For 23-year-old Emily Ethier, a normal day means taking a 45-minute moto ride to Gikonko Health Center. Arriving before 7:30 a.m. for a staff meeting in a mixture of French and Kinyarwanda, she often sets to work cleaning wounds and changing dressings.
Sometimes she vaccinates babies, or distributes milk to mothers of babies at risk of malnutrition. On other occasions, she assists in the emergency room in life-or-death situations.
After work, she heads to a nearby school to lead a health club, the Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) Club or the Boys Excelling (BE) Club focusing on leadership, entrepreneurship and career planning. She has given hygiene and hand-washing lessons to nursery school students, working in some finger painting fun at the same time.
Emily, a Greenfield resident, is working with the Peace Corps in Rwanda to offer maternal and child health care, a dream that had been brewing in her mind since high school.
“She’d been telling us since she was 16,” said Emily’s mother Martha Ethier.
“Her mind was made up,” agreed Emily’s father Jerry Ethier.
Emily’s interest in joining the Peace Corps began at Greenfield High School, when students and staff partook in a Secret Santa. Bryan Smith, former community outreach and work study coordinator, got her an autobiography written by a Peace Corps volunteer who was a midwife in Africa.
The autobiography was the first of about 15 books Emily would read about Peace Corps service. In one of her classes, a Peace Corps volunteer came to speak, making it seem like the stars were aligning for Emily.
“I knew I didn’t want to travel as a tourist,” she explained. “If I go somewhere, I want to be a part of the culture. That’s the whole thing about the Peace Corps, they really want us to be a part of the culture and really integrate.”
After high school, Emily studied anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst while taking Swahili and French classes to prepare to travel to Africa. East Africa, she knew, is where she wanted to be.
Within a month after graduating last year, Emily arrived in Rwanda’s Gisagara district, located within the country’s southern province. For the first two months, she lived with a host family and grew accustomed to the culture.
“I really wasn’t sure what to expect,” Emily said. “The last time (Rwanda) was in the media was 1994 immediately following when there was a huge genocide … so I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into.”
According to History.com, from April to July 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Even more became refugees.
“The Peace Corps part was alright,” Martha said, remembering when Emily told her and Jerry she was going to Rwanda. “It was Rwanda we were concerned about.”
Then there were living accommodations to worry about.
“Myself, as well as my friends and family, thought I was going to be living in a hut with no cell phone service or electricity,” Emily said.
Emily was surprised to find a lifestyle very different from what she and her friends had watched in “Hotel Rwanda.” She lives in a building with “relatively reliable electricity” and running water, rather than having a latrine.
The country, she said, is undergoing so much structural work on its bridges, drainage and roads that it already looks different from when she arrived in May 2016.
“Rwanda’s actually quite developed,” Emily said. “If you’re in the capital city (of Kigali), you can almost pretend you’re in an American city.”
“I expected it to be very rural and poor, but it isn’t,” Martha agreed, noting there’s a spectrum of wealth like in America.
Martha recently visited her daughter for two weeks, and recounted how her host family’s living room looked like one in America, with a rug and television.
In cities, Emily said there are high-rise buildings and the roads are mostly paved. However, most people live in more rural areas, where roads are dirt and sometimes wash out during the rainy season. Weather in Rwanda alternates between rainy and dry seasons, she said.
There’s also a range of buildings, from mud houses, to brick houses with roofs of corrugated iron or steel.
In terms of government structure, Emily was surprised to find nearly half of the upper level government is made up of women, and nearly everyone receives health care coverage under a nationwide system.
However, given a difference in technology, Emily said there’s plenty of aspects of living in Rwanda that are more difficult.
“You don’t have a washing machine, you don’t have a stove, you don’t have an oven,” she explained.
With no refrigeration to speak of, Emily eats mostly vegetables, rice and beans that she cooks over a charcoal stove, or with a hot plate when she has electricity. A woman in her village washes the clothes, though getting them back can take two days during the rainy season, Martha said, given no time to hang them outside to dry.
Before she returns to America next summer, Emily hopes to teach high school age students about reproductive health, reproductive hygiene management and sex. In Rwanda, she explained, it’s not as simple as walking to a store and buying a box of menstrual pads.
“A lot of girls end up missing school and eventually dropping out,” she said, adding she plans to give girls reusable menstrual pads.
Emily also wants to offer basic health care training to Rwanda’s first responders, which are police officers, teachers and moto drivers.
“Here, you don’t call in to get an ambulance,” she explained. “You walk miles and miles and miles, usually uphill, to get to the closest health care center.”
At Gikonko Health Center, which Martha described as being several mountains away from Emily’s residence, services offered include surgery, a maternity ward, regular consultation, lab testing, treatment for HIV and AIDS, and a wound clinic. Martha said the health center’s waiting room is routinely filled with as many as 200 people, who often receive health education on topics like hypertension while they’re waiting to be seen, which is sometimes all day.
But Emily has also seen her share of death in emergency situations, explaining that diseases that seem easily treatable in America can be deadly in Rwanda. However, the way death is handled is different given its common occurrence.
“If you have six or seven kids in your lifetime, having two die before you when they’re fairly young isn’t unusual,” she explained. “One of the biggest things I’m able to do is just be there for the families after.”
Upon the death of one child, Emily was the only one there. Mustering up the words in Kinyarwanda, she told the mother “Your child is dead. I’m so sorry.”
As the mother sobbed and Emily tried to comfort her, other nurses came in to move the body so the room could be used for another patient.
“Where I was ready to focus on the emotional, they were ready to focus on the practical,” she said.
Emily said she knows even when she leaves Rwanda, she’ll remember those trying times with families.
“Whether it’s the kid who’s sick, or the family after they’re gone, that’s the time I feel I connect on the deepest level with them. You don’t need language to hold their hand, or to rub their back, or to show them that you’re so, so sorry,” she said. “That’s usually when your language fails anyway.”
“A smile here and there, or a joke, or holding their hand for a minute can make a difference,” she continued. “Those are the times where I feel like I’m going to remember, and maybe someone, one of them, will remember too.”
Getting to know Rwanda’s natives, and their getting to know Emily, took some time. Something particularly alarming to Emily was the custom whereby mothers carry their babies on their backs with a towel made from the local fabric igitenge.
“They think it’s like, no big thing, but for me, it took like the first two months not to have a heart attack while these mamas just sling these babies on their backs,” Emily said. “I just look like the crazy white person.”
On her recent trip to Rwanda, Martha said she felt like a celebrity as children routinely came up to her to say “Good morning” and “How are you?” proudly demonstrating their knowledge of English.
“The kids are funny,” she recalled. “They’d come up to me and want to pet me because my skin is white and their’s is black.”
Both Martha and Emily emphasized how friendly the Rwandan people are, though they can be reserved at first. Shortly after Emily arrived, they came to her rescue when she fell into a stream.
“All of these Rwandans, all of a sudden, they came and pulled me out by my backpack,” she said, adding that they helped her get dry and ensured she was put on a moto to a hotel.
“Somehow still, Rwanda took care of me,” Emily said.
For Emily, serving the community and the world has always been a normal part of being an Ethier. She helped her father Jerry with his fundraising efforts through the Knights of Columbus, such as a golf tournament for the poor and an annual Tootsie Roll fund drive. When people donate money to support individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities, the Knights offer Tootsie Rolls in exchange.
Because Jerry worked in emergency medical services for 50 years, even starting his own ambulance service, Emily became an emergency medical technician (EMT) when she was 20, despite her 4-foot, 11-inch stature.
“I tried to talk her out of it,” Jerry remembered. “I said ‘You’re a small girl and those are some big people.’”
But Emily was determined, as she was about going to Rwanda. Jerry explained giving back to the community “is all we’ve ever done.”
Even when she returns to Greenfield, Emily hopes to become a physician’s assistant or a critical care paramedic working out of a medical helicopter or a firehouse.
Whatever career she decides to pursue, Emily said she knows she can do just about anything — especially if she can speak English while doing it.
“The things that I used to get nervous about or unsure about at home, are like nothing now (that I’ve been to Rwanda),” she said. “Everything would be so much easier in English, or somewhere I know, but I also think it would be boring … I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t have to work really hard just to get through the day.”