The day we got our site assignments (yay!)

My original plan had been to skip dinner. I had spent the majority of the day in bed, watching movies, drinking passion fruit juice and struggling to fight off my newest African ailment. Then Jessi’s phone rang; it was Sally, who explained that Mup and the other Peace Corps staff would tell us our site assignments before dinner if everyone came to the center right then. My stomach churned, for once not because of sickness, but from nervousness. So we trudged the 20 minutes to the center and were greeted with a large scale chalk drawing of Rwanda on the concrete, with the names of organizations placed next to corresponding stars within each province. My eyes flitted across the map, from the Eastern Province, to Kigali Province, to the Northern and the Western and finally the Southern Province. I recognized some organizations names, but most were foreign to me. I noticed where there were up to 4 stars in a row and other stars that seemed to be miles from the next one. Then I slowly reminded myself that those stars represented people’s futures, where I and the rest of my training class would be spending the next two years of our lives. So, I held my breath (and stomach) and waited.

Names were called, people began clapping and laughing with excitement as their organizations and districts were read off. Then I heard my name. I slowly stood up, walked towards the map and heard “Access, Musanze District in the Northern Province”. Wait a second. Can you repeat that? Did you just say Access (the project I’d been hoping for since I got here)? And did you say the Northern Province (the region I would have picked for myself if given the opportunity)? Yep, I heard them right; it wasn’t a joke. The stars aligned, the gods looked down kindly upon me, and all those other metaphors people dream up when things just go their way. As the remaining names, organizations and districts were revealed, my euphoria was slightly diminished as I looked around and realized how lonely me and my star were. The majority of my closest friends had been placed in the Southern and Eastern Provinces, and my star was definitely floating up in the Northern province pretty isolated. But then I realized where I was standing. For any of you who haven’t had time to brush up on your Rwandan geography, the Musanze District borders Volcanoes National Park on the border with the DRC and is supposed to be breathtakingly beautiful. Volcanoes National Park also just happens to be your ticket to…Mountain Gorilla Trekking. So, basically, those of you who hadn’t decided yet if you wanted to come visit me, you might want to start looking up flights now 

I was (and am) stoked, content, excited, exhilarated and beyond words happy.

So what does this mean? It means starting in May, I will be spending the following two years (as long as everything continues to go according to plan) living and working in the Northern Province of Rwanda, specifically within the district of Musanze. I’ll be working for the Access Project as a Health and Community Development (HCD) Volunteer. I'll know more about the Access Project after this week but you can get more info here!! http://www.theaccessproject.com/index.php/home/

My job description goes a little like this: “The HCD Volunteer will work in all 11 health centers in Musanze and will work with the project District Health Advisor (DHA). Duties of the HCD volunteer will include working with the DHA within the domain of Data Management and IT Management.” It goes on but I can tell you that my favorite parts include: 1) Develop methodologies for collecting, assessing and improving quality of health centers’ data; and 2) Collect, analyze HIV, TB and Malaria data and ensure analyzed data is used for decision making. I’ll also be responsible for writing “Success Stories” recording new developments and progress at certain Health Centers.

For any of you who even have an inkling of my background and interests it’s obvious that I could not have been placed with a better organization or given a better job description! I’m beyond excited for this challenge. We're in Kigali now and will meet our supervisors tomorrow, then on Tuesday we’ll head to visit our sites for the rest of the week. I’ll be staying with a current volunteer working for Access, and am excited to hear more about her community and her experiences.

I’m sure I’ll have so much more to tell you all next weekend, but I can’t even explain how excited I am for what’s to come. Happy weekend everyone, and have a fantastic week!


Things that made me happy this week:
1) Site assignments! (duh!)
2) Dancing
3) Getting my first package!! (that I sent myself..before I left. Yes, I knew exactly what was in it and it still made my week)
4) Getting a roll of the “good” toilet paper. (Aka the kind that ISN’T reminiscent of crepe paper)
5) Giving two kids high fives and having the last kid, who must have been 3 years old, go to high five me but instead raise his hand up to his head (total “siiike” moment). This probably should have made me sad but I mostly just found it hilarious. No joke though, I saw the same kid the next morning and he ran up to me to give me a high five, so I think he still loves me.
6) Getting passion fruit juice brought to my bedside, and “accidentally forgetting” to take it back to the center.
7) Whatever that glorious carrot/unidentifiable vegetable curry concoction was at lunch on Wednesday
8) My wonderful housemates. Even Laurence. Hehe.
9) Walking home alone in the rain. (This unfortunately was followed by my unhappy moment of the week: realizing my book bag is not waterproof and that every book I had in it was soaked…)
10) Clean sheets and Pepto Bismol
11) Getting to participate in umuganda for the first time. Umuganda, held on the last Saturday every month, is a nationwide day of community service activities that all Rwandans take part in. We arrived in a field set on a hillside with hundreds of villagers and soon everyone was in a long row at the bottom of the field tilling the soil (umutaka) with their hoes (isuka). Of course we didn’t have tools and were left to simply watch for a little bit, but quickly enough all the mazungus were pitching in, much to the amusement of all of the Rwandans. The air was filled with laughter and countless explanations of the “correct hoeing technique”, which honestly does exist, I finally got it after an hour or so. We took turns with the Rwandans, and the entire hillside field was ready for planting within a couple of hours; something that would have taken days for a family or cost hundreds of thousands of francs in labor costs. It was by far the most rewarding thing I’ve done yet here, and I have the blisters (abamavu = wounds from farming) to prove it!!
12) Making homemade cheeseburgers and French fries. At our house. In the rain. In Africa. Particularly because it was the first hamburger our 3 Rwandan housemates had eaten; they devoured theirs down in seconds and asked for more!
13) Figuring out that if you really want to have a dance party in your living room, the “strobe light” feature on your headlamp can come in very handy.