Homestay

I got here Monday night, and we all moved in with our homestay families Thursday night. It seemed like no time at all, like we just got here and were just barely starting to get acclimated and they were throwing something else at us. I'm starting to think that's SIT's thing. Really, I'm pretty sure they do it intentionally. Anyway, we were all incredibly nervous about moving in with our families. It's hard enough navigating a new culture, then add learning how things are done in people's houses (how do we do laundry? what do we do with feminine hygiene products?), then the fact that we'd be living in such close quarters with people who were from a completely different culture and that we could accidently do something to make things really awkward or offend them or make them laugh at us or think we're really weird (etc., etc., etc.), and then there are the more mundane difficulties of moving back in with a family with things like rules and curfews after living on your own for years. Oh, and there's no guarantee that they'll speak any English. You can see why we were scared.

I wish I could compile for you a collection of the everyone's different homestay stories. Some of them are awkward, some are beautiful, and a lot of them are absolutely hilarious. I have laughed so much in the last week. I makes being awkward Americans so far from home so much better that we can laugh so hard about it. Unfortunately, I can only tell you my stories, because they're the only ones I know well enough to recount without doing them great injustice.

I'm afraid my stories are not very funny, or especially awkward, but though it may make for less exciting reading material, I consider it a good thing. So far I think I've had one of the smoothest homestay experiences of the group, largely because everyone in my family speaks very good English. I live with a single mother and her children (I found that unexpectedly comforting similarity to home). My mom, Melanie, is a banker, and her children at 9, 13, 15, and 24, though the oldest, Juliet (everyone calls her Julie, so I have a sister named Julie here too!) is actually an adopted niece. Many children here go to boarding school, so I haven't met Vanessa, the 15 year old, yet, because her school is too far away for her to come home on the weekends, but Nice, the 13 year old, comes home every weekend, and Eddy, 9, goes to school nearby and lives at home. They are all very kind, and have done their best to welcome me into their family, answer all of my cultural questions, and generally make me feel at home. I am also lucky, because, unlike many of the homestay families, we have running water, with an actual flush toilet, not a pit latrine, and a working shower. No, we do not have hot water. Most people here don't. I'm glad it's warm, but I still hate the cold showers. Every morning when I shower I just barely turn the water on, so I can easily avoid being under it until absolutely necessary, and I dream of the amazing, long, hot shower I'm going to take when I get home. Really, that's going to be the first thing I'm going to want to do when I get home.

I'm starting to feel settled here. I take the bus to school every day, walking just around the block to the bus stop, catching the bus downtown, and then getting on another bus to Kacyiru, the district where my school is, and then I have a 5-10 minute walk to school. It's really pretty easy, and as I've gained confidence in my ability to get around I've started to feel more at home here. I'm also lucky in that my mom is not very strict, and wants me to be able to "be free" here, so, unlike many people, I don't have a curfew; when I ask when time I should be home, she just tells me that it's really not safe to walk home after 8, so I come home before then, but could stay out later as long as I called. It's nice, I was a little concerned about how I would deal with that. Surprisingly, I've found that the hardest thing about the homestay for me has been adjusting to having younger siblings. As a twin, my exposure to children has been limited. I've never spent extended periods of time with kids, at the most I've just played with them for a few hours and then given them back. Even my campers at Teameffort were at least middle schoolers. Even though African children so far seem to be much more mature than American children, I'm starting to think that I just don't like kids. Eddy is great, and he enjoys helping me with my Kinyarwanda homework (this morning at breakfast he was quizzing me on numbers), but sometimes his very typical 9 year old behavior drives me nuts. I'm grateful that I have my own room and can escape sometimes. I know I will return home with much more patience than I brought with me.

Don't worry, I do have a few funny stories for you.

The doorknob on our bathroom door is broken. It's intact but loose, so you have to jiggle it around for a bit before it catches and opens. My first night here, I didn't know this. So I went into the bathroom and then when to leave and could not get the door to open. I was wiggling, jiggling, otherwise maneuvering every way I knew and I could not get it to open! I was imagining myself being stuck in the bathroom after only having been in the house for 2 hours, going to school in the morning and telling everyone how I'd had to wait for someone to walk past the bathroom so that I could call pitifully for help. Fortunately, that did not happen. I got the door open, and I think I'm finally getting the hang of it, but I still try to avoid going to the bathroom at night because I feel like I make such a racket trying to open the door that everyone in the house must hear me.

Second story. I told you that we have a working toilet. This is true, but we are lacking the lid to the tank, so that we have to reach in and pull the lever to get it to flush. Not a big deal, I've done that with American toilets. Last weekend, while Mom was gone visiting her Vanessa at boarding school, I went into the bathroom and noticed that there wasn't any water in the tank. Mom had mentioned when I moved in that sometimes there wasn't running water, so I went to ask Nice how to flush the toilet when there isn't running water, expecting that she would just tell me where I could fill up a bucket to dump into the tank. Not a big deal. Turns out it was even less of a big deal: the water was working, the tank just hadn't refilled, so Nice showed me how to turn on the water to the toilet (just like you would for an American toilet), so that the tank would fill up and I could flush, and then the water would stop automatically when the tank had refilled again. It was much simpler than I thought. Great. Still not a big deal. What was a big deal was when I went back to the bathroom a few hours later and realized that the water had not stopped automatically, and that the tank had been filling and overflowing for hours. Half of the bathroom floor was flooded and it was spilling out into the hallway. I am so grateful that all the floors here are concrete, because Eddy simply got a squeegee and pushed all the water out the backdoor into the yard. I think I'm the only one who thought that was at all a big deal, but it still remains the most embarrassing moment of my homestay thus far.

Last one, and this one is ongoing. Laundry here is done by hand, and I still have not figured out how to wash my underwear. My family has a houseboy (really common here), and my mom told me to just give my laundry to him. Our directors at SIT had warned us that if someone else was going to do our laundry we should not give our underwear to them, and I'm really grateful they told us that because she didn't say anything about it. I was going to just ask Mom about it, but this house is really small and I have yet to have a moment alone with her when Eddy isn't around, and I don't want to talk about my underwear in front of him, so I've just given up on that plan and decided to figure it out for myself. There is usually at least one pair of underwear hanging up in the bathroom, so I think people just wash one pair when they shower. I've heard that that's what other people's families do. Anyway, I have two clean pairs left, so I'm going to go buy some laundry detergent tomorrow and just wing it!

That's all for now. I hope you enjoy my homestay adventures. More to come soon!