Patience is a Virtue

Hello everyone!  I am so sorry for the length between this post and my last.  That was over a month ago I believe.  All I can say is that in some ways realizing it’s been about a month feels about right but there are definitely days it feels like it’s been way to short of a time to be February already.  On the 4^th of this month it will have been 8 months since I arrived in Rwanda and on the 18^th it will be 6 months since being an official volunteer.  Time really flies by but even with time seeming to fly by patience is something I’ve been truly learning throughout most of this experience and recently I’ve found that, even though it’s (most of the time) really difficult for me to just go with the flow of things it pays off in the end.

In the past month or so and especially these past two weeks I’ve finally felt like a wall has been falling down from between myself and the greater community around me.  It generally takes me a bit of time to be able to open up to people and here in Rwanda it can sometimes be hard to get to know people as well so putting us two together has been a bit of a challenge.  But recently I’ve been playing soccer almost every day after work with the kids who live nearby, my counterpart at work has decided that 2016 will be the year I learn Kinyarwanda so everyone at the health center is trying to speak with me in Kinyarwanda more which has already made me feel a lot more included and integrated (as we like to say in PC). Finally, I’ve sort of found my niche in the community, the boutiques I always go to, people know me by name in the community for the most part, and things are starting to really feel just like everyday life rather than completely foreign and intimidating.  It’s an interesting and great feeling.  That’s just an insight into the less tangible part of the experience.

  In terms of work and PC life a lot has actually been going on over here.  I could go on for a long time about everything that I’ve been doing this past month or so but that would probably turn out to be way too long of a post so I’ll give you the highlights!

Since my last post…

·         I spent Christmas at Lake Kivu (the biggest lake in Rwanda) with an amazing group of friends.

o   Our hostel ended up being under renovation giving us the whole place to ourselves.  That’s what we get for trying to save money… but it was great it was our very own “home base”.

o   I never thought lounging at the lake and eating at super cute cafes was going to be part of my 2 year Peace Corps experience… but apparently it is!

o   I hope you can tell from the pictures how great this Christmas was! And it was even better going and picking up my Christmas care packages from the post office a couple weeks later and getting to have a second Christmas!

·         I wrote a grant for a hygiene and sanitation project.

o   I think I’ve mentioned this before but along with 15 other volunteers I am working on a project called WASH.  This project consists of the creation of hygiene clubs in the villages.  The purpose is to create a means of education around hygiene and changing the behavior of the community to improve hygiene in a way that is sustainable after I leave.  In order to do this project we each had to write a small grant requesting money to cover costs for 2 different trainings and the basic materials to get the project up and running.  This consisted of hours and hours at the Peace Corps office in Kigali going over budgets and goals and indicators etc. in order to form a well written grant that will hopefully be approved in the coming months.  It was a lot of time and effort but also a lot of fun with other volunteers and a great experience in grant writing.  I’m looking forward to actually getting things started here in my community!

·         I held a Permagarden Training for my group of pregnant mothers.

o   Last week I had our amazing PC staff member Modeste come and help me to put on a training for my First 1000 Days Association about a type of kitchen garden that is climate smart and is meant to provide a plentiful amount and variety of vegetables for the family to eat each day.  With Modeste being Rwandan and able to speak Kinyarwanda fluently and being a agriculture and food security specialist he was much more of a fit to actually lead the training.  It was great seeing the women engaged and open to the different approach to a kitchen garden than they are used to.  One thing I learned was that, even though these women are incredibly strong, it’s not necessarily a great idea to have pregnant women doing a decent amount of manual labor in a short amount of time.  But the garden got built and I’m looking forward to all the food that will grow!

·         I started helping test for HIV as we increase our HIV services here.

o   We recently got approval from the ministry of Health to provide ARVs and counseling for HIV positive patients.  So now we are trying to increase our number of community members who are tested.  With our limited staff number I got to learn how to do the rapid HIV test.  Even though it’s a simple test getting to work in the lab felt at home and I really love being able to give people their negative results and see the happiness on their face!  

·         I learned I will NEVER Go into Dentistry.

o   When working on increasing our number of people tested for HIV we decided to test all the people being treated for dental problems (we have a really large number of patients everyday).  One day somehow instead of just working on HIV testing I ended up filling out the register for the patients coming in for tooth extractions, which meant I had to sit through a large number of tooth extractions.  They give shots of lidocaine to help numb the pain but you know it’s not completely numb…I’ll spare you all the details but even being an EMT and someone who is not bothered by blood or vomit etc sitting there for hours was an awful experience!

Whew! That was a lot to write and I bet a lot to read but I really love being able to share as much as I can with all of you. Sorry for the lack of pictures... The internet isn't allowing it but I wanted to send this out any way.
 It truly has been an amazing experience so far and there is so much that is impossible to share that I wish I could.  So if there is anything in particular you want to hear more about let me know and I can dedicate some posts to more specific topics! 

Miss you all and I hope 2016 has started out well for everyone!