Lucy Sung
ED 2 - Gicumbi District, Northern Province
The Education 2 groupis known as the “Big Group.” We started with 70 doe-eyed strangers at staging,some were lost along the way, and we gained some when Niger was evacuated. I’mnot too sure where we’re at but it’s fifty-something, which is pretty darngood.
A weekend before inKigali, some of us were bouncing off song ideas that we would blast in thebackground as we walk into the plane and take off into the blue blue sky. Wehad several good ones, ranging from “In My Life” by the Beatles
Or of course, “Africa”by Toto.
Our Close Of Service (COS) Conference is coming up and perhaps a song forour last conference would be “Should IStay or Should I Go?” by the Clash. This is a thought on many PCVs minds:should I stay? Should I go? What should I do?
For me, I’m ready togo home. My projects are wrapping up, most of my students will be graduating,my shoes are tied. I’m working on my graduate school applications and with it,the inevitable soul searching and replaying memories in my mind. Two memoriescome strongly to mind.
GLOW Club
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| Josee (GLOW Club member) and and Flaviah (aka Flavour Princess, GLOW Club President) |
For one the earliestlessons in my GLOW Club at my school, College de Rushaki, we talked about selfesteem. I’ve been dying to get some creative expression out of these studentsso after a quick lesson, we did a fairly common exercise called Flowers of Power.In the center of each flower, students wri te their name. Then on each petals,they write an adjective about themselves and glue it to their name, theirFlower of Power. I showed them an example that I made for myself. Lucy: smart,creative, caring, etc…
I instructed thestudents to first write their adjectives on a piece of paper and show it to meor the GLOW President, Flaviah, before getting markers and construction paper.
I am a girl.
“Lilianne,” I said. “Youmust think of adjectives, words that describe you, that you are proud of and istrue. For example, Lilianne, you are very intelligent.”
Lilianne grinned andrushed back to her seat and continued to write. I monitored the students untilI realized, some had taken the example flower I had made and were copying thewords I had written.
“Oya! Oya! (No! No!) Thesewords must come from YOU. From your mind and from your heart.” I took thepapers of these students and made them start again.
Many students now hada great first draft and I began dispensing the craft materials. Lilianne comesback with her new draft.
I am intelligent.
I stifle a groan andsit down with Lilianne for round three.
Operation Smile
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| The best helper! She's 4 years old, was teaching her how to write her name. |
In March, Ivolunteered with Operation Smile, an international organization that surgicallyrepairs cleft lips and palettes.
First a disclaimer, any opinions said hereabout Operation Smile are opinions of my own and not of the Peace Corps.
There are many officesof Operation Smile around the world and the South Africa chapter did a missionto Rwanda. It was sadly ironic when I was posting up flyers in my villageannouncing the dates when a neighbor came up to me.
Neighbor: “Umutetsi wa college afite uwana w’ibibari.Yapfuye uyumugitondo…” The cook of the College has a child with cleft lip.He died this morning.
I’ve never seenRwandans in the village with cleft lips so I was surprised to hear that it wasvery common.
During the dates of themission, other PCVs and I helped to register incoming families, get their mealson schedule (which was very difficult), and advocate for the Rwandans to the foreignstaff. I do not want to criticize the work of Operation Smile, because it is soimportant in more ways than one can imagine, but there was some nonsense thatleft many PCVs frustrated. It was then I realized how the PC experience is sodifferent from that of a summer intern or expat working for somemulti-acronymed organization. We called the staff asking for basins, heatedmilk, clean water, all sorts of items that would not come to mind immediatelyto someone who didn’t live in the village like us. We talked to the patientsand their families, many of them subsistence farmers from the Southern providence.It was the growing season so we talked about the corn in our gardens and plansto plant beans next.
While groups ofpatients were taken to the hospital, the other PCVs and I stayed behind and assistedthe best we could. Even while sitting on the grass, or coloring books, I wasalways asked the same question, over and over: “What causes cleft lip? Whatcauses cleft palette?” The other PCVs and I asked the staff, consulted the everreliable Wikipedia, and could only tell the Rwandans, “No one sure, but it is acombination of genetics and environment.” It is very difficult to describegenetics in Kinyarwanda, but we managed by saying family history and biology.
The Rwandans had theirown hypotheses but one thing was for sure, for a woman to have a child born with avisible deformatity like that is ostracizing. There was a teenage girl with ababy, she was kicked out of her home and shunned because her baby had a cleftlip and palette. There were many mothers who were they by themselves, notbecause the father had to work or be somewhere else, but because they werealone, completely. No wonder I never saw anyone with a clef lip in the villages, they are hidden.
One afternoon, a middle aged man accused allwomen for being at fault for giving birth to child with a cleft lip, that thewoman had sinned.
“A woman’s body islike a garden, and her garden was not taken care of,” said the man.
A weathered lookingmama stood up from her plastic lawn chair. “Well, every garden needs a farmerto grow plants, and if the garden is not good, then it is also the fault of thefarmer!”
Oh snap.
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