One Year in Rwanda

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This week marks one year in Rwanda! Here are my ramblings about what I've been up to this past month:  

Musanze
I spent a long weekend in May visiting a volunteer in Musanze (the main town in the Northern province)  with some fellow volunteers. In addition to spending at least a quarter of the trip at this amazing restaurant, we went on a 4 hour hike with some visitors from the states. These pictures don't do it justice! 
All Volunteer Conference
After our weekend in Musanze we traveled to Muhanga (yes, this is where 90% of peace corps trainings take place) for the All Volunteer Conference. Before heading to the conference Tracy and I spent a night at Graces' site in Muhanga. We enjoyed the luxuries of tacos (with meat!!!), candy, and the best 90s playlist ever before heading to the conference the next day. All vol brought together all volunteers in Rwanda from both the health and education programs. About 50 of the 70ish volunteers in country attended this 3 day event. I'm glad that because we are a small PC country we have the opportunity to all meet up once a year. It's almost impossible to see people who aren't in your region, on your  committees, or in your cohort, and all vol gave me an opportunity to get to know volunteers that I never or barely spoke to before. 
Taco dinner!!! 

 Home sweet home 
After All vol I traveled back to my site for just a week before the WASH hygiene training. I finally visited the secondary school to start the camp application process with the students (FYI I had been planning to visit the school since December... if only I had known a visit meant complimentary tea and amandazi....) This was also the second week of the weekly community finance class my library counterpart is teaching. I was so happy to see that the class had already decided to save money as a group without waiting until it is required further into the program. I was a bit worried about the sustainability of the class since I have been and will be away a lot in the upcoming weeks, but my facilitator is very dedicated to the program that I am confident it will continue seamlessly! 

WASH training 
As I've mentioned before the group of us doing the WASH hygiene project has had quite a few setbacks during the process. We weren't even sure the training would happen 3 days before it was scheduled but thankfully it did! The training took place from May 25-29. I had 3 officials from my community invited to this training, and it ended up being 1 of the originally invited ones and 2 replacements. Fortunately enough my replacements positions are more relevant and convenient to the project than the officials who were originally invited by the Ministry of Health guidelines, so it ended up being even more beneficial than it probably would've originally been. 

Shoutout to the other two volunteers who I am collaborating with on this project (Angelique and Melissa). It would not have been possible to do all the errands, planning, and organizing for this training alone! Now that we each have trained facilitators in our communities the next step is to hold the big village level training in our target cells for the hygiene clubs that each village has to form. If all goes as planned with the timeline that's set the lessons should start mid-July. 

WASH Training of Trainers

WASH Training of Trainers

Rwamagana! 

The WASH training was followed by yet another training (at this point I'm pretty sure 25% of my service is attending trainings). This was a 3 day training to train the new health group that just arrived in Rwanda on Thursday. Current  volunteers assist staff during the new groups training and I'm assigned to the Malaria and HIV focused week.  I also was able to visit my host family while there, and  my host mom's trend of giving me fruits before I left continued with a pineapple! The following day the new group arrived in Kigali and my cohort joined them for dinner at their hotel to get to meet them before they traveled to their homestays in Rwamagana today.  Welcome health 7! 


 Health 6 minus 1, celebrating our 1 year 

Home!!!
I finally got back to site today, where I'll be for 3 weeks before my Mom and sisters visit!!! I definitely missed it here, but not the bat living in the ceiling above my bed....

Until next time,
Vanessa

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