All things have a begining!
Both landlocked countries with a population of about 8 million, but that's where the similarities end between where I'm coming from and where I'm going to...Switzerland to Rwanda. One has a population with four different mother tongues, different traditions and a large immigrant population which is best known for its financial industry, expensive watches and its history of peaceful coexistence and non involvement in the great wars of Europe. The other has a homogenous culture, a people with one language that have been a nation state since well before the Europeans got there. It is best known for having erupted in terrible violence and a genocide that left 50,000 bodies washed up on Lake Victoria only a decade ago.
Along with the CIA factbook listings i have provided, I have one final personal factoid to add which may help
you in visualising the differences I'm about to experience...
Current Job : Research Assistant at a prestigious technical university
Wages: 60,000CHF (Swiss franc) per year
3,800 CHF net monthly = just under $3,000 per month
Future Job: IT specialist in a Government Ministry
Wages : 55,000 Rwf (Rwandan franc) per month
110,000 Rwf net monthly (when the NGO stipend is added) = $200 per month
So I trade in earning the hardest currency in the world for one of the most volatile...but am I really going to survive every month on little more than it would cost me for a weekend ski-pass?? Once you start putting things in dollars the enormous disparity hit me and I began to wonder what I'd let myself in for...
Just before leaving I had spent the weekend at Verbier, a well known Swiss ski resort. While there I met a Dutch guy working as a business consultant for a multinational tobacco company. We got chatting about how I was leaving Switzerland and where I was going etc. He said " I hope they are paying you well". I explained the whole VSO set up, to which he replied "You should send me your bank account details, I could put 10$ in it every month, I wouldn't even notice it". It was an amusing pleasantry, in a first world kind of way.
Deep down I knew I shouldn't be worried about the impending move ,some things are meant to be...and besides
I'd already been to Rwanda, in a way of speaking...
DUBLIN 1958
A fledging nation, barely a decade after gaining independence sends its first troops to join the United Nations Peacekeeping forces in the troubled Belgian Congo, amidst much pomp and ceremony in the capital. Among them is a young man from the west of Ireland, who joined the army in the hope of a good career something not easily obtainable for someone who had to leave school in his early teens. He was to serve two tours of duty in Africa, return to Ireland, get married and have three children. One of whom would apply for voluntary service with a well known British based NGO.
Of course I knew about my fathers military past and his service in Africa, my childhood had been filled with stories of the smell of the jungle and the "heat that hit like a blast furnace when they opened the airplane door". But what I did not know, before telling my family I was going to work for a year with the VSO, was that for 6 months my father had been stationed in Goma, a town in the Congo which borders Rwanda and that he had been into Rwanda several times. And so with a twist of fate I become the second generation of an otherwise inconsequential family from the west of Ireland to go working in Rwanda. "It's a beautiful country", was my father's only comment when I told him about my posting. And you know what? I'm inclined to believe him...
Along with the CIA factbook listings i have provided, I have one final personal factoid to add which may help
you in visualising the differences I'm about to experience...
Current Job : Research Assistant at a prestigious technical university
Wages: 60,000CHF (Swiss franc) per year
3,800 CHF net monthly = just under $3,000 per month
Future Job: IT specialist in a Government Ministry
Wages : 55,000 Rwf (Rwandan franc) per month
110,000 Rwf net monthly (when the NGO stipend is added) = $200 per month
So I trade in earning the hardest currency in the world for one of the most volatile...but am I really going to survive every month on little more than it would cost me for a weekend ski-pass?? Once you start putting things in dollars the enormous disparity hit me and I began to wonder what I'd let myself in for...
Just before leaving I had spent the weekend at Verbier, a well known Swiss ski resort. While there I met a Dutch guy working as a business consultant for a multinational tobacco company. We got chatting about how I was leaving Switzerland and where I was going etc. He said " I hope they are paying you well". I explained the whole VSO set up, to which he replied "You should send me your bank account details, I could put 10$ in it every month, I wouldn't even notice it". It was an amusing pleasantry, in a first world kind of way.
Deep down I knew I shouldn't be worried about the impending move ,some things are meant to be...and besides
I'd already been to Rwanda, in a way of speaking...
DUBLIN 1958
A fledging nation, barely a decade after gaining independence sends its first troops to join the United Nations Peacekeeping forces in the troubled Belgian Congo, amidst much pomp and ceremony in the capital. Among them is a young man from the west of Ireland, who joined the army in the hope of a good career something not easily obtainable for someone who had to leave school in his early teens. He was to serve two tours of duty in Africa, return to Ireland, get married and have three children. One of whom would apply for voluntary service with a well known British based NGO.
Of course I knew about my fathers military past and his service in Africa, my childhood had been filled with stories of the smell of the jungle and the "heat that hit like a blast furnace when they opened the airplane door". But what I did not know, before telling my family I was going to work for a year with the VSO, was that for 6 months my father had been stationed in Goma, a town in the Congo which borders Rwanda and that he had been into Rwanda several times. And so with a twist of fate I become the second generation of an otherwise inconsequential family from the west of Ireland to go working in Rwanda. "It's a beautiful country", was my father's only comment when I told him about my posting. And you know what? I'm inclined to believe him...
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