A moto-taxi sunset, a lawyer in a bar, and everything in between

Today on my ride home from work on the back of a motorcycle taxi (moto-taxi, or just moto), I watched behind me as the large, deep orange sun slowly nestled itself behind the endless hills of Kigali. An overwhelming feeling of warmth and contentment and exhilaration sprung up inside me, and I wondered how I could even begin to describe my experience here so far without just simply writing a  book. That's not to say that my week here so far is worthy of a memoir, but there's so much here that is new and exciting to my American eye and humanitarian heart, and I tend to lack conciseness. I also tend to lack patience for the description I feel is due, hence my avoidance thus far of this blog. But I'll try to keep it short so that I can keep myself motivated to come back--though this one may still end up being pretty long since I've got a lot to cover. But I'll try.

So let's take a step back. I got here last Tuesday night, totally exhausted. But I only have 6 and a half weeks here total, so I wanted to start my internship with FHI right away. Wednesday and Thursday I mostly just got oriented with FHI, which I'm more and more impressed with every day. The work they're doing, the attitude and effort they bring to the field, and the completely community-oriented, community-implemented, community capacity-building programs they support. The work environment is just absolutely fabulous. On top of the fact that everyone seems to actually enjoy their job, everyone is incredibly friendly. People will walk past my door and then backtrack to say hello, ask how my day is going, how my weekend was, etc. There's also an office-wide "game", so-to-speak, called (or rather, pronounced) ka-ka-we-te, which I suspect, but don't know, might actually be the word "cacahouette"--French for 'peanut'. The "game" is that everyone's names are written on little pieces of paper and crumpled up, and then you each choose a name. And then for the next month you leave little treats or little notes (like little peanuts?) on that person's desk. And at the end of the month, there's a tea party and everyone's secret person is revealed. It's like Secret Santa in July. I'm told we do it because we're all so busy. What a great idea : )

My office is great. I have my own office with an open window and an open door directly to the outside so the breeze comes in and out all day long. I just hook up my laptop and get to work from 8 in the morning to 5:30 in the evening, minus 45 minutes for lunch and trips back and forth to get tea from the tea tray that is set up every day by the staff. Outside in the compound is pretty beautiful--green and trees and just a lovely little courtyard area and gazebo, despite the fact that we're smack dab in the center of the city. There are three buildings that we're all in, and it looks like a 4th is being built. FHI has expanded its programs immensely, and it seems they're just trying to catch up with their workers.

Every Friday is a half-day. How great is that, right? We get done at 1. So Friday morning I did a little reading and then went off for the rest of the work day with some other FHI staff to observe one of their training sessions. They had community members from various parts of the country in the city for a 2-week training in Peer Education for HIV/AIDS prevention, for referring people to counseling and testing, etc. and training in what they call "Magnet Theater". Basically, magnet theater is a community theater program where role play and theatrical shows are used to engage people in a conversation about HIV/AIDS and prevention. It's really awesome, and I actually learned a lot about facilitating a conversation from them. They really know what they're doing, and it's really, really good work. And everyone was very enthusiastic about what they were learning, which is definitely a good sign. I really hope I will get to see one of these magnet theater performances--perhaps on one of my site visits, which I'll be doing a lot of. (More to come on that soon!)

After work, my colleague Olivier (O-lee-vay) invited me to a meeting for her sister's wedding. In Rwanda when someone is getting married, the bride's family gets together (with the bride) and goes over the budget for all of the wedding festivities and expenses, which include the type of house items that in America you'd typically register for for your wedding shower. Different family members (mostly cousins and siblings in attendance at this meeting) commit to pay for a certain amount, and then they "go to the uncles" to ask them to cover the rest. This happens over a series of meetings. They were meeting right near where I'm living, and Olivier said she wanted to introduce me to some of her cousins so that they could show me around the city, so I went. I couldn't really understand everything that was going on because they were mostly speaking Kinyarwanda (the national language that every Rwandan speaks), but they threw in some English here and there and their body language and facial expressions kept me interested. It was sort of fun to watch, actually. And I'm invited to the "Introduction" towards the end of July, when the families get together and ask questions and settle any disputes and pay the dowry--but the dowry is actually paid by the husband to the wife's family--opposite of any dowry situations I've ever heard of. The wedding won't actually be until the end of August, after I'm gone. But apparently the Introduction is "the fun part".

After the meeting I went out with her cousin, Sonny, who's an editor for one of the pro-government newspapers here (as they are all pro-government). He took me out and introduced me to his friends--some Rwandan, some Western (American, British, etc). One of his friends was a commercial lawyer in the city but had actually spent most of his life in Uganda, and I had a really interesting conversation with him about the Rwandan and American governments and politics in the countries and all sorts of things, really. I met some other Americans doing different work with different non-profits and also got to see a bit more of the city. It was a really fun night.

Saturday I just chilled out and read and continued to recuperate from my jet lag. Sunday morning I went to visit a woman named Domina, who's probably a few years older than me. Another American, whom I haven't actually met but has been very helpful in connecting me to various people in Rwanda, connected me with her. I went to visit her at her home, where she lives with 2 of her sisters in a small 2-room building in a compound with several other families. There was a communal toilet area (the hole-in-the-cement kind) and communal area between the buildings where people hung clothes to dry and cooked over hot-coal stoves and just hung out and listened to music. They had electricity in the house and a radio and Domina and her sisters each had cell phones. Domina even got internet and email on hers. Domina told me their rent cost about $60/month. Domina studied to be a teacher but hasn't found a job yet. She hopes to get a job in immigration next month, and hopefully as a teacher at the beginning of the next school year in January. If you pass your secondary school exams, you can go to university on a government loan, essentially, but you have to start paying back your university fees as soon as you get a job. It's not the picture that typically comes to mind when we think of developing countries or people living on rather small incomes, is it? But I guess that's the point, isn't it? There's just a lot we don't know.

I had porridge and mandazi (a fried sweet bread), just like I had in Kenya last summer, as Domina and I sat on the mattress where she and her sisters sleep in the back room, which besides the mattress and a few suitcases had no other furnishings, and she told me about the history of Rwanda, the education system (which she had studied in her undergraduate degree), and her boyfriend, who's in the military and currently deployed to Sudan. Her father and step-mother and her step-mother's children live in a village a few hours away, but she has some other relatives in the city, whom she and her sisters were living with until they moved here about a week ago so that her sisters would be closer to their secondary school and wouldn't have to pay the taxi (public transportation) fees to and from school every day.

After lunch with Domina and her sisters--ugali (like a moist bread dough) and a vegetable dish of groundnuts and carrots and tomatoes and green tomatoes that was really, really good--I rode a moto-taxi home for the first time. I had been sort of nervous, but it was so simple and the drivers actually drive pretty safe, other than the fact that they cut in between cars in the middle of lanes, but the drivers seem to expect it and there never seem to be any close-calls. I took a nap that afternoon (unintentionally, but I obviously still needed it in my recovering from traveling) and then went out for a few hours to the KBC, where there are restaurants with burgers and a popular coffee shop, with Sonny, my colleague's cousin, and discussed the gacaca court system--the community level justice system that has been used to try the "less heinous" crimes from the genocide. I'll tell more about that soon, as well.

I think that's enough for now. I definitely have more to share--and probably some more interesting stuff to share, but that's at least the groundwork for what I'm experiencing here. Next entry, I'll discuss the language (English? French? Kinywarwanda?), interesting things I've been hearing about the state of this post-genocidal society, some of the really cool things (like kitchen garden training) that I've been seeing FHI doing, and more about my daily life! Also, tomorrow is a national holiday because it's Rwanda's Independence Day! So we'll see what that's like. No work tomorrow--but that's all I know so far. More to come--in briefer anecdotes : )

Love.