FAQ

Before I get to the post, let me apologize for yet another extended absence.  But, funny as it sounds, I have a good excuse: my parents' long-lasting marriage.  See, it was their 30th wedding anniversary on Wednesday, so for the past couple weeks my brother and I have been frantically putting together a e-scrapbook for them with messages and pictures from family and friends.  (Leave it to us to wait until the last minute to finish a project we started in August.) The book turned out to be a great (but time-consuming) success and now that its done I can resume blogging, so let's get to it.  

Over the past two months, in my conversations with you via Skype, email, gchat and other online mediums, there are certain questions which just keep coming up.  For the sake of efficiency (and consistency) I've decided to address them all here, in a "Frequently Asked Questions on Zara's Life in Rwanda" session. 

On Rwanda

• What's the weather like?  
• Kigali may have the world's most consistent, temperate climate.  The city lies just over 1.5 degrees south of the equator, approximately 90 miles (150km).  Under normal circumstances, this would mean that it would be hot as hell year-round, but thanks to Kigali's elevation of over 5,000 ft (1,560 m), the city stays cool, with an average temperature for the year of about 70 F (21 C), and hardly any variations between seasons.  Apparently, since I got here, we have been in one of the two "rainy seasons" for the year; I haven't noticed.  Having spent the past several summers in places with infamous monsoon seasons (Mumbai, Dhaka, Mt. Cameroon), a few short afternoon thunderstorms hardly registers with me.  In sum, its sunny and balmy.  (I should point out that the downside of living near the equator is that the sun rises at exactly 6am and sets at exactly 6pm and after that it is pitch black.  There are no long, late summer evenings here; dawn and dusk each last approximately 7 minutes.)
• What side of the street do people drive on?
• According to the law, the right-hand side.  And in reality, the right-hand side.  I mention both because very rarely in the developing world are those two answers the same. However, there is no standardization regarding which side of the car the steering wheel should be, so all is not in perfect order on the streets of Rwanda.  Adding to the confusion, here left and right turn indicators don't actually mean you are turning left or right.  These signals have taken on new meanings in Rwanda, creating a complicated new semaphore-esque language of flashing lights.  Pass me, don't pass me, I want to pass you, I'm passing you, I'm slowing down, you're going too slow, I'm stopping soon-- all of these sentiments are expressed through turn signals.  Like with any language (or the code of horn beeps in west Africa), it takes a while to pick up and until you do driving can be a bit dicey if you expect your fellow drivers to use their indicators as the engineers designed.
  
• There is not a lot of traffic in Kigali (except for the one roundabout that constitutes "town") but the (very mountainous) roads outside the city are quite dangerous.  Not only do drivers have to contend with trucks barreling downhill at full speed, but they have to dodge the streams of pedestrians alongside the road, since the single-lane roads have no sidewalks or footpaths next to them.  And in an incomprehensible folly of civil engineering, there are 4 foot deep drainage ditches where the shoulder should be.  Driving on these vertiginous roads you look to one side and can vividly imagine plunging to your death 3,000 feet down, then look to the other side and just as vividly imagine a tire slipping into the ditch and the car plowing into the rocky side of the mountain.  This is why I choose to take a nap on such drives.   

• How do you get around? 
• Well, I walk to work, which only takes 20 minutes.  For work-related travel, embassy cars take us.  For personal trips, I call a cab; I have two great drivers on speed dial.  Of course, if I had that Vespa I wouldn't need them....

On work

• What's it like working in an embassy?
• Like working in a fortress guarded by marines.  Actually, its not as bad at our embassy as I imagine it is elsewhere, but getting your car inside is a minor production.  We tend to have a lot of meetings outside the embassy since its a hassle to get visitors access.  
• What do you do all day?
• Go to a lot of meetings, both within the embassy and outside.  We have meetings with our PEPFAR team, meetings with implementing partners, meetings with Government of Rwanda officials, meetings with other donors.  We have giant meetings with a few hundred people and meetings with just one other person.  We call meetings "conferences," "workshops," "joint reviews, "strategy sessions," "forums," and a dozen other things to trick ourselves into thinking we aren't in a meeting.  Actually, I shouldn't sound so bitter; most of these meetings are very productive and informative.  When not at meetings I'm usually at my desk responding to emails (from the parties listed above) or writing pieces for our official reports.  There's isn't a lot of time for Spider Solitaire or the Onion, alas.  
• What's it like working for a science-y organization like CDC? 
• Like being the a mediocre basketball player on a state championship-winning football team.  I consider myself a relatively bright person, but when we have discussions on the efficacy polymerase chain reaction based testing or debate the merits of using dried blood spots versus dried plasma spots, I find myself sitting slack-jawed and silent.  Of course, when I brought up the concept of diminishing marginal cost in a budget meeting, it was the rest of the team with blank looks on their faces.  But having much more seniority, they could just ignore me and move on.  On the plus side, when you say you're with CDC, people automatically assume you are an MD, as evidenced from the conference name tag below. In those situations I feel like Doogie Howser, which is nice.  

On me     

• Are you there alone?
• Yes, I am old enough to fly by myself, after all. 
• Are you lonely?
• I may be alone, but I am definitely not lonely.  The funny thing about being a foreigner is that every other foreigner automatically considers themselves your friend.  Here's an illustration of this phenomenon.  A couple weeks after arriving in Rwanda my office had me call a meeting of several partners (i.e. the organizations we give money to carry out programs).  There were about a dozen people there, all but one of whom were Rwandans in their 30s or 40s.  The one who was not a Rwandan was a Canadian girl in her 20s.  After the meeting she very kindly emailed me, volunteering help if I needed getting acclimated to the country (she's been here a couple years).  We began an email exchange and she invited me to a Halloween dinner.  I went to the dinner and meet a great group of young, expat women.  I asked them how they came to know each other.  The most common answer: "I saw her on the street and I asked her if she wanted to be my friend."  And so it is.
• Have you gotten fat?
• No, I don't think so.  Blessedly, unlike during my previous stints in Africa and Asia, I am not forced to eat three all-carbohydrate meals a day and have no outlet for exercise.  Beef and chicken are readily available, even though they aren't cheap. (Sadly, bacon, my favorite food, is not so easily found.) I cook for myself and thanks to Dama (see below), I have all my vegetables cleaned and chopped for me, which makes "cooking" really more of an exercise in throwing food from Tupperware containers into the stir-fry pan and waiting 5 minutes.  
• What do you eat?  
• Well, as just discussed, I often make a stir-fry, but I also end up eating out a fair amount.  Pretty much every restaurant here, no matter what they claim to serve (Chinese, Mexican, French) serves pizza and pasta, so I end up eating a lot of pizza, albeit creative, fusion pizza.  As for lunch, I eat at the embassy cafeteria, which serves Rwandan food as well as sandwiches, wraps, salads and other standard fare.
• Why are you wasting your 20s in the middle of nowhere?
• If not my 20s, then when? Right now I have the freedom (and energy) to pick a random country and move there, to go off on a weekend jaunt to Zanzibar, or to climb Kilimanjaro, whatever I feel like.  Kigali may not be the most happening city in the world from a social point of view, but in terms of my career, I can hardly thing of a better place to cut my professional teeth. 
• Isn't your life hard there?
• Quite the opposite--your life (for those of you in the US) is hard! Really, I do zero housework and everything is delivered to me.  My apartment gets cleaned twice a week as part of my rental agreement (they even do the dishes and change the sheets and towels), and I have an amazing woman named Scola who comes once a week and for $9 cleans, does the dishes, washes and irons my clothes, and does all my grocery shopping; she even dices all my vegetables for me and makes me a giant green salad and a fruit salad.  Jealous yet?  No? Well I also get an excellent in-home mani/pedi for $12.  Now you have to be jealous.  Sorry.  

This is my balcony, where I blog from.  Rough, isn't it?