Murabeho (Goodbye for a long time), Mr. Chicken

Some events that merit a mention this week:

The embassy was temporarily closed, along with select others around the world due to recent international events and the interception of terrorist chatter which implied these locations might be the target of attacks. Apparently the U.S. embassy here has a fence instead of a brick wall surrounding it, making it appear to be more vulnerable than others. That being said, I hear it’s a lot more formidable than the previous embassy building which was so small that when the Americans moved out, it was converted into a pharmacy! In response to the embassy closure, Peace Corps shut down their Rwanda office for the week, but this did not affect me since our training site is located outside of Kigali.

On the touristy front, we took a field trip to the National Ethnographic Museum in Butare and saw this old-school Rwandan house:

There were a lot of interesting exhibits about Rwandan geology, agriculture, goods, traditions, and history. One section I found interesting involved divining, or the act of telling a person’s future through various means, such as throwing some small pieces of wood down and interpreting based on how they fall, or gazing into a pile of animal fat/intestines. 

Butare is a larger city, so after our tour of the museum we ate lunch in town and I enjoyed pizza, fries, AND a burrito. Extravagant, I know, but to be fair I went halfsies with a friend. On the return trip we had a random monkey sighting—like a dozen little guys just hanging out near the side of the road. One of our language instructors said that when she attended college at the National University in Butare, the monkeys would come to soccer games to sit on the sidelines and watch. How great would it be to have a cheerleading squad composed of primates?

In other news, on Saturday I watched a chicken get murdered. True story. P.C. set aside an afternoon for us to cook a meal for 30 people using only charcoal stoves. We decided to whip up some American dishes including garlic mashed potatoes and fried chicken. The team cooking chicken went all out and purchased 2 live cluckers. Then our Rwandan teachers gave us a crash course on how you procure meat when you don’t live down the street from a Stop&Shop. I decided this was probably something I should witness since I eat chicken frequently, but have never watched one meet its demise. It was pretty weird—way less noise than I expected, a lot of blood splatter, and some creepy squirming on the part of our main course. Needless to say, I don’t feel the need to see that again or to kill my own chicken in the near future. Some people took photos but I felt like you folks don’t need to see that. The phrase “Ignorance is bliss” never seemed more applicable.