Marking Important Dates: A Look Back at July and August

July and August were a busy couple months for events, birthdays, and anniversaries, as it turned out. As Eric settled into his new life in Kamembe, I dug my heels into one of the more significant projects of my service. And then we were busy celebrating everything from a priest’s ordination, to a wedding, to all sorts of anniversaries and birthdays.

We got back from Portugal toward the end of June, and were welcomed into the country by my former site mate and her husband at their home (which is essentially an urban farm these days) in Kigali. Even that weekend I was busy attending a meeting and dealing with some admin stuff for Peace Corps. And then the very next weekend, after I showed Eric around and checked in at work, I had to turn around and go back to Kigali for the final weekend of a career planning project I had been working on with other PCVs and some of the senior girls from the school.

But once that craziness ended, we were able to settle into a sort of routine: Friday afternoons swimming in the lake, evenings with the other Kamembe muzungus (of which there are approximately 4) at one of the many hotel bars, and weekends spent running errands and hanging out in town.

It was an exciting time, really, discovering new friends and gaining a better understanding of how things work in Kamembe while also being busy and fulfilled at work. In between those weekends, my colleagues and I spent 2 weeks training 52 Community Health Workers how to measure and report stunting and implement behavior change communication in the community.

And in addition to all that, we were watching the final of the Euro cup, going to see priests ordained in Mushaka (which was, naturally, Eric’s first view of my site), and, at the end of the month, going to Kigali once more.

For me, the trip was more about welcoming the newest cohort of Health volunteers. They had just finished their training and were swearing in as PCVs in Kigali. Having just come from assisting with their final week of training, it was a treat to be able to see them dance, laugh, cry, and take the pledge just as we had done a year earlier.

August brought birthdays, anniversaries, conferences, and vacations, starting with my dad’s birthday. I did write my dad a card, which felt very adult. I then delayed sending it until mid-September. But it’s the thought that counts, right? And he seemed pretty chuffed once he finally got it.

Next, Eric and I were able to celebrate our (2-year?!) anniversary with a nice dinner at Emeraude, on the lake. We splurged on everything from salad to ice to ice cream while watching the sun sink behind the Congolese mountains, and it was wonderful.

The following week was my 1-year anniversary of service, and the week after we were off to our Mid-Service Conference [MSC], which was held at a particularly swanky hotel at one of the popular tourist towns. We decided to take the ferry up there (which, though it feels more direct, is probably not actually quicker or cheaper than travelling through Kigali). My birthday happened that week, and my lovely friends gifted me a cupcake (though god knows where they found one), and a list of “24 reasons we love you.” After MSC was Kigali for the weekend until I went to another town for the training of the second phase of the Community Finance Initiative [CFI] (the financial literacy project I’m doing with my mothers who have malnourished children), and our trip to Uganda (which I’ve already told you about).

There were two national holidays during this month also — though I worked a little on both of them because we were in the middle of our huge screening for stunting of every child in the catchment area. Which involved measuring the height, weight, and middle-upper-arm circumference of hundreds of kids a day, and started to get me sick after a while. We started out easy, with the close-by villages who could come to the health center, and then started venturing further and further out, trying to combine multiple villages into one day so that my counterpart could take some time off. In part because my travel at the end of the month meant that he and another colleague had to make sure the remainder got done before the end of August, and that other colleague was coming to meet me at the CFI training. So that was a crazy process that I felt a little absentee for, but we got it all done and had some great data as we moved on to the next phase of the project.

And then, before I knew it, we were in September, watching that fly by also! It was a great couple months, overall, though I will say that I started hitting my so-called “mid-service slump” right as we were heading into our Mid-Service Conference. It was a sort of foreshadowing for what was to come in October (and what I was too busy to let set in in September), but, more on September soon.