Ababyeyi mu Rwanda Part 1

It seems that the longer I go without updating my blog the harder it is to do so. My mom and dad have been stateside for almost a week. The seminar in Kibuye was a success in many respects and we did discuss specific ideas for HIV/AIDS-related projects. So far, returning to site hasn’t been nearly as difficult as I expected. I’m happier than ever to be back in my little village and starting school again. But before I get too sidetracked, a lot of people have been asking about my parents’ visit, so here’s the promised rundown.

I should preface this by saying that in Rwanda, things almost never go according to schedule. I made an itinerary for my parents so they could plan a travel budget but I didn’t count on actually sticking to it for their entire visit. My most detailed plans were for the first night, and they only included hotel reservations and prearranged transportation. Louise helped me find a driver to pick them up at the airport and since he was a friend of hers he agreed to drive them for free. I was optimistic that in the very least I’d get them safely from the airport to their hotel without any major snags,

The night of my parents’ arrival, as Louise and I stood in the middle of the Gihara market waiting for our driver to show up, I felt somewhat less optimistic. Our original driver, Noah, was in Gitarama because I’d mananged to give him the wrong date. He’d supposedly found an available taxi at the last minute but we had no idea who the driver was or when he was coming, only that he had Louise’s number and he’d call us when he got to Gihara. My parents’ flight was scheduled to land at 7 pm. They had no way to contact me and I had no way to contact them. For the first hour of waiting I was too excited to be worried, but by 7:10 both Louise and I were still stranded in Gihara and Louise was talking about beating Noah with a stick.

We did eventually get to the airport, but only after taking moto taxis to the main road, locating the driver’s parked car and offering him partial advanced payment so he could buy gas. I had visions of my mom and dad looking bewildered and forlorn on a bench outside the airport with all their luggage, but it turned out that their flight had been delayed an hour. So our timing was perfect. Yet another of life’s reminders that everything works out if you just kwihangane.*

That night in Kigali my dad and I decided to grab some late-night dinner at White Horse. We were the only customers. We sat on the patio because the wait staff had converted the inside of the restaurant into a dance club complete with smoke and lights. When we came in one of the waiters ran up to us and yelled, “Welcome!” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

From Kigali, we took a taxi into Gihara where we were greeted with open arms. The nuns prepared a room and insisted we join them for lunch, dinner, and breakfast the next day. All in all it was a nicer setup than some of the hotels we stayed in. My dad said he wanted to repay the nuns for their hospitality and asked them if there was anything he could help them with, perhaps something that needed fixing. Sister Donatile said he could take a look at their electric stove. “We can’t figure out how to plug it in,” she said. No wonder. The power cable had no plug, just a bundle of frayed wires where a plug had once been. My dad said he’d see what he could do.

He spent the rest of the trip casually scouting for electronics stores. We never did find a plug, but I have to say I admire him for trying. Love you, Dad.

Our second day in Gihara, I took my parents to visit my headmaster and his family and then for a walk up past my school. Initially I had planned on making a loop back to the town center but on a whim I decided to lead them into Kagina (sp?), a neighboring village that’s known locally for its pottery. We ended up running into the village chief who gave us a full tour not only of the pottery collective, but of a local school as well. By the time we were done touring the village we had acquired a crowd of a few dozen children. Here's just a few of them following me and the chief:




That night we took a charter bus from my site to Butare. While we were waiting for the bus a crazy man played a song for us on a hand-fashioned instrument made from discarded bottles and what looked like fishing line, but otherwise it was an uneventful evening.

From Butare the plan was to take a charter bus into Nyungwe Forest for a day hike. We never did make it into Nyungwe, but we did end up having an adventure that took us most of the way to the border of Burundi. But I’ll save that story for my next post. It’s a story that deserves to be told in chapters.

*Kwihangane means “to bear with it” or to have patience.

Hey, I'm Back!

As I’m writing this I’m sitting on a balcony at the Centre St. Bethania in Kibuye looking out at a rather grey and foggy Lake Kivu. Peace Corps is hosting a seminar here on HIV/AIDS for education volunteers and their Rwandan colleagues, the purpose of which is to support HIV/AIDS initiatives in secondary schools. So far we’ve had sessions on communication and behavior change and HIV/AIDS epidemiology. I’m hoping we’ll discuss specific project ideas at some point but even if we don’t it will have been an informative few days, not to mention how nice it is to see everyone again.

I just had an amazing week traveling around the country with my mom and dad. We had a great time together and I now have a renewed appreciation for my site and Rwanda generally. More details to follow when I have time to write a longer post!

Kuruhuka Nziza

Hi all! I meant to update my blog over Independence Day weekend but somehow I didn’t get around to it. I’ve been busy catching up on grading and writing exams. I’ve also been compiling the results from the English language needs assessments which I finally managed to distribute to all of the teachers. I only got them back from the primary school teachers, but it’s just as well. I’m pretty tight with the secondary school teachers and it would be a little awkward trying to teach my friends. Teacher classes are all set to start next term and while I’m still apprehensive I’m also excited. I feel as if I’m pushing the final piece of my primary assignment into place.

For those of you who asked, Independence Day weekend was great. I had all kinds of plans to be productive over the holiday but instead I relaxed and took some time to reconnect with my site. That Saturday I spent two hours tossing an avocado back and forth with some kids, and I can honestly say it was the most meditative and wonderful two hours I’ve had all month.

I also bought sugarcane at the market for the first time ever, which turned out be quite an experience. In Rwanda, it’s considered impolite not to conceal food you’ve purchased unless you plan on sharing. The problem with sugarcane is that it’s only sold in eight-foot sticks, making discretion impossible. Sharing was also impossible because I was in the middle of a marketplace full of people and had I decided to share I would have ended up without any for myself. So I did the only thing I could do. After making my purchase, I marched briskly and defiantly through the town square, pretending I couldn’t hear the horde of children chasing after me and screaming for “agasheke.” I think my village enjoyed the spectacle.

Next week is exam week. I love my students but I have to admit, I am very much looking forward to the end of the term.

Crashing the Party

Long time, no blog! Sorry, all.

It’s been an uneventful couple of weeks with the exception of last weekend. Last weekend I went to the Kwita Izina in Musanze, the annual naming ceremony for Rwanda’s baby gorillas. Some other volunteers were going so I decided to go too, not realizing that it’s such a huge event. Turns out it’s one of Rwanda’s biggest tourist draws besides the gorillas themselves. There are performances by all kinds of Rwandan pop stars, speeches by important officials, traditional dances, actors in gorillas suits to stand in for the gorilla babies, and sometimes President Kagame comes and makes a speech. I panicked a little upon arrival because I didn’t have a ticket or an ID or really anything at all to legitimate my presence there, but I got seated in the VIP section anyway. There are all kinds of things wrong with that, but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth I guess?

In any case, the ceremony was awesome. This year the president didn’t show up due to “unavoidable circumstances” but Jack Hanna made an appearance, plus the music and dancing was amazing. The traditional dancers alone made the trip worthwhile. Each region of Rwanda has its own traditional dance and in the north the dances are particularly energetic with a lot of jumping and stamping. The dancers wore bells on their ankles to augment the percussion. It was so beautiful. The musical performances were also a lot of fun. There was a Ugandan singer, Chameleon, who pulled one of the PCVs up on stage with him. He got kicked offstage shortly after that, but it was an exciting few minutes.

After the ceremony there was a reception with complementary beverages and finger-food which was an experience in itself. It was sort like a mosh pit except we weren’t fighting to get to the front row at a concert, we were fighting over mozzarella balls and glasses of chilled white wine. Then security personnel intervened and the crowd was filtered out of the courtyard into the street, leaving in its wake a courtyard strewn with beer bottles and crumpled napkins and other such carnage. It’s hard to believe they’ve been doing this every year for almost a decade now.

Now I’m back to teaching and tutoring and putting off the start date for teachers’ classes until I can get a curriculum together. I’ll probably be at site for the fourth of July, so keep me in your thoughts while you’re barbequing or bonfiring or doing whatever.

Yep, Still Love My Job

I love my students so much it almost hurts.

Yesterday in class we played charades with different adverbs and they got so into it they didn’t want to stop. I had to instate a “no-touching” policy after a particularly spirited depiction of the word “violently” but otherwise it went incredibly well. They’re nothing if not performers.

My second class of the day has a ten-minute break halfway through, one of the very few opportunities they get to go out and enjoy some fresh air and sunshine, but yesterday most of my class stayed inside with me. They like to ask me about English words they’ve heard in songs. Sometimes it’s a minefield (how do I, as a middle school teacher, explain what Shaggy supposedly wasn’t doing?) but yesterday, mercifully, they wanted to know about “Baby” by Justin Bieber. I sang part of it and endeared myself to them forever. Say what you will about the Biebs, he is king in Rwandan middle schools. Even the boys like him here.

Yesterday was also English club day, a thing which normally leaves me completely drained and ready for a day off. Between this term and last term, English club membership went from overwhelming (seventy-five students) to underwhelming (about fifteen students) because I lost the classroom we initially met in to the understandably more-popular dance club. On top of that, all the S3 students somehow have an extra hour of class this term, so I’ve been struggling to retain my S3 members. I was beginning to the think the club might be a lost cause, but yesterday we started a project that might keep the club going into next year: letter writing. They’re so excited about writing letters to the U.S. it’s almost scary. If it goes well, I might try to set up correspondence with a middle school classroom in the States. If any teachers are reading this and interested, please shoot me an email!

Otherwise things are progressing nicely. English classes for teachers might actually happen, though I’m not sure how soon. I’ve been trying to call a staff meeting to discuss meeting times and distribute English pre-assessments, but it’s proven more difficult to do so than I’d expected. I don’t have the power to call staff meetings by myself and my headmaster keeps telling me we’ll have the meeting “tomorrow,” by which he doesn’t so much mean “tomorrow” as “not today.” The classes probably won’t be a reality until sometime next term, but that’s fine with me. I’d rather spend the rest of this term focusing on my students who, if not my raison d’etre, are certainly my raison d’etre ici.

I’ve also begun tutoring Yvette and it’s worked out even better than I hoped. She comes to my house every Thursday morning with an academic article or a book in hand and we go over all the difficult vocabulary. Then she asks me questions about grammar and pronunciation. I’ve been making up exercises on the fly but I’m accumulating a nice catalogue of lesson plans I might be able to use with the teachers at my school. Not only that, but I now have one more friend I get to see reliably often.

So, setbacks and non-meetings and non-members aside, I love my job. Through it all, my students are a reason to get up and face the world every morning. They say “thank you, Teacher,” Greek-chorus style at the end of class. Every time I want to tell them that I should be thanking them, not the other way around.

Sorry, do I know you?

It’s been a strange couple of weeks. Uncanny things keep happening, small things, none completely without explanation but bewildering nonetheless. I feel as if Gihara is trying to send me a sign, though of what I have no idea.

Take, for example, the bull.

I was walking home from school in the late afternoon when I saw it. It was standing in the clearing in front of the church, so still I almost thought it was a vision. It was a beautiful animal, huge and golden-brown with enormous pale horns that curved inward at the ends like a giant coronet. I’ve seen bulls here before, usually being herded through the countryside or in stalls behind houses. But this bull was somehow so much more powerful, so much more majestic. Perhaps it was the absence of an owner or the fact that it was dangerously out of place, standing as it was in the middle of town. I stared at it, and for a moment I understood why bulls are sacred creatures here, why traditional Rwandan dance mimics this animal, the shape of its horns. It was standing at a fair distance but even so I could see its eyelid flicker and I swore for a second that something passed between us, some kind of silent communication.

Then it turned and charged.

I have no way of knowing if I was charging at me or just in my direction. It might not have even seen me; I was far enough away. Anything could have startled it. There were people on bicycles, motorcycle taxis going by, children playing on the steps in front of the church. Whatever the reason, it rushed at me. And I froze. It wasn’t so much fear as surprise that stopped me from moving. For an absurd half-second I thought maybe I should wait for it to catch up with me, as if it was running after me to tell me something. Then the threat of the horns registered and I took off in a perpendicular direction, bounding to safety behind the garden wall of the convent. The bull tore past me, scattering a group of children who ran screaming into the bushes. In it’s wake, a harried-looking pair of farmers dashed down the street. I guess it was their bull.

I texted a fellow Peace Corps volunteer about the incident. He texted back, “Peace Corps for the stories, right?” I guess so.

~

I’ve yet to organize classes for the teachers at my school but I have taken on an additional student. Her name is Yvette, a masters student from Kigali. Meeting her was almost as uncanny as the incident with the bull. I was out walking on the main road from town one Saturday evening when she drove up in a Range Rover, itself an unsettling sight in the middle of rural Rwanda. She pulled over alongside me, almost blocking my path, and addressed me through a rolled-down window. She said she’d been hoping to run into me. She claimed I had personally promised to tutor her in English, but that she hadn’t been able to find me. I asked her to remind me of her name. “I’m Yvette,” she said.

I knew for a fact I’d never met this woman before. Warily, I asked her how she knew me. She said I knew her brother. “Is he a student?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “a student at university.” Not one of mine then. I didn’t know what to think. Later I’d find out that she’d mistaken me for another muzungu, but at the time I decided it couldn’t hurt to tell her I was a teacher in Gihara and that she could come find me whenever she wanted. Most people who ask me for help with English aren’t serious about following up.

As it turns out, she was quite serious. The following Tuesday as I was leaving school, the prefet asked me to meet him in his office. He said there were two men waiting for me there. Ominous and unexpected. They turned out to be Yvette’s brother and one of his friends. They had come to speak for Yvette; she couldn’t meet me herself because she had class that day. They spoke no English, so we had an awkward conversation half in French, half in Kinyarwanda. They explained that Yvette was quite serious about receiving English tutoring but that she had limited time to study. They asked if I could meet her the following day. Wednesdays are the busiest day of my week. I explained that I was available on Thursdays only, in the morning. I said that my first responsibility was to my school and my students and that I knew Yvette would understand. They thanked me and left.

The following day, the prefet interrupted my class to tell me that I had visitors again. He said it was a woman and her brother, one of the men from yesterday. Irritated, I apologized to him on their behalf and told him that I had another hour left of class. He said he’d relay the message. Fifteen minutes later, my phone started buzzing. I guessed correctly that Yvette had tracked down my phone number. Seething a little, I ignored it. Then the headmaster came in. He said he wanted to observe me. I was explaining in Kinyarwanda that we were doing a review, not a real lesson, when my phone started buzzing again. For the rest of the hour, I struggled to concentrate on teaching while my headmaster leafed through my lesson notebook and my phone buzzed at odd intervals.

Due to the various interruptions, my class ran ten minutes over. My headmaster commented in red ink on my lesson, “It’s good to finish on time.”

So it was that when I finally met Yvette face-to-face, I was prepared to draw a hard line. I told her I would tutor her if she was willing to make the trip to Gihara but only once a week, and only if she brought materials to study. She tried to bargain for more time, but at length she accepted. We start next week. Somehow, I feel like this is the boost I need, this little bit of extra work. It will give me some much-needed practice teaching adult ESL, and I’ll get a chance to look at materials from a Rwandan university. Yvette is a student of development studies. I’m actually quite excited.

Mwarambuze?*

I’ve been told I’m overdue for a blog. I guess I am going on three weeks now, not to mention my last post was about something that happened over a month ago. I apologize for not writing. The internet has been more unreliable than usual lately, but that’s not the whole reason. To be honest, I’ve been in a slump.

It’s not that things are going badly here. My students alone make everything worth it. They are so bright and so full of candor and enthusiasm, and since last term they’ve miraculously learned how to write in complete sentences, follow verbal directions and ask interesting questions. I don’t feel justified taking the credit for their progress as I barely have five months’ worth of teaching experience. If I’ve had an impact it’s because my students have worked extremely hard to understand and meet my expectations. I love them, and they frequently tell me they love me too, though I know it’s probably half sincere and half a shrewd attempt to boost flagging grades.

It’s not my site, either. Over the last four months my site has metamorphosed from a strange and sometimes terrifying place into a safe haven. People call me by my first name and no one asks me for handouts anymore. People don’t even try to overcharge me in the market these days. Children follow me around, not because they think I’ll give them money or biscuits but because they want play with me. If I’m sick or tired or otherwise not at my best, there’s no place I want to escape to. I want to be here. It’s home.

So, as it’s not my site or my students, I guess the thing that’s been frustrating me these past weeks is…me.

More specifically, it’s my own unrealistic expectations. On some level I believed that the mid-service training at Kibuye would miraculously imbue me with all kinds of new technical knowledge and that I’d return to site with complete plans for multiple secondary projects. Alas, such is not the case. I have some ideas for projects but I’ve yet to determine which ones are feasible in my community. I also foolishly promised my headmaster that I’d set up an English club for the teachers at my school this term, but with over forty teachers of vastly different proficiency levels, I have no idea how I’m going to organize it.

But who knows what I can do. Six months ago I couldn’t light a charcoal stove to save my life and my Kinyarwanda was limited to “good morning” and the numbers one through eight.

Anyway, until I figure out how I’m going to achieve the impossible, I hope to find little things to make me feel productive. Yesterday while I was out walking I met some coffee farmers on their way to work. I ended up helping them pick coffee berries for upwards of two hours. I’m sure they thought I was crazy, but they seemed happy enough to accept the free labor. I now have an open invitation to visit them whenever I want, provided I can figure out where they live.

I guess whatever ends up happening this term, I can at least say I’ve harvested coffee in Africa.

*Did you miss me?