My Average Day

Someone recently asked me in a email what my “typical day” looks like here. I haven’t blogged about my day-to-day routines much because I don’t find them interesting, but now that I think about it I imagine the mundane aspects of Peace Corps service are probably very useful to prospective Peace Corps volunteers, so in the spirit of utility I will give you all a detailed description of my average day during the school year. No hard feelings if it puts you to sleep.

My day begins at 5:30. I wake up early because I like to go running in the mornings but if I do it after my neighbors are awake people gawk at me and children run after me. This still happens occasionally, but the difference between 5:30 and 6 is the difference between one or two children tailing me and a group of ten surrounding me and making it difficult to run. If I’m on schedule I usually get home at around 6 or 6:15 which means people at the health center next door see me in shorts from time to time but they’ve gotten used to it so they don‘t hassle me much. Once I’ve stretched and scraped the mud off my legs I fill up a bucket with cold water from the rain tankard next door and use it to take a shower. Most mornings I try to eat breakfast, usually just tea and bread or oatmeal if I have it. Then I read for a little while before heading to school.

Weekdays I’m at school by 7:30 whether I’m teaching or not. I teach two sets of two-hour classes in the morning, three days a week. I go home around 11am to cook lunch, which takes about two hours on an imbabura. If I can borrow hot coals from a neighbor I heat up whatever I cooked the night before and use the extra time to take a power nap. Then I go back to school. On Tuesdays I teach another class in the afternoon and on Wednesdays I stay after school to supervise my English club, but most afternoons I just sit in the teacher‘s lounge and grade papers. I’m only permitted to teach fifteen hours a week because the Peace Corps wants me to have time for secondary projects, but since I’m only in month three of my service I have no idea what those projects should be. Eventually I’ll be giving English seminars for teachers and doing whatever else my director thinks I should be doing but right now I’m enjoying the extra free time.

I spend my evenings walking around and visiting people, which is actually a fairly important part of my job. Peace Corps stresses “integration” into our host communities, both because its important for us to have friends at site and because one of the major goals of Peace Corps service is cultural exchange. If I don’t have someone specific to visit I walk around until someone either stops me to talk to me or invites me into their house. I’ve learned a lot of Kinyarwanda this way, and I’ve also gotten to know my village pretty well.

I head home by 5:30 at the latest because I have to be inside my gate before dark. I don’t know how it is in big cities but in the villages women do not go out alone at night, both because it’s unsafe and because to do so is to risk one’s reputation. This used to bother me because the nights here are cool and clear and great for walking in, but lately I’ve learned to enjoy my nights in. I have a night guard named Josias who shows up at my house around 6pm so I usually talk with him for a little while or play guitar on my front porch (Josias loves it when I play guitar) and then I go inside and write lessons or read until I’m tired enough to sleep. If I need a reprieve from solitude I’ll have dinner with Louise, which is great because it means I don’t have to cook.

My Sundays are a little more interesting. On Sundays I wake up before 5am to play soccer with some of the young men in my village. My headmaster invited me to play with them once about a month ago and I’ve shown up every week since because if I don’t people ask me why I wasn’t there. It’s daunting because I’m the only female and I’m also terrible at soccer but the guys I play with are really encouraging and a lot of them aren’t that good either so I usually have a good time. We play until 8 or 8:30. Then I go home, shower, make breakfast, and go to mass. Yes, I go to church. It’s actually not that unusual for nonreligious PCVs to attend church because it’s a way of integrating, and it’s also an opportunity to be out in public without people staring at you or trying to poke your skin or pull your hair.

So there you have it, my typical day in Rwanda. A lot of this doesn’t apply right now because I’m in between trimesters so I don’t have a job, but certain things (the waking up at 5:30, for example) are still accurate. If anyone has any further questions, please let me know - like I said, to me this is all mind-numbingly boring but that may not be the case for everyone back home, I don’t know. Thanks for reading!