You Are Welcome to Rwanda

When I had been living in Spain for almost a year and my list of visited European countries was becoming something I was proud of, I started to feel like everywhere I went just looked like a mixture of everywhere else I had been. Wild feelings of insecurity, unfamiliarity, extreme disorientation, intrigue from a new fascinating culture, a language spoken like ribbons out of a stranger’s mouth, these were the feelings that captured my attention about world traveling and diseased me with a thirst for wandering. And those feelings were becoming harder and harder to chase. A new country was not enough to quench that greedy thirst.

And so I accepted a position to live in Rwanda for nine weeks.

All I could think my first night laying in bed in my new home was, "you've really done it this time, Stephanie. You've really done it."

Everything about Rwanda is unfamiliar.

Everything brings ten questions. Where is the drinking water? (In that tub) How do we use it? How do we refill it? How long do we have to wait for the water to purify?

Sometimes these answers are helpful but they mostly lead to more questions or leave me speechless and much more confused than I originally was.

Example- Do we have to replace the filter in there? (in regards to the drinking water)

Answer - Oh no, it's a candle. It does it automatically and doesn’t need to be replaced.

OHH, DUH! A candle. That filters water. Inside of a large plastic tub. Of course.

The language barrier is really a barrier. The other intern and I are the only Americans in the office. Everyone speaks English, but it's obviously not the same. We need cultural translations for just about everything. We can't ask the Rwandans how to wash our vegetables. Despite their sweetness and genuine welcome wishes, they’re simply incapable of estimating just how helpless we feel in this entirely new environment.

Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is like a large bowl with rows of little homes lining the edges. At night, it sparkles and during the day, you can see that beyond the bowl’s edges are rolling hills on all sides. Roads go from a red mud with dust kicked up by cars and pedestrians to a more sophisticated cobblestone, and only the major roads are actually paved. The street names here are all numbers (KG 645 or KG 9) and are not used nor known by the locals. On our walk from our home to school, we pass several non-governmental (non-profit) organizations. In a community that uses local landmarks and neighborhood names to describe addresses, someone new to the area that doesn’t speak the language seems to have little hope of getting around easily.

The home we are renting is actually owned by a church planting mission organization, and the owners have been so gracious to let us live here. The home is huge- intended for four children plus Mom and Dad. Although getting the water working, learning how to turn off and on the gas for the stove, lighting the stove, paying electricity, etc were all key components of the learning curve our first few days here, there is still much to learn.

Our first interactions with the office staff were over emails and our first day in the office the same sentiments were repeated. Each staff member would come up to me and say, “You are welcome to Rwanda” and then tell me their name. Despite our attempts to “do like the Romans do,” the other intern and I cannot help be perplexed by just about everything.  So, welcome to Rwanda where everything is a perplexing challenge followed by 90 questions without helpful answers.

You are welcome!