“Well, I just told my host family that my sister is also my girlfriend.” -Kevin

We met our resource families Saturday! We don't have host families that we actually live with, so in an effort to give us more opportunities to experience genuine Rwandan culture and practice our Kinyarwanda, they paired each of us with what we call resource families. We'll spend a few hours a week with them at their homes and/or work places and hopefully by the end of PST will have a better idea of what life at our sites will be like.

My resource mom works at a museum here in the district, and her husband works in agriculture. We visited the museum as a group on Tuesday, and then I went back to visit her there on Wednesday. It's kind of a long walk, but the views are absolutely gorgeous. At the museum you can see what the traditional king's house looked like, as well as the modern palace that was built during colonization.

My Rwandan parents have three beautiful children: an 8-year-old girl, a 7-year-old boy, and another 5-year-old boy. They were very shy for our first meeting, but I was eventually able to get them to quiz me on my numbers. The middle boy would hold up some arrangement of fingers, I would blurt out a number, and they would giggle at my answer whether I was right or wrong. I also showed them some pictures I took from the plane, and later I found them outside drawing airplanes on the front porch with chalk. They talk to me a little more each time I see them and I can't wait to get to know them.

On Thursday my resource mom went with me to the market to get some fabric for an outfit. Her friends own the shop where I bought the material and they were very kind. She also took me to the tailor she uses, so hopefully I'll have a nice Rwandan outfit in about a week!

A couple of days ago we had a tech session about gender disparities in schools here in Rwanda. The number of girls that attend school is significantly lower than boys, and an even smaller number of girls actually take and pass their exams. We talked about ways we can increase attendance and motivate attending girls to stay in school, and it really started to feel like what my heart tells me I'm here for.

Monday we had a tech session on how to create engaging lessons with limited resources, and it was amazing! A VSO who has been here for three years came and showed us some of the things he's used to keep class interesting, and you wouldn't believe the things you can use as classroom materials. He showed us how to teach prepositions with clothes pins and toilet paper rolls, how to make dice out of mattress chunks, and how to draw maps, graphs, and charts on rice sacks! It was really exciting and motivating to see that it's still possible to keep students interested without copiers and Power Points.

There's a group of elementary and middle-school aged boys that hangs out outside of our school when they're not in class, and I absolutely love talking to and playing with them. They speak just enough English and I speak just enough Kinyarwanda that they can show me how to play the games they're playing and I can be the crazy teacher that actually wants to play children's games. I learned more numbers this week, so on Thursday they quizzed me on Kinyarwanda numbers and I quizzed them on English numbers. Sometimes when I'm with my friends they'll hide behind trees and say my name just loud enough so that I turn and look to find no one. I've started doing that to them now, too.

My roommates and I usually spend time at night lying on the driveway looking at the stars. I wish I could explain what the stars look like here. It's like they never begin and never end, and depending on where we are in the yard they sometimes come all the way down to our feet. The best part is that it feels like I can see every single one of them.

Overall, my experience so far has been everything and more that I thought it would be. I know I'll hit a wall eventually and it won't always feel this great, but for right now I'm completely enchanted. A couple of days ago as I was walking home, a teenage girl approached me with about 8-10 very large tree limbs tied together and balanced horizontally on her head. As we began a limited conversation in Kinyarwanda, I realized that she was also knitting as she was walking! My days right now are filled with perfect moments like that.