The power went out in the village so I went to go buy some candles at the boutique nearby. On my way returning home, I passed by the teachers’ house. I saw a flashlight bouncing through the darkness, so I called out a greeting. It was one of the teachers. He shined his flashlight in my face as I approached, then said, “We need your torch.”

He grabbed my flashlight from me and brought it to where a couple of other teachers were cooking. One of them was hacking away at a goat head with a broken machete. I thought for sure the old man was going to take one of his thumbs off. The power soon returned, but I stuck around to see how they planned to prepare this goat head.

While we stood around the boiling pot that smelled like a distinct mixture of beef and wet dog, an interesting conversation ensued. This particular group of teachers is all Congolese. I discovered that they segregate themselves from the others because they are not Rwandan. The distaste that they have for Rwandan culture became more and more apparent as the conversation progressed. The two groups get along on the surface, but they don't like to spend extended amounts of time together.

I learned all about Congolese cuisine. It seems they will indiscriminately eat any kind of meat in the DRC, including small birds, tortoises, monkeys and rats. One of my Congolese friends explained to me that there is a certain organ in crocodiles that is extremely poisonous and must be removed under the supervision of the local authorities. When they remove this particular organ, they must throw it into a 30 meter-deep pit, dump gas into it, light the gas, and then bury the hole again.

When I finally tried to leave, my friends asked me to stay and eat with them. I obliged. Goat brain is now the strangest food I have eaten. It made the cassava paste seem normal. One of them described it as smooth. I would say goopdescribes its texture best.

I have made an effort to keep this blog relatively positive, but I also want to tell the truth. Here is the truth- sometimes this job is a lot harder than I imagined. Don’t get me wrong, this is a truly amazing experience and I love my life in Rwanda but lately teaching has been [...]

The Namib desert outside of Swakopmund, Namibia.Sandboarding in the Namib Desert, Namibia.Quad biking is actually really fun out in the desert dunes. Namib Desert, Namibia.Catching the sunrise on Dune 45, Sousselvei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia.Atop the Sousselvei Dunes, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia.One of the many dunes in the Sousselvei, Namibia.A fisherman piloting a mokoro in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.Cruising in a mokoro in the Okavango Delta, northern Botswana.

The desert is a cruel and unforgiving place. It’s also where a nation, Namibia, sits between two of the largest deserts in the world. The west coast of Namibia is the sand dune Namib Desert which houses the world famous areas of the Sousselvei and Skeleton Coast. To the east is the bushier Kalahari Desert. This arid Kalahari plain extends from northern South Africa to the Congo border, and from Namibia to Botswana. Look on a map of Namibia and you won’t see many settlements. There is a reason: no water. Namibia is (along with Mongolia) the least densely populated country on earth. Coming here from Rwanda was a night-and-day situation. Here is a land of vast stretches with nobody around. In fact, on my drive from Swakopmund to Sousselvei (five hours on a gravel road) I came across one building: a gas station with no gas. Now look at a map of Botswana. Most of the country (with the exception of the east and south border areas) has very few settlements due to the Kalahari Desert. It’s no different than looking at a map of Nevada. Undoubtedly the most famous part of Botswana is the Okavango Delta. The largest inland delta discharges all of the Okavango River water into dry salt pans in the middle of the desert (this was the area that Planet Earth filmed their first hour of the series). As a result Botswana has some of the best wildlife viewing opportunities in the world. Traveling in a mokoro (carved out wooden boat), you rarely encounter water deeper than a few feet. The past two weeks have been a journey of going through these two deserts in search of their best activities and most scenic opportunities. Enjoy the photos.

WOW!!!! It’s all that I can say today. . . .the books, that so many of you have so graciously donated money to help ship them here, have arrived. It has been almost a full year since our initial post about needing your help to get books sent to our village. I just want to [...]

Andrew and I made the trek to Gakenke to visit Chantal (my best friend) and her family. We went to Musanze, got on a bus, hiked to the top of a hill and finally reached her peaceful little house. You could see all of Gakenke and were comforted by the slight breeze. We ate, we drank and relaxed until it was time to leave and repeat the trek again. At the top, you can see Chantals mother and cousins picking off the maize kernels to grind to flour. Next, we eat a big meal as Andrew and Chantal's father sip the sauce straight out of the pot (we ate a huge plate...with meat!). Then, Chantal's father rests a bit after eating. Chantals brother and Andrew exchange conversation and drinks while trekking down the hill. And then we leave, on an empty bus.

Ashley is a volunteer at the Imbabazi Orphanage. See Ashley work on the computer in Roz's House above. See Ashley bake cookies with some of the orphanage girls (and local boy) below. They were chocolate chip cookies in case you were wondering.

Sunset on the beach in Stone Town

More Stone Town

Near the Slave Cave

Ye olde Zanzibar History Museum in Stone Town

Dog takes a break in Bwejuu

It’s been an awfully long time but I am going to try to be more diligent with blogging. I thought the best way to break my year long silence here would be to write a snapshot of an average day here in the lovely albeit small town of Rukara, this is the story of yesterday. Yesterday started off like any other day. I woke up at 5:30 and scrambled to finish making a poster (more specifically 3 posters) with the lyrics from “Summer Nights” from Grease which I will be using to teach irregular verbs in the past simple to my S1 students. I know from the get go that today will be a doozy. Before I know it it is 7:00 am and I am nearly going to be late for school. I quickly scarf down some dried mango and chug a cup of coffee ( I know I will need it) and dash out the door. Now lucky for me it is the rainy season which gives us a most needed break from the scorching sun. The trade off however is about 5 inches of squishy, slippery mud everywhere. I delicately walk/ski/slide across the school property juggling my three posters, 500 different handouts for the day, a ball (for a warm-up activity), bag of markers, box of prizes, speakers, my computer and a large roll of tape. On the way I greet about 750 itty bitty primary school students. I pass one group of students who appear to be snorting cocaine. On closer look its really just dried koolaid…so I guess that’s better? I literally slide into class for the first lesson of the day: S3B. The topic of the day is Human Rights. This is exciting because I love doing lessons on content that actually matters as opposed to just drilling past simple irregular verbs. I have decided to print out the UN Declaration of Human rights for the lesson. This document, if you have never read it, is chock full of inspiring, fantastically delicious prose. This also, however, means that its full to the brim of very complex vocabulary. Needless to say I over estimated my ability to explain them in English let alone Kinyarwanda. To try and bring the idea that laws are different than rights and that rules should exist to protect rights and not to hurt them I have decided to try a demonstration. I announce that I will be implementing some new rules starting today. I tell students that from now on I will consider row one the good students, they will be the only ones to get books, dictionaries and special prizes from me (I give out pencils). The second row I have determined is no longer allowed to speak in class (they were concerningly ok with this) and finally the third row was declared to be the bad students. They would no longer be allowed to sit in class. They would receive punishment everyday. As well intentioned at the exercise what, it was a bit of a failure-well-in the first two classes at least. The students are used to being told what to do and following un-questioningly. I am not sure if they really understood the concept of an unjust law. Planting seeds right? After 4 straight hours with S3 comes the most anxiety inducing part of my day: going to the toilet. This event causes me daily anxiety not because of the germs-I am pretty sure I am immune to everything by now, not because I have to walk half a mile through a muddy field watched by 1,000 curious eyes- you learn to walk carefully, not because of the 700 flies that buzz around the hole or the fact that there is no toilet paper, water or soap for washing afterwards. No no no my anxiety comes from the fact that some engineering genius decided to put the lock on the OUTSIDE of the latrine and locate the teachers toilets in the middle of the Primary school playground. I desperately fear that one day some smart ass 5 year old is going to lock me in the toilet. Why do I fear this??? Because it HAPPENED the second day here at my home by a 4 year old!!! And it would be so much more humiliating at school. But fortunately for me that did not happen today, today I was safe from certain smelly, claustrophobic death. For today at least. Thus relieved I return to teaching. Now I have two hours with S1A. That lovely, precious, eager group of young minds who understand so very little of what I say. Today I am excited because we are going to sing “summer nights” and I feel confident they will love it. False. Do you know how many key changes there are in that song?!?! Things you just don’t think about when you choose a song for class. Additionally, apparently “Summer Nights” was too much of a jump in vocabulary and melodic complexity from our last song “Hello, Goodbye” by the Beatles. Yes, that’s probably true. I concede. But not in class I didn’t . Sigh. I find that I often over reach in class. I love challenging my students but there’s a delicate balance. A little challenge is good and promotes thinking and trying and growing, a lot of challenge makes students give up, check out and go crazy. Too often I lean towards the second. If I have said it once I have said it a thousand times: teaching is an art…no doubt about it…hopefully I am getting there. Anyways 6 hours of classes later the school day ends. I’m sorry you may have thought there that I meant I was finished…o contrare. After school a film crew from Kigali comes to my school to film me teaching yet ANOTHER lesson with 7 MORE teaching aids to a DIFFERENT group of students. This lesson is about current events. I am participating in a television program series here called SMART LEARNING in which I work with different teachers to prepare lessons that promote good teaching methods. This week no teacher would agree to do it so that left yours truly as the only candidate. I reel in the students who I have chosen to stay after school to be in the program. We arrange the desks, clean the floor, get our supplies situated and are just about ready to begin when….oh yes that would be rain you here POUNDING on the roof making it impossible to be heard. We wait for about 20 minutes and then the rain subsides enough that we can continue the lesson. I teach the hour and a half lesson, the students do their presentations, the film crew films and then it’s a wrap. The crew brings in fanta for the students, two of them get sick from chugging too fast (mind you they are 19 years old) and then I send them home. At this point I am FINALLY able to pack up my bips and bops and start on the treacherous 5 minute walk home. On the way I meet several students who have apparently camped out along my path to ask for various favors: chalk, to come running with me tomorrow, to check their homework, to come to GLOW camp (still 4 months away) you know, the usual. At 5:30, I FINALLY make it home and turn to close the door for the night when low and behold the door won’t shut because three wiggly giggly girls are holding it open with shrieks and screams of “YOUR HOME!” and I know that I am home. I sit down to collect my strength before sliding down to the floor to draw on princess paper with my girls (neighbors from my compound) and try to remember what my neighbor said about people being lucky if kids like them, that they will find blessings in their lives when kids camp out at their home. Damn I must be lucky☺ Around 6 I start cooking dinner only to find that the electricity has gone out. I give up that endeavor and decide it will be a trailmix and banana kind of a night and I sit down to finish preparing my lessons for tomorrow amid a pile of arms and legs and fingers in my hair (literally). At 8 pm I send the children out with wishes of “dreams of God” and I just about collapse. But not before a quick chat with that ever patient, ever loving, ever thoughtful fiancé of mine. And that’s a wrap. Another PCV recently said to me, “Wow Caitlyn that’s so sweet you still care.” I looked at him blankly, trying to determine his meaning. What, I asked him sincerely, was the alternative? NOT CARING??? That seems like a revolting idea. I hope I always care, I hope I always try even when I am the only on (as it often feels at my school). The good news is that caring is catching and energy is contagious. I hope you’ve got the bug too and if not, share some of mine☺ Yours truly and ever caring, Caitlyn

After 4 years in Africa, I'm finally going home.

The sandstorms in Mauritania.

Canoes on the river near my home.

Getting water in the desert.

Living in the cold mountains.

It's been an awesome adventure.

...to go back on your computer and harmlessly check your facebook! It's not safe because unfortunately for you, I'm not quite done yet! I've been back now over two weeks and the initial shock of things has worn off. Now, I'm just dealing with the aftershocks (which I just had to look up on google to make sure it was a real word and not just something I was making up). Now I'm not sure if this is like or UNlike an earthquake having never experienced one, but there's no warning for when these aftershocks occur. No signal to tell you, "you're about to be overwhelmed and confused in a completely normal situation!!" My moment the other day was watching this woman's groceries go down the conveyor belt. I was staring at them in disbelief with all their shiny packaging and pre-made-ness and the variety of all the different things she could get in one place. And also by how little that meant to her. In all likelihood, she's never stared at her groceries in wonder. (Just going out on a limb there) And it stinks because people don't wanna hear about how much they take for granted. It's like looking at someone and saying "you're a spoiled jerk!" Even if that's not at all your intended meaning. You're just still stunned and amazed and appreciative of it all. I know that will fade, but I hope I never lose it completely especially in light of my next topic: First World Problems. I have found myself quickly irritated by people angered at things not going perfectly smoothly. All I can think is "So what, you have to get transferred twice and can't buy this ticket from the comfort of your leather chair." It's not really fair to people because they're used to things working smoothly and quickly and it's amazing how quickly you fall back into that, but obviously the Peace Corps sure makes you more ready to go with the flow and handle any situation thrown your way. It's hard to remember that not everyone around you has been through the same experience. You've been with them through so much and have known them so long you sometimes forget where you end and they begin. Then it comes into stark reality in those situations, but you don't wanna be that annoyingly optimistic and easy person that just says "hey, not a big deal, member how you getta eat 3 times a day?" That's not a way to keep friends, so you just silently seethe and wonder if you'll ever fit into your world again. But overall, I do feel at peace and at home and at...me. It's just nice to still have those Peace Corps people in my life with whom I can say "Can you believe them? Let's get a primus!"

After a flight from Jakarta, a day of walking and shopping in Bangkok, and a five-hour bus ride to the border, we arrived in Cambodia! Our first Cambodian destination was Siem Reap, gateway to the world’s largest religious structure, Angkor Wat. Going there mainly to see Angkor Wat, I didn’t have any expectations for Siem Reap itself, but it turned out to be a great town. Getting out of the town and seeing some of the villages in the surrounding countryside, though, turned out to be the highlight of our time in the area, at least for me.

Siem Reap is perhaps Cambodia’s best-known town, home to about 172,000 people. Parts of the town felt a lot like Europe, particularly in the architecture – leftover French influence, I guess. (Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953.) The area of town we stayed in was pretty happening, the streets lined with bars, restaurants, shops, and guesthouses, and filled with both Asians and Westerners.

Our hotel the Mandalay Inn, was great, and the staff were very friendly and helpful. It was $18/night for a triple room, though it didn’t include breakfast. We had an attached bathroom with hot water, a fan, AC, and TV (with CNN!), and the hotel even had a little gym on the roof.

Cambodian food is a bit different from Indonesian, but just as good, and everything we had in Siem Reap was delicious. My favorite Cambodian dish so far is amok, which is a coconut curry-based sauce with vegetables and chicken, beef, or fish, served with rice. Apparently Cambodians eat amok only with fish, and chicken and beef amok are served only because Cambodians realized foreigners like variety. I also tried Cambodia’s Angkor beer, which was very good and cost only $0.50 during happy hour.

Another highlight was the night we ate at one of Siem Reap’s several BBQ restaurants. For $5/person, we cooked noodles and pieces of raw meat and vegetables in extremely hot oil over a little grill at our table. It was a fun experience, and the food was really good – though we skipped the crocodile and squid options, having just chicken, beef, and pork.

I can’t talk about Siem Reap’s dining scene, though, without talking about the street food: street food in Siem Reap is abundant, diverse, cheap, and delicious. One of the main street dishes is fried noodles, which we ate one night while sitting on little stools on the curb. Another staple of Siem Reap’s street food were the banana pancake carts, which were all over. For $1, the vendor would pull out a lump of pre-made dough, fry it into a thin pancake, cook in some slices of banana, drizzle it with chocolate sauce, and wrap the whole thing in a piece of paper for easy eating on the go. They were delicious.

Siem Reap also has quite a few very interesting markets, catering to both locals and visitors. The best-known is the Angkor Night Market, which gets going around 4pm everyday. It has tons of stalls with vendors selling all sorts of clothes, accessories, and souvenirs, as well as street food carts offering fried noodles, sliced fruit, and banana pancakes. There were also multiple stalls set up as makeshift spas offering massages and other services. We went to the same spa-stall for foot massages a couple different times – only $3 for 30 minutes! There are spas all over Siem Reap, in and out of the market, and they were almost all extremely cheap and pretty nice-looking.

As I said, we went to Siem Reap mainly for the purpose of seeing Angkor Wat. Originally intending to go back a couple times, we ended up spending only one day at the temples, but it was very interesting. Part of the world’s largest pre-industrial city, Angkor Wat (literally “City Temple”) is a huge complex of Hindu temples built in the twelfth century, during the Khmer Empire. Though the name Angkor Wat is now used to refer to the complex as a whole, it is actually just the name of the largest and best-known individual temple, which is an iconic image here. The Cambodian flag features an image of Angkor Wat, and pictures of it are found in many hotels, restaurants, and shops, as well as on most souvenirs.

The complex also includes Angkor Thom (literally “Great City”), the Khmer Empire’s last capital, which is believed to have had a population of as many as 180,000 people. Within Angkor Thom are two of the complex’s major temples: Bayon, known for the 200+ faces carved into its stone towers, and Bapuon, a “temple mountain,” designed to represent Mt. Meru (considered by Hindus and Buddhists to be the center of all universes). Located outside Angkor Thom, another of the best-known temples in the complex is Ta Prohm, which has been largely untouched and now has trees growing out of its ruins.

Though the oldest structures in the complex were originally built as Hindu temples, it shifted to Buddhist use during the late-thirteenth century, and is still used by Buddhists today. In fact, most visitors to Angkor Wat will see monks and nuns, in orange robes and white gowns respectively, all with their heads shaved, while at the temples. Because Angkor Wat is still in use, visitors must cover their shoulders and knees in order to enter the temple.

On the day we went to the temples, we left town at about 5am and got to see the sun coming up over the temple of Angkor Wat, which was beautiful. We visited the other main temples, which were interesting but less awe-inspiring, and then went back to more thoroughly explore Angkor Wat in the afternoon. The sheer size of it, and the intricacy of the detail, is pretty astonishing.

Getting out into the countryside, away from the town and the tourist attractions, was actually my favorite part of our time in the Siem Reap area, but I’ll get to that later!

Hope LewisKarongi District, Western District

Girls Hub, a new organization located in Kigali, opened March 2011 with a focus on empowering young Rwandan women. The organization has two pillars of government: first, the goal to reduce the population growth rate and, to give better basic health education to some of the poorest populations in Rwanda.

Girls Hub has three programs. The first is a health program for all Rwandan girls 12 years and older. The second is a partnership with Nike Foundation and Rwanda Government Ministry of Health which offers a 10 month group learning experience that focuses on the dangers of adolescent pregnancy, knowing your body and HIV/STIs prevention as well as how to say “No” to sugar daddies and sugar mommies. Lastly, they have created a magazine “Ni Nyampinga” and a radio programme of the same name that runs by girls for girls.

Girls Hub believes, as many international organizations now believe, women are the key to alleviating poverty and spurring development in countries worldwide. Investing in a girl stops poverty before it starts. Their mission is to empower girl’s to have their own voice and create impact at scale. They also champion girl’s roles to influence decision maker’s actions. Girls Hub hopes to help girls manager their reproduction health and encourages their participants to make more informed economic and social decisions. They believe that girls who stay healthy, don’t get pregnant, and stay in school can lead very productive adult lives and can have immeasurable amounts of impact in their communities.With a quality education and these resources, the girls of Rwanda will have a bright future both for themselves and for the development of their country.

365 days, 52 weeks, 12 months.  You would think that I’d be used to all this by now, and in many ways I am, but sometimes I’m still amazed that I find myself in Rwanda.  May 5th marked a year of my being in country and what a year it has been.  I have yet [...]

I have a regular visitor these days. He comes to my house every morning to wake me up with his strong voice. He storms through the fence to my door. He calls for me. He plans his day to be sure that he is one I wake up to every day.

I look at him, morning, noon, and night, with hungry, longing eyes. I wonder if I will be able to stop myself. He is so well built, so strong, so… big. Someday, I think to myself, I will have him.

He is lucky I am such a good neighbor and stop myself from taking him right then and there in the garden. Self-control. But, with every passing day, I want him more and more. For dinner. Damn, that is one tasty lookin’ cock.

And now, for your enjoyment, a haiku:Cock-a-doodle-doo!Wakes me up early. Daily.I want to eat him.

And another:You look delicious.Feathers: A messy problem.Death will have to wait.

One more:Fried, roasted, grilled, baked,With mashed potatoes, veggies,Maybe tomorrow.

In all honesty, I hate that rooster. He really does come over to wake me up every morning. Even on weekends. He walks around my garden area like he owns it and I’m sure he’ll try to eat my lil sprouts once they grow. And he’s quite a lil slut, as far as chickens go (I’m assuming). All the time, using my back yard as a place to attack those poor lil hens. I throw rocks, I throw dirt, and he returns. Every. Damn. Day.

I have never killed an animal (OK, one squirrel, but I’m pretty sure he was suicidal and I was only a victim to his well-planned demise in front of my car). I had the chance on Thanksgiving, but happily took over the gutting station, rather than the becoming an actual head-chopper-offer. This rooster is testing my patience. I could just write a usual blog post about this, but with a cock for material, I had to make a little fun of it.

Don’t worry! I’ll keep y’all posted on this foul’s fate… (oh, come on, I can't kill my neighbors rooster!)

Hey readers! Thought I fell off a cliff? Or fell into a volcano? Or disappeared into the mist? Well, imaginations be damned, I am just fine. Though, it has been a while! I guess I should fill you in on the break we just had here in good ol’ ‘Wanda.

I think I left off at becoming a librarian. Yup, that’s been cool, but during the break, there weren’t even students to help or entertain, so the majority of April was spent at home. April is the break between first and second term and the break lasts a full four weeks, only one of which was spent marking exams and turning in grades. April is also the beginning of the rainy season that usually lasts until the end of May (or so I’ve been told). The first week, maybe two, were not rainy at all. In fact, I was doing daily rain dances with hopes of filling my water filter or being able to wash my stinky clothes. Well, it took an extra week or two, but those rain gods saw my mad rain dance capabilities and let me have it. It was like the scene in Forrest Gump when our beloved hero talks about the rain in Vietnam: We had little misty rain, a lot of big fat rain, rain coming down sideways, and rain of just about every other type. My basins and buckets have been full for a month.

So this rain, was great. Then it wasn’t. I quickly remembered how klutzy I am when the ground is not firm beneath me, and it only took about 10 steps from my front door to realize this. Dirt roads and paths + buckets of rain = Gil even more graceless than usual the usual tripping and spilling (tell me, how was I EVER in dance for so many years?!). Most of break was not only spent in my village, but the vast majority was spent in my house, far away from the slippery mud roads. Every time I did leave, there was a constant slew of, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” (this is what they yell when I stumble, slip, trip, or drop something) from people watching me attempt to find footing on the roads. Oh, and a lot of staring at the crazy white girl walking in the rain- shocker. So yes, home was the safest, warmest, driest place to be for the month.

Do you know what staying inside the same house does to a girl after that long? It makes me stir crazy. I watched a lot of movies. I cooked a lot of rice and beans/ other dry storage goods. I cleaned my house with all that rain water a lot. I took a lot of bucket baths to make use of all that water. And I may have gone a weeeeee bit mad. I tried to make this better by having a girlfriend come stay with me for a couple of days. It was great! She was able to make it from her site, but arrived soaked to the bone and had to piggy-back a man across a small river, but she made it! Yaaaay! Sanity!

We lucked out, the next day was sunny! We thought it would be a good idea to go to town, get some food, pick up a care-package of American munchies waiting at the post office, and come back home. Nice day, right? Well, as happens in Rwanda, none of this went according to plan. As we made it down my hill (yes, I call it MY hill) to catch the bus, we quickly realized no bus would be passing. The river on the south side of the hill had swelled so much from the rains that the road was not passable by car. Once again, my friend hopped on the back or a Rwandan man, as did I. For a month, this was the only way in or out of my village in either direction. Laugh it up. I wish I had pictures.

The rest of that day didn’t quite work out either. Many hiccups. A story in its own. We did not get our Ameri-foods or a day in town. We got sunburns, a broken motorcycle taxi, a long walk, and very, very drunk. It was quite warranted, if you ask me.

OK, so back to break. A week after our attempted day out was a scheduled In-Service Training, known in the biz as IST. This is for our entire Peace Corps group (there are 35 of us) to meet for a week and share challenges, successes, and learn about various side projects. It was a lot of information- a lot, but such a good time seeing everyone! Our group is pretty great- I love those fools. And we got to stay at a nice hotel on beautiful Lake Kivu. They had breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and dinner for us every day. I think I gained all the weight back that I was so happy about losing. They also had beds with pillows. PILLOWS! There were Western toilets (the kinds with seats and flushing contraptions… that worked). Best of all, there were showers. Hot showers. Beautiful showers (not really, they were shower heads over a small basin/drain, no tub, no shower walls or door, no shower curtain- but that sure as hell beats a cup and bucket full of water!). So yeah, that just about sums up IST. Back to the village.

I was thrown back into real life after a week of prepared meals, comfy beds, and did I mention?, showers. It was also back to teaching this week. Quite honestly, this left me crashing hard. It got me down: I came home to a house that had flooded from the rain when I was gone, and it was still a muddy mess, and back to hard work just taking care of myself. Oh, and we got flu shots, so I had all sorts of flu symptoms to make me more pathetic. Then what happened? Klutz Gil pulled through and I fell flat on my front-side onto cement and part of a pile of rocks. I was a bloody, scratched up, bruised up mess. After a day of teaching, followed by a Rwandan holiday (and no school), I didn’t even make it to school the other 2 days of my classes. I stayed in my bed, sick and pouting. It was one of those lowest of the low couple of days. I just wanted to be back to a life of pillows and showers.

Don’t worry, I didn’t wallow much longer. The weekend came and we got a day of sunshine. I found myself a hoe to borrow and sprinted to my overgrown, weedy, mess of a garden. For the last few weekends in a row now, my entire days are spent cleaning the house, then working in the garden for hours on end (until it gets dark, or until the rain is just too much). In just a few weekends, it has gone from awful to turned, turned again, weeded, weeded again, turned again, ugly tree torn down, and the garden space is now fertilized and planted. That’s right, if any bit of dad’s green thumb was inherited by me, I just may have myself a salad one of these days. Gardening has quickly become my meditation, my peace of mind, and my favorite hobby. The mamas love it, too. At first, they thought I was ridiculous, asking for a hoe to use myself. Now they invite me to take their lovely cow shit for fertilizing, they teach me how to turn the ground like Rwandan pros (ummm, this is no different, but they assure me I am doing it wrong and like to show me the right way), and they tell me to bring them veggies once they’ve grown. I like their company, so it’s a deal.

School is also in full swing. Classes are off to a great start, and I have realized how much happier I am working than I am having nothing to do in town during break (remember, this is a boarding school- so during break most of my students were out of town doing big things in Kigali. They think it is HI-larious that I stayed in the village during break). Things are back to normal, things are good. Well, the roads are even more washed out than before- not even piggy-back can get me through, but MOST things are back to normal. Phew.

“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate [...]

The students in one of my classes asked me to support them monetarily so that they could compete in an inter-class football tournament. I accepted with the condition that they would let me be their team manager and coach. I love it when they call me coach.

Here are some of the things I had to avoid on the field the last time I played football:

patches of tall grassholeslumpscow piesgoats crossing the fielda cowa motorcyclethe ball - it was waterlogged from the rain and weighed about five pounds

Due to my internet not working, here are a series of would-be facebook statuses that encompass the last two weeks: OMG SO MUCH RAIN I’m teaching again! LOVE my students. CRAP – internet not working. YAY WENT TO THE EAST REGIONAL MEETING AND JEN and KATIE were awesome, bringing us care packages – I GOT [...]

The experience of traveling in Rwanda differs from area to area and by the mode of transport you choose. Overall, it’s easy to get from place to place even though I don’t have a car. The modes of transport are motorcycles, small buses (in which, they legit squeeze as many people as possible inside), large [...]

Every 3 or 4 months, we have regional meetings. Because there are only about 10 of us in eastern Rwanda, we’re a region. In other parts of the country, the volunteers are more densely placed. We got together last Saturday, just north of Kayonza. The day was one of those quintessential you-know-you’re-in-Peace-Corps-when days. The whole [...]

A handful of months after Peace Corps Volunteers move to their sites, they attend what is called In-Service Training, better known as IST. So four months after Pre-Service Training (PST) ended, Rwanda 6 came back together for a week in Kibuye, a beautiful town along Lake Kivu. We stayed at an amazing hotel with running [...]

Isabella and Apolloknee (I am quite sure this is not how you spell her name, but it’s how I see it in my head, like Apollo—the space shuttle, and knee—a body part) arrived at my house earlier this week for dinner. I had just returned back from the boutique to buy a couple of rounds [...]

A couple of weeks ago I went gorilla trekking in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. The Rwanda, Uganda, DRC area is the only place in the world to see mountain gorillas in the wild. For me since I live in Rwanda it cost $250 but for anyone who lives outside of the country it costs them $500. Still $250 is quite a lot for me considering that I get $260 a month for my living allowance. I also had to pay my share of the car that took us to the volcano from Musanze as well as the cost of food and travel. I probably paid around $300 for this experience. As a volunteer you have to be very aware about how you are spending your money because it goes very quickly. I was able get a lift out to Musanze with a friend who was heading that way and stay there for free too at another volunteer’s house. Still it was easily the most that I have spent on a weekend for sure in Africa and maybe in my life. I have heard a lot recently that they will be raising the price soon to $350 for residents and $750 for non-residents in June so I had to get this in before then. I heard that they are raising the cost for conservation purposes. Too many people are going to see them at the low cost of $500 per person and it’s having a bad effect on the jungle. The gorillas can get sick from close encounters with people. Even with the high cost it was totally worth it. It was easily the best safari that I have been on. On the other safaris I have gone on are in Akagera and Queen Elizabeth I saw giraffes, zebra, buffalo, crocodiles, lots of birds, lions, leopards, hippopotamus, wart hogs, antelope and elephants. None of these animals really care that you are there looking at them and just do whatever they want. They were both really awesome, much better than a zoo, but you are in a car for most of the experience. We got out to look at giraffes and crocodiles from far away and lions from really far away, but that’s it. If you want good pictures of the animals from this kind of thing you are going to need a good camera with a good lens for it. I also went for a boat ride on the lake and watched the animals play in the water. That was cool too but still really far from the animals. When you see the gorillas you have to hike through the jungle. There is a guy with you with a machete who is hacking away plants as you go and ants crawling up your pants and biting your legs. The trackers go out ahead of you and look for the gorillas that you will visit and then radio back to your guide telling you where to go. We waited for a while outside the park before the guide got directions. Then we jumped the wall and hiked for about 40 minutes to find the gorillas. The gorilla family’s name that we saw was Kwitonda. In English that means humble. I don’t know how humble the gorillas were but they were great to watch. We saw three silverbacks, a couple of babies and like another 13. My favorite were the adolescents because they were climbing on stuff and fighting. The silverbacks just sat around grunting and the guide would grunt back, which he said was them communicating with the other gorillas that we were not threatening. They tell you that you need to stay at least 7 meters away from the gorillas and you think that they will be strict about that, but you get really close. Once we were there we were never even 5 meters away. The silverback was at one point only 3 feet from me and another gorilla slapped Aaron another volunteer with me on the back as it ran by. You don’t need a fancy camera either because you are so close to them. You can take pictures that could be in National Geographic with your standard camera. We were with the gorillas for an hour before hiking back out, but it felt shorter. If you are trying to choose a single experience in Africa I would suggest the gorilla trekking in Rwanda, but now that the price is going up you could go on maybe two or three other safaris instead of this one that would last longer. When I got home after the amazing experience the road was flooded and I had to wade through a foot of water on my way home. Everyone thought I was crazy and cheap for not taking a vehicle through the water, but its Peace Corps and pretty typical Rwanda.

I spent the last week in April working almost exclusively on Project FatNick. Well, okay that’s not strictly true; I was at my In-Service Training (IST) for Peace Corps. The IST conference brings together a group of volunteers, in this case the education group that swore in with me, after 3-4 months of service. IST [...]

Students of the BE (Boys Excelling) Club draw their community on the blackboard. The club is taught and lead by students of G.S Kabere who went to the BE Camp in Rwanda. It promotes leadership and good life practices among Rwandan youth.

Appalanie leads the GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) Club at G.S Kabere school. She is one of six girls from G.S Kabere that attended the GLOW Camp in Rwanda promoting leadership and good life practices among Rwandan Youth.

The Teachers Lounge

The official signing-of-documents procedure that serves as the final step from swtiching Headteachers.

Chantal grades finishes student report cards in my house.

I am currently on the train to Philadelphia where I will have a full day of orientation and meet the 20 or so other Americans that will be sharing in this journey with me. Excited is no longer the word to describe how I am feeling. While I’m a bit anxious as to what is [...]

Rwanda offers an abundance of delicious fruits but my favorite is by far the passion fruit, which they call “marakuca.”  I consumed six with lunch and have since been confined to my room thanks to a powerful storm that has delivered pouring rain and gusting winds all afternoon. Since I had some time on my [...]

After the overnight bus journey from Bali, we arrived in the town of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. Our hotel in “Yogya,” Venezia Homestay, was about $17/night for a double including breakfast, making it our cheapest place yet. It wasn’t as nice as our prior hotels, but was a really good value. We used a shared bathroom with a cold-water shower, and the room, though it had a floor fan, was ungodly hot – especially on the top bunk, where I slept. The family running the hotel, though, was very nice, and they even let us check in at 6:30am – and gave us a welcome drink!

To be honest, coming from Bali, Yogya itself was a bit underwhelming. It was a pretty big town, seemed to be largely industrial, and lacked Bali’s interesting architecture and general beauty. Like parts of Bali, it had Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts – I’m not sure when seeing places like that is going to stop being really strange to me. As usual, we skipped the American chains, but we did indulge in frozen yogurt at J. CO, the Indonesian equivalent of Bourbon (though J CO. wins, hands down). It was about $2.20 for a cup of yogurt with strawberries and chocolate chips, and was definitely as good as PinkBerry! On our first night in Yogya, we had dinner at one of the cheapest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at – I paid about $1.10 for a dish of vegetables and rice with peanut sauce, and it was delicious!

Yogya’s main attractions are the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which we visited, along with the smaller temple of Mendut. We left town at about 5:00am, to get to the temples before it got too hot (most days this time of year are in the high-90s) and crowded. Borobudur, Indonesia’s single most-visited tourist attraction, dates from the ninth century. The world’s largest Buddhist structure, it is huge – essentially a nine-story building – with the six square stories topped by three round ones. Indonesian Buddhists still use Borobudur for pilgrimages and for celebrating the holiday of Vesak, which commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death. Prambanan, which also dates from the ninth century, is one of the largest Hindu temples in Southeast Asia. It is actually a compound of numerous smaller temples, originally a total 240. Today, the sixteen main structures have been reconstructed, but only two of the original 224 smaller temples are still standing. Mendut is another Buddhist temple, also built around the ninth century. It is known primarily for its three large stone statues of Buddha – one each to liberate devotees from bodily karma, from karma of speech, and from karma of thought. Like Borobudur, Buddhists in Indonesia visit Mendut during celebrations of Vesak.

We also attended a dance performance in Yogya – a ballet, technically, though not a ballet in the Western sense. Accompanied by traditional gamelan music, the Ramayana Ballet is a dance-drama based on the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, believed to have been written around the fourth century B.C. The performance was similar to the one we saw in Bali, focusing on slow, deliberate movements and featuring incredibly elaborate costumes and make-up.

The following day, we boarded a second-class train to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. The train ride took about eight hours and cost $20. Trains on Java have three classes, known as economy, business, and executive. We ruled out economy class, having heard horror stories about the number of people that get crammed on each seat, and settled on business, since executive was nearly twice the price. I guess most foreigners spring for executive, though, as everyone else on the train except one Dutch couple seemed to be Indonesian. The ride was pretty enjoyable, and the train was much cleaner, less crowded (actually, probably about half the seats were empty), and more comfortable than expected. Business class doesn’t have air-conditioning, but there was a fan and, with the windows open, it was very comfortable. People came by every few minutes selling food, drinks, and other random goods including paper fans, flip-flops, and moist towelettes, and also renting pillows to passengers. Vendors would flood into the aisles at certain stops, stay on the train selling things for a bit, then get off a few stops later. Sometimes, they would set things down on the tray next to a passenger’s seat, leave it there while they continued to the next car – I guess hoping the passenger would eventually be tempted to buy it – and come back for it a few minutes later.

Unlike the seemingly never-ending sprawl of city we passed on the bus in East Java, the train took us through beautiful rural areas of Central Java. We passed small towns and villages and rice fields, and saw banana and palm trees right by the tracks and mountains in the distance. Perhaps another difference between business and executive, our train stopped a lot, often staying stopped for quite awhile. At some stops, children stood on the platforms of the station begging, and I saw one Indonesian throw a coin through the window onto the ground as his train was pulling away. The children noticed us, of course, but most of them left more or less immediately after I shook my head.

Late in the afternoon, we arrived in Jakarta, a mega-city of about ten million people. The urban poverty was visible from our seat on the train, as we saw small shacks, with children playing and women cooking and doing laundry, mere feet from the tracks. It was also fairly dirty, which I suppose it to be expected in a place housing that many people, with lots of trash on the ground and floating in the waterways.

Our hostel in Jakarta, Six Degrees, was the first place we stayed in a dorm. As Jakarta is apparently relatively expensive, even compared to Bali, it was $13/night per bed. Other than not having a hot water shower (which, again, was not needed), Six Degrees felt very much like a European hostel. It was air-conditioned, immaculately clean, and included sheets, a blanket, and a towel; and, each bed had its own lamp and outlet. We shared our room with two German guys, a Swiss guy, and an American girl – not only the first American we’d met, but also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Paraguay!

The food in Jakarta was as excellent as it had been everywhere else. For dinner, I had a particularly delicious gado-gado, a dish of raw vegetables covered in peanut sauce that had become my favorite Indonesian meal, for about $3. The breakfast at our hostel was equally great, and not only included very legitimate toast, but also had peanut butter!

We only had a few hours in Jakarta before our flight to Bangkok, and we spent it wandering around, trying to see what there was to see. The traffic was as crazy as any huge developing city, with lots and lots of motorcycles and tuk-tuks, and there were carts and stalls of street food everywhere we looked. I also have to note that Jakarta has McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Domino’s, as well as, believe it or not, The Cheesecake Factory (fiveof them, actually). After an hour-long bus ride from the city to Jakarta’s main airport, it was time to leave Indonesia for a brief stop in Thailand en-route to Cambodia!

Jeff Monsma

Education 2 -- Kamembe District, Southern Province

fun fact: Jeff lives the farthest and hottest part of Rwanda near the Congo border. We see once in a blue moon.

Muzungu! Muzungu!The high pitched cries float through the air and dust off my shoulders, mixing with the other debris in our moto’s wake. The driver and I laugh, as this is the fourth time children have braved the murky morning air to call attention to my already obvious presence. What the driver doesn’t know is that this is a step up for me when it comes to the oblivious prejudice of the pint-sized. I have been visiting another volunteer over the school break and am just beginning the trek back to oz. There, in my town and surrounding area, due to exposure to visiting Chinese factory workers throughout the years, any patch of white skin is greeted with a disharmonic chorus of umushinwa! (Chinese person!) And while I hold nothing against anyone with Far Asian ancestry, my decidedly Aryan looks have roots just a few degrees closer to the Prime Meridian. Despite my best efforts over the past sixteen months, children still scream at, and some grown men still greet—in Chinese, which they cannot possibly speak—the 6’4”, blond, long-faced Asian walking towards them. A friend and I have joked that if a pandemic of open-mindedness ever breaks out, some of the children in our areas will be invaluable in concocting the antidote. My brain calls my mind back to the task at hand as the driver picks his way through a patch of puddles. Successfully navigated, we continue on, blurring banana trees, mud houses, bush fences, and eucalyptus trunks into an ever-moving earthen stew. The sun continues to rise, bringing the mists with it, as we head down into the valley. Climbing up the other side, a small town slides by and the driver acknowledges some acquaintances. I join in the drive-by greeting and a few more muzungu calls fly out of young mouths. I respond to them, as I usually do while on the ephemeral social experience that is a moto ride, with a wave and as ridiculous a face as I can make. This often results in fear, delight, or some combination of the two. The wheels roll on and my mind turns with them. Unbidden, an image of Louis Armstrong pops into my head, eyes and smile wide, frighteningly similar to my own facial expression a few minutes earlier, and minutes before that. Am I some sort of warped, twenty-first century, international Uncle Tom? The idea smacks the wind in its face and stills the rushing air. True, there is no extended 400 year history of pain and racial polarization behind my actions, but there is still history, negative and racial. Well, what history is not negative from some angle? Glory does not, can not, exist in a vacuum. There is, I hope, no highly unbalanced power relationship between myself and the Rwandans I meet, but are my actions some sort of power play? No, I decide, as Billie Holiday’s perspective on Satchemo joins the image of Armstrong’s tomming, “Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart.” In any other situation, I would act the same, and have made the same faces to countless American children of various races. I haven’t put on any face that is not my own, have put on no chalky powder in some sort of minstrelsy nightmare. Hell, I didn’t even put on sunscreen. And yet, perception is a reality held in the eye of the beholder. We control others’ perceptions of ourselves insofar as we display the parts of ourselves that we want them to see. Once that image leaves our consciousness and enters theirs, it becomes something else entirely, and begins to catalogue itself in the mind of the observer. It gets kicked around by their own past experiences—direct and indirect, real and imagined—prejudices, and biases—both positive and negative. This social hardware, which enables all of us to navigate the human world around us efficiently and intelligently, immediately goes to work and churns out the appropriate response in milliseconds. Yep, fear, delight, or some combination of the two. We reach the main road, tracing fading fingers of mud on the asphalt. Considering the conditions, brought on by a downpour that pounded out a bebop tempo on the roof a few hours before, the ride went smoothly. We only stopped once, to clean the mud trapped under the front fender. My friend’s moto flags down a passing bus and we make a seamless transition in transportation, leaving two thousand francs and our thanks behind. We board the bus and grab the two empty seats in the back. Ironic. I actually like the back seats, and not out of any retrospective Rosa Parks solidarity. You can sometimes eek out an extra centimeter of leg room, and you can watch everyone else in the bus, a welcome inversion to always being watched. In a few high school and college classrooms, we used to toss around the phrase “a credit to the race.” I understood the concept, the implications, the reasons why the NAACP chose its champions carefully (Ms. Parks wasn’t the first black, nor the first black woman, to stand up and sit down). I knew, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m beginning to realize that knowledge and knowing are not the same thing, barely even synonyms. Looking back on my Peace Corps interview, I see it more and more as a selection of the “credits to the country,” choosing people who will, to the best of their ability, continually put their best face forward. It’s our job to be the best people we can be, from the minute my thirteen-year-old surrogate son knocks on the door and wakes me up at 6:00 in the morning to the last goodbye given to my favorite family, after they’ve accompanied me on the twenty minute walk back to my house, sometimes as late as ten o’clock at night. I can tell you right now, I’ve failed. I’ve had off days, slipped here and there, I’m human. But hopefully in that failure, there’s success. I’m not a poster, picture, or character in a movie. I’m here and I’m alive. And I’m me, from the heart, goofy-faced, loud-laughed, and all. And yes, I have a never before seen amount of arm hair. As my time here increases, I realize that the credit I lend extends to the various corners of my identity: country, race, gender. Gender. I hope I’m a credit to my gender, more than any of my other facets. As a male, I know I only have a second hand experience, an understanding, of the true nature of gender relations here. I catch glimpses, observe, but I don’t have a living knowledge of the imbalance of power. Still, I do what little things I can (along with some more overt measures. The boys’ team was less than pleased about being kicked off the court for girls’ basketball practice.) I’ll continue to cook and clean my own house, and when a random soldier passing by comes to the door, puts his fists to his chest in a vomit-inducing approximation of breasts, and says, “when you have a wife, you won’t do this anymore,” I tell him that I will, in fact, continue to do all of it. When another passerby catches wind that I have a sister and immediately asks that I give her to him in marriage, I (get a little angry and) tell them she’s not mine to give and the fact that you think she is means you have no shot. A friend and I continually discuss how great, and unattainable, fluency in Kinyarwanda would be, but I hope these men still come away with some understanding of their own. When I’m out in my community, or anyone else’s, I do my best to genuinely greet women, and use their names if I know them, if only to see their face light up in a split-second reflection of my own sincerity. I have bad days in this area too, but that’s all the more reason to pile on as many good ones as I can before I leave. Four wheels spin under us now, singing at a slightly different pitch, which will continue to vary as the road rises and falls, twists and moves. In another ten hours, I’ll be home, in that tiny corner that is not a foreign country, and I am not (always) a foreigner, where the kids run toward me, stopping their legs only when their arms are wrapped around my knees, screaming my name.

Tonight after dinner the nuns and I settled in for a movie night. I brought my computer so we could watch the movie Sister Act and the nuns absolutely LOVED IT! Since dinner started a little late I thought we could just watch the portions of the film when the nuns are signing and skip [...]

I just finished watching the movie "The Vow". The female character loses her memory. The last thing she can recall is a time during law school. She is probably mid-20s. She is engaged. But now in present time, she has a different husband and had become an artist. She can't figure out how she changed so much and went from point A to point B.

Besides being a tremendous love story, it makes you wonder about speaking to a high school or undergraduate version of yourself and telling them where you are today and all the things you've done.

I would have expected myself to go to law school or grad school for psychology by now; probably to have stayed in Michigan. Perhaps seeing the shocked look on my own face when I describe Rwanda or living in Boston, would be a great joy. Such pride I can take in myself for accomplishing these things; which is actually why I chose to join the Peace Corps in the first place. Like many things done in life, it was selfish. I wanted something I could point to with simple, unadulterated pride.

It's been practically a year to the day that I came home. I'm still working through a host of emotions that came along with the experience. Simple isn't a word that can easily be put in the same sentence with Peace Corps; but I've never been more proud.

I've been wanting to bring some closure to this blog. Everything previously felt forced so I never published it. This feels right. So I shall end by saying - this is just the beginning. If you are still here reading, good luck out there. Life is a beautiful adventure and it's been a privilege sharing a bit of it with you.

So I've been back a week today, and it's been quite the whirlwind. I got into Chicago Saturday afternoon and was met with smiles and hugs at the airport from my parents. It was nice to have someone at the end of the long journey. And then it was crazy to drive back down the highway with all the things you see from the road and it's bizarre the things you get caught up on...windows, streetlights, billboards. It's been nuts. I keep finding myself going to do things the way i would've done them in Rwanda and then catching myself and reminding myself that I'm in America. Example: I woke up my first day home, a Sunday morning at 4:30 a.m. It might've been a bit of jetlag, but I'd been waking up around that same time for the 3 days before I left Rwanda because of all my nervous/excited energy. But I woke up, looked at my phone, and then thought- 'I've got laundry to do and stuff to catch up on, but I can't do anything til the sun comes up at 6.' Then I looked around, realized there was no mosquito net over my head and saw the light switch. So I turned it on and then remembered all I had to do with my laundry was throw it in a machine with some detergent....crazy stuff. It's nice though cause even while I'm looking around at things sometimes and feeling like they're so far away and like I'm a different person, when I'm with my friends, I feel like myself again. When I'm out drinking jumbo margaritas and then quoting Will Ferrell the whole way home with my parents or going for a coffee date with my dad, I feel like it's where I'm supposed to be. This will continue to be weird and I will continue to walk into restaurants and still want one of everything on the menu again, just to try it, but I'm slowly feeling so hopeful and excited about what's to come.

28/4 So many weird feelings flying into Amsterdam. It was a crowded flight, none of the beautiful calm that I had flying in on Christmas day. Surprisingly, I’m less overwhelmed than I was then. I think I had more time to prep for going, I was more mentally prepared for what this airport and everything in it would be like…it’s still weird. I feel like I’m going to do something wrong or that everyone’s gonna look at me and just know that I’m clueless, not just because I don’t speak Dutch but because I’m fresh off the plane. Fresh from the village where toilets were an exciting day and downright thrilling if there was enough water to flush ‘em. Fresh from the land where a shower meant a basin and your dinner light was candlelight. I feel like they can see it on me. And I’ve been here before, not just this airport but Europe and this world. I was raised in it, and as always with reverse culture shock, home feels foreign. I’m sure it’ll be easier when I land in Chicago but for now, I’m still awkward. Leaving was surprisingly easy. I think my mind was so occupied with so many things that I wasn’t as focused on the having to say Goodbyes. They also didn’t feel like they were for good…so weird. I did start losing it when my Danae-nae started crying. I felt like I was abandoning her, like I was going and leaving her to the wolves. I imagined being on the other side and seeing someone go and knowing the person that you’ve spent the last year relying on won’t be there for the next. Who do you call when you’re lost and tired and need a sympathetic and empathetic ear? And that thought made me feel so guilty and upset, and even more so cause I didn’t know what would be comforting at a time like that. I’m trying not to dwell on all that, but instead to revel in the fun that is people watching at an airport.

Oh dear. Last time I updated it was January. It's now May. My bad, really, my b. I can't say I didn't warn you though, right? As I spend more time living in Rwanda, the less I feel like exciting things happen to me and more just "normal" every day stuff is happening. And sorry, I'm not really one to write an entire blog about the mundane daily activities. But, it IS indeed time for a long and much needed blog update because, well, it's been 5 months and stuff HAS happened!

So, here goes. Back in January, the second school year started. As usual, it got off to a slow start (no surprise there). However, all of us teachers buckled down and made the weekly schedule giving me 3.5 day weekends (worth it). At that point, I was teaching 5 classes of S2 Biology (8th grade). Little did I know that a month, yes, a month before the trimester officially ended we would be switching everything up again. Alas, about 2/3 of the way through the first trimester my headmaster calls a staff meeting and, guess what we do. We redo the entire.schedule. TWICE. Not only that, we have to switch around who's teaching what because we're short some teachers, yada yada, every Rwandan teacher needs to be teaching 30hrs no more no less, yada yada.Then this convo happens:

HM: Caroline can you teach more than 15 hrs??

C: Nope, no I cannot.

HM: Why?

C:My work doesn't let me.

HM: Can you teach English?

C:Do I have to?

HM: Please?? It's your native tongue, it will be so easy for you.

C: I really don't want to, do I have to?

HM: Yes, you will teach S4 EFK, Literature in English. 7 hours a week. And only 3 classes of S2 Biology.

C: I'll only teach English Literature if you give me a Sport class and only 2 classes of Biology.

HM: Okay.

So, with 2 weeks left of teaching in the 1st trimester, I went from teaching 5 classes of S2 Biology to teaching 1 class of English Literature (7hrs a week), 1 class of sport (2 hrs a week) and 2 classes of biology (3 hrs each a week). Worst part was breaking the news to my biology students I'd be leaving with another teacher...some of the started crying but alas, not much I could do and I'll be honest, I was pretty damn stoked to be teaching sport!!!

I'm still stoked about teaching sport, it gives me an excuse to go to school in gym clothes, how much better can you get??

I digress, so yeah that was the first trimester in a nutshell. Then we did exams way to early (per usual), my kids did..ehhhh, they at least tried hard. And then it was HOLIDAY BREAK!! Wa-hoo!

What'd I do during my last first trimester break of Peace Corps? Well, I'm so glad you asked. I received an absolutely wonderful and fabulous visit from my Aunt Linda! And we did all sorts of stuff like Gorilla Trekking (it rained hard), Chimpanzee trekking, Colubus monkey trekking (it rained hard again), Canopy walking, chilling at Caroline's village, visiting Caroline's host family, hanging in Kigali and being spoiled at the Nyungwe Forest Lodge in Nyungwe National Rain Forest. Talk about a good time. Next blog post, that whole visit in pictures, I promise. I'm just to lazy to write about it here because I know pictures are better.

Anywho, Linda was here in Rwanda for a week and a half and it was great, absolutely wonderful having her here. We had a great time and I was pretty bummed to send her back to America, though I know Uncle Pietro was probably happy to get her back. After sending Linda on her way, it was a pretty quiet rest of the holiday. I had some things to get done, so I was in Kigali a couple days but otherwise I tried to spend the rest of it in my village. Because I leave them soon, and yes, 6 months is soon, it's really really soon!

Fast forward a little bit to April 23rd annnnnnd, it's the beginning of the 2nd trimester! Again, we get off to a slow start. We've finished the first 2 weeks and I've taught maybe like 5 lessons. Goooooooo Rwanda! Upside though, I've been corresponding with my World Wise School matchup. This a partnership between Peace Corps and American schools to essentially do a pen pal type thing. At the beginning of break, I received some letters from the class I'm connected with. And finally, this last week, my EFK (English, French, Kinyarwanda Language Option) students were able to draft and write their response letters. Talk about excited. I have never seen those kids work so darn hard. They wrote draft after draft and really tried to use their heads to be creative (which is often a challenge here). They put in about 9 hrs of class time to write, and rewrite, and rewrite their letters. I was very happy with their final drafts which got sent out yesterday and are on their was to America! Very proud teacher right here, they sure rocked it.

Then this weekend I'm in Kigali teaching for the Judges program. That was fun and now I'm just working on organizing my life and updating things that are severely outdated (like this blog)! And as soon as this one posts, I'll begin working on a post to detail Linda's visit to Rwanda, complete with pictures!

Keepin it real, Rwanda style!

When we last left or intrepid but increasingly annoyed heroine, her visa debit card had been heartlessly snatched by a greedy ATM machine and was being held hostage until the end of the so-called "Easter Monday" holiday. What happened next is a tale of betrayal and redemption, the story of one woman's rise from poverty and rides on escalators. And like most stories from this part of the world, it ends with vomit on a bus.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself on Monday. My traveling companions headed up to Jinja for two days of adventures on the Nile; I decided to try to join them on for bungee jumping if I was able to get my card back in a timely fashion. The common sense nodule of my brain whispered at me that this was unlikely to happen. I ruthlessly suppressed it.

With very limited funds and no real idea what to do, I went into my default travel mode: aimless walking, people-watching, and caffeine abuse. Although, caffeine abuse usually results in the walking being aimed toward finding a public toilet. I have to say, the restrooms at the National Theatre are pretty darn nice, at least by my low and rapidly falling standards.

After a few hours of wandering, I found The Mall. Even now, I can only speak of it in reverently hushed and capitalized tones. There was a food court. There was a movie theater and a bowling alley. There was a store devoted entirely to lamps. There was an escalator going up. There was an escalator going down. And next door, there was Another Mall.

That afternoon, I was faced with the classic hero's dilemma. I was very hungry, but also very broke. I would smell the fried aromas of the food court tempting me, even as I stood outside the National Theatre and read a poster for the musical adaptation of Twelfth Night that was being staged that afternoon. My food hole was empty, but so was my culture hole, and I only had enough money to satisfy one desire. I chose culture. Ugandan traditional dance is nothing like Rwandan traditional dance. Rwanda is all about the arms and the feet. Uganda is all about tying a giant piece of fur onto your booty and shaking it.

Tuesday dawned bright and clear and full of the tantalizing hope of getting my card back and going bungee jumping. The common sense nodule of my brain still under lock and key, I headed out to Barclay's and arrived right as it opened. I was promptly informed that the ATM fairy had not yet visited, and that I should return at two. I decided to come back at noon.

Twelve rolled around and found me once more at the bank, where I was told that I could not be given my card because the system was down, and that I should return at two. At two o'clock sharp, I went through security for a third time, the common sense nodule of my brain quietly being bludgeoned to death by the paranoid fear nodule of brain. Sure enough, the system was still d own.

So I waited. By three, paranoid fear had been replaced by indignant annoyance. I went once more to the ATM lady's desk. The following conversation happened:

"Is your system still down?"

"Yes. But we have your card." She holds it up for me to see.

"But you can't give it to me."

"No. The system is down."

"Why is that a problem?"

"When the system is down, we cannot photocopy your ID."

"Can I go out and make a photocopy?"

"Yes."

Twenty minutes and one more trip through security later, I had my card back. I resolved to never use a Barclay's AT again. Fortunately, Kampala is a city of banks, and I quickly fond a KCB that let me use my card, no strings attached.

Obviously, the only thing left to do was go spend my new-found wealth at The Mall(s). Specifically, at the food court. It was a good afternoon. By the time I waddled back to the hostel, I was content with my vacation.

On Wednesday, I decided to while away the morning at the Kasubi Tombs, a museum dedicated to Uganda's still-present monarchy. Let's just say, it's good to be king. Later in the day, I met up with my erstwhile traveling companions. Of course, we went to The Mall(s). Then we went bowling in our socks. I choose to believe that my game would have been dramatically improved with the aid of proper footwear. To cap off the night, we ate dinner at a Korean restaurant with a dizzyingly extensive menu. I could have eaten the tofu all night.

The only buses going to Rwanda depart at night, so we had all day Thursday to hang out in Kampala. We went to The Malls. Steph convinced me that I would be a fool to squander this opportunity to go to the cinema, so we headed to the matinee showing of Man on a Ledge. The plot is only slightly more complicated than the title might suggest. Maybe this is merely a side-effect of not having been in a movie theater for 18 months, but I can honestly say that Man on a Ledge was one of the most riveting cinematic experiences of my life.

Suddenly it was night, and after a few minor misadventures at the bus station, we boarded the 10 p.m. GAAGAA bus to Bujumbura, via Kigali. The roads in Uganda are not as well maintained as the roads in Rwanda. There are many potholes and no noticeable speed limits. I went airborne at least half a dozen times. But maybe I should have stayed in flight, because during one particularly twisty portion of road, my seatmate vomited on my shoes.

Later, when safely back in Kigali, Steph and our channeled our inner monsters in order to text our feelings about the GAAGAA bus experience:

- "GAAGAA coach had its license revoked in January because of to many fatal crashed. I'm not that surprised." -"I'm shocked. I guess I can't read their p-p-p-poker face." -"They want your psycho / your vertigo stick / Gonna bounce until your neighbor gets sick. / Gonna vom on you / Vom vom vom upon your shoe." -"Eh eh, nothing else I can say. So sit back down where you belong / in the back of the bus / where my thighs feel numb."There was more, but it's now been lost to eh great inbox in the sky. In the end, we made a solemn pact never to ride GAAGAA again. Some puns are just not worth dying for.So that was my relaxing holiday getaway. Maybe one day I will return to Uganda, armed with an ample supply of cash. But until then, it's back to real life in Rwanda...

I absolutely hate packing. The only thing that's worse is unpacking. Now while I admit that there is some bizarre satisfaction that comes with finding ways to cram everything into a small pack, packing is where some of my obsessive compulsions take over. I managed to mash all of my clothes into one suitcase, with mash being the operative word. I mean, once those shirts and pants are taken out they are going to be way wrinkly. I hate wrinkly clothes. Almost as much as I hate packing.

On a positive note, once I packed my bags and lifted them I was positive that I would be way over the 100 lbs we are allowed. Turns out I'm good, very good to be exact. All of my clothes came in at roughly thirty pounds. I haven't weighed the other suitcase yet but I'm highly doubting that it is going to be over 70. Now, the dimensions of my bags is pushing it a bit, but I'm just hoping the airport people let that slide.

At some point I would like to put together a list of everything I've packed, but for now...I'm too tired to even think about it.

Danae PatersonHealth 3 - Kamonyi District, Southern Province

Women and girls around the world, in every society, face a wide-ranging plethora of challenges and obstacles. They also possess an enormous strength, and a significant potential for incredible growth, change, and determined success. Gender plays a key role in a great deal of development, and as Peace Corps Volunteers we are in no way immune to witnessing the enormous piece of the puzzle that gender can play in our own in-the-field experiences. In fact, there are so many major angles of development through which gender can play a crucial role, it can be very difficult to decide even where to start.

One key challenge that plays a direct part in many Peace Corps experiences is education. Many of us work directly or indirectly in this field. To put it quite simply, involving girls in education is a critically impacting opportunity for sparking a multi-layered potential for positive change. One method of considering the importance of linking young girls to education is called the Girl Effect.The basic premise behind the Girl Effect is that we have a problem on our hands. And that we also have a solution.

Worldwide, gender discrimination is a serious issue. Especially, gender issues that relate directly to education for girls and tie to serious health and economic issues – and not only for girls, but also for the immediate families that women are members of. Consider the following:

Of the world’s 130 million out-of-school youth, 70 percent are girls (1) .In Sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of girls with no schooling are married before the age of 18, versus only 10 percent of their educated counterparts (2)14 million girls aged 15-19 give birth in developing countries each year (3).Medical complications from pregnancy are the leading cause of death among girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide (4)

In sum, in parts of the world, the less education a girl receives, the earlier she marries. The earlier a girl marries, the sooner and younger she bears children – the younger she is when giving birth, the more likely she is to contribute to maternal mortality statistics. Education can in this way be linked to maternal mortality. This has a direct affect not only on the girl in question, but also on the health of her children.

Now consider this:o When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children (5) o Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels of schooling among mothers (6)

From a straightforward comparison of these two sets of information, the problem is clear: girls who have less education are more likely to marry young, and have an increased likelihood of bearing more children, earlier – and this contributes significantly to high maternal mortality rates. Inversely, a girl who has increased education under her belt is more likely to delay both marriage and childbearing. This has a twofold health affect – not only extremely positive for the mother, but also for the child of that better-educated mother. In this way, increased education for girls has a clear tie with health benefits for multiple players.

In addition, girls’ education has a lasting economic impact. Study after study has shown that further access to education for girls is one of the most dynamic ways to fight poverty. According to co-author of Half the Sky Nicholas Kristof, “Schooling is . . . a precondition for girls and women to stand up against injustice, and for women to be integrated into the economy.”Consider:

o An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20%. An extra year of secondary school, 15 to 25%. (7) o When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40% for a man. (8)

Increased education is shown to improve a woman’s ability to generate income, and it has been shown time after time that women use their income in a manner that benefits a wide net of people: their families. Also consider, women with income at their disposal often finance the education of younger relatives, and save enough of their pay to boost national savings rates. A widespread rippling affect is not difficult to see here – all resulting from just a few years’ increase in a girl’s education.

According to the Girl Effect, “Girls who stay in school are more likely to stay healthy and avoid HIV, marry when they choose, avoid early pregnancy, and raise a healthier family, and break out of the cycle of poverty.”

Education, it is clear, has the potential to create significant and overlapping impact in a dynamic way.As PCVs, these are realities that many of us have experienced on a daily basis. So what can we do? The GAD Committee was created, in part, to help PCVs find creative ways to answer this very question. To combine our not inconsiderable collective experience, innovation and inspiration to focus on girls’ education, empowerment, confidence building, involvement in IGAs and savings workshops with women specifically in mind, and much more. There are many ways for PCVs to be involved in this aspect of their service, and education is just one piece of a large and complex puzzle.This, of course, has been a brief and simple foray into to a multi-layered and complicated series of issues. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to check out some of these resources, and feel free to send any of your own to your GAD representative to create a larger compilation!

girleffect.org – a media-based webpage that discusses the Girl Effect phenomenon in more detail, and has a list of its own resourcesHalf the Sky by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn (copies are floating around Peace Corps)www.care.org - we have CARE in Rwanda! CARE is increasingly focusing on women and girls.www.engenderhealth.org focuses on reproductive health issues in the developing worldwww.thp.org - the Hunger Project – focuses on empowerment of women and girls to end hungerwww.icrw.org International Center for Research on Women – emphasizes gender as the key to economic developmentwww.womenforwomen.org - Women for Women International – connects women sponsors with needy women in conflict or postconflict countries (we have a Women for Women center in Rwanda, in Butare, where frequent meetings and workshops on topics related to gender in Rwanda are held – could be a great resource for gender-based projects!)

Some additional resources for “quick facts” related to challenges that many girls throughout the world are facing:(1) Human Rights Watch, “Promises Broken: An Assessment of Children’s Rights on the 10thAnniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1999(2) Informational Center for Research on Women, Too Young to Wed, 2007(3) UN Population Fund, State of the World Population, 2005(4) UN Children’s Fund, Equality, Development, and Peace 2000(5) UN Population Fund, State of the World Population 1990(6) Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries” Social Science and Medicine, 1993(7) “Returns to Investment in Education: An Update” Policy Research Working Paper, World Bank, 2002(8) “Women’s Rights Vital for Developing World,” Yale, 2003

A lot has happened in the past few weeks since I last posted. Most notably, time has flown by. I can now count on my fingertips the days until I fly out to Africa. Which is exciting and nerve wracking and overwhelming all at once. I keep glancing at my list of things to buy before I leave and am dismayed at how far behind I am with packing. Being a notorious procrastinator, I was determined to be fully packed and ready to leave well before my departure date.

That, of course, will not be happening. I fully expect to be at Wal-Mart the night before I depart hunting something that I had been putting off.

In other news, I was able to take one last trip to New York to visit my friend and generally spend lots of money. My goals with this trip were many, basically involving food and drink. I arrived in New York late Wednesday avenue, and met Eric in Harlem (M60 Bus to 125th St I had that so well memorized). He handed off his house keys so I could drop off my suitcases and headed to his class. You see, he's a Masters student at NYU and does real important things. My trip to drop off the bags turned into one of those oh wow, there's a comfy bed kind of trips, and well...before I knew it he was calling my cell and three hours and passed and I was that bad kind of groggy that you feel after napping for three hours. We had a few beers and some pizza and called it an early night because I operate on an old person's schedule. I actually wanted to wake early so that I could head to the theater district and pick up some rush tickets for a show the next evening.

Now, I feel like this is a good thing to comment on. Rush tickets are basically student tickets that the theaters offer to those willing to get to the box office when it opens and maybe wait in line for a little bit. Most people who know me know that I love theater, and try to make an effort to see several shows whenever I'm in New York (I have an embarrassingly large Playbill collection). I had all of the shows I wanted to see picked out, and headed to the appropriate theaters the next morning to get my tickets. Except...I didn't get them. Any of the days. You see, the A train from Brooklyn to 42nd St takes too damn long and I wake up too damn late, and for some obscene reason was completely unable to get tickets to any of the shows I wanted to see. Frustrated. Of course, come Saturday I realized this was my last chance to get tickets to a show, when the usual suspects weren't working for me, I happened to notice a billboard for Jesus Christ Superstar. Now, I absolutely LOVE JCS (yes I call it that). I've seen it too many times. And yes, I realize it's generally awful, but oh so good. I know all of the lyrics by heart which again, is horrible. But it sounded like fun, Eric had never seen it, which is not acceptable, and before you know it we were waiting in the long line to get tickets...and...we got some! The show was amazing! Slightly cheesy, but I loved it. I'm pretty sure Eric did too.

Now seeing as we were going to a Broadway show at 2:00 and had a few hours to kill, we chose the manliest activity possible to fill our time: New York International Auto Show! The show was a lot of fun. It was packed and so I spent most of my time ramming into people and waiting like a little schoolboy for the chance to sit in some nice sports cars. Highlights definitely include: checking out the MINIs because, well, they're just fun and I'm pretty sure I'm want one when I come back from Rwanda (I know, that sounds very superficial. But come one...just look at them!) Other fond memories include drooling over some of my favorites (Audi A6 anyone, a VEYRON?!), sitting in a Miata while Eric makes revving sounds that would embarrass a small child, and riding in some simulator from hell a la Mazda. Also, I think at one point I was so hungry I sat down on the floor and downed a doughnut. Donut. How do you spell that?

Thursday and Friday were mostly spent walking around observing the city. I've done all of the 'touristy' things there are to do in NYC, so it was nice to just have a trip to wander around and explore. I love that city. Still not sure I could ever live there (I mean...can you kayak in the East River? Would you want to?!), but it's a great visit. Some other highlights included visiting the United Nations building, which...for a political science geek is a pretty big deal! Also, while most of my lunches included trashy street food gyros, we did stumble to some cool restaurants on the lower East side that were surprisingly good. If you can see the guacamole in the picture...well, it was everything I could have wanted and more. Of course I'm sure it ended up costing a a fortune, because when our $200 bill came all I could was laugh. And then cry. Then ask for more margaritas. (Just kidding. I went elsewhere to drink. Of course...elsewhere equally as expensive).

The trip was more than I could have asked for, but all good things have to end and so Monday morning I packed up and prepared for the bus/subway/something ride to the airport to fly out. My attempt to take the A train/G train/7 train last time turned out to be incredibly stupid because apparently no one uses the green line, so we came up with a much smarter option this time around. That doesn't mean it wasn't without its difficulties. There was a point where I was chasing a bus down a city block. All the while holding a McDonald's smoothie and rolling a suitcase behind me. I should mention that Eric was banging on the side of the bus the whole time. When I got to the airport I got all checked in and prepared for my departure.

Now, I should point out that while sitting in the LaGuardia food court (don't worry, I didn't actually eat there), I knew all along what was to come. And in today's news, Ian Allen shows some emotion... I admit, I don't always channel my feelings the best. I usually have some kind of cynical remark to mask how I truly feel. But the thing is...when you know in your head that this is a good bye for two years. It was a little much. Eric was very nice and walked me right to the security line, which really was a terrible thing to do because I had no idea how to say goodbye. I mean, the whole trip I knew I would have to. And it's even worse when you're saying good bye to your best friend. I just, gave him a hug, told him I had a great trip, and wished him well in his endeavors. I mean it was all very sincere and corny. He left, and I was staring at a very long long line ahead of me, with a very crabby lady behind me (she kept shoving her rolly bag into my heel. Apparently I was waiting too slow.) And then it all kind of hit me. This was awful and embarrassing and I'm not even quite sure why I feel the need to bring it up online but I want to be honest in this blog. Basically...I started crying. Not ugly crying, not someone I love is dead crying. Just...the realization of everything hit me. At this point the lady behind me stopped shoving her bag into me, and actually looked somewhat concerned.

Saying good bye to Eric was tough, and made even more tough by knowing that this was only the beginning of the Ian Allen farewell tour. Kind of like Cher. Since being back in Wisconsin, I went down to Madison to visit some good friends as well as my grandparents. And one by one I had to say goodbye to everyone. I was discussing with a friend who's abroad the other night about how much easier it would be to just pick up and leave and not have anyone know. I mean...I feel like it happens quite often where you go months, even years, without seeing someone. It's just the knowledge of the duration of your Peace Corps service that makes things so hard. And it makes you think about what you're going to miss.

I'm going to miss the great times I've had with my friend Danielle. We've been friends for a long time, and she's someone I know who will always listen to me bitch and complain. She was very nice to let me crash on her couch for a bit. And she may like red wine more than me...you have to have friends like that! Saying goodbye to Kelsey wasn't too hard because for all I know she will be working at the embassy in Kigali next year. She's just that kind of person. When she runs for President I will probably vote for her (president of Nicaragua, obviously). Saying goodbye to my grandparents was...hard. I'm going to miss them so much. I'm hoping the whole skype situation in Rwanda works out because I'd love to be able to chat with them from Africa. The whole webcam communication thing is very impressive to my grandma. Saying goodbye to Eric was tough. I don't see much of him anymore, but we generally talk a few hours every week. We gab. Like old ladies. Of course I know that that is not going to be happening too much anymore (calling abroad is uh--spensive!). I think what I'm going to miss most are the weekend mornings when he would stumble into my room, turn my light on and call me a 'ho,' then plant his ass in my chair as we discuss a myriad of topics. We really should get our own NPR show.

This is a pretty long post, so to summarize: trips to NYC good. Trips to Madison very very good (of course that may just be the old fashioneds speaking). Saying good bye...sucks.

I leave you with this picture, a shot of Manhattan I took while walking back to Brooklyn.

Four weeks from today I will be attending the orientation for my Peace Corps service. Of course, up until yesterday I had no idea when or where exactly this would all take place. In fact, I was half expecting to call Peace Corps and have someone say, "Ian Allen? Nope, I don't see your name anywhere here, are you sure you applied?" Because I'm always nervous like that.

Well fear not Ian! Yesterday I finally got the e-mail that I had been waiting for, staging for Health 4 Rwanda volunteers will be held in Philadelphia on May 8-9. Apparently no planes from Wisconsin are leaving for Philadelphia that day (or you know, maybe they filled up seeing as we're booking four weeks out!) so they are going to fly me in the night before and put me up. In a hotel. I think. The e-mail had several instructions, the first order of business was to call SATO travel, the agency that does booking for government agencies, and arrange my flight. To my surprise it was the easiest flight I've ever booked. I suppose the big difference is that normally I am checking kayak.com every 20 seconds to see the cheapest deal I can get. When it's not my credit card and money isn't the issue, well, arranging flights is much easier. They are flying me right out of Mosinee (I can smell it already...some of you know what I'm referring to) and then to Minneapolis, then eastward bound. Staging looks to be typical orientation fair, the kind I used to facilitate at our Study Abroad office, but I'm most excited to meet some of the other people who will be in my program. Many of us are part of a Facebook group for Health 4 volunteers and this has been a great outlet for quelling some of my nerves. I mean, let's be honest, I can be a bit of a nervous nelly, but I finally have an outlet for getting some of my questions answered. Better yet, others usually ask before I do so I don't seem as needy. Everyone in our group seems so nice and just as antsy as me to go ahead and get started on our new journey.

So the countdown has begun. Four weeks. In that time I have some ambitious plans. I mean...first and foremost I have to actually pack. I don't like packing...but I have four weeks, right?! Not only that, I have to pack up the stuff I'm going to be leaving behind in my parents basement. Which means, much of what I own needs to get thrown out. I don't want to return two years from now to a bunch of paperwork and old clothes I just couldn't get rid of. Second order of business is saying my goodbyes...and having some fun while at it! Tomorrow I am flying out to New Yaaawk to visit my old college roommate and basically blow a bunch of money. Fitting. I'm also looking at planing some trips to Madison and Eau Claire to say goodbye to friends and family. And then of course, before I leave there seems to be a mound of paperwork I have to get done. Financial stuff...you know, fun stuff. I've been putting this off for a while because getting everything figured out is such a pain and I have so much time, except I don't and I should really just get this done.

Long story short, I am a mix of nerves and excitement. I am a little stressed but don't have a whole lot going on. I wish I was leaving tomorrow, and yet am happy I still have some time to put things together.

The countdown has begun!

Today my dad and I drove to the cabin to open it up for the year. Apparently a whole family (colony?) of flies was keeping it occupied during our time away. Unfortunately many of them didn't survive the winter, I gave them a proper funeral by vacuuming up all their dead bodies. It was gross. The lake was mostly frozen, which surprised me because I don't remember it dropping below freezing...ever. Amazingly, the temperature inside the cabin managed to be a good 10-15 degrees cooler than outside, which is a godsend in the summer but today, not so much. After college, I left my bookshelf (and by relation all of my books) here, so I was glad to get the opportunity to recoger some of them to read at my increasingly boring job. I love our cabin. In the summer it is my favorite place to be: sitting on the wooden deck grilling steaks, drinking cold beers, going for long kayak rides, swimming in the lake. There are so many memories here, and I know that once I'm gone it's going to be one of the things I miss most.

It's amazing how sometimes in life nothing seems to be happening and yet you feel busy/satisfied nonetheless. Maybe that doesn't make any sense. Somehow I feel like nothing has happened over the past few weeks, and yet, they've gone by (rather quickly, I might add). It's no lie that my job is a monumental bore. I sit and answer phones, do surveys, and generally listen to people yell and complain about stuff. I get to read sometimes, which was nice (I love reading), but sitting and reading for 8 hours can cause the following side effects: blurred vision, hallucinations, dizziness, confusion between what is story and what is reality.

There have been a few highlights. I'm planning a trip down to Chicago in a few weeks and am looking forward to some big city living for a little bit before I head out. I had been itching to do a road trip somewhere, but with the price of gas and size of my bank account, that's probably not going to be happening. I've managed to save up a nice sum of money from working the past few months, but when I begin to add up all foreseeable expenses (things I still have to buy before I leave, 27 months of student loan payments to be made while I'm abroad, possible future vacations [while abroad], etc) the account suddenly goes into the negative. Of course, being one obsessed with planning ahead, I'm just going to have to begin penny pinching now. Which brings me onto another topic: why on Earth is booking a flight so difficult. I mean, I check the prices of flights one day: they seem good. They next day: $200 more! Next day: Waaaaay cheaper, but the flight leaves at 2 AM makes 8 pit stops resulting in a 16 total travel time flight that should only take about 2. I had thought about going to New York, but since I checked last weekend prices have gone up, up, and away (okay, it was actually me just looking away because I was so horrified). Is there someone stalking my IP address who gleefully raises prices when I'm not aware? Also, just for laughs I planned out a trip from Chicago to Kigali, in the even that someone I know should want to visit. I think I may have spit. Literally, I think I spit a bit. There wasn't a single flight for under $2500. Now...I checked this out a few months ago and prices seemed to be a lot cheaper, so maybe [again] I was looking at a bad time? I've been told that there was this magical time (10 years ago?) when people went to a local shaman type, dubiously named an 'agent of travel.' These people booked not only flights, but hotels, whole trips even! Of course, some idiot decided to try doing it himself, maybe got a better deal, but the gods have not been kind on those who followed. I'm assuming times changed because it's cheaper to book off of sites like Kayak, but it's such a headache I would almost rather have a travel agent do it for me. I will never know if I paid way more or less that I should have, but ignorance is bliss, really. (I actually hate that statement, but I think here it applies).

Okay, I didn't mean for this post to turn into me whining...there have been positive things going on in my life as well. This week I went to the annual Youth of the Year banquet for the Boys and Girls Club of Portage County. It was held in the Elizabeth Inn in Plover (you know it...the sketchy one waaaaay out in Plover that I swear caters only to 16 year old birthday parties and methed out ladies of the night). Of course, putting aside the scary looking food (I mean really...making pasta look that gross takes a certain effort), the night was a big success, and a lot of fun. I wasn't too keen on going (tired), but I'm glad that I did, I was able to catch up with some of my old co-workers and some of the kids. At the end it made me realize just how much I miss that job. It was never easy, usually required several ibuprofen upon completion, but for the most part I only seem to remember the positive moments I had. The kids were great, and they have such a unique outlook on life you can't help but change the way that you yourself think. I talk about this a lot with my mom (a fourth grade teacher)...working with kids is a lot of things, but it is NEVER boring. Which makes the time fly (unlike this job [yes...I'm blogging at work]). There are times where you are depressed, times where you are elated, times where you are stressed, but the moment you step in that door and the kids come running up to tell you about their day, all of that goes away, and you are there, in that moment only. Sometimes I wonder I'm embarrassed by how much easier it is to talk with kids than with others adults. I'm not sure if I would ever want to do this as a career, but for the time being, it has been a blast.

Continuing with the Boys and Girls theme, I have also somehow become the unofficial videographer for the club. Back in November, there was a contest put forth by the organization's Board of Directors: each club picks their most successful program (we picked my Healthy Habits cooking class...obviously), and submits a 3 minute informational video. The winning video would receive $250 to continue the program into 2012. Now...I've never been conventional about my video projects, and I usual have a difficult time explaining 'the vision,' so I'm sure my director though I was nuts when I tried to outline what our video would entail. During my cooking class I did a three month program called 'Eat this not that,' where we would look at healthy alternatives to the easy foods that have taken over America. Example: making homemade chickens nuggets instead of those deep fried sodium balls at McDonalds, making homemade spaghetti sauce and chili using only vegetables from our garden, etc. The program became quite popular (we are all starving around 6:00, and kids will never turn down free food). I wanted the movie to evoke the excitement of preparing a meal (from the garden to the plate), but also be fun and whimsical. Well...let's just say our video was phenomenal. And we won. I would put it on Youtube (because I'm just that proud of it), but of course, it stars kids, and I'm sure that seeing as I'm not their legal guardian it's somehow illegal. So...just take me word for it. I've also been shooting a lot of footage for the club's 10 year anniversary video. The final product was amazing. A local marketing group in town edited the final version, and I was impressed with what they did with a lot of the footage. I've always considered myself creative, and can be kind of a control freak over the projects I work on, so it is always fun to see someone else's vision. I shot a lot of interviews with the kids, and lo siento to the person who had to sift through the hours of footage, but the final product was very Kids Say the darnedest Things. I've been filming some other projects for them as well, and though I may be maxing out my pro bono budget a bit, I've enjoyed doing all of the work. I'm excited to get to Rwanda and attempt some documentary-style films when I'm there!

So again, a disjointed entry, but hey, that's how I think.

Winter months mean lots of reading, and the past few weeks have found me with not a whole lot to do. I've been reading like a madman and finally paid the library back all of the fines I owed, hence the "WANTED" poster with my picture on it had been taken down and I'm able to borrow books once more. In case anyone is interested I've reviewed some of my recent reads below.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

This is the second book I've read by Erik Larson. He has an amazing way of writing historical narratives and making them read like a novel. This particular book deals with the American ambassador to Germany right after Hitler's rise to power. It's an interesting perspective on the Third Reich. So often books only touch on the events leading up to World War II, this book starts a whole decade earlier and gives insights into the growing anti-Semitism in the region. Good read.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Franzen is perhaps most famous for his 2002 book 'The Corrections,' which is one of my favorites. This books came out about a year and a half ago but I just finally got around to reading it. It was excellent literary fiction. Franzen has an amazing way of writing about American culture, suburban Midwestern life in particular. This book wasn't quite as quirky as 'The Corrections' and a lot of reviews on the internet complain about Franzen's misanthropic edge. Which, has some truth. Also, the book can be a bit of a downer. Despite these criticisms, I really enjoyed it and I'd recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the genre or into pop culture and politics. This book is unique in that there are probably a lot of people I wouldn't recommend to read it. I would say check out the first chapter (which perfectly sums up what is to come) and if you aren't sucked it {which...just seems impossible}, ignore this one.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

One of my favorite books that I've read over the past few years was Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Feast of the Goat,' a gripping (cheesy word, but this book is GRIPPING) tale of the last days of Rafael Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo is one of those dictators who gets briefly mentioned in classes (He was a bad motherfucker who had a reign of terror blah blah blah). It wasn't until I read that book that I realized what a profound effect the man (and his nearly three decade long regime {el Trujillato}) had on the island. He defined a whole generation. He was a genuinely terrifying man (even those in the United States dare not criticize him. When a Columbia grad student did take the dictator to task in a paper, he was kidnapped and [rumor has it] dropped into a vat of boiling oil. You know...like a frozen chicken MCnugget.) While Llosa's book was some great historical fiction, this book uses the literary fiction genre to observe the effects Trujillo had on one Domican family. The book starts out describing the {terrible} life of Oscar, a fat and acne faced Dominican teenager, destined to die a virgin (the only Dominican man to do so!). The writing style is perfect, with a mix of both Spanish and English, and includes a plethora of fun factual footmarks. As the book progresses, we read the histories not only of Oscar, but of his mother, grandmother, etc. A central theme of the novel is the fuku, an ancient curse that haunts the family. This book is fun, quick, and full of history.

Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

This is the behemoth of a book I'm currently tackling, though I'm not sure for how much longer. I'm about a hundred pages in and this book is a difficult read. Maybe it's the super small print, or the fact that it weighs about ten pounds (seriously?!?!?! it's only 600 pages, they must have printed this on the most dense paper money can buy), or it could just be that it's not all that exciting. It tells the enthralling love story of Karl and Jenny Marx. Okay, not so enthralling. I do enjoy reading about Marx's life and how he came to view the world and shape his economic theories, but it's...difficult. I became interested in the book when I saw the author doing an interview on TV and found her a pretty capitivating storyteller. I'm hoping the book picks up a bit.

Well, that's what I've been up to lately. Now I should review some of the TV shows I've been watching, because I would have LOTS of stuff to say about that!

I just glanced at the calendar and noticed this coming Wednesday is February 22nd, the day I would be leaving on to go to Honduras. Of course this managed to stress me about a bit because in my head I'm thinking there's no way I could leave on Wednesday! I still have so much left to do! Well then the other part of me says no shit, you have so much left to do because you weren't preparing to leave. Of course the more I think about it there's really not all that much left to do. I've been preparing to leave since...well forever. At this point there some basic things that have to get done: I still have to get flights booked to staging, but from what I understand this is usually done about a month before the departure date. Glancing at other blogs it looks highly likely that the staging for Rwanda will be in Philadelphia. Also, I have to head over to town hall sometime soon so I can register to vote absentee for the upcoming elections (I already know who I'm voting for...can I just jot it down and slip it in the ballot box early?) (That last parenthetical was a joke btw. I am a PolSci major.) There are still some things I want to buy for my trip. Few clothing items, some other necessities. AND I have to figure out how I'm going to pack everything.

Finally, I have to say my goodbyes. It's one of those things nobody actually wants to do, but you pretty much have to. Of course I shouldn't panic so much, I mean, I don't leave until MAY for godsakes. So, plenty of time, right?

My life lately has been...boring? Without excitement? That's not totally fair to say, but I'm definitely in an in between stage. After quitting my job, I went a few weeks without anything to do. Which was boring and basically meant I watched trashy TV all day. In early February my uncle was nice enough to get me a job (that's right...I'm that kid) at his furniture store answering phones and doing some surveys. It's not the most exciting thing in the world but it's something to do and some money in my pocket.

This past week one of my good friends from High School (who's now living in Florida) came back to Stevens Point to visit. We really hadn't seen each other in quite a while but really it seemed like no time had passed. To many it's no secret that my mind is a bizarre vault of random trivia. I love talking with Kevin because he really is one of the only people I know who catches all of my references, and who has seen all of the movies I've seen. He's probably packing more trivia than I am.

This time of year is always difficult because the days are so short and the weather soooo cold. But oddly enough, this February has felt a lot more like spring. The temperature rarely dips below thirty, which is rare for Wisconsin. I'm not complaining, you see I hate being cold (and hot for that matter), but really...40 degrees in February?! This can't be a good thing. I'm not sure if it's related to global climate change, I can only imagine it is. I curious to see how the next few months shape out to be.

On a final note, I've been relentlessly changing my blogging template and can't seem to find one that I like. I've settled on this look, granted I'm going to be making a few changes because it seems rather blah right now.

A disjointed entry, but that's where my mind is right now.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. For one, I celebrated my 23rd birthday, which means I'm getting very old (according to the kids at the Boys and Girls Club where I work). Also, I got some exciting news from the Peace Corps.

I've been bad about updating this blog, and now all of this seems like afterthought, but I thought it would be good to share.

The first week of January was a haul. For one, the vacation was over. I had a great Christmas this year, and not only because I spent it in Vegas :) I got to see old friends, catch up with family, and eat a lot. Who could ask for more? Of course, the whole time, the uncertainty of my situation was always in the back of my head. Ringing in the New Year was exciting and nerve-wracking! I was very anxious to hear back from the Peace Corps, but given my past experiences dealing with the bureaucracy, I was expecting to hear back, oh I don't know, mid JULY! So, I was shocked to receive a phone call the Wednesday after New Years. Of course, I had just eaten the nasty salisbury steak at work and was battling a bout of indigestion, but tried to maintain composure on the phone. Furthermore, the anxiety, stress, excitement, nerves all seemed to be attacking me at once. I was shaking so much I could barely write down what the placement officer was telling me.

I think it boiled down to this:

'Oh hey Ian. So, sorry about Honduras. I wanted to talk with you about some of the various option we have going forward. I have three assignments leaving around April-May, all three in Africa. The countries are Uganda, Rwanda, and Mozambique. All of them are community health positions. Also, there is a program leaving around the same time for a Latin American country. I'm not going to tell you which one because they would make too much sense. Instead I'm going to warn you how difficult it will be to get because you will be competing against the 100 other people who were dis-invited to Central America. So. I need an answer soon.'Well, its not word for word, but pretty close. I swear these Peace Corps officers must write out full monologues before calling people. Of course, I had no idea what to do. I was really hoping on a position in Latin America given my Spanish studies. BUT, I had resigned myself to the fact that it probably wasn't going to happen, and the more I looked at going to Africa, the more it appealed to me. Of course I'm young and naïve, right? I took a half day from work and went home to google where exactly Mozambique is. (I know, it's embarrassing, but really...who knows that off the bat?!) The more I looked at these three countries, I kept coming back to Rwanda. I don't know why. I may never know why. But something about it just seemed to call out to me.

I realize how cheesy that sounds. You can roll your eyes at me. But that's what went down. So I picked up the phone, called Brian (maybe he spells it with a Y, I'm not sure), and requested an invitation to Rwanda. Three days later, FedEx dropped off my invitation!

A few days ago I sent in my acceptance email and made it official. On May 7th I leave for Rwanda for 27 months! The past few weeks have been a learning process, I've probably read the Wikipedia article on Rwanda a million times. I'm excited to start this new chapter in my life and to learn a new culture. Of course, this position is slightly more daunting than my previous. For starters, I've never been to the region, so there's not the comfort of having visited before. Also, it is really really really far away. And not in the same time zone. And tickets there cost a billion dollars. It will be a challenge.

Of course, the biggest challenge will be learning the national language, Kinyarwanda (which isn't even recognized by my spell check!) O mein gott. One things for sure, I'm going to have some good stories for my blog.

Everyone has been asking when I leave for Honduras...which of course requires a pretty long answer. The past week has been filled with some highs and lows, but with regards to leaving for Honduras it's been low low low. On Friday of last week I received a phone call from Peace Corps informing me that due to violence and instability in the region, Peace Corps would not be sending any more volunteers to Honduras for 2012. After a quick google search I discovered that the prospective volunteers leaving for Guatemala and El Salvador were also affected by the decision. According to the New York Times, that's almost 105 volunteers that now need to be placed elsewhere. Sometimes I wish I had an e-mail of some of these other volunteers so that we could share our thoughts/frustrations, hopes for the future. That sound cheesy, but it would be nice to talk to some other people in the same boat. This week the New York Times reported that not only was Peace Corps not sending any more people to Honduras, it was evacuating the country altogether. Come January, all 168 volunteers that are currently serving there will have to come home.

This of course speaks volumes about the rampant violence that is plaguing Central America and Mexico. I'm not an expert on the issue, and I'm sure there's no easy answer to ending it, but it is a very sad situation. Especially for a region that can never seem to escape violence.

So I'm closing the book on Honduras. Since I received my placement letter in August I've been learning a lot about the country; its history, culture, and politics. But now I'm getting excited all over again, that nervous excitement that I had all summer, waiting for my country placement. On Tuesday the placement office for Peace Corps called. Her initial question was about my priorities; Am I most tied to: my regional placement? my {work} assignment? or my departure time period?

I assumed that saying 'all of the above' wouldn't be a proper answer. So I mentioned that I was hoping for a Latin American country where I could use my Spanish. She was very blunt [not in the rude way, but in a way one can appreciate] and told me that not only was Latin America the most requested region, but given all of the recent events, I should probably not plan on going there. Which is fine, I'm very flexible, just eager to leave! So number two priority: departure date. It looks like, however, all of the programs through March are filled. Meaning the soonest I will be leaving now would be April. The rest of the conversation was pretty standard 'we don't know too much yet, we'll be in contact' stuff the Peace Corps is good at. It looks like I won't really know anything until mid-January.

Only one program leaves in April (at the end of April I should point out): Uganda. So...assuming I'm not going there I'm probably going to be around for quite a while. Which leads to another problem. WHAT ON EARTH am I going to do with myself? Come February I'm effectively unemployed. And Peace Corps has my passport [what's the status on that?! I'd like to know]. So...I'm thinking I need to find something to occupy my time. I've created a list:

1. I'm aching to go on a roadtrip. A fun, long, friend filled road trip. Of course the likelihood of this happening is very small. But I'm holding out hope.

2. I have a friend who lives in New York and I've thought about going to visit him [again]. Of course he's busy and has an actual life, plus New York's expensive. So...not sure if that's going to happen.

3. Find a Job. Just until I leave. Of course...not sure if that's going to happen.

Okay I'm three into my list and realizing how ridiculously pessimistic I'm being. In all honesty I'm holding out a lot of hope too. I'm hoping that I find out my country [sooner rather than later] and find enough awesome things to do this spring to hold my attention.

Only time will tell. I'll keep you updated.

I found out on Friday I won't be going to Honduras in February.

A volunteer was injured {in some kind of violent incident}, and due to growing instability in the country the Peace Corps has decided to cancel the program for next year. Which is the second setback I've had during this whole process. I have very mixed feelings about all of this, number one being frustration. After the delay last year, finally receiving my invitation made it all seem like such a sure plan. Now things seem to be a little up in the air. Of course, I don't want to be in a situation that's deemed unsafe. It just goes to show how lucky we are in the United States (I'm not saying there isn't violent crime here, but it doesn't seem to dominate daily life like it does in many countries around the world).

At this point I don't know too much, the placement officer told me I should be getting a phone call on Monday or Tuesday to explore what my options are from here on out.

Isn't it funny? The little things you seem to remember. I remember the night my placement officer called to tell me I had been nominated for the Peace Corps. It was a significant step in the process because I finally felt like I could begin telling my family and friends about my [tentative] post-graduation plans.

I was in my kitchen in the midst of making spaghetti a la carbonara (because I'm cool like that, it was actually a staple in my college diet). Now, anyone who's anyone knows that the final step in making carbonara, while not difficult, requires a lot of care and attention. After rendering the fat from the pancetta and cooking the noodles, you create a mixture of egg, cream, black pepper, and parmesan cheese. Noodles go into the fry pan and mixed with the rendered fat and the cooked pork. Finally, you add the egg/cheese mixture and stir the sh*t out of it. Ideally it will become a creamy cheesy mixture. If you f*cked up it will become scrambled eggs with noodles (which I can only assume is disgusting). So back to my story, noodles were cooked, fat was rendered, when--RING RING. No that's not quite right. I believe I had an Amy Winehouse ringtone. So she starting singing and even though I'm terrible at multitasking, I answered the phone. My placement officer Janice was on the other line, and started off with some small talk. Straining the noodles. Wiping the fog off of my glasses. 'So I just wanted to tell you that I've decided to nominate you and we can move on with the process. The pancetta pops and a piece of grease hits me on the hand, 'SH*T!' doesn't sound like a proper response to what she's saying so I ignore the pain. 'Given some of your past experiences, I've decided to place you as a health extension volunteer to work in either Central or South America.' Sigh, or maybe it was quick intake of breath. Its one of those sounds you make when you're excited, only to later ask 'What the hell was that sound?!' 'I thought you might be excited, I know that's where you were hoping to go!' Pouring the mixture into pan and stirring my heart out. Some just fell onto the floor, but doing two things at once is hard enough, I'll wipe it later. 'Now I know you were hoping to leave next summer, but this program will have you leaving next September.' Ten months from now, I can live with that. 'Do you have any questions?' I made a lot of carbonara, would you like some? 'Great well congratulations and you have my phone number!' At this point I was completely ignoring my delicious italian treat and running around my living room like a buffoon doing, what I can only imagine was, an incredibly awkward dance. I wanted to call someone, but of course nobody was answering their phones!

It was a good night. The next part is the hardest. The waiting.

Towards Christmas time I received a lovely, thick packet from the PC office with all kinds of medical/dental forms that I was to have filled out ASAP. Now, normally I would have all of Christmas break to get this done, but seeing as I was out of the country for most of January, I had a small, five day period in which I had to get my entire medical review done. For anyone who wants to know what the medical review is like, I would say: all-encompassing. I was poked in every orifice (that's actually not a joke, it was kind of gross). I got every vaccine scientists could think of. [I pride myself on being well-vaccinated. And no Michelle Bachman, the vaccines haven't made me mentally retarded] I had gallons of blood taken (okay that one is a joke, but it seemed like a lot!)

Good news: I'm healthy. Bad news: Insurance covered none of what I got done. Good news: I have parents who love me...and paid to make sure I'm healthy :)

After being cleared the waiting game continued. All spring. 'Ian where are you going in the Peace Corps?!' Still don't know. All summer. 'Ian where are you going in the Peace Corps?!' Still don't know. About mid-July I received a letter in the mail, but it wasn't the letter I was hoping for. Due to budget cuts, my program, set to leave in September, had been canceled. To say I was upset would be an understatement. I was also a little depressed having realized this was the basket in which I had placed all of my eggs. There was a possibility that I would get to leave with the next health extension team in February, but I would be competing against the people nominated to leave then, as well as the comrades I was to leave with in September. In order to stay competitive I would have to complete so many hours in different volunteer sectors and do some résumé polishing. It was going to be a lot of work, and I didn't really have the time. Luckily I had gotten a job at the Boys and Girls club for the summer and was able to acquire quite a bit of hours of 'health-teaching experience.'

Well, the work seemed to pay off, and at the end of my [depressing] summer, I received the invitation kit [and country name] I wanted so badly. Honduras.

So it's set. I'm leaving February 22nd to serve as a Health volunteer (working with HIV/AIDS) for 27 months! The process was long and tedious, and the waiting was HARD, but it has paid off. I am excited for the adventure that awaits and eager to get on the road. Plane. Eager to get on the plan.

Since I applied for the Peace Corps I've been getting a lot of questions. Most often I get asked where I'll be going, which for the better part of a year, I really had no idea. I guaranteed people they would know as soon as I did. [I held true, posting my position/country on facebook about three seconds after tearing open the envelope. Speaking of the envelope, the whole invitation package was wrapped up in what is quite possibly the most well sealed piece of mail I've ever received. Which seems like a cruel joke. I digress] Most people seem to think I'm only going to be gone a few months. 'Well, yes. 27 months.' Cue wide open shocked expression.

Them: Will you be able to come home? Me: Well...I do get vacation time, but I'm hoping to instead meet my family somewhere in Central America for Christmas. Them: What are you going to do when you come back? Me: I have two years to decide! Right? Them: Will there be translators? Me: Nope. Hoping this Spanish degree is worth something. Them: Is it safe? Me: Um...well yes and no. I've been reading a lot about Honduras (an obsessive amount) and I won't lie. There are nerves. And it's upsetting that a country and a people have to exist in that kind of turmoil. But, from what I hear and read, the Peace Corps puts its volunteers' safety as a top priority. And its not good to live life doing only the 'safe' things.

Them: Why did you decide to join?

Me: ...

This is one of those questions where there never seems to be a simply concise [elevator] answer. The truth is that this has been on my mind for a long time, even back in high school. Of course what did I know back then. Throughout college I would attend the info meetings, signup for emails, and read the literature Peace Corps sent to me [did I sign a list? How did they find me?!]. But in the back of my mind those books were always under the grad school ones. Because that's just what you do after college, right? At least, that's what all of my friends are doing.

CUT TO: INT. COLLEGE APARTMENT LIVING ROOM. SUMMERTIME

I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to go to grad school right away. I might get some flak for saying this, but I didn't see the value in going from school to school. For me at least, I want to get out of the classroom and learn on location, which really, is the best way to learn. (I'm thinking a blog post on this topic is soon to come)

So with that in mind, I opened up my laptop, googled the Peace Corps, and filled out the online application. All in one fell swoop. Actually the application is incredibly time consuming and took me a few weeks. It's a good primer to the application process as whole, which is...[trying to think of an adequate word but failing]. Long. About mid October the application was finished and submitted, and then I had only to wait. Soon after I received a phone call from my local placement officer, who just so happened to be coming to town the next week! We scheduled an interview, and quick google search revealed [in advance] some of the questions I could expect. Once I got to the interview I was [pleasantly?] surprised at how we went through the list verbatim. I left the interview feeling good, and excited for what was to come...

This certainly isn't the first blog I've ever started, but I'm hoping it proves to be more successful than some of my [pitiful] past attempts. I have this problem sometimes where I start things and lose excitement shortly after. or maybe i assume that nobody cares.

I actually have a reason for writing one this time. I'm leaving soon to join the Peace Corps, and I'm hoping that this will provide the perfect outlet for me to chronicle my time abroad, as well as letting my family and friends in on what's going on in my life.

'You're joining the Peace Corps Ian?' let me guess, you've thought of it too. I hear that a lot, and to be honest one of the biggest motivators for me to send in my application [and eventually accept my invitation] was reading the blogs of current PCVs. I'm hoping that this can provide the same insight to someone, somewhere, considering the adventure. I'm always open, honest, and 100% sarcastic which cancels out the honesty. Basically I'm hoping for some good stories :)

The process of applying and getting ready to leave has been a long one (I still have until mid-February before I ship out!) but has taught me a lot about patience. It's also helped an über-planning control freak learn to go with the flow [which i must admit is has been hard, but i best get used to it now because i can only imagine what my time in the peace corps will be like!]

There's so much more I want to write about but I'm tired and will consider this small, late night contribution to be a sufficient start.