6:00 a.m.: Wake up. I don't set an alarm, this is when the surprisingly loud birds outside wake me up. Sometime in the next hour I'll shower, get dressed, do devos, etc.
7:05 a.m.: Breakfast. See my previous post.
7:40 a.m.: Driver picks us up for work, it takes 10-15 minutes depending on traffic.
8:00-8:30 a.m.: VFC devotionals. I follow along in the Kinyarwanda song book as best I can- occasionally it's a tune I know. Gilbert or Claude translate the brief message for me.
8:30-10:45 a.m.: Whatever work there is to do. I'm at the mercy of the branches; if they've sent in the journals for us to enter, we'll be hard at work on that. If they haven't, I'll surf the web and write emails. This morning, we had a pile of journals to do, and we knocked out all 30+ in two hours.
10:45 - 11:00 a.m. (approx): Tea break. It's tea with milk, with a lot of sugar and occasionally instant coffee mixed in. Very sweet, still makes me feel sick, but I'm getting used to it. Talk with co-workers about various things, they grill me on how they can get jobs in America. Today, they mentioned that the workers digging the new fiber-optic line outside earned about 1000 RWF a day, or less than $2 U.S. I realized that a worker in America doing the same job would make 30 times as much, assuming minimum wage. I'm reminded every day of how great America really is- every day people talk to me about their desire to move there.
11:00 a.m. - 1:oo p.m.- Work some more. Occasionally interrupted by Claude, who is working on his English and would like me to explain something or pronounce something.
1:00 - 2:30- Lunch back at the house. A full meal is usually waiting for us, prepared by our housekeeper Olive. We'll watch CNN after lunch until the driver picks us up.
2:30 - 6:00- Work some more. Today, having finished everything, I'm writing this blog post. At 4:00 someone is supposed to arrive from the northern and southern branches, carrying more updates for us to post.
6:00 - 8:00 - Go home, watch TV with Yacob, my Ethiopian housemate. Usually news, sometimes BBC Entertainment which has old 'Whose Line is it Anyway' reruns. Yacob laughs throughout, but I'm skeptical of how much he actually understands.
8:00- dinner. I'm starving by this time, not really sure why we eat so late. I asked Olive to move it up a little bit please, but I don't think she understood. Oh well.
10:00- I'm in bed, window open, mosquito net down. I've adjusted surprisingly well to the humidity and heat, don't really sweat so much at night anymore.
So, pretty boring. I have plans to see some of Kigali this weekend, and I'm traveling down south with Jean Marie Wednesday and Thursday next week. There I'll (re)train the branch staff on how to take good stories and pictures, and see some more of the countryside. I'll try to take lots of pictures.
Its too bad we have so many illegal immigrants from a certain country that will not be named..... it would be great if instead we could have all these awesome people from Africa come over here!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting. We really look forward to hearing from you.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised you have cnn, bbc, etc. there. I assume it must be over-the-air instead of cable, right? I think the late dinner is a European custom. I've heard that Germans eat dinner at like 9 pm.
We have a satellite dish in the backyard for the TV. Yeah, the people here are really hard workers, sincerely want to take advantage of all that America has to offer, and know that learning English is one of the keys for success. If ever I make it in the State Dept or something, I'm definitely raising the visa quotas.
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