Four months already?

This week I celebrated my four-month anniversary of living in Rwanda.  To mark the occasion I visited the office of Immigration to finally get my visa.  Needless to say, they were not happy that I had waited so long and I got to pay a pretty substantial fine because of it.  There is a long story about me visiting and them not accepting documents, but I won’t bore you with that.  To make it short, I spent my four-month anniversary very angry at Rwanda.

But there has been much good also.  I see that I have not really made a good post since Thanksgiving, so there is quite a bit to update.  To answer all your questions, yes, we did kill the turkey I am pointing at in the Thanksgiving picture, I prepared an entire Thanksgiving feast, and the whole international community I live with loved the American holiday that none of them had ever celebrated.  Chris was out of town for the week so I was the only American to celebrate this American feast, but they loved it and it in turn, made me very happy.

As far as my work is going, well honestly, I’ve been slightly bored.  The school year ended in late October, and since then things have been pretty quiet.  While I am not teaching, the whole pulse of the center beats on the school, and without students, a school is pretty boring.  I am still working, but with not many students to spend time with and many of the farm staff also on vacation, it has been challenging.

Graduation itself was a very bitter-sweet day for me, as all graduations are.  The students that I had grown close to over the past months were now leaving, some of them probably forever.  It was nice to see them, nice to know they remembered me, wanted pictures with me and cared enough to take time from their graduation day to talk to me.  This day was affirming for me, as it reinforced my hopes that I was truly making meaningful relationships with the students here.  We even got invited to a couple graduation parties, unfortunately we could only go to one, which may have been the longest, most boring event of my life!  But regardless, it was a good cultural experience, and the fact that I got invited was a very special gesture.

Because there is no school we had a summer-camp like program called “patronage.”  This is where young children aged about 3-15 came to the center every morning for our program, which included singing, games, dancing, mass and group outings.  I taught a group of kids the words and accompanying hand motions to the song “Yes Lord” in five different languages, so now every time I go outside our center there are hundreds of kids who recognize me and scream “Yes Lord” while giving either a thumbs up or making an “L” with their fingers to accompany they lyrics.

After patronage ended was when life began to get really boring, but luckily Adam, our director from New York, came to visit, breaking up the lull of school vacation.  As soon as Adam left we  were off to Jinja, Uganda to visit some friends who are volunteers with Holy Cross that we met at our training last summer in New York.  Christmas is not yet very popular in Rwanda, so I wanted to go somewhere with some American spirit so we could celebrate Christmas as best we could without snow!

Jinja was great.  Terry, Derrick, Whitney and Joella are all teachers and also bored on break.  But we turned down time from boredom to relaxation, as they live in a house with a front porch, a kitchen and a living room decorated in appropriate Christmas spirit.  We spent the week reading, talking, sleeping and cooking, culminating in a giant Christmas Eve feast followed with a personal (nearly) midnight mass in the living room.  We followed mass with Tom and Jerry’s and readings from the gospels of the Christmas story.  It was almost like home.

We also had some fun in Jinja.  As soon as we got there and had our first Nile Special beer we knew we would visit the brewery which is very near.  It wasn’t quite Anheiser Busch, but it was still a good tour with our new friend, and tour guide, Herbert.

We also decided to bite the bullet and pay for the expensive, touristy rafting trip on the Nile -- it was the Christmas season and all.  This is something I will never regret spending money on, as it was one of the coolest things I’ve done here.  The trip was 30 Kilometers of rafting with multiple series of Class IV and Class V rapids.  I got thrown out of our raft three times, one of them was when the raft flipped completely over.  I only feared for my life once, but luckily my giant life jacket pulled me up from the rapids I had been frantically trapped under for a better part of 20 seconds.

We returned to Kigali with Derrick, who was having his own visa problems in Uganda and had to temporarily leave the country.  Even though Hannah is now gone, our house is getting full.  There are two young men from Belgium who are experienced in agriculture and have come to work on the farm.  We also have a young Belgian woman who was adopted from Rwanda at a yo9ung age and has returned to meet her family (a successful reunion!) and our favorite “community mother,” Rita, who takes care of all of us.  This collage of Belgians has everyone speaking Flemish and has gotten me anxious to start researching my own family Flemish roots (one of the Belgians has the name Hooge in his family, which is similar to some of my origins).  It has also been nice to have a couple extra hands on the farm, especially guys who have studied and worked in agriculture!

To round off the holiday-season post… on New Years Day we went to an East African Community Party held at the National Stadium in Rwanda, featuring some of the top artists from across East Africa.  It was a great time and somehow, even though we purchased regular tickets, we found ourselves in the VIP section standing right in front of the stage!

As I’m reviewing this post it looks like I’ve just been partying all the time, so let me redeem myself by telling you that I still work.  In fact, I have begun to cultivate a new plot of land with the intention of planting a special kind of beet that will be able to sustain the cattle during the dry season when their main source of food, grasses, becomes scarce.  I am also overseeing a construction project for a new shop on the perimeter of our property.  Here I will manage the supply and selling of agricultural products, hoping to earn the center a little extra money.  I am also going to begin helping to teach some of our teachers English.  They will all have to attempt to teach in English this academic year, and for some of them it will be challenging.  I recently helped butcher a hog.  It was interesting, although any hope I ever had of trying blood sausage was dashed after I helped to make it.  I have also become the go to man for soccer refereeing.  Am I qualified to referee soccer?  If you consider playing and refereeing park and rec soccer in DeWitt qualified than yes, but I do not.  Regardless, I’ve taken the role pretty seriously and am even starting to enjoy it.  Its nowhere near the feeling of calling balls and strikes, but its filling some kind of void there.  Last week I had a match where a team from the Congo came to play our team in Rwanda.  I gave two yellow cards, which is something I think baseball needs to adopt.

Oh, and I’m still digging.