Site visit, big dreams and thankfulness

Last week I crossed a major milestone in my training as a Peace Corp volunteer: site visit. Peace Corps assigns each volunteer to a different town based on the requests of the local schools. Apparently about 100 schools in Rwanda requested a Peace Corp volunteer and then PC staff selected 65 sites to send volunteers. Last week we got to spend 5 days getting to know our village and the people we will be working with for the next two years. My site assignment is a small village called Rukara in the eastern district of Kayonza about an hour from Kigali.
I travelled with four other Peace Corps Trainees to my site because we were in the same general direction from Nyanza. As we approached Rukara my stomach was in knotted anticipation to see where I would be living and working for the next two years! The bus I was on stopped at the side of the road where there is a small sign announcing Rukara 7km. I got off and greeted my headmaster who had met me at the stop and then hopped on the back of a moto bike to ride up a steep hill to my village.
Rukara is a quiet place with friendly people and little to no industry. Most people there are substistence farmers and there is definitely a culture of sustaining the status quo rather than one of progress and moving forward. One of my favorite things about Rukara was the women! I met so many incredible, lively women and I am very excited to work with them perhaps in community, vocational classes when I live there. The secretary at my school and her sister are two such young women that I anticipate will be my best friends while living there. Though they speak no English we still had so much fun together and they give me some good extra motivation to learn Kinyarwanda.
There is a convent founded by the Spanish church in the village and this is where I stayed during my visit. For the first 4 days of my stay the sisters were actually on a vow of silence and prayers, which they do periodically, so no one could really talk to me! I was very confused until about 10 pm on my last night there when all the sisters came running to me to explain that they are actually very fun and love to sing and dance and talk but only could not this week! Haha that was a relief I must admit because the sisters were not lying, we had a wonderful time celebrating the end of their week of silence and prayers with singing, dancing and REAL CAKE! Nuns are such a unique group of people. They have so much joy and softness but a pronounced stealiness in their core and they definitely understand sisterhood. I will be living at a house owned by the convent during my service so I am excited to be a frequent visitor and honorary sister with them. There are about 20 Rwandan sisters and two Spanish nuns. My brain was about to explode trying to remember my Spanish from high school at the same time as I tried to construct sentences in Kinyarwanda!! Who would have thought that all those years of Spanish would pay off in Africa!? And I will certainly be using it because none of the nuns-Spanish or Rwandan-speak any English!
My primary assignment in Rukara is to teach Secondary school English. Rwanda just recently switched from French to English as their national language and around the same time they extended their public education from 6 years to 9. Schools have struggled to handle the influx of students at the same time as they shifted to a language that neither students nor teachers have a firm grasp on. I will be helping fill the gap and also introducing new pedagogy and learner centered teaching techniques. Teaching is only a part time job however, and the rest of my time will be spent training teachers, teaching English to different members of the community and doing secondary projects. As I walked around Rukara, meeting people and getting a feel for the great need in the community, my mind was racing with ideas for secondary projects. Murals, art and dance clubs, women’s vocational classes, health sessions….the list is endless. Peace Corps administration and even the other volunteers seem to downplay secondary projects, emphasizing the need for these things to start slowly and have small goals. I am not a small goal kind of a girl. I can’t help but dream big dreams. I am not sure if this makes me naïve or just foolish but I am filled with excitement and anticipation at the change and progress that is possible in Rukara. I know without a doubt that there will be tremendous challenges and difficulties. I know I will struggle with loneliness and purpose but I also know I have hope in a big God with a big love for his people in need and I am THRILLED to be his hands and feet in Rukara for the next two years.
This Sabbath day I am filled with joy and peace and big dreams that seem a little impossible but well isn’t that what its all about?? If not then what the heck are we doing here??
I definitely missed home this week of Thanksgiving. I hope you all had remarkable holidays filled with gratefulness for both your blessings and your struggles. I am grateful for the incredible support system God has blessed me with both at home and here. I am grateful for the new friendships I am building here and for dear friends all over the world. I am grateful for the profound beauty of the country where I am living. I am grateful that I dont have to cook turkeys in massive holes dug in the ground every Thanksgiving (haha) and I am grateful for the opportunities I have each day to love the one in front of me, to be excellent for the kingdom and to be the hands and feet of Christ.
I hope your Sabbath is also filled with God-sized dreams and visions for bringing heaven to earth whether you are in Rwanda, Kenya, New Zealand or Nashville. :)

The Complexity of Collectivity

Rwandan society, like much of the east African community, is based around a collective social identity rather individualism which is the foundational social identity in the western world. The phrase “it takes a village (or umudugudu in Kinyarwanda) to raise a child” is very much a reality here. Children are fed, disciplined, instructed and herded by the entire village and not just the biological mother or father. In fact, there is no word in Kinyarwanda for the sister of my mother, she is simply called mama wacu-our mother.
Likewise, there is an expectation that any surplus in the household budget to go towards a neighbor’s hospital bill, sister’s children’s school fees or brother’s schooling. In the wonderfully insightful book “Africa Friends and Money Matters” the author lays out the stark differences between the American/western economic system and the African one. He argues that the African system is structured so that everyone has just enough and does not reward growth or innovation as more valuable than subsistence of the whole. Western capitalism on the other hand is structured such that growth is the ultimate goal and without growth there is great civil unrest. The African economic system based on the collective social identity incentivizes generosity and community solidarity. The western system based on individualism and growth can incentivize greed and amassing of individual wealth.
At first glance, it can appear that Africans have got it right when it comes to a socially just, equitable and generous economic system. It may not be growing rapidly or driving the most innovative progress but at least everyone is taken care of equally right? I think my mindset has been that Africans have the social mindset of economics on the right track and just needed to work on the innovation, investment side of things a little more so that there would be more wealth for everyone. Three weeks into my Rwanda experience, I am thinking that things are much more complicated than they first appeared. It is more complicated because the collective social identity that makes Africans so wonderfully generous and community minded is the same thinking that binds their hands when it comes to innovation and development. The collective social identity that encourages solidarity also incentivizes conformity. It becomes highly undesirable to be different in anyway. From how you dress, to how you clean, to how you make money, different is seen as bad.
Rwandans are quick to criticize a person who chooses to shirk social expectations. This holding each other accountable can be good when it helps make a city cleaner (for example on the monthly day of nation wide community service called umuganda), but it can be destructive when a person trying to increase efficiency by doing an old thing in a new way is ostracized by their community.
I think this spirit of conformity is what I am struggling most with right now. I want to integrate fully into Rwandan community, to be accepted as part of the umudugudu. To do so I must conform to the unspoken rules of dress, behavior and interactions. My very existence here, however, is an oxymoron. I am here to make a change, to facilitate progress because there is a need for change-otherwise Peace Corps would not have sent volunteers here. Change and progress require a breaking with a status quo and a shift in the way things have always been done. Thus my life is lived in the tension between conforming to the pressures to behave, dress and interact like my Rwandan friends and challenging the way they do things in a humble attempt at making things better.
I have never been one to go with the flow of popular opinion or one to conform to the wishes of others. I am having difficulty swallowing the necessity of conformity for the sake of progress. This unforeseen personal challenge is an interesting microcosm of the difficulty of development in east Africa. And like development in east Africa, it requires a great deal of humility, listening, patience and a long long time to see progress. I must learn to swallow my western ideals of individualism and independence if I wish to enter in to the fabric of the collective. If I want to make change I must first make myself nothing, taking on the posture of a servant so that I might work from within to move the collective forward in solidarity instead of conformity. That is why I am here, and that is what I must remind myself on days when I think having a wrinkly shirt is not such a big deal or I don’t feel like greeting everyone in the neighborhood on my way to work or I don’t want to bow to the strict hierarchy in Rwandan schools. I must live in the tension between integration and change, and between solidarity and conformity. I pray for strength to be ready for such an existence, for humility to sustain it and for love to endure it.

In solidarity but never conformity (and of course in shalom)
cg