A year (and two-ish months) ago I stepped foot in Rwanda to begin my life and work as an English teaching Peace Corps Volunteer. A year (and two-ish months) later, I feel like I’ve arrived.
I've tried to come up with a dozen different ways to introduce this piece without resorting to cliché. Yet the accuracy of this particular cliché fits so well for how I want to unravel my thoughts about my first year as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’d still like points for trying to avoid it but you’re probably wondering what ‘it’ is so here goes: during my first year as a Peace Corps volunteer, I feel as though I have learned so much more than I have taught. I know, I know. I can hardly keep from rolling my eyes myself. But friends, it’s true. This post delves into a few of the many ways my experience living and working in Rwanda have impacted my life. I would love to detail all the ways in which my presence has had a positive impact on the lives of others but I don’t want to speculate. Only time will tell if and how my work and presence has influenced my community. So, for now, I’ll dive into a few of the numerous ways that Rwanda has changed my life for the better. Here are three skills Rwanda has taught me; skills I never knew I needed.
One: Musing on a Moto
Yoga. Forest Retreats. Coffee. Of the many ways people find to relax and make their minds better conduits for inspiration, the previous three options all sound plausible and pleasant. Oddly enough, much of the inspiration that I’ve garnered over the past year has come during one of my many trips on a motorcycle taxi (known here simply as ‘moto’). If you’ve ridden a motorcycle or scooter (say in the US or Europe), you may picture the freedom and fun of speeding down the road with the wind in your face, the comforting grip of the handlebars, and the undeniable ‘cool’ factor of the whole look; the jacket, the sunglasses, the jeans. You know what I’m talking about. Okay, so riding a moto for a Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) in Rwanda is exactly none of those things. [While paved roads are expanding across the country on a daily basis, PCVs are only permitted to ride motos on unpaved roads for safety reasons.] So…swap a paved road for a dirt one (often up or down a steep hill and riddled with bumps, rocks, craters. Swap the soothing wind for stinging dust during the dry season or flying mud during the rainy season. Swap that comforting handlebar grip for no handle at all (as a passenger) gripping with your thighs, calves, or even ankles while trying to avoid touching the burning hot exhaust pipe. And swap the ‘cool’ factor for dirt-covered pants, a rain jacket that is insulating all your perspiration, and a backpack doing its best to pull you off the back of the bike with its weight. With all that, you ask, how is a moto ride even remotely a good environment to cultivate inspiration?
“How is a moto ride even remotely a good environment to cultivate inspiration? ”
Well, I’ll tell you. For those 30-40 minutes between the main road and my house, the sum total of my responsibilities have been boiled down to maintaining my balance on the back of this motorcycle. I have gradually learned to trust the expertise of my driver and to trust my own body’s ability to maintain equilibrium. I’ve become comfortable with being uncomfortable; my initial frustration and soreness have, over the months, given way to patience and a certain resilience of mind and body. I’ve come to accept that reaching any destination is never an easy process, and every road is riddled with obstacles of some kind. I’ve been gratified with the knowledge that rough as the road may be, others have traveled it before me with success and those coming after me will be observing my attitude along this journey. In many ways, this short trip has become analogous to my entire Peace Corps experience thus far. Somehow, my confidence, familiarity, and even enjoyment of these rides mirror my increasing confidence in my work as a teacher and my life as a community member. Those moto rides are brief periods of time where my mind is uncluttered with the responsibilities of driving or the other distractions of being inside a vehicle and my imagination is allowed to stretch and expand in new and interesting ways. Even so, being far from my home country and in many ways disconnected from my life there, I’ve found that new thoughts and ideas have taken root and grown even from the rockiest of ground.
Two: The Oven Conundrum
As the first volunteer at my site, I moved into a completely empty house and spent the first several months turning it into a home. The first few nights were a little stark cooking with my gas stove on the concrete floor and rummaging around in the dark for ingredients out of my metal trunk. I was eager to try my hand at making the famous "Peace Corps Oven” —essentially a giant cooking pot with a lid heated by a wood or charcoal fire or, in my case, a gas stove. I found a banana bread recipe in a little cookbook gifted to me by my cousin. The first task was to assemble the recipe with ingredients that I had available. Swap butter for margarine. Swap granulated sugar for raw sugar. Using a plastic Tupperware container, I assembled the dry ingredients and folded in the wet ingredients finally ending with the mashed banana. The batter looked perfect. But the next hurdle was to actually assemble and properly use the aforementioned PC oven. The sun had already set so under the cloak of darkness I slipped outside and dug up a fair amount of dirt from my back yard tossing it into my base pot. Once I had a couple of inches of dirt, I hauled the pot back inside and considered what to use as the ‘feet’ on the inside. In the end I opted to empty three tomato paste cans, clean them out, and press them into the dirt. So far, so good. Placing a smaller oven lid over the tomato cans to be the oven ‘floor’ I surveyed my work with pleasure. Lifting the entire contraption on to one of the burners on the gas stove, still on the floor, I turned on the gas, switched on the burner, and…nothing. It took another five or six tries before the burner would actually light, all the while I was praying that nothing was about to explode. It didn’t. My obsession with baking prompted me to bring an oven thermometer in one of my bags which usefully informed me when my makeshift oven reached the appropriate temperature. I opted to do muffins since they take half the cooking time as bread and I was impatient to see the results. A little over twenty minutes later, beautifully baked banana muffins emerged from the oven. I was stoked! Lifting them out of the muffin pan, however, I discovered that all the bottoms were completely burnt.
“I discovered that all the bottoms were completely burnt.”
After two more rounds of muffins, the burning issue was still occurring. I chalked it up to this being my first time using the oven, cut off the bottom of the muffins, and still enjoyed eating them and sharing them with my landlady’s family. Over this past year, I have baked dozens of times. From this unusual baking apparatus has emerged cakes, artisan bread, quick breads, muffins, brownies, pizzas, cookies, and biscuits. Sharing these various baked goods with neighbors, friends, and colleagues, I’m usually met with surprise and joy and sometimes confusion about how sweet they are relative to almost every other food in the typical Rwandan diet. These baking experiences relate so easily to my life in a new place with unfamiliar surroundings and a lack of surety in completing the daily tasks which came some naturally to me in my home country. I’ve found it necessary on a daily basis to create teaching materials out of whatever is available in my environment. I’ve felt the joy and subsequent disappointment of interactions which I thought went well only to walk away and suddenly realize I made a linguistic error. But ultimately, the tools with which I’m equipped and the new ones I’m acquiring on a daily basis have supported me on this journey. In circumstances and environments and with materials totally new to me, I’ve been able to build relationships, teach students, and share in the lives of the people in my community. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. So. many. mistakes. But walking out the door with a daily commitment to start afresh means my results are a little better every time.
Three: Kinyarwanda
There’s a beautiful quote by Nelson Mandela that has stuck with me since the moment I first encountered it. He said [paraphrasing] that when you speak to someone in a language they understand, that message goes to their head but when you speak to someone in their language, you communicate with their heart. For this and so many other reasons, I’ve always been drawn to foreign languages. I joke now that I speak approximately 2.5 languages with my English, French, and gradual acquisition of Rwanda’s native language, Kinyarwanda. There’s something so powerful about opening up a whole world of communication with millions of people through learning their language. But, goodness, it is not easy. In fact, it is incredibly challenging. Thankfully, Peace Corps gives volunteers three months of rigorous language training prior to us moving to our work sites but there’s only so much you can learn in 90 days when you’re literally starting from ‘Muraho’ (hello). The group of people in the United States that I sympathize with (even more so than I did before) are immigrants and refugees who move to a new country with little prior knowledge of the most widely spoken language. They are then given 90 days of support (in the case of refugees) after which they are on their own to figure out an entirely new life conducted in a foreign language with often unsympathetic listeners. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I have language experts on WhatsApp that answer questions quickly and the support of an entire staff on a daily basis. However, I can relate to communicating with largely unsympathetic listeners. That probably sounds harsh, but in the world of language learning, it just refers to a listener who isn’t accustomed to communicating with someone who doesn’t speak their language fluently. As a black volunteer, the confusion is escalated when my listener tries to switch to Swahili assuming that I must just speak some other Bantu language. Sorry to disappoint, folks. With continuous exposure and striving to maintain a willingness to laugh at my own mistakes I’ve gradually made strides and feel more confident about communicating with anyone. Kinyarwanda is such a beautiful and fascinating language how it folds syllables together into a single “word” that actually represents what, in English, would be an entire sentence.
“Kinyarwanda is such a beautiful and fascinating language how it folds syllables together into a single “word” that actually represents what, in English, would be an entire sentence. ”
Just the other day one of my students (who is also my neighbour) asked me a question in Kinyarwanda. She spoke so quickly and it sounded like a single word but I employed all my brainpower to decipher the meaning. We were discussing a certain book and she asked: uzankisangire? Looks like one word, right? Let me break it down for you the way my brain processed it in that moment:
U - This is second-person pronoun “you”
Za - This is an infix which indicates the future tense
N - This is a first-person infix indicating “me”
Ki - This is a direct object infix for nouns like “igitabo” ( “book”) which was the noun in question
Sangir - This is a verb stem from the verb “gusangira” which means “to share”
e - This is a suffix that represents the conditional or ‘subjunctive’ tense; something that isn’t certain
So, in essence, she asked: Would you be willing to share this book with me later? Ideally, the meaning would have come to me instantly as well as the appropriate response but a year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to understand it at all and today, I can. Friends, I call that progress.
Rwanda is a wonderful country in which to be a Peace Corps volunteer. While my first year here has been marked by daily challenges, each challenge has created an opportunity for personal growth. I am deeply thankful for some of the unusual lesson I’ve learned in this first year and how they have shaped me as a human being and a global citizen. I can only imagine how much more is in store for year two.