My Mom is Here!!

I must be the luckiest Peace Corps Volunteer because my mom is here! She came with Partners In Health (PIH). PIH is a non-profit organization started by Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Jim Kim to help developing countries improve their health care system by making it more accessible to everyone. For a wonderful read, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder beautifully illustrates their challenges making healthcare equitable and accessible in developing countries, such as Rwanda. 

The first week she and her PIH group were traveling around the country, visiting health centers, hospitals, and a medical university that PIH supports. I met up with my mom and her group in Kigali last Saturday for lunch. I typically go to bed around 9p, but I was so excited to see her that I was up until 2am. This has been the longest I’ve gone without seeing my family (5 months) and it was such a happy and emotional reunion. Many people on the PIH trip are parents (especially moms) and seeing my mom and I together hit them a special way. 

I wasn’t the only guest at the PIH lunch, we were joined by Dr. Anges Binagweaho. She’s Rwanda’s former Minster of Health, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, to name a few of her titles. She is credited with turning around Rwanda’s health care system by insisting that health – in its physical, mental, and social facets – is a human right. She implemented national projects to encompass the fuller picture of health, ones that we are continuing at our health centers at the ground level. I felt like I met a celebrity!

My Mom and I spent our weekend in Kigali together – I thoroughly enjoyed leeching off the hotel room’s running water, hot water, showers, air conditioning etc. I loved every moment of it before I brought my mom back to my village life, where I don’t have any of those luxuries. 

I showed her my house, health center, and market. Everyone was so eager to meet her! Vendors who I loyally buy all my fruit and vegetables from were so happy to welcome her. One of them gave us a papaya as a welcome gift. It brought my mom to tears seeing that in a few short months I’ve built these relationships. I’m happy that she got to see my life here. I think she’s a little jostled by how rough it is, but I’m glad I can share a small sliver of my life with her here. 

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We made the most of our time together, despite the fact that I still have work at the health center. On our way from Kigali to my village, we stopped by the Nyanza district where the King’s Palace is. Rwanda’s royal family lived in Nyanza, until 1960 when they transitioned out of the monarchy. We learned that penultimate king was overruled by the Danish because he didn’t accept Catholicism and the Christian Church, but his youngest son did. He was appointed as the next king of Rwanda, while his father was forcefully removed, because he allowed the new religions to wash over the country. 

We also made a day trip to the Nyungwe Rainforest and a neighboring Tea Farm. Nyungwe is one of the most protected rainforests in Africa, it attracts tourists with its beautiful hikes to see Baboons, Colobus monkeys, and to do the Canopy Walk. It’s a 90m cable bridge suspended 60m above the ground in the rainforest. It wobbled so much! 

Fun fact: The source of the Nile River comes from all the rainfall in Nyungwe!