Finally!

Murabeho, everyone! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to finally write a new post - internet here is slow and they charge by the minute. Last time I tried to blog I spent twenty minutes waiting for the page to load before I gave up. But today, success!

Rwanda is beautiful. It's all rolling green hills, and the weather is like Hawaii - warm and wet. When it rains it pours, but only for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. The air always smells pleasantly of burning charcoal and there are goats and chickens everywhere.

It's hard to describe everything that's happened, there's so much that's different. Right now we are at a training site in Nyanza, a few hours outside of Kigali. Instead of living with host families, we live in houses of between two and ten volunteers with one to four LCFs (language and cultural facilitators). The LCFs are sort of like our Rwandan R.A.'s. They are Peace Corps employees recruited in Rwanda to teach us Kinyarwanda, live with us, and basically show us the ins and outs of everyday life here. We have been taught how to wash our clothes by hand and how to cook with charcoal stoves, although we're learning with varying degrees of success. The houses have some amenties, but it varies from house to house. My house has electricity most of the time and running water out back, but not in the bathroom. We take "bucket baths," which basically entails hauling a bucket of cold water into the house, soaping up, pouring the water over yourself, and mopping the water out the door. It's not as bad as it sounds. I miss orange juice more than I miss hot showers.

The city of Nyanza is, for lack of a better phrase, pretty nice. Everything is impressively clean, especially considering there is no state-organized trash pick up. Apparently plastic shopping bags are illegal - it's part of a government effort to reduce litter. I think that's the most interesting piece of trivia I've learned so far.

Although we don't have host families, we have "resource families" that live in the area. We are required to visit them twice a week for meals and to practice Kinyarwanda. Some families speak some English, some don't. My resource mama speaks a little French, but as I've discovered, it's incredibly difficult to parce things out in bad French. Fortunately I also have a sixteen-year-old resource sister who speaks incredible English. She's basically my only means of communication with the rest of the family until I learn more Kinyarwanda. I know "good morning," "how are you," and "I don't understand," but that's the extent of my vocabulary right now.

Again, there's so much to say I'm not sure what to say - if you have any questions, please post them here, or email me (gelseyh@gmail.com) and I'll respond the next time I get around to checking my email. Eventually I'll get a modem (when I can afford to) but for now the only way to consistently contact me is by phone, which I'm sure is prohibitively expensive. I also have a mailing address:

Gelsey Hughes
PC/Rwanda
BP 5657
Kigali Rwanda

It takes three weeks to a month to receive anything, but I will be very appreciative of letters! I also plan on sending letters as soon as I can afford postage.