You’ll receive the federal funding, you can have a hefty grant
You’ll receive the federal funding, you can have a hefty grant
Strategize the presentation, make them see that you’re the man
Strategize the presentation, make them see that you’re the man
Man, man, maaa-aaaan.
“Federal Funding” - Cake
(As read by Sir David Attenborough)
It’s a chilly, gray dawn in Rwanda, on Monday November 20, 2017. The persistent precipitation from the tropical rainy season has transformed the once earthen red hills into a grassy verdant green. Hawks soar the hillsides looking for prey and places to construct their nests. The deep and discontented calls from domestic cows are carried by the cool winds that sweep the early morning landscape.
And when the sunrise continues to break over the Land of 1,000 Hills, Volunteerus P-Scorpicus begin to stir in their habitats that dot every corner this small country. On a normal day, each individual of this peculiar species may stay in their enclosures for several hours more, or even the entire day - known as they are for profligate laziness and slumber. But today is no ordinary day. Volunteerus has been summoned through the mechanisms of their not-yet understood complex bureaucratic hierarchy to go forth on a journey that all Volunteerus must make during the course of their service - the journey to In Service Training. It is a journey that is reluctant…but necessary.
The wind at their face and their belongings on their backs, they utilize the complex transport systems of their new environments, traveling along the roads by bus and motorcycle. They travel from far and wide - some making a trek lasting over 9 hours from the very most corners of the country, and others taking 20 minutes coming from seemingly right around the corner. In either case though, the most harrowing part of the journey lies at the very end - a 2 mile walk, along the dusty roads and villages that lead from the main road to the final destination.
The Muhazi Beach Hotel, located in the Eastern Province of Rwanda is the location of the In Service Training for Health 9 Volunteerus P-Scorpicus. Despite it’s name, there is no sandy beach at the Muhazi Beach Hotel, as the grassy hill it sits on runs unbroken, directly into the water. And the Muhazi Lake looks much less like a lake than it does a winding river that snakes its way through the valleys of the gently rolling Eastern hills.
The African sun beats down with its characteristic intensity. Soon after they begin their walk, sweat begins to form on their brows. The bags grow heavier with each dull step forward. In desperation they demonstrate their distress calls, in hopes that someone may help them in their struggle. “Uggghhh Peace Corps reaaaaally did us dirty this time! How did they not figure out a way for us to even get to this damn place! Got-damn ridiculous!”. In response, the children of the villages they pass respond with their own call. “Muzunguuuuuu! Give me money!”. One particularly exhibitionist village youth ups the ante: “Give me my money, bitch!”. No matter. Volunteerus has become habituated to these calls. It is youthful exuberance, nothing more. They move onward as if nothing happened, slowly but surely.
After some time walking, the usual landlocked landscape gives way to a small, glittering stream in the distance. Upon seeing the signs of the watering hole, Volunteerus increases pace. The stream gets closer, and it becomes clear that it leads into to a larger body of water - Lake Muhazi itself. And on the side of this lake lies their desired resting ground, the site of In Service Training: The Lake Muhazi Beach Hotel. Volunteerus collectively signal their calls of joyous triumph. “This place is dope! Water views! We don’t have to cook for ourselves for a week and a half!”. An excited chatter overtakes the group, and exuberant greeting rituals are undertaken as more Volunteerus complete their pilgrimage along the course of the day. Victory is sweet indeed.
Reunited, and It Feels So Good
Thank you for the colorful introduction, Sir Attenborough. I found it to be tragically hilarious that your own people decided against having your distinguished name don a Antarctic exploration ship in favor of the made-up moniker “Boaty McBoatface”. It seems as though the British are not as delicate and sophisticated as we make your sweet accents to be. It is good to know that you have not let the embarrassing setback affect your Planet Earth narration work. For this I thank you.
But yes, the Volunteers of the Health 9 cohort did indeed make a trek to the Eastern Province of the country, and the fact that we all converged from all over the country to the exact same place could very well warrant the title of The Great Health 9 Migration. It was difficult to believe, but about 90 days had passed between the day of Site Installation and our arrival at the Lake Muhazi Beach Hotel, and the two scenes could not have been more starkly different. While I believe that I had previously described the morning of Site Installation day to be like “a scene from a refugee camp” - with crying eyes and pining faces plastered to the windows of cars vanishing into the dusty roads - the reunion at Lake Muhazi was a mushy love fest of warm hugs and exchanged news and stories.
We had spent the last 3 months in or very near our sites, doing Peace Corps’ bidding and integrating dutifully into our communities. And while we all maintained our allegiance to the “Peace Corps Health 9 XOXO” group chat, we had not all been together since that fateful day when we believed our lives were ending. Well I was slightly hungover, so I mostly just had a headache, but somewhere in there I felt inklings of that despair as well.
Given that we had been living in our respective villages for such a long and interrupted period of time, by the time we got to the hotel, our conversation quickly turned from light catching up to more serious and pressing matters. Was the water hot? How comprehensive did the kitchen look? Was the cleaning crew reliably consistent so we would never have to clean for ourselves? What was the bar situation like? Did we bring enough cash for said bar? Some of these questions could be immediately answered, but like many great and elusive mysteries, only time would be able to reveal their answers to us.
The grounds of the Hotel were beautiful. Like most nice places, it was remote and took a bit of work to get to, but once we were there, we could see that the right choice was made on our behalf. On a large, sprawling estate, the hotel itself was comprised of small and spread out buildings, which included a small conference room, the volunteers’ rooms which sat in a long row down a steep hill, and the main dining area where we were to receive our lunches and coffee during breaks.
The star of the show, however, was Lake Muhazi itself. Since the Southern Province of the country has no bodies of water to boast, I had forgotten that there are significant bodies of water in the landlocked country of Rwanda. I know this isn’t true, as I have had my eye on going to the famously beautiful Lake Kivu in the Southwestern part of the country, but 3 months staring at the same hill outside my door encourages a short memory and small scope. Having grown up in Annapolis, getting a reintroduction to the water after such a long period made me feel as close to home as I have since I’ve been in Rwanda. The hotel had a dock at the end of the hill that stretched out into the water, along with some chairs that lightly resembled the adirondacks that I spent my youth sitting in, overlooking the beautiful sunsets of the Chesapeake Bay. Lake Muhazi as we saw it was a small, placid body of water cased on all sides by the low, green hills of the East, with the occasional flip of a fish and a glittering surface from the golden setting sun. To see all of my friends again in such a scenic locale was quite the treat after 3 months in our houses by ourselves.
Now Get Back to Work
But we weren’t at the Lake Muhazi Beach Hotel just to hang out, much to our chagrin. After our arrival on Monday, we found ourselves in the conference room bright and early the next morning ready to start our packed days of technical sessions - all of us were fully cleaned up from the gloriously hot and running water in our bathrooms, and, likely for the first time in months, dressed in our nice clothes as a personal statement of triumph and dignity. We were ready to learn about how to start primary projects in our communities, how to write grants in order to execute these projects, how find the right groups of people to target in order to attain our desired impacts, malnutrition statistics, and much much more.
The goal of In Service Training is to help volunteers move forward in their work. The logic is that once you have spent a few months in your village learning first how to survive and then how to get people to like you, you will be ready to take on additional information that will help you carry out your true purpose as a volunteer, which is to start a primary project in your community where you an convince the people you live with to take on better habits related to nutrition and hygiene.
To do this we have to take on a series of what we call “technical sessions” that is, sessions directly related to our health work and not related to other things like Peace Corps policy or cultural education. They include, but aren’t limited to, many of the sessions I mentioned above, and we did another useful training about the Perma-Gardening technique, which is a fascinating small garden with deeply dug beds that are capable of trapping water over a long period of time to make for high crop yield and low weekly maintenance.
The biggest difference that IST presented from the normal training we received during our first few months in the country is that instead of just being a training among the volunteers, our counterparts from our respective health centers were invited to take part in the second week of the training. This provided for an opportunity to get our counterparts more familiar with the Peace Corps and what they are trying to do, and in the case of a significant volunteer-counterpart language barrier, have adequate translation through our Peace Corps managers.
Having the counterparts at the training provided for an interesting dynamic. I am one of the lucky volunteers that has a great counterpart, and I was happy to have everyone meet her. Cecile is the Nutritionist of my health center and the person I work with just about every day. We work together to give out milk and fortified porridge to malnourished kids and poor families. She is a short and demure woman in her mid 50’s with a short crop of natural hair and soft voice. Like many other Rwandan women, no matter the climate she wears a long dress, a scarf and various other formless cloths imprinted with traditional African patterns.
She was the very first of all the counterparts to arrive at IST on the next Sunday after we arrived, as she prides herself on her punctuality. After she arrived, we had lunch together away from my rowdy colleagues - and at the end of the lunch, in her typical fashion she brought me in closely to tell me what always seems like a grave piece of news, but never is. In her broken English, she began to speak. “Alexi, I have to tell you something. I am tired. I will go rest now”. I always laugh at her characteristic misdirections. “No problem Cecile! See you at dinner. “Yego” she responds, always tilting her head down slightly and holding the last syllable a little longer than necessary. She then sauntered off to her room for her daytime Kuruhuka.
Cecile was a hit among my friends, and rightfully so. Underneath her disarmingly kind demeanor lies a woman who is either a little crazy, or crazy like a fox. One night at dinner, upon hearing the quintessentially American opinion from one of my female friends that she never ever wants to get married and views all men as stressors (she was mostly joking but Cecile didn’t know that), Cecile quieted the entire table to let my friend know that she was willing to offer her mental health counseling at our health center for no charge. The suggestion was met with some vexation from the table, but was met by me with raucous laughter.
In another instance of cultural friction, with no provocation she announced to the table (again of mostly American women) that she was pleased to see that so many Americans were “big” because, “in general, big women and big men are vedi vedi kind people”. Again, I cried with laughter. It seemed that Cecile had somewhere along the way missed the cultural training on the subtle distinctions between stereotypes and generalizations and whatever else makes people upset. But her intentions are so clearly benevolent, and her disposition is so purely maternal that no matter what she says you can’t be upset with her. Throughout the training many of friends approached me to say what a sweetheart she was. I couldn’t say much more than, “Yeah, Cecile is awesome”.
A Very IST Thanksgiving, and other Moments
IST fell right on top of one our very favorite American holidays, the day of Thanksgiving. Believe it or not Rwandans do not celebrate, let alone know about the American holiday in which we honor the breaking of bread between pilgrims and Native Americans; a holiday which has since manifested itself as a wonderful celebration of food and all its diversity and quantity. But after some negotiation, our group managed to get a few hours off at the end of the day and enough food supplies procured to attempt to cook our own American-African hybrid Thanksgiving meal. This meant cooking up some Fried Chicken, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and macaroni and cheese, which was really just spaghetti noodles with baked cheese on top. True to form, before we ate we went around the table to say what all 25 of us were thankful for. A ubiquitous theme was the strength and quality of our Health 9 group, which exists as a true testament to the power of diversity, and also to the statistical insanity of 25 previous strangers getting along amicably. In a perfect ending to the round of Thankful-Fors, our very own “Big” Dan Cyr closed with the following heart melter, “We may not have much here in Rwanda, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I have everything I need”. Well said, sir. While we were all sad to be away from our families, with good food and good company, we found ourselves satisfied. It was quite a unique Thanksgiving.
But, as with any time we forget we’re in a developing country in the middle of Africa, we are quickly reminded that we are in a developing country in the middle of Africa. During a session about creating care groups of mothers with malnourished children, a giant bat flew into our conference room in the middle of the day, flapping around and banging its ugly head along the low ceiling and flying low enough at times to elicit shrieks from the potential victims, including me. It eventually found its way back from where it came, which was a small colony in one of the underpasses near the door of the conference room. On a rainy day which precluded going outside to learn how to make hand washing stations, hotel staff decided to light a charcoal stove inside the closed conference room, so that we may continue with the session as scheduled. It was only when I raised my hand through the thickening smoke to ask, “Can we put that thing outside?” did it occur to them that smoke inhalation may be of any concern to our wellbeing.
While we watched longingly as Rwandan guests at the hotel frolicked and played in and around the lake, we were strongly warned by our Peace Corps doctor during a medical session to avoid swimming at all costs because a parasite colloquially known as Schisto would invade our bodies and unwittingly cause us kidney failure if not treated. Naturally, we wouldn’t even know it needed treating, because of course it is symptomless until it is too late. Meanwhile, carrying up the hill we could hear the sounds of Rwandans partying - listening to music, playing volleyball and swimming to their hearts delight.
One day after sessions we found a ball and went to the small field on the hotel ground and played a game of soccer in what has probably been one of the most successful and cool instances of cultural exchange that I have seen since coming into the country. Through the universal language of sport, the volunteers challenged the counterparts in what became a highly competitive and unbelievably fun match that continued almost until we couldn't see the ball anymore. We shook hands as ladies and gentlemen at the end and were about to walk off when one of the Rwandan counterparts insisted that “we salute the fans”. We laughed and heartily agreed. So in the waning sunlight, sweaty and tired, all participants walked around the field, clapping to the invisible fans in the invisible stadium that had been breathlessly watching our mini-soccer match. It was a fun moment.
None of us knew this, but it is apparently Rwandan culture to receive a certificate at the end of significant trainings to show that they completed it successfully. While we as Americans are used to a drab, if not dismissive ceremony to give and receive this type of recognition, Rwandans have a decidedly more fun time with it. With volunteers on one side of the aisle, and Rwandan counterparts on the other, our Program Manager-turned-Emcee announced our counterparts name, quickly followed by a loud African pop beat on the hotel speakers. The volunteer and counterpart then paired up Soul-Train style and danced down to get the certificate and dance back to their places in line. We saw hip bumps, male-male Tango trots, rapper and hype man duos, and many other hilarious American-Rwandan dance pairings that made us all laugh. While we sometimes give Rwandans a hard time about being seemingly reserved and stiff, on occasion they sure do prove to us that they know how to party.
It was a fitting end to our In Service Training. Maybe we couldn’t talk to our counterparts all that well, but with some effort (and good translators) we were able to learn, laugh, play, and party together. With some of the restrictions lifted off the volunteers - including travel, starting primary projects, and writing grant applications for those projects - it is the hope that we will be able to move forward and start Saving The World - or something along those lines. That may very well be so. As for me, I continue to take the tack that doing the best I can is all I can do. But to have some more things to think about, and a more organized way of thinking about them is only a positive thing. In the meantime, where is the next conference at?! Did I mention how great the hot water was? What it’s not til next fall??