More Living, Less Blogging

That's just the way things go sometimes.  I have a lot more to tell you, but less time to tell you, so you'll just have to imagine most of it. It has gone from crazy busy to ludicrous speed around here and I just to not have time to catch you up on everything.  All is well.

The girls in Eleanor Roosevelt family are working hard this term to get involved in everything in the village (drama clubs, dance groups, choirs) and also working hard in school to learn to write compositions and improve foundational math skills.  By and large, they are healthy and adjusting to the village pretty well.  We have the types of problems you might imagine with 15 girls living together.  ("I fetched water for a shower and someone else took it."  "She took my notebook."  "She borrowed my shoes and didn't wash them.")

I still love eating meals with Grace, Yvonne, Noeline and Josianne.  Ornella and Adelaide have been getting quite serious about basketball.  Happyness is dancing and singing all the time.  Honorine wrote a poem and read it at village time!  We are having vision screenings and the girls who had dental screenings last term have been getting teeth pulled.  Time marches on.  I can't believe I've ben here almost 6 months.

We miss Jeanette and are planning to go and visit her gravesite as a family on Saturday, July 6.

I am busiest teaching TOEFL prep for the top 16 students in Sr. 6. These kids are amazing and I am really enjoying working with them.  They all dream of winning Mastercard Scholarships to American universities like Stanford and Duke. They do well on the reading comprehension and writing sections.  Grammar is harder and grammar lessons are no fun. I am really stretching to explain things like the present perfect and past participles.  I wish Mrs. Howe, my 4th grade teacher, was here.  She would know what to do.  Additionally, we are especially struggling with the listening comprehension section because hearing actual Amercian English accents at real speed is not something the kids have much experience with.  We are listening to a lot of NPR World Story of the Day podcasts.  They do not love this, but I think practice is the only way to improve here.

"Somehow*" I am working on The Big Project (R) for JC.  Just, you know, writing a hit pop song and then directing a video for YouTube that will go viral.  No biggie.  As you know, this is my area of expertise.  Anyway, we are inspired by Hot Cheetos and Takis and I am working with an amazing Student Leadership Committee to write and record a fun song and we will see what happens.

I am still working in the Student Resource Center to help students write CVs and cover letters and leading a ridiculous thing called "tutoring club".  Every minute of the day is scheduled and honestly generally double booked, so I just do whatever I can before I fall asleep standing up around midnight.  If you are waiting on an e-mail back from me, do not hold your breath.

I had an amazing birthday.  Thanks so much to my mom who mailed me the highest tech, best coffee mug (and a whole box full of other awesome goodies). [Suck it Mega.] My sister sent me some high tech quick dry pants from Athleta.  Here in the village, my housemates decorated my door with construction paper and made me a 'cake' out of amandazi and nutella.  It totally made my day and reminded me of when my sister used to decorate the bathroom we shared for me  on my birthday when we were growing up in New Jersey.

Later in the day some of the volunteers took me out to a restaurant in Rwamagana where we had chicken and bananas stew and some beers.  Then they gave me a real honest-to-goodness chocolate mousse cake that was like a real dessert from America (unheard of in Rwanda).  We were all flipping out.  It was a coordinated effort that involved getting keys to a refrigerator and a matatu/bus ride back and forth to Kigali with a cake (no small task) and it really was the nicest thing in the world.  The cake was super wonderful and delicious.  [It did almost kill Jerrod, who is deathly allergic to almonds, but that was a small price to pay in my opinion.]  I also got a gift bag from some of the volunteers with amazing treats like a Snickers and Doritos and some hand carved art.  I was touched that everyone went so all out and I had a really fun day.  There are some cute photos out there of the day and I'll add them here later if I can get my hands on them.

the staff took this floating on the ceiling of the cabana

me saying, can't you just hear my voice, that all i need to be happy has been provided: , a cake, a huge beer, and a cabana.  i was elated.

me stalling cutting the cake

party team: avi, rod, kome, me and miki

I kind of thought he might die

Jerrod - post almond

In less uplifting news, I still cannot run without pain.  Achilles tears are no joke.  I have been doing my rehab exercises since April.  This blows as running was one of my favorite things to do in the area and a major component of keeping me sane / stress management.  I'm broken hearted about missing the marathon and more importantly not really being able to work out at all.  I am doing this lame circuit training to still pretend like I am exercising but it pretty much only serves to make me angry.

Even worse, last weekend, I got super sick and had to go to a cray third world health clinic.  Actually everyone at Polyclinique Du Plateau was incredibly prefessional and nice.  What I know now is that I had a bad cold, and then I contracted a nasty stomach virus.  What I knew then was I had a fever, vomiting, other extreme gastro intestinal symptoms, a bad cough, a runny nose, ear pain and generally felt like every system I had was failing.  I went to the clinic and they gave me IV fluids and some IV stomach calming meds and some tylenol for the fever and I felt much better in 12 hours or so.  They wrote me about 7 prescriptions, some of which you can see here:

Also here's me in bed, running my mouth, like I do:

I am so miserable and weak in this photo and Hassina, village director of Health and Wellness is taking pics to entertain me.  My thinking at the time, was that the only thing to make up for how much discomfort I was in would be fishing for sympathy later on the blog.  The logic holds.

I was feeling pretty terrible for a while there, but am much better now.  Also, then all the other volunteers got the stomach flu, and once we knew what it was and that it ended in about a day it didn't seem so scary, but since I was patient 0 everything seemed so strange and unpleasant.

I spent the night in the clinic and had three bags of IV fluid and two examinations and the bill was about 130,000 RwF, (about $200), which is pretty low compared to what I would have paid for that kind of care in the US I think.

Now I am better and back in the village and just working and trying to deal with a minor hostage situation.  I'm delighted to hear the Spurs won game 5 and I wish them the best, but closing out at Miami is no small task.

Hope you are well.  I am busy here, but generally doing okay and trying to find a few meaningful interactions a day with kids amid all the chaos.

*I should probably write an entire post on how Rwandese use the word "somehow" but it is ubiquitous on any topic and is a reducing modifier that means, kind of or sort of or might mean complete disagreement.  For example, "Do understand me?" "Somehow", by which is meant, "no."  I love it and use it all the time, somehow.