Many of you have asked what everyday life holds for us. Here I will give a little glimpse into our daily activities.
Generally, we go to sleep extremely early; anywhere from 8-10PM. We also wake up early; anywhere from 6-7AM. Part of the reason for this change in schedule (for those of you who know our past routines) is that it is quite easy and natural for us to do this here. There are an even amount of hours of darkness and light every day. It gets light at about 6AM and then gets dark at 6PM. So, at 10PM it has been dark for four hours and it makes us feel as though it is later than it is. It is much like in winter when it gets dark early and the day (and your energy) ends so much sooner than the late summer nights.
In the mornings when we wake up we go to breakfast here at the restaurant, which is comprised of a cup of tea and a chapat (like flat bread). For lunch every day their buffet consists of some combination of the following: rice with carrots, plain noodles, plantains, kidney beans,homemade french fries, greens, usually meat, and a tomato sauce. Dinner is usually the left overs from that food. They have a strange bottle that looks like an eye-dropper with yellow pepper liquid in it. I usually douse my food in that. In the beginning I was using about four drops, which was plenty spicy, and now I just spray it on.
We eat in the restaurant here for breakfast and lunch primarily because we don’t have a kitchen. We live in one of the little motel rooms on the conference grounds, which means we couldn’t even dig a fire pit nearby to cook in if we wanted to. Thankfully, this past weekend in Kigali, Drew and I found a single electric eye for $20. We got a small pot for $2 and now we are able to cook for ourselves! We will probably continue to eat breakfast and lunch in the restaurant because those meals are extremely cheap. It is less than a dollar for both of us to eat breakfast, and about $4 total for lunch for both of us. Additionally, we are usually busy enough during the day that it really helps to be able to just go and eat and then continue on our way.
Actually, tomorrow I am going to the market with the boy who does the shopping to see where he gets all the vegetables, rice, etc, and at what price. It will be better that I see how much he pays because usually we are given a mazungo price when we go out.
Drew and I have a water boiler in our room which has also been helping tremendously. He is able to make coffee, I can make tea, and for the last two weeks we have been experimenting with dinners that we can make with only boiling water. So far, we have succeeded with a kind of spaghetti, oatmeal (more like soggy cardboard), and an Asian noodle we just discovered in the market. We are also able to boil water to purify it so that we don’t have to keep buying bottled water all the time.
Little things like this make me feel more at home. Maybe its just a woman thing, but I felt completely inadequate and incompetent not being able to provide meals for us. Now that I can make Drew coffee, or serve visitors, I definitely feel like I’m settling in better. Also, their dinners are served much later than Drew and I like to eat, and sometimes it wasn’t served at all, or we felt like they were cooking just for us. Lunch and breakfast are much more stable.
Usually between meals we spend our time around Seeds of Hope or around the town doing various things. Drew is always on a mission fixing something, while I am either assisting him, cleaning something, preparing lesson plans, or teaching. Drew’s administrative duties are also picking up daily as the language barrier slowly (and I mean EVER so slowly) decreases. Other than the daily happenings around there are some consistent activities that take up our time.
One of my favorite tasks I have done so far is to wash clothes. After the week of being sick, I was so looking forward to cleaning and washing the sheets and our clothes. I asked Angelique, one of the cleaning girls, to teach me how to wash clothes by hand. She did so and it was a very enjoyable process. I have always found washing dishes to be therapeutic, and this was similar to that in its effect. It was incredible to watch her methods! It is an absolute skill that they have mastered. Every item of clothing had a very specific way to be washed. I realized after awhile that they have the major sweat spots on a person down to a science. She began by filling three buckets with water. In the first she did the major scrubbing, the second to soak and scrub a little more, and then the last for rinsing. In the first, she was amazing in the way she was getting all the key points and then spot scrubbing at the same time. She got out spots that have been there for months! I keep wondering how machines are able to spot scrub like that; in fact they can’t! I kept trying to get my hands in there to help and she would give them a light tap when I was doing it wrong. I absolutely couldn’t master the manner in which she was scrubbing.
Some of the odeties we noticed when we got here we have now seen the practicality in. For example, the curtains over the door windows are attached on the wall above the door instead of the door itself so that every time you open the door the curtain gets tangled in it. Even though it really is annoying, we realized that they use the curtains almost as screens. So when they want to air out the room or dry from mopping, they pull the curtain down to protect from the dirt and bugs coming in. The reason I say that is because of another example of this. I was wondering why she was turning everything inside-out to dry as it was an extra step in the process. Later I realized it was probably to protect from the colors bleaching out in the sun.
Anyway, after my great experience washing clothes last time, I was really looking forward to having a go at it myself last week. Showering is quite an ordeal here, and I had just taken one the night before, but I figured that I would be safe washing because the other women come out looking unchanged in their appearance afterwards. I carried our clothes, sheets, towel, and our bucket over to the washing zone, and I got many strange looks on the way over. I guess mazungos don’t usually wash clothes. I got offers from three workers to wash the clothes for me, but we have been trying to explain that this is our home now and we want to pull our weight around here (although we do accept help in many areas). So I went at it. At any given point I may have had two or three people looking over me either staring blankly or trying to correct my methods. Truly, I never thought I would be so absolutely self-conscious about something like my ability to wash clothes by hand. I felt so awkward in my motions. I just could not reproduce the skills they seemingly have by instinct. By the end of the three hour process I looked like a drowned rat. Literally, I was soaked from head to toe. I had started out with my hair neatly put up, shoes, and a nice wrap skirt on, etc. By the end I had tied my skirt in a knot, my hair was a disaster, I was soaked top to bottom, I had kicked my shoes off, I was sunburned and exhausted, and all my fingers were bleeding. It is amazing to me how competent the women are in so many areas, while I struggled through one load of clothes.
After speaking to Bernard’s wife when she asked about what happened to my fingers, she again explained how to rub the clothes without rubbing my fingers. I still can’t get it, but I promised I would keep practicing. Also, she told me I tried to wash way too many at one time. She said to take about 5-10 things at a time and do “many soaps, many soaps, scrub scrub scrub.” I was embarrassed that I had been thinking in an American mindset, saving up a huge load as if I could just toss it all in the machine. So I decided to wash more during the week. I tried again today with a much smaller load, and it worked pretty well. I still cannot master the method, but I’m sure it will take me much longer to even come close.
Another new activity is the act of showering with buckets. Drew and I often chuckle because we know that we would be laughed at if the Rwandese could see us trying to take a bucket shower (but that would be weird and I’m not suggesting that that happen). It takes two of us to do it, and it is a very long process. I have cut out any extra step I used to have, like using conditioner. You would be surprised how unnecessary it really is, girls! Usually by the time we are done there is water all over the bathroom floor (partly because there is no shower curtain, but I’m not even sure a shower curtain could hold that mess back). Our methods are improving though, because for the first two weeks had this strange spot of dirty hair on the crown of my head, and I realized it was because I have been washing my hair upside down and that spot was right in the middle getting ignored. Now I am coming out thoroughly clean.
After the day is done, Drew and I usually read The Chronicles of Narnia together. This is a very special time for us. Usually we want to keep reading more and more, but we are trying to preserve the books as we are on the 5th book in the series of 7! I keep telling Drew that there are more books in the world, but he (as am I) is very attached to these.
I will stop here, but I am sure at other times we will elaborate on the work we are doing here. Please pray for Drew, he is either coming down with what I had, or something else. I have been shoving loads of vitamins in him for a week hoping to kick his immune system into gear, but he still seems to be getting a little worse every day. I’m really hoping its not Malaria, because about two weeks ago he woke up with 9 mosquito bites all over his back, as we had slept in a room that had a really dinky mosquito net. One thing that gives me hope is that the same night both of us kept being wakened by the buzzing mosquito (or two, we aren’t sure), finding out later from the Bishop’s wife that the ones that buzz are males, and males do not carry Malaria. Interesting.
Thank you all for your consistent interest and prayer.
Julianna
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