A day in the life: Iminsi yanjye mu Rwanda

Muraho! Hello faithful readers! I can't believe it's already December! It's constantly warm and sunny here, quite a different feeling from what I'm used to experiencing this time of year. We're slightly more than halfway through training now, and things are starting to feel normal. In this post, I'll go through a typical day of training so you can now what I do with all my time.

During training, we have sessions to attend Monday through Friday from 7 AM to 6 PM and on Saturday from 7 AM to 12 PM. Sundays are free. No matter what day of the week it is, I get up between 5 and 6 AM and go for a run. Running in Rwanda is interesting. First of all, it truly is the land of a thousand hills, so no matter where I run I spend time huffing and puffing up several small mountains (this makes saying the morning greeting of mwaramutse very difficult). Secondly, a lot of Rwandans run. While the country doesn't produce as many world-class runners as their East-African neighbors, Kenya and Ethiopia, the citizens are definitely joggers. Some days I'll see as many as 20 or 30 other runners during a 30-minute run.

After running, I take a quick cold shower or bucket bath. We have running water (sometimes) at our house, and if it's working I get a shower. If not, I fill a bucket with some water we have sitting in a huge container outside our house and use that. A lot of people find the cold water unappealing, but after a run, it's a great start to the day.

I live with four other Trainees (Matt, Jeff, Deanne, and Aaron), and two Rwandans who are teaching us the language (Gilbert and Emmanuel). Our house is one of the closest to the training center (about a 5-minute walk), so we all leave together around 7 to head up for breakfast. Breakfast lasts until 8, and then we have our first session from 8 to 10. At 10, we have a tea and coffee break for 30 minutes before another session from 10:30 to noon. At noon, we have lunch, which lasts until 2 PM. Typically, I finish lunch in about 30 minutes and then either go into town and just walk around, go home to rest, or sit around and study Kinyarwanda. At 2, we're back at it until 3:30, when we have another 15-minute break. After that break, we have a final session from 3:45 to 5, and then we have dinner at 6.

The sessions we have vary from day-to-day. We have language classes almost daily (typically in the morning), technical sessions also almost daily (how to teach), safety and security sessions, cross-cultural sessions, and medical sessions (sometimes we even get vaccinations!). On Saturdays we follow the same schedule, but only until noon. And, on the last Saturday of every month we do community work, umuganda, alongside the Rwandans. This consists of using hoes, shovels, and machetes to fix the dirt road, trim the grass and bushes, and dig out gutters along the road to direct the water off the road when it rains.

The schedule will change a bit next week when I begin model school. Half of our group has already begun. This is a practice three-week school, and it means I'll be teaching and observing other teachers all morning Monday to Friday for three weeks. I won't have as much language training and the other sessions will be fewer too.

On Saturday afternoons, I typically do some relaxing, head to the market with my housemates to get stuff for dinner, and then help cook. Sometimes we'll go out as a house for dinner or for a beer.

Sundays are our sole days off. Unfortunately, I still have work to do. After running, I do my laundry, which is done by hand with a bucket of soap water and two rinse buckets. It takes an hour or so to get through all of my clothes, after which I bathe and get ready to go to church. Church is not something I've done for a long time, but I enjoy going and seeing my host family (who attends every Sunday). Also, listening to Kinyarwanda for two hours is very beneficial. Rwandans tend to be quite religious, though not in a fanatical sense, and I see a lot of people I know there. After church, I always run into some of our language instructors, and sometimes other Trainees. We'll often go to a restaurant for lunch and some more Kinyarwanda practice. Then, in the afternoon, I might play some frisbee or soccer with other Trainees, take a nap, read, or study before starting to cook dinner around 4 or 4:30 (we don't finish until 7 or so). Then, the next day is Monday, and it all begins again.

So, there is a typical day here in Rwanda. I'll do a similar post later on my typical day after I get to site and start teaching.

As you may have seen, I've finally gotten my computer problems worked out, and photos have been posted. If you want to see something in particular, let me know. Thanks for reading.