Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays everyone!  With Christmas right around the corner I can only imagine the hustle and bustle that's going on whether it's last minute shopping, traveling in treacherous weather conditions, or getting your house ready for loved ones to take over for a bit.

Over here I've been keeping busy myself even if it is in a very different way than I normally would be this time of year.  Once I got back to site after Thanksgiving I started to dive into project implementation.  The big one was kicking off my First 1000 Days project.  I have mentioned previously what the background behind this project is but now let me tell you about the first meeting to kick things off in my villages!
         
Through my Community Health Workers I invited all pregnant women from the 15 villages in my encatchment area to come to the introductory meeting of the program.  Based on the monthly report there were about a total of 50-60 pregnant women at the time.  As usual, this was just a verbal invite not even directly from me so it was a bit up in the air as to how many people would actually show up.  So on the day of the meeting I was prepared and ready to present on the project in as much Kinyarwanda as I could, had a whole agenda made up and wore my favorite Rwandan dress.





That morning there were a couple women who showed up bright and early after our staff meeting and by 9 o'clock I was sitting in our meeting room with only 6 women and my counterpart was keeping himself busy with Sector Official visits and patients.  There I was just sitting in silence with these women who couldn't understand me, since I already introduced myself exhausting my best Kinyarwanda, in a bit of a panic.  Luckily one of the Community Health Workers showed up and after a short conversation helped me get the women signed in and then she was calling the other CHWs.  Within a half hour the other CHWs show up with more women from their villages! As I saw them start to show up I could finally start to breath again and relax a bit.  In the end we had 35 women show up wich was so exciting to me. Seeing the mobilization from the CHWs made me so happy to be working with this group of people and it was a moment of reassurance that I get to work with a great group of volunteers from this country to make my programs successful.

All of the Pregnant women and the CHWs!

This was their voting process, lining up behind the candidates.

This meeting was just an introductory meeting.  We elected a committee to lead the group and gave an overview of what is to come.  I'm excited to say that our next meeting will be learning how and actually building a permagarden at my health center with the help of one of our amazing Peace Corps Rwanda staff members Modeste!  I will tell you all about this after we finish (I have to keep you coming back and reading somehow...) but basically it is type of small home garden that is able to be functional throughout both dry and rainy seasons providing food for the home everyday of the year.

Our fully formed Leadership Committee

I also am currently in the grant writing stage of my WASH project along with my fellow WASH volunteers.  I actually am headed to a meeting at the Ministry of Health today to discuss the overall implementation of the project.  Even though it isn't quite time to implement it into the villages yet there is still a lot of work happening behind the scenes right now.

Finally, we had our first HIV committee meeting here at Peace Corps this past week. We have an amazing group of volunteers on this committee and I'm excited for the project ideas we have coming up!

Flash back to my big family (we need an updated picture...)

Even though I have been working hard on getting projects started I haven't completely forgotten it is the holidays.  This week I took advantage of some time I had in between meetings in Kigali to do some visiting in the Eastern part of the country.  First, I went and visited my host family from training.  I didn't really realize how much I missed them until I got there.  It was like nothing had changed except that they kept calling me by the name of the most recent Education volunteer, but I'm kind of used to that coming from a big family back home anyway.

I also visited a fellow volunteer in the North Eastern part of the country.  It was so cool to see a different part of the country.  The East is so much flatter and open than the North.  It felt completely different.  I also could see Uganda from where we were which was really cool!  We went hiking in search of this allusive hippo that lives near by but unfortunately we didn't get a glimpse but we did see all of this amazing scenery! 

You can technically see Uganda in this picture!

Now, tomorrow I'm headed to lake Kivu to spend Christmas with a group of other volunteers.  Pictures and stories to come!  I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and start to the new year! 

Talk to you soon!