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.