Slowly by slowly

Imagine you're in high school, and you're taking some pretty tough classes. At first you were failing, and you almost wanted to drop out entirely, but you've worked really hard and paid attention and you're finally managing to do well. It feels good; you've earned these successes.

Then suddenly, by no fault of your own, you are informed that effective immediately you are going to have to repeat kindergarten.

This is kind of how I feel right now.

I am still really excited to be in Rwanda, but I guess the newness of it has worn off a bit and I'm realizing that it's not so fun to be a trainee all over again. In Mauritania, I had worked so hard -- to know how to travel from point A to point B, to negotiate the market, and especially to learn to speak Pulaar. I really prided myself on being able to shock locals by being perhaps the first white person they'd ever heard speaking their language. Now I'm back to square one. I go into a little corner store and greet the shopkeeper in Kinyarwanda, but when he lights up and replies with further questions, I can only stammer that I don't understand. I hate that.

This pre-service training (PST) is really different from my last experience. (I feel like a broken record comparing the two all the time, but it's impossible not to.) Just one week after I got to Mauritania, I was dropped off in a dusty village of 50 people with only three other trainees. We had no electricity or running water. I was given a room with a host family who spoke only Pulaar. (At the time I arrived to their home, all I could say was "How are you?" -- and smile. A lot of smiling.) For the 10 weeks of training and my following year of service, I slept on the ground on a foam pad. From day 1 I was "eating with my right" -- hand, that is, sitting on the floor around a communal bowl -- and "wiping with my left," in an open-air latrine. I had language class for eight hours a day, sitting outside on the sand in the shade of a grass hut. And it was all wildly exotic, sure, but it wasn't so difficult. Being with a family really forced me to learn intimately all about the culture and language.

But Peace Corps Rwanda is only 10 months old, and Rwandans are evidently more private than Mauritanians, so we were not able to live with host families for this training. Instead, all the trainees and Rwandan facilitators are split between four houses in the same community. We have electricity and tiled floors and Western toilets and toilet paper and brand new bunk beds. Someone comes to clean our house and do our laundry. We eat our meals together, all the trainees and staff, and we have tables and chairs and silverware and individual place settings (such foreign ideas, I know!). All our classes take place in a central location, so essentially I am just with 34 other Americans all day every day. It feels like I live in a college dorm. Clearly, this is not very conducive to foreign language immersion.

So, to borrow a phrase from Rwandan English, "slowly by slowly" I am learning some Kinyarwanda, frustrating as it may be. I am very eager to get my final site placement, but I probably will not find out about that for several more weeks. Since we are the first group of TEFL PCVs, our future sites are new posts, and they have not all been selected yet. This Wednesday through Friday I will be visiting a PCV currently serving in the Health sector, to experience a sampling of life there. It's pretty likely that I won't get to see my own site until the moment I'm dropped off there permanently. So it goes serving in a new Peace Corps country, I guess.

Apologies for the complaining! I am having some good times, I promise. For one thing, the fruit here is absolutely amazing. It's safe to say tree tomatoes are a new obsession, and I'm also enjoying passionfruit and the best bananas and pineapple I've ever tasted.

And in other news, this weekend we had a great Halloween party that I helped to plan. It was the first such celebration for most of our Rwandan staff members, so it was amusing to try to explain to them all the little Halloween traditions we have in America. "You dress in clothing to look like someone different. And you go to houses of people you don't know and ask for candy, and they have to give it to you. And you buy pumpkins and cut them into faces or shapes, and you light candles inside of them" -- how bizarre, honestly.

Somewhat for the occasion of Halloween, but really just for kicks: fellow PCV Megan and I had shaved our heads together last year, so we went the opposite route this time and got long extensions braided into our hair. Synthetic hair is really cheap in the markets here (like just over a dollar a pack) and comes in every color and texture you could dream of. I opted for mid-length brown with magenta tips. The braiding took about four hours and cost me 3000 Rwandan francs, about 6 bucks. Pretty great, I think. It's fun to have long hair again, for a time!

My subsequent "costume" wasn't too terribly original, but the Rwandans enjoyed it... ;)