birthday festivities

The birthday activities went well. We slept in some and then I made some oatmeal for breakfast and boiled some water for a hot bucket shower. While my water was warming, I opened my email to see the monstrosity of emails sent from all of the people who read my blog. Thank you all so much! It made me feel really happy.
After my hot, amazing shower, we went to the market to get some food. The school was having a game day, so ALL the kids were outside playing volleyball and watching the game. I think there was some sort of tournament going on. Well, when they saw us coming, we got surrounded and they were all yelling at us and we ended up leading a giant procession of children through town to the market. I told them to leave and go study, but they just informed me that it was game day and they didn’t have to. While in the market, a drunk man decided to follow us around and help us bargain and was yelling at the umucuruzi (sellers) and the abana (children). He ended up stealing some of our greens and leaving. We led another procession on the way home, but when we got to our hill, I turned around and said “bye!” so they wouldn’t follow us up to our house. One girl looked at me and said “bye bye muzungu”. I thought it was cute and funny even though I hate being called muzungu. We got home and prepared the lesson for English class and had some lunch (beans, rice, onion and cabbage). Em was teaching, so I just sat and helped out every once in a while until momma called and I got to talk to her. The class sang to us in English, French and Kinyarwanda! Umunsi mukuru nziza, umunsi mukuru nziza….
After class, we stopped by the restaurant and got some beer and brought it home to have with dinner. I don’t even like beer, but it was my birthday and I thought I should drink a beer. I cooked pesto pasta (from a packet of seasoning I brought from home and have been saving, the pasta Emily bought in the capital) and onion bhajia, an Indian dish of spicy fried onion that I bought in the capital and was also saving. It wasn’t healthy, but it had a lot of flavor and was delicious. For dessert, I had some cookies with nutella, but I opened my nutella to find ants! I was furious, but it’s almost a full jar and I didn’t want to waste it, so I just dug them out and ate it anyways. I put the jar in Tupperware now so it’ll be safe from the little buggers. Nutella is super expensive and is a very special thing for me. I’ve been saving it because I cant buy it in my village, and they only have the imposter kind in Cyangugu, so if I want the real stuff I have to go to Butare or Kigali, which I don’t get to do very often (this is my explanation of why I ate ant infested nutella, don’t judge me!). All in all, it was a good birthday. I didn’t get ice cream to presents or cake, I didn’t get too see my family and friends and get hugs, but it was a good birthday.

It didn’t rain once on my birthday, but my goodness, we are making up for lost time today. I woke up early to talk to dad on skype for my birthday (it was still my birthday in seattle) and then went out to do laundry. It was kinda cold and cloudy, but then the clouds broke and it was warm. Ricky called and I got to talk to him for a long time, and that was really nice. I finished my laundry and was writing up my lesson plan for the day when my counterpart stopped over for a visit. It’s always awkward when people just stop by because I think they want something and we don’t communicate well, so a lot of the time we’re just sitting in silence. This wasn’t so bad. I asked if he needed something and he said no, he was just visiting, so I decided to use this time to get some things done that I’ve been meaning to do. I showed him my CNA assignment so he knows that I am supposed to do it and showed him my butchered translations of the questions. He helped me to identify the people that I need to talk to. I also asked if I could spend a day at the clinic observing while people worked. Every time I go, people stop what they are doing to hang out with me and I hate that I am disrupting work at the health clinic! People’s health is way more important than I am. They usually get out of whatever chair they are sitting in and give it to me, people leave their work to come and stand by me and I just sit in a room doing nothing and disrupting everything. I tried to make it clear that he didn’t need to take care of me during the day, that I was just going to be there observing and he didn’t need to worry about entertaining me. I hope it got through the language barrier. I also asked him to set up a meeting with the community policing officer for next week when the safety and security officer visits (she’s bringing me mail from Kigali!!!) Then the nun whom I teach English to from my house came over and we had a short lesson, which is when the rain began. It was pretty soft at first, so I didn’t bother grabbing my clothes and then it got a little heavier, so I grabbed my pair of quick dry pants that were the closest thing to being dry. Well, immediately after that the sky opened up and poured down the heavens. My clothes left on the line got another few rinse cycles! Its been raining on and off every ten minutes. The kind of rain where I cannot hear myself think, it comes and goes so quickly it’s shocking. You hear maybe one or two drops and then the loudest, most deafening sound for ten minutes, then it stops suddenly and all you can hear is the rain dripping from the leaves. My clothes were not dry the next day and I just took them off the line before the next huge rainstorm came and laid them out throughout the house. Friday after our lesson, the nun gave each of us a pineapple for our birthday; it was awesome. I love pineapple.