Matayo ajya mu cyaro

Amakuru buri wese? (How's everyone doing?)

Well, I made it safely to my new site, and it's been a bit of an adjustment, but things are starting to feel “normal” now and I'm still alive. I arrived at my site late on a Tuesday afternoon, and I started to get settled in right away.

As I mentioned earlier, I live with three other teachers (well, mostly two others, since one only stays here on the nights before he teaches, otherwise he goes home to his wife and kid in the next town). Anyway, I live with Wellars (an English teacher) and Alphonsine (a Religion/Computer/Creative Course teacher), and then there's Leonard, who teaches PE/Geography/History and is Alphonsine's brother. Our house is nice. As my mom said, it looks like a cute little cottage. It certainly is. I have a small (very) bedroom and a living room to myself, which is nice when I want to get away. There is a toilet and bathing area in a small hut outside, and then there are two other bedrooms, a storage area, and a small dining area. Cooking is done outside. The house has its fair share of lizards, bugs, and bats, but all in all it's quite nice.

We live no more than a ten-minute walk from the school, which means we don't rush around that much in the mornings. We have no electricity or running water, but we have some solar cells at the school to charge phones and things, and we fetch water at another teacher's house a couple hundred meters away.

My days here are much slower than they were in the what I now realize is the big city of Nyanza. I still run each morning, though a shorter distance and with more faces staring at me and children crying out "umuzungu" (white person). Then, I take a bucket bath (my last shower for quite a while took place in Nyanza), have a bit of porridge and the previous night's dinner for breakfast, and head to school. I teach every day except for Tuesday, between two and six hours per day. The school day is from 7 to 2, with a 15-minute break half-way through. After school, do different things. For the first week, I was still getting settled in, so I went to pick up furniture or get a jerry can. Otherwise, I sometimes walk and talk to people, go home to play igisoro (a Rwandan game similar to mancala) or listen to the radio, or I read.

On the weekends, I wash clothes and clean my living area well on Saturday. Last Sunday, I walked the seven kilometers to the nearest Volunteer, and we went to church, but I don't know if that will be a weekly venture or not. Really, I do a lot of sitting around and talking to Rwandans (or more often listening to them talk).

Meals are generally cooked by Alphonsine. I'm trying to work my way into being allowed to help with the cooking, but it's a slow process. I don't like just sitting back and watching her do all the work, though. Plus, we ca eat earlier if more people help!

I taught for the first time in a real Rwandan classroom this week: Senior 3 (9th grade) French. I introduced myself and then asked the students to write about their vacation (a classic first-day assignment for Charlie Brown). I had some responses that make me sure that I will have an interesting time teaching French.

I won't teach Math for the first time until this coming week, but I'm looking forward to it.

I'm afraid I don't have a ton more to add. I'll have more for sure as time goes on, but that's it for now.

Mwirirwe! Rwema