Tell Me That You’re Alright… That Everything is Alright

We’re at that point. The point where we can say things like “This time next week I will be: in a shower, in clean sheets, in a bed bigger than a twinsize (made of something besides RwandaFoam), drinking an iced coffee, etc.” But, for everything we’re looking forward to, we are incredibly, incredibly sad to be leaving Rwanda.

It’s hard to explain. As two girls who really love heels, America and Perez Hilton, how can we miss this developing country with its uberlimited internet bandwidth, 20-people-in-a-space-meant-for-7 bus rides, and perpetually muddy feet? But we will, because somehow this country has completely stolen our hearts. And if anyone knows the RAs – our hearts are famously hard to steal.

We came to Rwanda for one reason – and it was not the typical, bleeding-heart, volunteer reason. It was because we needed to see our lives from a new perspective (cue new Panic at the Disco song…). One of us quit her job and is in the process of finding a new one and the other was accepted to every grad school she applied to. Our lives are in completely different places, but the fact that we needed to turn our backs on our old lives and move forward with new glasses was at the heart of both of our motivations for coming here.

And Rwanda did not fail us. It may have tried to get us down (scrunching us into bus seats; making coffee irrationally difficult to find in a country for which it is a major export; frowning upon eating in public), but some days it gave us a sunrise or a sunset or a city view that took our breath away. Some days Rwanda sent us children who were dead set on making us miserable and other days their cuteness and sweet faces made us melt. Also not to be forgotten were the $1 beers that were as big as our heads… and some days, those went a long, long way.

We became part of Rwanda’s blossoming art scene. We learned a pretty formative Kinyarwandan vocabulary. We become muzungu aunties to a newborn. We saw giraffes and zebras. We pee’d in places that we dare not even THINK about ever again. We became “Teacha! Teacha!” to a hoard of children. We became experts in chapatti selection and samosa quality. We became lovers of Primus. We went to Congo. We stood on the shores of Lake Kivu. We were extremely, unquestionably lucky.

And now, its time to open a new chapter. Fortunately, we truly feel like we’re keeping in the same book. Before we came to Rwanda, we were excited to begin a whole new book. But now, this book, the one that has Kigali as its first chapter, is the book we’re excited to write. It’s the book that one of will write from grad school and the other will write from a desk somewhere. It’s the book that lets us start over, never forgetting where we came from, but always knowing where we get to go. It’s the book that’s scattered with African sunsets, giraffes and a group of children who are walking around (seemingly unknowingly) with pieces of our hearts in their grubby, dirty little hands.

Leaving Rwanda is a mildly terrifying prospect. We are happy here. We know what each day will bring. Home is completely unpredictable (finding jobs, paying bills, turning our cells back on), but we know that it's time to finish the story of our lives that we started here (with the understanding that this will take, at minimum, another 120 years and infinite mixed drinks). As we move on, Rwanda will move forward, and as excited as we are to see how it turns out for this, our strangely adopted country, we’re even more excited to see what our book will look like.