I'm going to do my best to answer direct questions my dad and mom are dying to know.
Am I taking lots of pictures?
Not really. I've taken a couple from the back porch of the guest house that I'm staying at, and I will post some of those soon, but I'm still trying to get a feel for this place and what to carry around when I go out and stuff like that.
I am, however, going to go to Akagera National Park this weekend, where we will go on a couple of "game drives," or safaris without guns. I will definitely take pictures then. I'll try to get a good shot of a Nile Crocodile to see if they compare at all to Fido and the rest of the gang in Bridge City.
Are there other Americans or foreign nationals working with my group or with other groups?
Yes. The Country Director, Dwight Jackson, is from Illinois I think. He's got a wife and three kids here. He was a Sociology professor at Greenville College for a while, and he's been Country Director of Rwanda since 2005. He just got promoted to Regional Director of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, which includes Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and maybe some others. He's a very visionary man who knows his limits and listens well. I'm excited about working with him.
Also, there are at least five Hunger Corps members here from America right now (four stationed in Kigali and one in Gitarama), and there are a couple others from the UK in training right now who will be working in Gitarama I think. There's also a Hunger Corps girl from Switzerland coming in a couple weeks to work in Kigali. FH has a corporate office in the UK, Canada, Switzerland, and maybe some other places. This probably accounts for the high participation rate of people from those places.
There's also a professor from Greenville who's on Sabbatical right now, his wife and two kids, and an graduate school intern assisting him in some research he's conducting.
I think there may be some more people coming later.
Most of the Americans here are working in a supportive role. There are a few Rwandans in similar positions, and most of the non-administrative workers are Rwandan.
There are NGO and non-profit organization signs everywhere. The FH Guest House (where I've been staying) is on the same street as a number of other NGOs. I see USAID logos on a lot of signs. The UN is here also. I don't think they have any troops, but they're here through the High Commision on Refugees (UNHCR) and some agriculture project.
I don't know how many ex-patriots there are in Rwanda right now, but NGOs have a very prominent place here as the country confronts HIV/AIDS, poverty, and other pertinent issues.
Are there radio and television stations?
I've heard some music while riding in bus-taxis. I think mainly Swahili hip-hop, but I've heard Shania Twain is popular here as well. They don't usually have talk radio on in the taxis, if it exists.
As for television, there is one Rwandan station, and it is a hodge-podge of content from sub-par theater plays on film to BBC World News. I've also heard that the Lizzie McGuire Movie has graced the tube. I haven't found a TV Guide to figure out when any given show will be on. I think they may just draw names of shows out of a hopper to decide.
That's all for now. I've got to go to bed. This is more intense than I thought it would be.
Friday, September 21, 2007
I've spent the last few days really trying to inhale and process what my life will be like for the next three months. In doing this, I've experienced a wide spectrum of emotions and thoughts: happiness and sadness, purposefulness and purposelessness, connectedness and loneliness.
I'm still trying to figure out the balance between immersing myself in this place and remaining connected back home. I want to heed the advice of Jim Elliot, "Wherever you are, be all there," but at the same time keep up a healthy flow of interaction with you guys in the States. That's one of the things I'm working through this week.
Also, I've realised (I'm starting to really like the British spellings of words. Its how they do it here. Call me anti-American if you wish; I'm still working through the morality of endorsing it. I guess its just the testing of new, uncharted waters that is an essential part of every coming-of-age journey.) that it takes me a while to process things, and I've been processing a lot this week, which has put my mind and emotions in overdrive. So there's my excuse.
Note: when I refer to going to "town," I mean basically "downtown." I am staying in Kigali, which is the biggest city in Rwanda, but I'm a few miles from the main commercial hub, which we would call "downtown" and which Rwandans call Mumugi (pronounced "moo-MOO-gee").
We (Becky and I) went into town on Wednesday morning and walked around a bit, familiarizing ourselves more with the area and acclimating ourselves to interacting with Rwandan people. Then, in the afternoon, we had a meeting with Dwight to discuss what we will be doing for our internship. Drumroll please...
My Job
I think I'm basically going to be a Research Assistant for assessing the Business Development and economic context in which Food for the Hungry is working here in Rwanda. My goal is to gain a good understanding of the macro-economic policy of the Government, their goals and strategies for poverty alleviation and economic development, as well as any models and/or forecasts they have constructed. This research will then be used to evaluate the effectiveness and contribution of Food for the Hungry's work in Rwanda, as it pertains to the government's priorities in their strategy for poverty alleviation. This is a very important aspect of FH's work in Rwanda, because we don't want to implement projects with goals that are contrary or contrasting to what the community views as its needs, but to walk alongside churches, leaders, and families to create sustainable development. Again, we don't want to impose unnecessary projects on a community, but to simply provide resources in assisting them with confronting issues that they've pinpointed as a priority. FH has been doing this in Rwanda on a micro-level very well for a few years, but Rwanda is small enough of a country and, from what I've read so far, there is enough of a overarching strategy already formulated by the government to consider how FH's work is fitting in to the bigger picture of helping Rwanda rise out of its crippling poverty. This is the "walking with leaders" part of Food for the Hungy's mission. Its pretty cutting edge stuff, at least to me. I'm really excited about it. On Wednesday, Dwight let me speak to Alexi, one of the higher-ups in the FHI office here. He used to work for the Ministry of Commerce in the '70s I think, so he has some connections with people in the government that can hook me up with some relevant documents. So part of my work will consist of me going to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and the Ministry of Commerce to hunt down documents. Pretty awesome.
And there it is. I finally have some idea as to what I'll be doing for these next three months. I've learned this week that the quality and effectiveness of this internship experience will be very dependent on my being proactive and taking lots of initiative. If you pray, please ask the Lord to help me in this area, because I do not do this naturally. Having some sort of concrete purpose does help a lot though.
I'm still trying to figure out the balance between immersing myself in this place and remaining connected back home. I want to heed the advice of Jim Elliot, "Wherever you are, be all there," but at the same time keep up a healthy flow of interaction with you guys in the States. That's one of the things I'm working through this week.
Also, I've realised (I'm starting to really like the British spellings of words. Its how they do it here. Call me anti-American if you wish; I'm still working through the morality of endorsing it. I guess its just the testing of new, uncharted waters that is an essential part of every coming-of-age journey.) that it takes me a while to process things, and I've been processing a lot this week, which has put my mind and emotions in overdrive. So there's my excuse.
Note: when I refer to going to "town," I mean basically "downtown." I am staying in Kigali, which is the biggest city in Rwanda, but I'm a few miles from the main commercial hub, which we would call "downtown" and which Rwandans call Mumugi (pronounced "moo-MOO-gee").
We (Becky and I) went into town on Wednesday morning and walked around a bit, familiarizing ourselves more with the area and acclimating ourselves to interacting with Rwandan people. Then, in the afternoon, we had a meeting with Dwight to discuss what we will be doing for our internship. Drumroll please...
My Job
I think I'm basically going to be a Research Assistant for assessing the Business Development and economic context in which Food for the Hungry is working here in Rwanda. My goal is to gain a good understanding of the macro-economic policy of the Government, their goals and strategies for poverty alleviation and economic development, as well as any models and/or forecasts they have constructed. This research will then be used to evaluate the effectiveness and contribution of Food for the Hungry's work in Rwanda, as it pertains to the government's priorities in their strategy for poverty alleviation. This is a very important aspect of FH's work in Rwanda, because we don't want to implement projects with goals that are contrary or contrasting to what the community views as its needs, but to walk alongside churches, leaders, and families to create sustainable development. Again, we don't want to impose unnecessary projects on a community, but to simply provide resources in assisting them with confronting issues that they've pinpointed as a priority. FH has been doing this in Rwanda on a micro-level very well for a few years, but Rwanda is small enough of a country and, from what I've read so far, there is enough of a overarching strategy already formulated by the government to consider how FH's work is fitting in to the bigger picture of helping Rwanda rise out of its crippling poverty. This is the "walking with leaders" part of Food for the Hungy's mission. Its pretty cutting edge stuff, at least to me. I'm really excited about it. On Wednesday, Dwight let me speak to Alexi, one of the higher-ups in the FHI office here. He used to work for the Ministry of Commerce in the '70s I think, so he has some connections with people in the government that can hook me up with some relevant documents. So part of my work will consist of me going to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and the Ministry of Commerce to hunt down documents. Pretty awesome.
And there it is. I finally have some idea as to what I'll be doing for these next three months. I've learned this week that the quality and effectiveness of this internship experience will be very dependent on my being proactive and taking lots of initiative. If you pray, please ask the Lord to help me in this area, because I do not do this naturally. Having some sort of concrete purpose does help a lot though.
Monday, September 17, 2007
The Adventure Begins
Semi stream of consciousness here i come...
I am extremely jet lagged. I went to bed at 9:30pm last night, awoke at 1:30am to go pee, and couldn't go back to sleep until 5:15am, which didn't do much more than make me more tired, since i got up at 6:45 for the day.
And it has been a pretty intense one. The first day of orientation (which, as far as i understand it, consists of me and Becky (the other intern) finding out about what FHI (Food for the Hungry International) is doing in Rwanda so that we may try to fit in somewhere useful, which is a much less organized process than I first expected.) brought an overload of info into my sleep deprived mind. We started off the day in the FHI office in Kigali (Rwanda's capital). There we participated in the morning staff devotional led by someone who spoke in Kinyarwanda (the native language). It was very interesting. Then, Becky and I got into a conversation with Jim, a professor of psychology at Greenville College who is on sebbatical here in Rwanda with his family. He is doing some research for Dwight (the country director) to help quantify the real impact that FHI's projects are bringing about in the communities in which they are implemented. It sounds like some very interesting work, and we listened to an overview of what he was doing for a good hour. We got to ask plenty of questions and to see how our backgrounds may be applicable to this work. In my case, they are about to enter a statistical analysis phase of the project, which has really intrigued me since I took that graduate level statistics course this summer.
After a couple hours of chatting and contextualizing and brain-picking, Becky and I drove with Dwight and Melissa (a Hunger Corps volunteer) to Gitarama, where Dwight gave a two hour presentation on the Vision of Community that is supposedly the backbone of FHI's work. It was very interesting and enlightening, but it was also very daunting, because it pointed out that real development, as accomplished through walking with churches, leaders and families in specific communities to appropriately address both the physical and spiritual hunger prevalent in those communities, is very complicated work, and it requires massive patience, humility, and flexibility. The goal is not to enter a community with some preset agenda as to how FH should operate, but to engage churches, leaders and families in seeing how FH can best help them to overcome debilitating perpetual poverty--not to be the savior of these communities, but to adequately equip them to foster sustainable development themselves. This is creates an element of much more complexity, but I think it is a very good philosophy of work and ministry for Food for the Hungry, and I am very excited to be a part of trying to figure out how that looks in the flesh.
On the way to Gitarama, which is about an hour drive from Kigali, I talked with Dwight about what I might want to do for my internship. I told him I was an Applied Math major and that I had no experience in international development (ID), but that I wanted to explore how my degree may "apply" to this field. I told him that my initial idea as to how math would apply to ID was through economic modeling and forecasting. So he suggested I do it. He talked about some areas it would be applicable and some direction I might go in, and he said it would be some very useful work. Stuff like going to the Bureau of Commerce and seeking out the government's long-term economic models and goals, and seeing how FHI's work fits into those. Really interesting and legitimate work.
So there you go. One day in and I've got two possible projects to work on. I worry, though, if I'm really qualified for the tasks at hand. They seem very interesting and I would love to learn about them, but having something to offer is another story. But, a Hunger Corps person here in the Guest House has said that "unqualified" is not an appropriate term here. Availability is the key, and with it I may be able to unlock some neat opportunities....and that's both here AND there.
I am extremely jet lagged. I went to bed at 9:30pm last night, awoke at 1:30am to go pee, and couldn't go back to sleep until 5:15am, which didn't do much more than make me more tired, since i got up at 6:45 for the day.
And it has been a pretty intense one. The first day of orientation (which, as far as i understand it, consists of me and Becky (the other intern) finding out about what FHI (Food for the Hungry International) is doing in Rwanda so that we may try to fit in somewhere useful, which is a much less organized process than I first expected.) brought an overload of info into my sleep deprived mind. We started off the day in the FHI office in Kigali (Rwanda's capital). There we participated in the morning staff devotional led by someone who spoke in Kinyarwanda (the native language). It was very interesting. Then, Becky and I got into a conversation with Jim, a professor of psychology at Greenville College who is on sebbatical here in Rwanda with his family. He is doing some research for Dwight (the country director) to help quantify the real impact that FHI's projects are bringing about in the communities in which they are implemented. It sounds like some very interesting work, and we listened to an overview of what he was doing for a good hour. We got to ask plenty of questions and to see how our backgrounds may be applicable to this work. In my case, they are about to enter a statistical analysis phase of the project, which has really intrigued me since I took that graduate level statistics course this summer.
After a couple hours of chatting and contextualizing and brain-picking, Becky and I drove with Dwight and Melissa (a Hunger Corps volunteer) to Gitarama, where Dwight gave a two hour presentation on the Vision of Community that is supposedly the backbone of FHI's work. It was very interesting and enlightening, but it was also very daunting, because it pointed out that real development, as accomplished through walking with churches, leaders and families in specific communities to appropriately address both the physical and spiritual hunger prevalent in those communities, is very complicated work, and it requires massive patience, humility, and flexibility. The goal is not to enter a community with some preset agenda as to how FH should operate, but to engage churches, leaders and families in seeing how FH can best help them to overcome debilitating perpetual poverty--not to be the savior of these communities, but to adequately equip them to foster sustainable development themselves. This is creates an element of much more complexity, but I think it is a very good philosophy of work and ministry for Food for the Hungry, and I am very excited to be a part of trying to figure out how that looks in the flesh.
On the way to Gitarama, which is about an hour drive from Kigali, I talked with Dwight about what I might want to do for my internship. I told him I was an Applied Math major and that I had no experience in international development (ID), but that I wanted to explore how my degree may "apply" to this field. I told him that my initial idea as to how math would apply to ID was through economic modeling and forecasting. So he suggested I do it. He talked about some areas it would be applicable and some direction I might go in, and he said it would be some very useful work. Stuff like going to the Bureau of Commerce and seeking out the government's long-term economic models and goals, and seeing how FHI's work fits into those. Really interesting and legitimate work.
So there you go. One day in and I've got two possible projects to work on. I worry, though, if I'm really qualified for the tasks at hand. They seem very interesting and I would love to learn about them, but having something to offer is another story. But, a Hunger Corps person here in the Guest House has said that "unqualified" is not an appropriate term here. Availability is the key, and with it I may be able to unlock some neat opportunities....and that's both here AND there.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
I'm in Rwanda!
We arrived in Kigali last night around 7:00 p.m. (noon CST), and aside from the airline losing my traveling partner's luggage and the major jet lag lagging on my body, it was a wonderful trip. We're about to go on a walk around Kigali to see what there is to see. It just started drizzling an hour ago, and the other workers are touting that as the start of the rainy season here in Rwanda.
Many adventures to come...
Many adventures to come...
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