Host Family

I’ve been living with my host family for just over a week now. Generally my day starts around 5:45am, or when the goats, cows, and chickens decide it’s time to wake up. I don’t actually get out of bed until about 6:15-6:30am though for two reasons. One, it’s cold. Two, it’s dark. I have no electricity and if the sun isn’t up it’s impossible to see anything. I then make my way to the latrine (a.k.a. hole in the ground). I don’t go the bathroom at night. I’ve started a pee bottle and have yet to reach a decision on a poo bucket. It’s not that the latrine is that gross but that at night, when it’s extremely hard to see even with a flashlight sometimes, I’m scared I will slip and fall in the area preceding the latrine, which the goats have claimed as their latrine. I also need to figure out a potential upchuck bucket because when the moment comes I am not sure I want to put my face near the hole in the latrine. I’ll tackle that battle later on.

My host family consists of a mom (Theodosie-28ish), a dad (Zacharie-33ish), a daughter (Mutoni-7ish), a son (Fabrice-4ish), and a bun in the oven. I think that the bun might come out of the oven while I am staying with the family, in which case I wonder what role I will play in the birthing because I imagine a home birth happening based off of what I am about to tell you. A current volunteer told us trainees the other day that another volunteer was on his way to Kigali on a bus one day. There was a woman near him, who looked stressed. People around her could tell something was off but no one did anything. The guy sitting next to her noticed that a pool of blood was collecting near her feet. The woman put her hand down into her danger zone and pulled out a baby. Not a peep out of the woman. So, if Rwandan women are all like that, I expect nothing less from my host mom.

Back to family dynamics. There are two other kids (about 16 years old) whose relationship to the family changes on a daily basis because I don’t know enough Kinyarwanda to know what they’re saying to me and I know one of them is at the very least a brother from another mother. The boy (Jean Pierre) I think is from a poorer family and is kind of apprenticing under my host dad. The girl though is more dubious. Tonight, while I was in the “kitchen” “helping” to cook we were exchanging English and Kinyarwanda words. The mom shows me Fabrice’s butt and asks me what it is. I tell her it’s “butt”. She then points at Pauline and says that Pauline has a big butt. I know she’s not their daughter because they told me that they have 3 kids (Mutoni, Fabrice, and me).

Overall I like my situation. Granted I have no electricity so my day is structured around when the sun rises and sets, which makes it extremely difficult to study when the sun sets at 615ish every day and I don’t get home until around 6pm sometimes and I have to eat with the family around 7 then after I want to sleep. It’s also hard when all I’m eating is rice, beans, cabbage, bananas or plantains, and potatoes (sometimes in the form of French fries). I decided yesterday to go ahead and stop eating meat because honestly, it’s not happening anyways. So we’ll see what happens with that.