The training begins

We started our ‘in country training’ today and there was lots to learn, such as how to light a kerosene stove without burning off your eyebrows and how to boil the candles in your water filter, and all of a sudden it all seems really real! Its going to be such a different life, looking forward to it but also feeling a little bit daunted by all the changes, I think I will become a much more practical person!

I found out from the programme office staff today a bit more about the teacher training college and where I will be living. Apparently there are birds roosting in the resource centre...its obviously a comfortable place to be!  I’m going to be living by myself in a small village in a house with electricity and water and a garden. I am about a 45 minute drive from Kigali, the capital city, so I won’t have far to go to visit people, although I will be the only volunteer about in my village and no volunteers have lived there before. I’ll have plenty of chance to make some Rwandan friends and meet the local people so I’m not worried.

There is so much more to learn tomorrow, its a good job they give you a file full of paper with it all written down, otherwise I’d have no hope of remembering! I particularly like the VSO Rwanda cookbook. There is a recipe for chocolate cake using things you can get hold of so I know I’ll be fine.