Life has changed a good deal in the
past few days! I am now in the research portion of my study abroad,
which means classes are over and for the next month I will do an
independent research project on trauma. For this time we move out of
our host families, and I am living in an amazing house with 5 of my
friends.
Check out our Gazebo!
This is what I look at as I eat
breakfast every day.
The house is lovely, has a fully
equipped kitchen and we all have our own bedrooms. As a future
development worker who expects to make very little money, this might
well be the nicest house I ever live in. We even have a house boy,
who is awesome and does our dishes and is confused by our insistence
on cooking for ourselves. As a student I feel I don't deserve this,
somehow, but it was the cheapest thing we could find with furnishing
and enough bedrooms.
While I am doing my research, and for
the next three months, I have an internship with AVEGA, an
organization created for genocide widows to address trauma and
healthcare. They later expanded to work on legal advocacy and
economic projects, and pretty much awesome. Check out their website!
http://avegaagahozo.org/ I am
working under two psychologist, which is perfect, because
post-conflict trauma healing work is what I want to do with my life.
So far I have attended a two day trauma counseling workshop!
Another piece of good news: I
officially have a major! I applied and got into the Global
Development major at my school! I have been planning on since I got
into UVA, but have been a little nervous about because the major is
small and competitive – less than 1 in 3 applicants got in last
year. So its really nice to have a major :) I may also double major
in religious studies, which is something I never would have planned,
but I have just really enjoyed religious studies classes at UVA and
have taken a lot of them, so I may as well get a double major out of
it!
So life is pretty good :) Having my
own house and making my own food has somehow made Rwanda feel mine.
It is really home now. Some weird stuff is going on because of
Genocide Commemoration Week, but that is a story for another day.
Hot water in the new house? I am focused on hot water because my water heater is broken at the moment and I am anticipating at least one cold shower. That is about as close to roughing it as I can get sitting here with my Turkish coffee reading about tankless water heaters in Consumer Reports.
ReplyDelete