. Now we cook for ourselves. I have been mixing all kinds of spices and trying different recipes in the cook book I got from another volunteer. Both of my roommates love to pile on the hot spices so I doubt they can even taste most of what they eat. I enjoy it though.

Something that I wish I got more of is the fruit. It is not as available as it once seemed. It is still more available than cereal.

Here I am with my roommates and Chi the Taiwanese guy who slept on my couch for a week.

The morning assembly.

The morning assembly with me.

Reconciliation

A little over a month ago was memorial month in Rwanda. Everything shuts down for the whole week. Everyone is supposed to go to discussions about the Genocide. This is to try to ensure that genocide doesn’t happen again. I recently read We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch. It is about Rwandan history and is very interesting especially to me because I am living here with people who lived through it. I wrote down a quote from the book that I thought really summed up the current situation here. “Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same communities, as one cohesive national society.” The Genocide is something that I’d rather not think about, but I am constantly reminded of it every day. How forgiveness comes to the people whose lives were ruined by this is only through God’s grace.
The recent death of Osama Bin Laden forced me to think of how September 11^th compared to the Rwandan Genocide. I quickly decided that those who orchestrated it were the same as Bin Laden, some of them are still at large. The Interahamwe is the same as Al Qaeda both of which are still at large and even though we hear a lot more about Al Qaeda, we all know how dangerous it is in the RDC. By the numbers and how the destruction was performed the Genocide is by far the worse of the two, but I’m not sure about the motives. The result in both cases was the death of a lot of people. The motive behind September 11^th was to destroy the economic and security centers of American and cause panic. The motive behind the Genocide was to wipe out an ethnicity of people. Both motives are driven by love for your own kind and hate for those who are different.
I have a hard time forgiving for much smaller things. This weekend I have made more honest confessions in a shorter period of time than I ever have before. There were two, neither of them were easy to make, and if I felt like I needed to make more, then I would. Both of them made me extremely nervous for opposite reasons, which prompted me to rehearse the conversations to myself about a hundred times in the last three weeks. Both conversations have been a long time coming too. They originated something like six or seven months, twenty pounds, a term of teaching and most of pre-service training ago. I can easily say that most of my time in Rwanda has been leading me to having these conversations.
The first of these conversations was with my boss, the Country Director (CD) of Peace Corps Rwanda. The CD is an incredible woman and I feel extremely lucky and honored to work for her, but for a long time I have hated her. Peace Corps has a lot of policies that the volunteers must follow. If a volunteer breaks a policy the CD has to investigate as to why the volunteer broke this policy and make a decision as to whether this volunteer should be allowed to continue to serve or if it is necessary to terminate the volunteer’s service. Within only three weeks of coming to Rwanda I had already broken one of these policies. I broke the out of site policy. Part of the out of site policy says that you must text the travel phone whenever you leave your site and then again when you arrive at your destination. This policy from what I understand is not in all Peace Corps programs and was brand new at this time. Prior to this they had mentioned it to us but did not provide us with the phone number to make these reports. I was also under the impression from Staging, which was the event we had when we were all in America before catching our flight to Africa, that it sufficed to tell another volunteer that you were leaving that you were leaving your site.
Now that I set myself up I’m sure that you are wondering what I did. For one week of training we visited our sites. We were supposed to learn about our school and meet some of the community. Upon arriving at my future site one of the teachers delivered me to the house of the volunteer that I would be replacing. She was changing sites because of a problem that she had been having for a while. She was an excellent host for the week of my visit. She showed me Mulindi and the surrounding area as well as fed me and taught me a lot about Peace Corps. We also played Scrabble which influenced me to buy my own board on my way to my site that cost 23,000 franks – about $38.50 which is a lot for me, but I think it has been worth it. Anyways what happened that caused me all of this stress is on Wednesday of that week the she was going to Kigali for a meeting and asked me if I’d like to come. I hadn’t had the chance to see Kigali at all yet, and she was going to the Peace Corps office which I was curious about, and I was craving a burger which I heard you could get there so I said yes.
The Safety and Security Officer had told us about dangerous Kigali could be, but I have been to dangerous cities before and even lived, worked and volunteered in all of the most dangerous parts of Pittsburgh so stories of violence and theft in a city didn’t scare me. We arrived in Kigali and took a bus to the Peace Corps office. Kigali has a much better transportation system than Pittsburgh. I have had to wait for hours to catch a bus in America, but I never have had to wait too long here. Even to get out of my village the wait is always reasonable. I think this is because there aren’t any unions and anyone who can buy a van can be a taxi driver. Also a lot less people own cars so this is the main mode of transportation. A taxi is extremely cheap too. The only thing that slows them down is they don’t like leaving unless they are full. If you can’t wait for a taxi to come you also have the option of a motorcycle taxi.
At the office my host went to her meeting and I waited for her in the volunteer lounge. While I’m waiting I was able to use the internet for the first time since coming to Rwanda for longer than a minute. I saw a few people who I knew from training who were surprised to see me and then the Assistant Program Manager took me into his office and we talked about how I should be there. He stressed that I had things I needed to do and informed me that I was breaking policy. After I had been scolded, my host finished her meeting and told me that she had also been slapped on the wrist. We left Kigali with our tails between our legs, but not without getting lunch first. I got a burger that was pretty good. She made it seem like it was no big deal that we had been reprimanded so I soon forgot about it and enjoyed the rest of my week at her house.
I returned to the training site that Friday, and the next day at lunch the Program and Training Officer took me into an office and we discussed the severity of what I did. He gave me a memorandum that I had to sign and respond to. My response was to be discussed by the entire senior staff and they would determine if I would be allowed to continue my service. He told me that they were not “leaning one way or the other at the moment.” My response was expected by the end of the day on Monday. I didn’t want to let that sit at all. I went straight home and wrote my response. I then called my host from the last week and read it to her because I didn’t want to say anything about her that she didn’t agree with. She tried to comfort me but her attitude of they are trying to make an example of you and there is no way they would administratively separate you for this did not calm me down. I did not eat that night or the next day. I stayed at home and pitied myself for being caught in this situation while others were going out and enjoying their weekend. I listened to all of the Tim Keller sermons I had on my Ipod twice and the Relient K song Deathbed about forty times. Everyone I told this to took a similar attitude to my host. They’d say that “How could they send you home for that, you didn’t know better” or “She should have known better than to take you to Kigali.”
On Monday I turned in my response. Next the worst part came. I waited something like six weeks before I heard back about it. It was pretty much the only thing that I thought about. I had language and teacher training to take it off my mind, but that only did so much. I was at the same time becoming less concerned about it and angrier. One day the Program and Training Officer asked me “Are you ready?” He was talking about the next session that we had, but I was terrified of him at this point so when he asked me this I got scared and asked “for what?” He knew what I was thinking and told me they hadn’t come to a decision yet. After the six weeks I finally had my interview with the CD that everyone was having, but mine was later because my name starts with an S. The interview started with her recognizing that I was the same person that showed up at the office uninvited. After she stated this, I asked if they had ever come to a decision and why they haven’t gotten back to me. Her response seemed incredibly condescending. She said “I’m sorry that you thought we were going to get back to you on that. Had we not liked your response we would have sent you home. We want you to make good decisions and to see what your decision making was for this situation.” At this point I was extremely relieved find out that I wasn’t going to be administratively separated, but shortly after this happened when I started telling others about what she had said the anger I had continued to swell. The memorandum that they had given me said they would get back to me as soon as they had made their decision. Also what would I had written in my response that they may have not liked. Only an idiot who wants to self-destruct would say anything but an apology.
In my mind this confirmed that they were making an example of me and they never planned to follow through with terminating my service. It was exactly like everyone had been telling me, and finding that this was true made me so self-righteous. The slander of everyone who was a part of putting me through this was not censored and it felt great. I took a lot of pleasure in telling others how I was wronged. Everyone I told this to sympathized with me too. There was only one who defended what they did, and I needed to hear someone say this.
I didn’t think about this too much after pre-service training ended. I was at my site. Far from all the people who caused me to stress and a lot to keep me busy, although I did develop an unhealthy fear of the administration. Anytime I received a message from anyone of them I would be afraid to open it, especially if it was from the CD.
After three months at site the volunteers are brought together for in-service training. In –service training is a chance to see all of the other volunteers that you went to pre-service training with and discuss what you are doing and strategies to improve your service. It is one week long. I found out on the first day that the volunteer that I replaced was coming to give a few sessions and all of the feelings of self-righteousness flooded back. I was telling my story to people once again. When I saw her I joked with her that I was afraid that she would get me into trouble. Her response was the same one she said five months before when I called her to read my response to her. On Thursday, she led a session on the Peer Support Network with the volunteer who had defended what had been done to me. I listened to them talk about stress while the CD sat there watching. So the person who had caused me the most stress since coming to Rwanda was telling me how to deal with it. The irony of this was more than I could handle. I was furious listening to her. I asked the CD a question during the session about having a support group meet in Kigali trying to get permission to have bible study there, but both the CD and the volunteer I replaced interpreted it as I wanted permission to party there. This made me even angrier. I told the other session leader that what stresses me out the most is the Peace Corps Administration. She told me that she understood exactly what I was saying and that she wanted to talk later. Then I got up and walked outside for a moment to clear my head. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so angry but it must have been at my parents for something they wouldn’t let me do and I couldn’t see their reasoning. I went back and waited out the session. That night I talked to the other facilitator about this for what must have been three hours. We finally came to the conclusion that I needed to talk to the CD. My hate for these people came from not forgiving them. My anger was controlling me. I couldn’t keep living this way. I needed to tell them that I forgive them.
On the way back from in-service training I went to bible study in Kigali and the volunteer that I replaced was there but didn’t participate. At the end when we were taking prayer requests mine was a long story about what had happened to me and how I need to forgive them. The volunteer I had replaced overheard some of what I said. After bible study ended she took me out onto the balcony and closed the door. She had heard me talking about the CD but missed what I had said about her. She wanted to comfort me and encourage me to talk to the CD. I appreciated this but I used this opportunity to tell her how much hatred I felt towards her. I told her that I slandered her and that I was sorry for doing that. I said that I forgive her and she apologized. I understand how hard it must have been for her to hear this, but it was necessary. Then we hugged and rejoined everyone else.
Upon arriving home I emailed the CD saying I needed to talk to her about what happened. Three weeks later was the first time we would both be available. I went to meet with her this past Friday. I told her how nervous I was when we started talking. She told me that I don’t have to worry about what I had done, but I didn’t meet with her just to hear that what I did doesn’t affect her opinion of me. I told her the same thing as the volunteer I had replaced that I was sorry for slandering and hating her. She told me that she isn’t concerned with what people say about her which I’m sure is true, but as a leader you either want to be loved or feared and she definitely tries to be loved. She kept repeating herself saying that she was impressed that I would come tell her this. I was reminded of how it is just as hard to hear someone tell you this as it is to say it. I felt very relieved after saying this. It was incredibly healing. To be able to forgive like this has released me from my anger. I am confident that next time I am contacted by the administration or see the volunteer that I replaced I will not be overcome by anger, but instead I will be able to respectful and loving. I turned them into monsters, completely forgetting that they are just as vulnerable as I am, which turned me into a monster.
The other confession that I made was the next day. I told another volunteer that I have had a crush on her for almost seven months. She told me that she needs some time to think about it. She said that she’d get back to me in a week at the longest. So right now I am in suspense, but I am really happy that I told her this even if it results in her saying no but I hope she doesn’t. She does have a lot to consider so I am not upset. I wonder how much she is thinking about it because I’m having trouble thinking about anything else.

Thorns

Peace Corps is very difficult. Their slogan is “the hardest job you’ll ever love.” It’s true for me. Now that I have been here for six months I feel like I can understand it. It is difficult for many reasons, but God has done so much to prepare me to come here to serve him. I talked a lot about how he made me suffer through being poor for the first time in my life for the last two years so this time is going to be about discovering God. I grew up in Pittsburgh’s white suburbia. When I was in sixth grade, and my father was working for a very successful company at the time, we moved into one of the wealthier parts of suburbia, Fox Chapel. My mother wanted to get away from living in the same community where she taught. This plan of escape resulted in buying a very expensive house for a fairly good price in a very expensive neighborhood. A lot of my neighbors belonged to one of the top notch country clubs and sent their kids to the excellent private school that were both closer to my house than the high school that I attended. These aspirations may have been what my parents had in mind when we moved to this area, but then came the recession of the early 2000s. My father was laid off and I had similar images in my head to that of the Saved by the Bell episode where Kelly’s father loses his job and she can’t afford to go to the high school dance. These images were facilitated by my mother always saying that we had no money and now we were going to have to give up things that we had come to expect. I don’t actually remember this, but my mom tells a cute story about me when I was in elementary school and I told the teacher that my family was too poor to give up some onions so we could make soup for a project. We were living the American dream of the more you have the more you want. From the outside looking in, if you were poorer than my family you might have considered my family to be wealthy, or if you were richer than my family you would consider us to be middle class. My family did control their spending in a lot of ways though, like we never had a pool, sometimes we didn’t go on vacation and when we did it was in the continental US and I went to public school. We have been in some kind of awful debt for as long as I can remember. It’s the American way after all.

Although suburbia has other races in it, specifically a large population of Indian Americans went to my high school, the majority is by far white. My generation has had an advantage over generations before it. The advantage is that we have been taught over and over and over how terrible racism is. But this doesn’t even stop us from becoming raciest. I remember very well soon after moving to Fox Chapel finding it cool to draw swastikas and only making friends with the other white kids. Liking others who are like you is of course a good thing, but that line between loving your own kind and hating those who are different is very fine. I went through high school trying to be cool, and of course I cared to great degree what other people thought of me. We all want to be loved, but I concentrated a lot of my time trying to get into the inner rings that I could never join. I was always trying to convince myself I liked classic rock and that I didn’t like hip hop or pop, which if you know me now you know that it is the opposite. I distinctly remember one of the people that I wanted to like me talking about how he could smell the theater when 8 Mile came out. I can’t remember the things that I said but they were either just as bad or worse. The only contact I had with any black Americans my age was at church, but none of us wanted to be there or have anything to do with each other.

In college was the first time I was introduced to Americans of other ethnicities who wanted anything to do with me. My roommate in our tiny pie slice of a dorm room was Matt aka Matty Voice who was really into hip hop and he is still the best beat boxer I ever met. Matt was white, but he was really popular among the many of the black population that I was exposed to. He won the Black Action Society talent show with excellent renditions of Drop it Like it’s Hot and the Mario Brother’s theme. I became jealous of Matt’s popularity and skills and pushed him away. I feel like we could have been really great friends had I been more mature. I did make my first multicultural friend this year though, Chris aka c-dogg. Chris is half Pilipino and half Chinese and he lived in a dorm down the hall and hated his roommate. I love Chris. He’s one of the coolest guys I have ever met. Chris, Pete aka PTP1 and I were quite the trio and sometimes Mark aka Mulsh was added to our group when he stuck around in Oakland instead of taking off to the Southside. Pete is one of the biggest nerds that I have ever met, and I love the guy. I was really lucky to have these guys as friends. I really need to get in touch with Pete because he is just a few countries away in Cameroon right now. Like I said before I was a selfish, raciest, greedy, immature, self-serving people pleaser who only cared about myself. If you had asked me at this time if I was a Christian I would have told you yes, but I can easily tell you now that I wasn’t. I regularly attended a Christian fellowship called Cornerstone and volunteered occasionally with an organization that cared for the homeless, and I knew the gospel in my head but not in my heart. I cannot honestly tell you that all of the problems that I had back before I was a Christian are gone but I can say that God has done a lot of work on me. All of the sins I listed above are fairly easy to see and hate when you see them in other and you never suspect yourself to be guilty of them. I had a lot of friends at Cornerstone which is really the only thing that kept me coming back, (especially after they rejected me for a leadership position that they seemed to give out like candy, that really hurt my pride but also started the healing it needed) they were all white though.

Between freshmen and sophomore year I went on a study abroad trip to Beijing for two weeks. On this trip I absolutely loved the culture and met some of my best friends in the other people who went including Matt aka Magnum, Eric aka Jackhammer, and Guy aka Guy. Once again they were all white.

Sophomore year I lived with Eric aka Erow in a sweet hotel like dorm room. Eric has got to be one of the most goal oriented people that I have ever met. He is already married to a beautiful woman named Beth (I had the honor of being his best man) and works as an industrial engineer for a grocery store and tells me about how he should be making more money, he would rather be doing consulting and he plans to move to Copenhagen within ten years. No plan to have children yet though, but if that did happen he would have to reconsider all of his other plans. He is the one who got me interested in joining Peace Corps, which I am confident he would also love to do this, but I feel like his life is too structured to move to Africa without knowing what things will be like beforehand. I really liked living with Eric. He made me better. He got all A’s because he studied a lot. I remember complaining to our mutual friends that he would be studying when I wanted to watch TV or play video games. I did not study nearly enough. I would cheat on homework and just scrape by in the classes that I wasn’t interested in. When I think about what I learned in college the thing that sticks out the most is that I learned how to learn and think. Civil engineering is an excellent degree and I do feel like I earned it, but I would have had a much better GPA had I not cheated so much. I never turned to performance enhancing drugs to get better test scores, but that doesn’t make me better than those who did. Cheating is cheating.

My cheating drove a wedge between my relationship with Chris. We were studying the same major, but at the end of sophomore year he changed to Architectural studies. This was a good move for him, but at the time I felt like I was being abandoned. Now he is in graduate school studying architecture and he is really good at it. I frequently asked Chris for his homework so I could copy it and he was always unhappy doing that. I caught some students last term copying homework and they got zeros. When I caught them doing this I wasn’t angry. Instead I felt sympathy for them because of my own experience with cheating. I hope they can learn the same lesson that I did. Things are cool between Chris and me now. He is still one of the coolest people that I have ever had as a friend.

Between sophomore and junior year I worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. My position was as a co-op working for the bridge inspection crew. I hated this job and my boss. Everyone I worked with appeared to hate their job and their boss. I did make a lot of money though so I bought a flat screen TV. I decided not to return to that co-op.

Junior year I lived with Chris and Pete, but we continued to drift apart and I blame it on me. Although I wished this had never happened I can see why it was necessary. I was spending a lot more time at Cornerstone getting to know everyone there and a lot less with the friends that I had held onto since freshman year. I started to attend cornerstone events whatever they were. I didn’t care if they sounded fun or if my friends were going to be there. I went to a lot of volunteering opportunity and also all you can eat prayer (all night prayer was the real name for it but I like calling it all you can eat because there were a ton of snacks there so you could indulge in that too). I saw and admired this in my friend Dan aka Fish and decided to emulate it. Every event that I went to I could always tell myself that Dan will be there. Also at this time God brought into my life the best friend I have ever had JB aka Josh. JB is not cool. He is not attractive. He is very weird and childish a lot of the time. He is only the most loving and humble person that I have ever met. Oh yeah and he is black. I can imagine now how difficult it must be to be one of three or four black people in a crowd, but JB did it and changed my life because he did. There are a few reasons as to why JB became my best friend. JB and I have been perpetually single. We may date a little, but there has not been anything that you could possibly consider a relationship. We went to the same bible study for a long time and share 90% of our friends because of this. Lastly I see who I want to be in JB.

Second semester of junior year I started a new co-op at Bunting Graphics Inc. I was working as a project manager of sorts. They never gave me any real responsibility. I hated this job although my boss was alright. Everyone I worked with appeared to hate their job and their boss. While working here I went on a mission’s trip to the Naomi house orphanage in Navajo Nation Arizona during spring break. I went with a lot of people that I knew but didn’t hang out with. I don’t think I would have done this the year before, but now that it no longer mattered to me who was going. It did still matter if these people liked me though so that was my main focus of the trip. I succeeded. It didn’t really matter to me how much I could help out there even though that was really the reason I went there. I have been told many times that an experience is going to change your life, but never actually experienced that. The Naomi trip did not change my life. All it really did was showed me more people that I desperately wanted to be like. Rob aka Ham Loaf was the guy I admired most. I knew Rob from before, but we hardly knew each other. I would consider Rob to be the most genuine person I’ve ever met. Rob is married now to Chelsea who also went on the trip and lived in the apartment above mine at the time. I missed their wedding because I moved to Africa the month before. Another guy I became friends with is Andy aka dad. Andy and I have a very similar sense of humor so we hit it off rather quickly even though he is a huge West Virginia fan. He also was one of the Cornerstone leaders.

After I finished working at Bunting Graphics Inc. I went back to school for an entire calendar year. This wasn’t my plan. I wanted to find another co-op and continue trying to make civil engineering work out. Any civil engineering job is a good one right so if this is the case then in order to be successful I needed to continue down this path. I had hated both co-ops that I had had so far and neither of them wanted me back either. The co-op office decided that they weren’t going to help me find a new co-op. On the same night we had bible study. I was off during bible study and it must have been obvious because at the end of the night Andy started asking me what was wrong. We talked for a long time about how I felt like a failure. Andy praised me for my actions on the Naomi trip. This was the life changing experience that I was waiting for. God was speaking to me through Andy. I was like Jacob, wrestling with God for my whole life; serving myself instead of others. Any good that I did was a selfish desire to make myself feel a little happier. Happiness isn’t based on what happens to you it is how you face what happens to you. I thought that money and success would bring me happiness, but the only thing that could make me happy is doing as Jesus says. I needed to die to myself and live for others.

Becoming a Christian can be instantaneous like it was for Paul, but for me it took years. It was a slow painful process where all of my sins had to be revealed to me first. I needed a reason to repent before I could do so.

I went on a trip to Akagera National Park. It was great. I went with a bunch of friends on a safari. While riding on the truck I kept hanging out of the window to get a better look. Once when I was hanging out of the window I got whacked in the ear by a jaggerbush. The thorn on this jaggerbush was probably about an inch long. My ear got really bloody and hurt for a long time. I usually sleep on the same side that I got hit on and that night I could not sleep at all. Luckily the thorn did not stick in my ear because that would be serious. My ear healed completely within two days. I boast in my weakness like Paul did to the Corinthians. I rejoice in my failures. God has removed my thorns and healed my wounds, but I am always finding new ones that I need to ask Him to remove.

I attribute most of my understanding of the gospel to Greg aka The Baron. He was there for me from the first time I went to Cornerstone up until I left for Africa teaching how to be a disciple. Christianity is an education and I got a good one. He just got married as well to Jenna who is one of the coolest girls I have ever met and was probably not supposed to tell me this but she said if I hadn’t moved to Africa they would have wanted me in their wedding. I am happy to let someone else have the opportunity to share that special day with them, but it did hurt to not be able to make it. I just hope that what I said in this blog doesn’t embarrass him in any way because I know that I might have it wrong.

 

Akagera National Park is beautiful.

Everyone who went and the drivers.

Giraffes

Me hanging out the window.

My poor ear.

I’m taking the bull by the horns. It’s a metaphor but it really happened.

I cannot Accept!

Most of the Rwandans that I talk to think I am really rich. They think that all Americans are really rich. They also think that no one is unhappy in America. They desperately want to go there so that they can escape poverty and suffering. They hear about the welfare checks and food that our government offers and they think that everyone gets these things automatically and that no one goes hungry. One of the five English phases that all Rwandans know is “Give me money”. They know to say this to abazungu (anyone who isn’t African) and I hear it on many days. I also get asked a lot if I can take someone with me to America when I return. By American standards I am not rich, but even a fairly poor American is rich compared to a Rwandan. The story I am about to tell is one I have been telling recently to people to justify why my life in Rwanda has been easier than when I was in America. I’m definitely not saying that my life has been hard or bad because it has been good. I have had every opportunity available to me to succeed living in the upper middle class in an affluent neighborhood. Last year I got my taste of the real world that you hear about all the time while you are in school and honestly I am not in a rush to get back to it.
Last year I was a poor American. I would just call it two year except that I escaped to Africa for the last part of the second. I was lucky that my mother took it upon herself to continue to feed me even though I wasn’t living at home, but other than that I had a very hard time. This started when I returned from a vacation to Hawaii and found 90% of what I had in my apartment had been stolen. All that the thieves left were my surround sound system because it was too much work to take probably and my golf clubs that were hidden in the basement. My best friend Eric, aka E row, lived really close to me so right after leaving my luggage at my place I went and told him about it. I couldn’t be there. I had just gone from a lavish family vacation where we were blowing all of the mileage and hotel points my dad had built up to being as upset and pissed off as I have ever been. After that I got in Eric’s car and he drove us to a bible study and I remember really well the joke that he made, which turned into a trick because I went along with it, he actually had people believing that my bed was taken. The next week I was scammed into buying a sound system that was supposed to cost 1800 for 250 dollars but was really worth about 100. So right after I lost most of the things that I had spent my money on I wasted more with the idea that I could get them back (I was hoping to sell the sound system on the internet to make some kind of profit). I soon after applied to the Peace Corps and when I realized how selfish I was and how prideful I was of the things I had. But I was by no means done learning this lesson.
After graduating from college I got a job working as an independent contractor for Dan. I liked working for Dan although I did hate roofing, but that was only because it was hard work. This lasted for three weeks until Dan dropped a downspout that sliced into my thumb. This is when I found out for real that my health insurance was gone and how much I use my thumb because it was three weeks before it healed (independent contractors do not get insurance provided for them or work man’s compensation). After returning to work I told Dan that I no longer had insurance so he fired me. The money that I made working for Dan held me off from July till September when I found a job working for another contractor Rich who didn’t care that I didn’t have insurance. I worked on and off for him for about six weeks. He told me the story of when he was growing up which puts this one to shame. At the same time I had met someone who told me that they would hire me to tutor math at a high school not too far from my apartment. All that I had to do was receive child abuse clearance. I applied for this clearance in September and waited until the end of December before it came. So I started that job in early January 2010.
I felt like such a loser when I couldn’t pay the rent because my tutoring job didn’t pay me for two and a half months. It was just as bad that I couldn’t pay my roommates for the gas, electricity or cable. I remember when my bank account hit zero was when I was paying for my vaccinations to get medically cleared to join the Peace Corps. I went into the bathroom of the clinic and cried. Then I walked to the office of my friend Greg and prayed and cried some more. My life was so filled with uncertainty. I was counting on the Peace Corps to accept me, but everything they sent me just made me more uncertain that I would ever get my invitation. The following Sunday I went to a different church than I usually go to for service, but I did attend Bible study there, because I was volunteering there after the service with my bible study to give away lunch to the homeless. I was sitting in the pew with about 27 dollars in my pocket and negative two on my credit card and 25000 in loan debt and no income to speak about. And I felt God speak to me. He told me to put the money in my pocket into the offering. I then convinced myself that I shouldn’t do that though so God told me to go home to my parents’ house and break my piggy bank that I had completely forgotten about. My mom had mentioned this piggy bank to me on one of our grocery shopping trips but I blew her off partly because I didn’t want to count it or pay to have someone else count it for me. I finally got over my pride and counted it. There was nearly 600 dollars in it that I had been collecting since I was in elementary school so I could settle at least most of my debt with my friends all in quarters, nickels and dimes. Once I was paid I didn’t just sit on it either like I had done for all of the other jobs I have ever had. I tithed immediately because I felt bad that I hadn’t given when God told me to. I also called up friends that I hadn’t seen in a while to get lunch with them and tell them I had gotten my Peace Corps invitation.
The next thing I knew I had gotten a job working for the census, which paid well. I only worked for them for seven weeks but that was enough for me to ride on until I left for Rwanda.
I was living in fear and I hated it. I imagine that this is a lot like what Rwandans go through. I had a lot of people who bailed me out of my misery by either taking my word that I would pay them back or by giving me handouts out of the goodness of their heart. These handouts include the time amazing friends who I lived with or hung out with, and of course my family continuing to buy me the food I wanted. And one thing that I remember specifically was when Greg took me to the AFC championship game between the Steelers and Ravens, which was followed by the Steelers winning the Superbowl. That happened the weekend after I bought the junk stereo system. I had a conversation with Magnum who was my roommates through all of this right before leaving for Rwanda. He said to me that he knew how hard this time was for me, but he hoped that I would remember all of the fun we had together, and while I was unemployed he could always count on me to be home to hang out or talk to. He more than anyone else except maybe me, noticed a change in my behavior and Maturity. During this time was when I realized for the first time what Jesus meant by you cannot serve two masters and to not worry about tomorrow. This is why I think that I like it when Rwandans say be patient to each other. I know that God put me through this period of suffering so that I could become more of the person he wants me to be. Difficult periods are parts of life and all we can is be patient because for everything there is a season.
For the Rwandans who tell me that I am rich I give them the facts. I try to be completely transparent about it. I tell them that I have 20000 dollars in debt (my parents paid for some of it but that is only because they had told me they would and I was using their word as leverage for things like getting them to agree to the Peace Corps that they would take care of my loans while I was serving and cosigning a lease for me which they never did anyways and another one of my roommates had to sign in my place. I am not bitter about these things and I am grateful that they paid for so much of my college tuition. I have forgiven them for any and every way they have ever hurt me. I do love my parents. I know that I am just another prodigal son anyways). I tell them my monthly salary here. (I don’t usually tell the students this though). It is a lot less than what they all think I am making. A student at the school thought I was making 40000 dollars a month. I told him my actual salary and his response was “I cannot accept!” By this response I can tell that I am not rich by Rwandan standards either, but I am not living in poverty either. I have also told people that my life was harder in America than it is here in Rwanda and I get the same response. I respond to that with “Have you been there, how do you know?” but that doesn’t really change their minds. This last statement still might be difficult to agree with if you know both Rwanda and America, but I have a different perspective of both than most do I think.


This is me with my teaching staff on our school picnic out to Gisenyi. This picture was taken in Musanze though





Gisenyi is right on the Lake Kivu. Notice how everyone is looking at me.





The view of a mist filled valley from Byumba.












Taking the water buffalo by the horns. It’s a metaphor but it really happened. I would love to get a picture of me doing this for real but I haven’t worked up the courage/been stupid enough to go through with it yet.

Writing and Giving Exams Continued…

Things turned around completely on Tuesday. I had to monitor some other teachers’ exams so that pretty much meant no stress for me. While doing this I had the chance to grade my own.

When I arrived in the morning I saw the secretary laying out the tests to be given first, so I told her I wanted to see my English exam today before the exam is given tomorrow. She can’t understand English so we cannot communicate very well so she went and found the headmaster to talk to me. He tried to tell me to just wait till tomorrow, but I explained to him that I wanted to correct any mistakes in the test before the test so I may be better prepared than I was for my Math exam. Right after I said this, another teacher who was listening in chimed in with “We have a problem of economics here, and…” This same teacher kept telling me this the day before and finds himself to be very funny. I didn’t want to hear this again because I still hadn’t calmed down completely from the day before I guess so I blew up at him. “I know I that the school can’t afford it. I was told this twenty times yesterday. I just want to see what the secretary typed so I can correct any mistakes before we give it tomorrow.” He apologized after that. Then the headmaster said that I should be able to see it before I left today. This made me happy, but not as much as what happened next.

During the first exam the headmaster came and talked to me. He had the English exam that I had made with him as well as a calculation that he had done. He found that the cost of photocopying my exam was cheaper than he thought it would be and decided that was what they would do. My exam had been altered a little so it did have a couple of mistakes I had to fix as well as a mistake that I found I had made. I just needed to meet up with the secretary and use her computer to fix these problems.

After lunch I was ready to make this happen. I walked up her office and she wasn’t there. It was still lunch time so I went to the teachers’ room and worked on correcting exams. I waited an hour and went back up there and she still wasn’t there. I know that professionalism is a foreign concept for a lot of people here so I really shouldn’t expect her to be in her office as soon as lunch is over. I waited another hour and returned and she still wasn’t there, so I called the headmaster and asked him where she was and he told me he would call her. After that I returned to the teachers’ room and told the others who were there that I needed her and they suggested I go to her house. I didn’t know where she lived, but everyone else did so it wasn’t too hard to find. I started knocking on her door and I had to wait for about five minutes before she answered it. I could hear inside so I knocked more than once, this made me think of when I worked for the census, I would have waited there knocking as long as it took to get her to respond. She finally came out and she rubbed her eyes like she just woke up. She knew exactly what I wanted I didn’t even have to say anything. We went to her office and I made the corrections and left the test with her like the headmaster instructed me to do.

The next day my English exam was administrated without any problems. If the headmaster was trying to redeem himself to me, he did and more. Going through that bad experience on Monday was all made worthwhile by them taking me seriously on Tuesday.

Writing and Giving Exams

Being a teacher in Rwanda has some very interesting challenges that arise. For most of them I am patient enough to shrug them off, but there is one, which happened today, that I cannot let go as easily. I think that is a fair warning that I am going bitch in this blog a little. Devin pointed out that this was my first bad day.

Things that happen that don’t bother me too much include: the five to six hour meetings where I can’t understand what they are talking about except when the other English teacher translates about 30% of it (which is all the more I think I would want to hear), the students not understanding anything that I am teaching or even saying to them, being told that the next day is a national holiday so we don’t have class by the students and other teachers and then I get a call that day asking why I am not at the school, and other teachers taking my class periods. I feel like I have dealt with all of these in stride and they haven’t bothered me for more than a second. Some of these have given me the opportunity to be flexible, patient or humbled by the situation. I have progressively slowed down my speech to a crawl and taken other teachers classes while they take mine.

The one thing that is hard for me to accept as just part of Rwanda is how I was deceived today. Deceived might not be the right word, but they weren’t honest with me. Writing exams here means the teachers handwrite on a piece of paper that is given to the secretary to be typed. The secretary uses an old-fashioned type writer that she bangs away on at a rate of ten words per minute. They then take that paper and use an old fashioned printing press of some kind that I haven’t seen yet and make copies.

I asked the other teachers and the master of discipline if it would be ok for me to write my exams on my computer and then I could give them that. They said that would be fine so that’s what I did. For the math exam I typed it in Microsoft word, and if you have ever used the equation tool you know how much of a pain it is and you will understand why it took me six hours to write it. When I was writing that I was wishing I had my old computer that had Mathcad. I have also got to tell you that after spending six hours trying to make this exam look as much as possible like the national exam I was pretty proud of it. I was proud of it because I really felt like I was giving these students solid practice for the exam, not only in the content but also in the design and feel of the test as well as show the other teachers what a test made by an American looks like. For me pride is so easy to develop and hard to recognize. I know that this pride that I acquired is the reason that it hurt so much when I wronged.

Upon finishing both of the tests last Tuesday I transferred them onto the secretary’s computer and printed out copies of them. She told me that she would go to the village center where they have a photocopier and make enough copies for the students. At this point I felt like there was nothing to worry about. How could anything go wrong?

This brings me to the day of the test, today, six days after giving the secretary my exam. I show up at 20 minutes before the test and start grading something that I had left undone from the week before. When the other teachers start to arrive they all are looking at the tests sitting out on a table across the room. I get up and walk over there because I want to see how mine turned out. At first I cannot find any and I am getting worried until I realize that what I am looking at is my test. The secretary rewrote my test on the typewriter with about a hundred mistakes. I was confused and angry. What happened to my beautiful test I had worked so hard on? I started asking everyone what happened and why was my test changed. I didn’t have time to fix these mistakes because the exam was in five minutes. I found the secretary and asked her why she did this and she passed the blame to the headmaster. I called him and asked him why he had the secretary do this. He told me how it was too expensive to print enough copies for the students and then he told me how the secretary was not trained in writing math exams, which I assumed to begin with and is why I typed it myself. I told him the reason that I was upset was because no one told me about the change in plans. I personally find it hard to believe they can’t find enough money in their budget to make test copies. The students pay a lot to come here comparatively so I understand when they say they cannot afford accounting software or a projector, but I don’t when they can’t make 80 copies of my four page exam.

Next I had to go through the entire test and correct the mistakes the secretary made. Then I needed to go to every classroom and write the corrections on the board. Thankfully the headmaster helped me with this so I only had to do this six times instead of twelve. He must have sympathized with me or maybe he was taking responsibility for the mistakes. After finishing this task with a cramped wrist and a sore neck I walked over to where the headmaster was standing next to the other math teacher who also helped me to correct the mistakes and the headmaster reiterated how the secretary isn’t qualified to write math exams. I responded with saying that I want to see my English exam before the day of. He said yes to that, but I doubt that I will a little. He never apologized to me, but you don’t have to when you are the authority.

I do like the headmaster and until today I haven’t had any reason to be upset with him. I know that this sort of thing isn’t unheard of back in America and this definitely isn’t the worst thing a boss has done to me neither is it impossible or even unlikely that I would do the same thing to someone else. Writing this blog post has calmed me down enough to start grading I guess. I don’t really like doing that either though. I hope my English exam goes better. I don’t think it could be much worse.

What Kind of Christian are you?

The church in Rwanda that I have attended most is the Pentecostal church. In training my host family was Pentecostal and in Mulindi the Pentecostal church is closest to my house, other teachers I work with go there and I really enjoy he songs and watching them dance. Also when I go to church I get time to think and I take a notebook with me to write it down.

When I tell people I am a Christian, Rwandan or American, a lot of people ask the same question. What kind? I hate this question. I realize that they don’t mean anything offensive by it though. The Rwandans, I feel, just want to find something in common with me. But the imagery that is associated with Christianity is too strong not to automatically group them into a stereotype.

My church at home is called Northway Christian Community. I guess one would group it into the non-denominational category. If I were to respond to that question with nondenominational the image that comes to mind for me is of rebellion. The people who go that kind of church must not be able to fit in at any other church so they gotta start their own. Jesus wants us to rebel the flesh not the church. Northway is also a mega church, and I went to branch campus where show a recording from the night before. So you can picture me in a crowd of people watching church on a projector screen, and where it was filmed 2000+ people are watching it live. They do still have a live worship and a resident pastor though. I really like it there.

All I care about is being the kind of Christian that is in the New Testament. And when I read what Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, and John say about being a Christian all of the divisions of the Church seem so insignificant.

I am not Pentecostal. Even though I was raised full gospel, I don’t think that I will ever be comfortable praying in tongues or even hearing it even. When they do it here I can’t even really tell that they are doing so because it could just be Kinyarwanda, I don’t know.

I have also been to the Catholic Church on the top of the mountain, but I am not Catholic. I know that the Catholic Church does many great things and I have known Catholics who are a lot better Christians than I am, but Catholicism is too religious for me with the Vatican and all the saints. Therefore by default I am Protestant.

Of the Christian literature I have read my favorite authors were Anglican and Lutheran, but I have never met anyone who has told me they are either of these. I honestly don’t even know the difference between most denominations and I am not very interested either.

What I am interested in is learning about is Islam. I wish there was a mosque in my village and I could ask the Muslims questions about Islam.

My answer to that question (What kind of Christian are you?) is the same every time. “None of them, I’m just a Christian.” I know that I am not really answering their question, but their question really doesn’t have any thought behind it and they will get all kinds of images in their head depending on my answer not that they don’t already because I told them that I am a Christian. I think the other English teacher at my school said it best when he responded to my response with “It’s all the same God.”

Yesterday was the first of I hope many Bible Studies in Kigali. I led it on Philippians chapter 1. It was great. There weren’t a lot of us and I was the only guy there, but I loved it. I don’t want it to be exclusive so if you are still reading this blog post at this point and you want to come to Kigali once a month to study the Bible let me know by sending me an email at dserwon@gmail.com. The only stipulation is you need to be able to speak English and even though we are all capable of teaching English this is not an invitation to free English lessons. This may be unnecessary to say since it is in English, but it seems like a good idea.

These cranes are the most exotic animals I have seen here so far.

Heinz sent me a box of Ketchup.

The garden we started with the help of the grounds keeper where Devin works looks pretty sweet.

This is a drum I saw on the bus that is made out of an old can of powdered milk and animal skins.