I have been back home for about 5 days now and I still can’t seem to understand what my summer truly consisted of. To say that my life was changed is an understatement. I met people that I will never forget. I met a culture that I fell in love within days into the program. I witness lives being changed because of the work that our hands performed. I will forever remember the past two months of my life.
Rwanda is a country that stole my heart. There’s really absolutely no other way to put it. I miss it and its crazy things every day. Coming back is definitely harder than I thought it would be. I missed my family during the two months but I just wish I could pack them in my suitcase and take them back to show them the place I called home this summer. Being able to interact with their culture and see how things have improved since 1994 was life changing.
I look back to April this year, when I was making the final decision of whether I would attend the Summer Institute or not and I can not express enough how glad I am that I didn’t listen to the little voices that told me “its not worth it”. Rwanda changed my life. I guess the sole purpose of this last blog post is to tell you to go out there! To explore and to meet new people that will change your life. To spend time abroad truly understanding that there’s so much out there than this side of the globe. I can’t stress enough how important I think an experience like this is for people.
When I first got to Rwanda, within 3 days I laid in my bed and thought to myself “you have 2 months, that’s not that long”, so I can’t sit here and tell you that from the start I wanted to be there. I got homesick, more than once, and I got scared; but slowly but surely, the Rwandan culture taught me so much more.
Ill start work in Austin within a few weeks, meaning I’ll be moving to Austin next week. I am terrified and change always scares me a little but I know that I have a safe place in my head to go to. If theres anything that I want you to take from my experience in Rwanda is that EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE. No matter how big or how small, everything happens for a reason and its a miracle within itself. So trust the journey, keep your head high and travel places; you never know what you might find in a small little country in the middle of Africa. It might just be life-changing 😉
PS: To see for yourself please check out the video my partner and I made for our last 5 weeks in Rwanda! https://drive.google.com/a/tamu.edu/file/d/0BzL193CHMYnfNDR3VERlck4xNEE/view
.Gaby E. Perez. 