Site...Finally

My arrival at site has been a little more eventful than most because I ended up switching sites halfway through the first week at site. As I mentioned earlier, my site was supposed to be a tiny little umudugudu not that far from Kigali and right off the main paved road that connects Kigali and Butare. I met many wonderful people during my time there, including my host family and some of the health center staff, but for programmatic reasons the Peace Corps Rwanda staff decided to move me to the west of Rwanda.

The two sites are about as different as possible- my first site was close to Kigali, but without running water or electricity. My new site, located near Cyangugu and the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, is highly remote (in fact, the most remote Peace Corps site in Rwanda) but has both electricity and running water. While none of Rwanda is “flat”, we are truly in the mountains here, which provides for some spectacular views, including the vast tea fields along the dirt road that leads to our site. Our house is located at the very top of one such mountain and as we walk down the first hill every morning, I always get this strange sensation that the villagers must see us as the white people descending from their big house on the top of the hill like gods descending from Mount Olympus (with the appropriate amount of distain attached, of course.) To get to the health center, we have to walk by the primary school, which means that at the end of the day we often end up with a group of children tagging along behind us, and we always make sure to stop and say goodbye at the bottom of the hill. I will truly feel at home here once I can walk up that hill without getting winded!

I say “we” ” because I am living with another Peace Corps volunteer in this mansion on the top of a hill. Typically this is not acceptable in the Peace Corps- volunteers can’t live together unless they are a married couple, but it is my understanding that this site was once supposed to be for a couple and Peace Corps Rwanda decided it was remote enough that it made more sense for two volunteers to live here together. So when I pulled up after my brief stint at my first site my roommate had already been here for half a week. In fact, we have been playing a weird game of musical sites because the girl that was supposed to be her roommate was moved to a site out east when one of our two couples went home. My roommate and I are strangely similar- she is a vegetarian too, is an MI getting her MPH, and she and I share the same birthday. Crazy, right? Our main focus at the moment is finding a wait to create separate health jobs in a small community. We tried to arrange a meeting to create two separate job descriptions, but they ended up simply telling us to split a list of health topics. As a result, I am responsible for HIV and AIDS, malaria, and nutrition. Easy task.

Thus far, we have been conducting a community needs assessment (a fancy title for getting to know the people around us and determining the biggest health concerns) and teaching English to the staff at the health center. They learn quickly- during yesterday’s lesson (time) I taught them the vocab for early, late, and on time, so when one of the staff walked in late, they are made sure to tell him he was late. We fill out our days with trips to the market and cooking our own food (in Rwanda, it is typical for each house to have a cook.) Strangely, we seem to be getting worse at bargaining, though with avocados for the equivalent of about ten cents how can one complain?