By Definition

There are some things I am still wrapping my head around in this country. Let me give you two examples of my favorite Rwandan oxymorons.

Exhibit A: Volunteers who get paid. Some organizations are better than others at making an indirect path of money from their pockets to their 'volunteers' hands. Some are just blatant about it. It is culturally assumed that if you are asking someone to take a few hours out of their afternoon, that you will reward them with Fanta and sambusa. In a country where Fanta is for special occasions and meat is sometimes only eaten on Christmas, this is a special treat. Sometimes after weeks or months of lending a helping hand, people are given an amount of money in an envelope that they then have to sign for. Don't you just love volunteering? Sometimes around the office if a community member helps you find a person or track down a solution, you get elbowed in the ribs with the hint that compensation would be nice. Maybe if I was nutritionally deficient, unable to feed my family, unemployed and dying of AIDS, I'd want money for my volunteering too.

Exhibit B: Orphans often have one living parent. Haven't you ever heard this definition of an orphan? Yes, in Rwanda orphan means a child who has had one of their two parents die. One day I was perusing the database at work of the orphans or vulnerable children that we pay school fees for. I came across one child marked 'orphan', then scanned over to the column for residence. Well low and behold they lived with their mother. Hmm, apparently not a clerical error in this country. I've discussed my discovery with other Peace Corps volunteers. Apparently we all made our own personal discoveries about orphans but just failed to communicate to each other.