Muraho neza! My name is Christopher Johnson and I am serving as an Education Volunteer for the Peace Corps from January 2018 to December 2019.  I am living in a very small village (that I can’t even find on Google Maps) in the Southern Province of Rwanda, a sub-Saharan African nation.

I was born and grew up in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, a small seaside community in the South of the United States.  I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Europe and South America, and throughout the United States, prior to my service, but the move to Rwanda is the largest transition I’ve ever made.  There are more new sights and culture shocks than I can fit in to a single blog, so I have a lot of source material.

I attended the University of South Florida from 2013 to 2017, majoring in Political Science and English (with a concentration on Rhetoric and Technical Communication).  I’m a news junkie and read like books are a dying species.  Aside from traveling whenever I get the chance, I love to cook and hike.  And, of course, write.

For the next two years, I want to use this medium to make sense of my radically different new home.  I hope to share advice for future volunteers, but I also want to give an honest assessment of the benefits and difficulties of working with the Peace Corps these next two years.  I love to write but will be limiting my published content to a monthly basis, to focus on the experience of my service and the community that I am a guest of.

Check back every month for something new and, if I do this right, thought-provoking.

“Rubona” is the name of the “umusozi” (mountain) near my site.  Rwandans say that it’s only a hill, but I’m from Florida, so it might as well be Everest.