“This Is Africa”: My Site Visit

As part of Pre-Service Training in the Peace Corps, typically every trainee goes to visit his or her site. If you aren’t the first group (like us), you go with the Peace Corps volunteer that had the post before you and they introduce you to the ropes at your new site. For us, however, we were given a counterpart who was to give us our first introduction to the places we will soon call home.

My site is in a tiny village between Kigali and Butare, although it is a completely different universe from either city. This little village is home to a bank, a prison, several schools and a health center that serves a population of over 46,000 people. There are no electrical lines to the village and there is a significant water shortage in the region, so both electricity and water are going to be conveniences I will need to learn to do without over the next two years. While there, my job will entail working with Twubakane (Kinyarwanda for “let’s build together”), which is an organization formed with the Government of Rwanda, USAID, and other NGOs and health care providers, and the health center to do community outreach and education on a variety of subjects: hygiene, nutrition, sanitation, vaccinations, family planning, pre and post-natal care, HIV/AIDS, insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) for malaria, etc.

The story that bests illustrates my time at site begins in the home of the family with whom I was staying as they don’t yet have a house for me in the village. My host dad invited over a couple of his friends who spoke both English and French to help me translate my job description since it was written in French. When we began translating, the lights were still on thanks to the solar panels on the top of their house that provide a limited amount of electricity each day. However, a couple minutes in, the lights went out and all parties involved whipped out flashlights and leaned in to continue working. As I sat there giggling at the immense energy involved in this one task- six adults huddled around a sheet of paper in the dark, both illuminating and translating- one of the guys remarked “this is Africa.” This IS Africa, and as a result everything I do will take longer and be more difficult than I ever anticipated BUT, if I can gain the support and trust of my community, all those goals outlined in my job description just might be possible.