Workin' 9 - 5

Gender Based Violence Placement (Days 2-4)

So far, we’ve been able to expand our skills in the following: basket weaving, tye-dye and teaching children. RA1 & 2 have never been rumored to be amazing with children, but we must say – not to toot our own horn or anything – but that we’re doing a good job. Lindsey was the first to work with the children and told them all about Canada and her family. RA1 & 2 followed up on the family lesson with teaching the children how to do introductions of their family and of boys (his name is...) and girls (her name is...). It sounds very rudimentary, but the children have been mandated by the government to learn English so we’re using various methods with them including, but not limited to: “Body Man ('these are my hands,' 'this is my nose'),” “duck, duck, goose,” “head, shoulders, knees and toes,” “tracing time,” “coloring time” and “red rover.”

The women, of course, are the main reason for this program and BOY do those women put us to shame! We learned to do basket weaving with the teacher, Habiba - we affectionately refer to her as HABIBATEACHER and we think it makes her laugh. She was great, but I think she thought RA1’s baskets were crap and she gave RA2 a brand new basket to work on due to her lack of confidence. Cordina is a cute young woman who is having her second baby and makes great baskets. She sat beside RA1 the first day of basket weaving and provided lessons on top of endless laughs. ESPECIALLY, when she grabbed RA1’s hand and put it on her tummy since she couldn’t communicate in English that she was preggers. RA1 – clearly, the one with the aversion to newborns – was equally horrified and crying she was laughing so hard. We finished this day on a high note, coming up with publicity and marketing ideas for the womens’ various products and agreeing to come in an hour early on basket weaving days to teach the women English. In exchange, they are going to teach us Kinyarwandan.

After basketweaving, we walked with Elise to her manicure and pedicure lessons. Elise has roughly the education of a third grader, so she is learning to do manis and pedis to make a living. We walked for what seemed like hours, to arrive to a shop – roughly the size of half of a cubicle in America. We sat down and were promptly serviced for manicures and pedicures. In total, a full mani/pedi cost 2,000 RwF or - $4. We’re working on setting up some times for the women to come to our guest house and do mani/pedis. First however, we must work on communicating some health and safety standards for our women beauticians because there was a huge lack of rubbing alcohol in the place we had our nails done and although we’re brave and doing this for their practice – we want to make sure they are able to give a high standard of service to the next women so they can charge more and make more money and be independent – YAY WOMEN!

Our last group of IGA (Income Generating Activity) is tye-dye. The first time we went we were taken to Kristen’s house where she was teaching Louise and Mary how to tye-dye. The next day a woman named Melissa came to join. The women sit together, gossip and tye up white bolts of fabric to prepare for dying. Then they boil water and put dye, some sort of acid and some sort of powder into a bucket (we weren’t allowed to participate in this part because we haven’t gotten our hot little hands on a set of Dexter-approved work gloves) and mix it together. They quickly put the white fabric in the buckets of dye and basically handwash the fabric in the dye. After about 5 minutes of that they take the dyed fabric out, remove the strings and dip it into a mix of water and some special powder which keeps the color from fading, then rinse. After they’ve finished they hang the fabric up on the clothes line to let it dry. They’ve learned to fold the fabric in a way that if you split it in half, you have two matching pieces. You can buy a full piece of fabric for 5000RwF (roughly $10) or one half of fabric for 3500RwF (about $6.50). A lot of the fabric is purchased with the intent to sew it into something fabulous like a skirt, dress or scarf.

Basically we’ve learned how the women in Rwanda, who can’t afford school, make a living. It’s been a fascinating experience filled with laughter and us waiting for the translation of a gossip session from Claire. As we’ve mentioned before, we’re pretty much writing the GBV program from scratch, so there’s tons of opportunities for us to put our assistant hats on and help the women sell the fabulous products their making. It is extremely cost prohibitive for women to purchase a stall at the local markets (300,000Rwf or roughly $600), so we have to come up with creative ways to get their products out in the world. Unfortunately, we’re still learning the functions of publicity in a country we’ve been in for barely a week – so it’s a work in progress, much like you’re beloved RAs.