a month in already...

It’s been hard to update the last few weeks because I’m now at my site in Musanze. The internet is less reliable here and I’ve been keeping busy enough that it’s hard to take the time to sit around and wait for the internet to decide to work for me. My school is supposed to have wireless, but the students aren’t here yet, so the power is currently off in the computer lab.

My school, St. Vincent’s Catholic secondary girls school, is absolutely beautiful. They really take care of the grounds and the buildings are in great condition. I don’t have a lot of space in my room, but I have fairly new furniture (a wardrobe, a desk, two chairs, and a bed) and a new mattress so that makes up for it. I also have an actual toilet that flushes and running water in my shower (though it’s cold water). I was honestly one of the luckier ones in my group. Some volunteers don’t have running water or electricity at their sites.

Kim and I have recently discovered that we have three cows, two calves, and a bunch of pigs. The two calves have names but they’re Kinyarwanda words so I don’t remember them. One is the word for ‘homesickness’. Sister Florence explained that when the sisters don’t see the cow for a while they miss him and that’s where he got his name. The other is the Kinyarwanda word for white bird.

We just got an electrical outlet put into the room we’re using for a kitchen so we should be able to buy a hotplate and start cooking for ourselves soon. The sisters at our school also run a small resturant and guest house, and they fed us three meals a day for the first week we were here as a welcome. We’re pretty much on our own now. There’s a few hotels to eat at in town, but we’ve been frequenting the cheap buffets more than anything else. A buffet is generally 1000 rwf or about $1.75 without a drink.

There isn’t much to the town of Musanze. It’s comprised of four or five streets with shops for buying clothing, food, and housewares everywhere. There are two open air markets that are pretty nice compared to others that I’ve seen in Rwanda. One is called the Everything Market. This market is the bigger one of the two and is where you can buy clothing, shoes, fabric, and random household items. The smaller market is an agricultural market where you can buy fruit, vegetables, flour, salt, rice, beans, meat, and various other things. I think I’m going to ruin myself for fresh food forever. The fruits and vegetables are so much better than the stuff you can get at the grocery stores back home. You can get great deals too. Yesterday, I bought a bunch of 9 bananas for 200 rwf which is about 30 US cents.

It takes a while to orient yourself to the way things work in the market because there aren’t any manuals or helpful guides. It’s also naturally harder for someone who’s obviously foreign to get a good deal through bargaining, but they tend to respect you more if you at least try to communicate in Kinywarwanda—even if many of the locals do think it’s absolutely hilarious for a ‘white’ person to say ‘good morning’, or ‘how much does this cost?’ in Kinyarwanda. It’s mostly that they’re not expecting it, I guess. A few days ago, two of my worldteach friends and I were in the market buying food and we caused a mini-scene by just being there. The Kinywarwanda word for white people started going around as soon as we started buying things. It seems that once you buy one thing, everyone knows you’re actually there to do business and then it’s a free for all. It was pretty overwhelming, but we left with red onions, tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, enough salt for a small army, a cabbage, and the best tasting pineapple I’ve ever tasted in my life.

School is also not in session right now, so we aquired a small group of boys following us around asking to carry baskets for us. At one point, I yelled “oya!” which means ‘no’ in Kinyarwanda fairly loundly and I think I accidently scared them.

In general, I don’t enjoy having a lot of attention on me, or being the focus of a large group of people I don’t know so I think being in the market has been good practice because having that unwanted attention simply because I’m not a native Rwandan and I can’t easily blend in without practice isn’t going to disappear while I’m here. People are generally friendly here, as long as you initiate conversation, and there haven’t been any people who’ve been openly hostle aside for the odd drunk or town crazy. 

School is starting on Tuesday and I’m still unsure about what I’m teaching and when. The schedule won’t be done until Monday. Being here a month has really taught me to just roll with it though, even moreso than before I came, so I’m not exactly worried. It’s more an annoyance that I can’t plan ahead at this point.