So, this week I fell down the hill when it was dry out and scraped up and bruised my knees, found a giant spider in bed crawling out of my bed in the morning, tried killing it with my book, but lost track of it, missed class Tuesday because of the rain, helped with the PMTCT activities on Wednesday, I weighed and measured the moms and then took down the husbands ages and wrote on the multitude of forms, there was one husband who was super funny. He was so afraid of getting his blood drawn that he was squeezing his eyes shut and covering them with one hand while gritting his teeth and wimpering, the nurse, his wife and all the people waiting to be tested were laughing at him, he was so loud and funny. I got to practice speaking a little Kinyarwanda when I had to ask the umugabo (husband) his age (mufite imyaka angahe?).
In class on Wednesday we played charades while teaching about household chores, and our students got into it and it was really fun. We had a few people who came up multiple times to act out something. Thursday I was awoken really early (4ish?) by my roommate puking, then I got a call at 5:30am from one of my trainers and then my roommate was up again puking. I got out of bed around 6:30 and helped my roommate out a little, she ended up puking in the hall way and almost passing out, so I made her some Gatorade and put her to bed and cleaned up the hall and took a shower. She made it through the day okay, I didn’t have to clean out her bucket all day until the nuns came over to check on her after I had gotten back from teaching. Then of course she puked in front of them and we found a nice mess in the latrine, so they thought I was taking terrible care of her, which turned into them continually feeding us throughout the weekend. We had a constant barrage of people all weekend to visit and bring us food and tell me I wasn’t cooking her the correct type of food. It was so nice, but also a little frustrating. She had one bad day and they were appalled at me for not constantly cooking her food and taking care of her. I am so happy we live next door to the nuns, because if I ever truly get sick, I know I will have more than enough people who will be caring for me. Also, Thursday after teaching, the titilaire called to me while I was leaving that I had received something. The car from AIDS Relief came earlier in the day and brought us mail!!! I FINALLY got my birthday box from mom and Emily got a package from her world wide school. It was a happy night opening my package and unwrapping my birthday presents! Emily was still stuck in bed, so I had to keep coming in to show her everything.
Sunday was pentecoste, and while I don’t know what that means, I was invited to the party at church. Mwezi has a big catholic church and many nuns and so all the other catholic churches in the area were invited to mwezi to celebrate Pentecoste. There were around a thousand people and they put me and em on stage with the nuns. It was 4 hours long, but not too bad. There was a lot of singing and dancing and it was fun. Singing and dancing are two of the best things about Africa, and what I always miss the most when I get back home. I took a lot of photos and one video and will try my hardest to get the video up so you can see it because it cannot be described in words. There were three little altar boys sitting in front of me and they were so serious about their job, it was cute. I’ve never been to catholic church before, but I have a feeling that Rwandan catholic church is much different that what we have in the states. There was an electric guitar and electric bass to back up the traditional drums and clapping. That threw me off guard! I was awoken this morning to drums around 6am, even though the service wasn’t supposed to start until 9:30 (it actually began at 10). The nuns brought us home with them for a late lunch and then I took a cold shower; it is literally impossible to shave your legs in that shower, I would take off too much skin due to the immense amount of goosebumps (this is my excuse for not shaving my legs). I have already devoured the bag of goldfish that I received in my birthday box on Thursday.
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