Cows

For those of you who were unaware, in addition to my weird obsession with donuts, I have a strange fascination with cows. Apparently, Rwandans do too!

Cows are a very important part of the culture in Rwanda. To call a woman a “young calf” is one of the highest complements. A typical greeting among older Rwandans is Amashyo! Many Cows! Or, Amashyongore! Many female cows! These greetings are a way to express wishes for young people to have many reproductive cows, a sign of wealth. I love it.

When a man proposes marriage to a woman, he has to provide her family with a cow as dowry. All of the wedding albums I’ve been shown so far include pictures from three different ceremonies: the religious wedding ceremony, the civil ceremony (usually takes place a few weeks before); and the engagement ceremony, which always includes pictures of the cows young grooms present to the bride’s family.

In Rwanda, there are special bread cows that have enormous horns. They are absolutely beautiful.

In case of marriage proposal while in Niger, my witty father and I had come up with the perfect response: Baba ni, shina son shamu dari shidda. My father wants 600 cows for me. Looks like the response will also work well here, now I just need to figure out how to say it in Kinyarwanda!

FOOD

The food in Rwanda is delicious and nutritious. I eat meals with my host family, and I love it. All meals include a serving of rice and some mix of incredibly tasty beans, tomato and vegetable sauce, spinach-like boiled greens, as well as some variation of boiled or fried potato/cassava/plantains. At restaurants you can order delicious brochettes that come with beef and a really tasty flavoring that I haven’t quite figure out yet… but it tastes great.  

Rwanda also produces high-end tea and coffee, so I feel like I’m in paradise. Did I mention I buy 3 avocados for 20¢? I can also buy 5 passion fruits for the same price. Japanese plums, pineapples, papaya, and mangos are also available. Where am I?!

Also eating corn on the cob here in Rwanda!

My favorite traditional Rwandan food so far is umugali. The English translation is “cassava bread”, which seems pretty accurate. You cook the cassava in water and stir it until it has the consistency of pizza dough. You eat it by picking off little pieces (or big pieces, if you’re Rwandan) with your fingers and dipping it into a tomato/meat sauce. Deeeelicious.

There is one serious problem with food here: I have yet to find donuts. I asked my language instructor about it, he pointed me to a lightly friend cake desert…. It’s really weak, more baked than fried. Fried foods are not really part of the culture; in fact the government outlawed street food because it’s unsanitary. This might become a serious problem for me.

 

Local Elections

I have had the pleasure of observing local elections in both Niger and Rwanda. As a former student of government, I have found the experiences absolutely fascinating.

On Monday February 22^nd Rwanda held elections for local offices. Rwanda is divided into five separate provinces, each divided into a number of districts, divided into sectors, divided into cells, divided into umudugudus (sort of like large neighborhoods). As usual, I understand maybe a quarter of what’s going on around me so I think these were elections at the district, sector, and cell level.

My host mother, Alice, was running for one of the sector level positions reserved for women. Over the weekend I walked around town with her and observed as she greeted everyone and handed out flyers with her picture and slogan. It was really fun for me to notice the big differences but also subtle similarities between local campaigns in Rwanda, Niger, and the United States.

On Election Day I was woken up around 6AM to singing and drum beating, which my host mother informed me occured in every umudugudu across Rwanda as a way to remind people to go vote. In Rwanda and Niger local Election Day is a national holiday, and people in both countries have told me about the importance of their right and responsibility to vote.

The polling places I witnessed in both African countries had very festive atmospheres. Here in Rwanda, people were dressed in their Sunday best and walked gingerly into the various classrooms to vote.

In Niger, men and women sat separately in groups outside the schoolroom, joking and amusing themselves as they waited for names to be called individually to go vote. In the meantime, children ran around selling fried food and drinks, which in a strange way reminded me very much of Major League Baseball games in the United States.

I voted in Ithaca, NY’s local elections during the falls of 2008 and 2009. My senior year, I walked into a church in Collegetown at 5PM, and if I remember correctly I was the 32^nd person to vote. Both times, I did get pretty awesome stickers, and two great City Council members!

Murambi Memorial Site

Two weeks into training, I visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial Site, in the Southern Province of Rwanda. This Memorial Site is particularly important because of the mass graves once located there.

The 1994 genocide that took place in Rwanda killed over 800,000 people in just three months, over one million throughout the whole year. Many scholars have described this genocide as particularly atrocious (I can’t imagine a genocide ever not being that way). One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Rwandan genocide was the physical and emotional proximity of victims and perpetrators. Women recognized the men that raped them. Lifelong neighbors did not just turning each other in; they actually killed each other.

The effects: physical, economic, mental, and emotional are present everywhere in Rwanda even today.

Much has been written and reported about the genocide. Notably the movie Hotel Rwanda inspired by the movie We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch. Frontline has done two series on the genocide, Ghosts of Rwanda and also The Triumph of Evil. The websites include a lot of good information about the United States’ involvement, or lack there of. 

The Murambi Genocide Memorial Site is where over 50,000 Tutsi were massacred in less than twenty-four hours. In April 1994, the regional government told all Tutsi people to gather on the hill, where an empty would-be high school was being constructed. Innocent families fled there, thinking they would be protected. Most of the refugees arrived around April 9. By April 12 all water to the area was cut off, and access was completely restricted. Interhamwe (trained militia) guarded the surrounding fields and watched from the neighboring hills to make sure no one left.

On the night of April 19^th, soldiers and people from the neighboring villages came with guns, machetes, and clubs to kill everyone. The next day, the Governor of the region thanked and congratulated the killers for a “job well done”. He encouraged the men to move on to neighboring churches, where many Tutsi were still seeking refuge.

In July French soldiers came to Murambi to secure peace as part of Operation Turquoise. According to our guide, there were obvious signs that genocide had taken place only months before, including unclosed mass graves. At Murambi I was told the French soldiers closed up the graves, and set up volleyball court less than ten feet away.

One of the graves (where over 1,000 people were buried) was so deep that oxygen did not infiltrate, and when it was reopened over a year later many of the bodies had not fully decomposed. These bodies are preserved today in limestone to remind us of the horrors that occurred.

I saw six schoolrooms full of bodies. Most were the bodies of women and children. The fear and agony experienced by those who died was still painfully present. The distorted body of a small child who had a club smashed into his head lay next to the body of his mother, whose left arm was still positioned in a way that showed how she tried to protect her son until death.

As I walked out of one of the rooms, I noticed some children playing in the grass only a couple yards away. The contrast between the pain and terror I had just seen inside and the beautiful Rwandan countryside where these children were playing was almost too much for me to handle.

Before visiting Murambi, Peace Corps organized a guest speaker to come talk to us about the history of the genocide. After the presentation I felt somewhat more informed about particular events leading up to the genocide and potential theories of what caused it, but I was frustrated the presenter had not spoken about the effects of the genocide on individuals in Rwanda today. Only after Murambi did I understand trying to generalize or even stipulate the attitudes an entire population on such horrific events would be absolutely impossible.

Volunteer Projects

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what the actual job of a Peace Corps Volunteer entails. Well, it’s not exactly a 9 to 5.

As you may know, the Peace Corps Mission is threefold: the first is to providing training to interested men and women in host communities. The second is to share America with your host community, and the third is to share your host community with America.

Over the last five months (five months?! what?!) I’ve been doing a lot of goals two and three. As a single young woman in two heavily Muslim countries, I spent a lot of time explaining how yes, I was choosing not to marry or have children. I talked with many Nigeriens about how Americans value education and independence, particularly for girls and young women. Sometimes they believed me, sometimes they didn’t… sai hankuri.

Through this blog, I try to share little pieces of where I am with anyone who might be interested back home… and elsewhere around the world according to my blog tracker!

I’ve also been fortunate enough to be a part of the World Wide Schools Program, where I exchange letters with American classrooms. I paired up with my friend Elie, who is teaching high school social studies in Saint Louis, Missouri through Teach for America. Shout out to Sumner High School!! Although the mail system has made our exchanges rather limited so far, it’s a lot of fun for me.

I am anxious to get down to work in the more traditional sense. I have nothing to report as of yet, but I would like to share some projects other PCVs have worked that I find particularly inspiring. These projects are incredibly exciting and also great examples of what many PCVs work towards: acting as a facilitator, and being a small part of big changes.  

Midwife Training. Maternal health is one of the most critical problems in Niger, the country with the highest maternal mortality in the world. Most women who die in childbirth do so because of a lack of medical attention.

In Niger, a PCV conducted training for twelve local midwives in Kore Hausa and the surrounding villages. As I understood it, she selected dedicated women who were well respected and already worked as traditional midwives in the community. The volunteer facilitated training sessions that taught the midwives to deliver babies in a safe and healthy manner. The women were trained to detect warning signs during pregnancy that might complicate childbirth, and to encourage mothers to visit the local health centers. I met one of the midwives in Kore Hausa, and after telling me how she took women to the health center for prenatal exams and at the time of delivery; she proudly displayed her training completion certificate.

Literature for ESL Students. English language is becoming increasingly important in Rwanda. It is now the primary language of the education system and becoming so for all other public offices. Still, the number of trained English teachers is low.

An education volunteer in Rwanda recently told me about a literature project she’s working on. When she realized her students were eager to read English novels, but were having trouble with the vocabulary, she was inspired. This PCV, who is well over the age of retirement, has been rewriting The Last of the Mohicans for English as a Second Language classes. With her students, she condenses the text, one chapter at a time, “without dumb-ing it down, keeping all the action and the juice”. As they write, she and her students are also compiling a dictionary of all the difficult words and writing simple English definitions. When the project is finished she’s hoping to get it published for her school and ESL classes elsewhere.