We realised we have neglected to inform you about our diet whilst being out here so thought we should compensate. All our food is brought from the local market which happens twice a week. The market is loud, buzzy and completely different to everything we have at home. There are women selling live chickens, hundreds of different types of rice and flour, a large variety of fruit and vegetables and the local green bananas seem to be on sale everywhere you look. Working out how much to pay for each item, with the language barrier, is always entertaining and can result in about 10 people trying to translate for us. Being the only white people (Muzungos) in the town we draw attention to ourselves wherever we go. This is most obvious in the market where everyone seems to watch us and come towards us with their produce making shopping quite difficult.
The food we eat here is mainly carbohydrates with a vegetable sauce. Meals include vegetable sauce with rice or potato chips or sweet potato chips. Green bananas in a peanut sauce is a firm favourite in Rwanda as they are grown locally, easy to make and relatively cheap. The meat here, which we haven’t eaten, is mainly goat, chicken or rabbit. Goat is the most common meat and seems to sneak its way into everything including omelettes. The fruit is delicious with pineapples, papayas, passion fruit and amazing yellow bananas being a part of our daily diet. Eating out in Rwanda is the same type of food but in a buffet style with pasta and noodles thrown in just in case we didn’t have enough carbs. The food has on the whole been good but we are very excited for some protein and other food groups.
Another aspect of Rwandan culture, which we were not expecting, was how keen the Rwandans are on cleanliness and hygiene. We cannot go to one of the centres without the children cleaning themselves, their clothes, their sheets or the centre. We have often had to pull the kids away from cleaning to teach them English. We experienced this enthusiasm personally when we were last at the centre as we got roped in to cleaning the shoes of one of the boys. He then demanded to clean our shoes. We accepted the offer as they were filthy but had to clarify that it was not in our culture to have filthy shoes but that our shoes were not used to the dust in Rwanda so looked very worse for wear. After he produced our shoes looking as good as new he decided that our feet were not up to scratch either. “I clean your feet” he announced and not wanting to seem rude we had our feet (which we thought were perfectly clean) cleaned by the boys! It seems as if they really enjoy cleaning which again is very different from what we are used to from children at home. This is something that echoes around all of Rwanda. On the last Saturday of each month an event takes place called Umuganda from 8am -11am where everyone in the country goes out and cleans the streets, builds schools and takes part in community service. This creates a great community spirit as well as making sure important jobs are done at as little cost as possible. We were quite amazed by this as no one is exempt from taking part as it is a criminal offence to avoid Umuganda. Rwanda comes to a virtual standstill as progress is clearly being made.
On Wednesday afternoon we went on a home visit to meet a family that SACCA supports. The girl we were going to meet, Louise, is one of SACCA’s vocational students. She is training to be a seamstress and she has two children and is only 22. We went to her house which we thought by Rwandan standards looked relatively normal and so to begin with we didn’t understand why she was getting support. She still lived with her parents who were given their house by the government. They had been thrown out of Uganda before the Civil War as they were Rwandan citizens. They had built a successful life for themselves in Uganda and had nothing when they came back to Rwanda. By this time the father had become too old to work and so the family ended up in extreme poverty. This was not helped by Louise getting pregnant at a very early age. It became clear to us how important SACCA’s work outside of the centres is as these young adults really need SACCA’s support.
Another vocational student who is supported by SACCA is the mother of one of the 7 year old boys, Dabo, in the Kayonza centre. Once when we were at the field with the boys, Dabo had this two-year-old chasing him around constantly calling his name. It wasn’t until a couple of days later we were told that he was his brother who lives with Dabo’s mother very near the centre. We later bumped into the mother on the street and realised how hard it must be that she cannot afford to keep Dabo in her house but that she could easily bump into him in the street at any time. They do have organised home visits but nonetheless it must be extremely hard.
In our lesson this week we taught the children about personalities and how to describe them. We got the children to come and act out the personalities and then asked them to draw their friends. We had some entertaining pictures and children seemed to like describing themselves and their friends as boring or bossy.
We even had some drawings done of us that were not necessarily us looking our best.
We are about to embark on our last week in Rwanda and are not looking forward to saying goodbye to the children who we have become quite attached to and who are truly amazing kids.